ABSTRACT
The practice of regulating for minimum building standards has been around for a lot longer than most people may think, and regulating for energy and emissions performance is merely the latest evolution in a long lineage of standards. Today a key question for those trying to reduce emissions from the built environment in this way is how much to use regulation and how much to use incentives. In theory at least there are many regulatory options that could achieve a significant increase in the numbers of low/zero carbon (LZC) buildings, but not all of these will be culturally, socially, economically or politically acceptable, and the acceptability of different options will vary from country to country. This poses difficult sets of questions, and the answers will vary not only internationally but also according to different subsets of the building stock, for example between domestic and non-domestic build, and by different tenure types.
