Level(s): Europe's common framework for sustainable buildings

Level(s) is a framework developed by the European Commission that defines a common indicator set for measuring building sustainability performance. It is not a certification scheme; it awards no points and no badge. Its purpose is to get different certification schemes and national regulations measuring the same things the same way.

Six macro-objectives

• Greenhouse gas emissions across the life cycle — both operational and embodied
• Resource efficient and circular material life cycles
• Efficient use of water resources
• Healthy and comfortable spaces
• Adaptation and resilience to climate change
• Life cycle cost and value

Those six headings place environmental performance in the same frame as economic performance. Making life cycle cost a macro-objective means environmental assessment stops being a purely technical exercise and connects to the investment decision.

Three performance levels

The 'levels' in the name refer to the depth of assessment. Level one is a common performance assessment achievable with simple calculations. Level two aims at comparable results and asks for more detailed data. Level three is designed for monitoring and optimisation.

The tiering serves a practical purpose: letting smaller projects into the framework. A project that cannot run a fully detailed building LCA still produces a comparable output at level one.

Relationship with existing schemes

Level(s) does not replace LEED, BREEAM or DGNB. Those schemes keep their credit structures while aligning their indicators with Level(s). The result is that, for the first time, embodied carbon figures from buildings under different schemes become meaningfully comparable.

For a construction product manufacturer that is good news: the same EPD feeds the same data into different schemes. Getting the product-level calculation right once suffices for all of them.