Interview with Essam Elnagar, PhD, Senior Data Analyst at BPIE

On 12 May 2026, BPIE launched the fourth edition of the EU Buildings Climate Tracker (EU BCT), one of its flagship publications, at the “Voices of change” conference. The conference gathered high-level EU policymakers just weeks before the deadline for Member States to submit their National Building Renovation Plans (NBRPs) to the European Commission. The EU BCT results painted a clear picture: there has been a narrowing of the decarbonisation gap in the buildings sector, but it remains insufficient to reach the 2050 climate objectives.

BPIE spoke with the Data Analyst and co-author of this year’s report, Essam Elnagar, and asked him how this edition’s results should be read and what they mean in the current socio-political context.

What is the EU Buildings Climate Tracker and why is it important? 

The EU Buildings Climate Tracker (EU BCT) is BPIE’s flagship monitoring tool for tracking how fast the EU building stock is decarbonising to achieve climate neutrality by 2050. It combines four indicators: CO₂ emissions, final energy consumption, renewable energy share, and renovation investment, into a single composite index benchmarked against a reference pathway derived from EU climate scenarios. 

What I find most valuable about the tracker is the reality check it provides. It’s easy to look at a year with mild weather or another with high energy prices which push people to use less energy and think “great, we’re making progress.” But the EU BCT strips that away and asks: is this structural, or is it temporary? Are we transforming buildings, or just reacting to circumstances? That distinction matters enormously if you’re serious about reaching climate neutrality by 2050. 

What would you highlight from the 4^th edition of the EU BCT?  

The title captures it better than anything I could add: “On and off”. When we landed on that phrase, it felt right immediately, because it’s literally what the data is telling us. 

Some things are genuinely working. Renewable electricity has exceeded its pathway target, reaching 45.4% in 2023 against a required 44.2%. The overall final energy consumption for households and services combined decreased by 7.5% between 2015 and 2023, slightly exceeding the required 7.4% reduction. On paper, that looks like an on-track result. 

But, that’s exactly where the unevenness becomes important, because when you look inside that number, the service sector has reduced its energy consumption by 7.9% against a required reduction of only 3.1%, significantly exceeding the pathway. Meanwhile, residential energy consumption is still off track, with households achieving only about three quarters of the required reduction. So the service sector is essentially carrying the overall result and masking a much slower transformation in people’s homes.  This is a structural concern, not a reassuring headline. 

The picture becomes even more stark when you look at renewable heating and cooling. We’ve achieved only 26% of the required progress there. That’s the biggest gap in the entire tracker, and it matters because heating in most European homes still runs on gas, on oil, on fossil fuels. Until we crack that, the transition in buildings is fundamentally incomplete. 

The deeper question I kept coming back to while working on this edition was: why is progress so uneven? And I think the answer is that the easier wins have happened, like cleaner electricity grids, efficiency gains in offices and commercial buildings, while the most complex implementations, like renovating millions of homes and replacing boilers, is moving far too slowly. That requires changing people’s behaviour, while securing resilient financing and materials supply chains needed for that transition. It’s not a switch you can just flip. 

What actions should be taken to close the decarbonisation gap and improve the performance of the BCT indicators? 

If I had to pick the single most urgent priority based on what the data shows, it would be renewable heating. A gap of nearly 74% against the pathway is not something you can ignore. As long as European homes are heating with gas and oil, we remain structurally exposed to climate risk, price volatility, and geopolitical shocks. The legislation exists through Renewable Energy Directive III (RED III), but Member States need to get serious about implementation now, not in five years. 

Renovation investment is the other major structural gap. We’ve reached about 59% of the cumulative investment required since 2015, and this gap isn’t just about total volume, it’s about where the money is going. The residential sector is lagging badly. The recast Energy Performance Buildings Directive (EPBD) gives Member States real tools to change that. The question is whether they’ll use them with the ambition the situation requires. 

But there’s a key dimension that we should pay attention to and that goes beyond the technical fixes. In this edition, we spent more time connecting building decarbonisation to housing affordability and people’s health. Over 41 million Europeans couldn’t keep their homes adequately warm in 2024, and around 16% live with damp walls or structural deficiencies that directly affect their health. These aren’t abstract statistics, they’re the human cost of a building stock we’ve failed to transform. Any serious policy conversation about buildings needs to start there, with the people living in them. 

Who would you recommend should read the EU BCT and why?   

The obvious answer is policymakers and energy analysts. If you’re working on EPBD implementation, national renovation plans, or heating and cooling strategy, this report gives you the granular picture you need. 

However, the EU BCT is increasingly relevant for a much wider audience. It could be relevant for anyone working in housing, public health, or social policy, because buildings connect all of those things. A home that’s cold, damp, and running on expensive fossil fuels isn’t just a climate problem, it’s a health and an affordability problem. 

And if you’re a citizen wondering why your energy bills are still so high despite hearing that renewables are booming, this report helps explain that. The electricity grid is getting cleaner, yes, but if your home hasn’t been renovated and heats with gas, that progress isn’t reaching you. The building is the missing link between the clean energy transition and people’s daily lives, and that story deserves a much wider audience than just the climate policy community. 

Why are buildings at the crossroads of the energy and climate crisis?  

Buildings are where the energy crisis becomes personal. When gas prices spike, it’s not an abstract market event, it’s your heating bill doubling. When a heatwave hits and your home has no insulation, it’s not a climate statistic, it’s genuinely dangerous. Buildings, where people spend their daily lives, are the place where all of these big systemic challenges land.  

The “crossroads” framing felt important to us because we really are at a decision point. The EU has done the legislative work with the EPBD, the Energy Efficiency Directive (EED), and the RED III forming a strong and complementary framework. We have the tools. What’s uncertain is whether we’ll implement them with the urgency they require.  

Buildings sit at the intersection of our climate ambitions, our energy security, and the daily economic reality of millions of Europeans. They are not just part of the crisis, in many ways, they are the crisis. And they are also, if we get this right, one of our most powerful ways out of it. 

Download the full report here: EU Buildings Climate Tracker, 4th Edition