Buildings are beautiful, complex objects — even the ones that leak or smell or creak. As a professional working in or on buildings, you have probably received enough “advice” to know that everyone has an opinion about buildings, from your taxi driver to your granduncle. While being bombarded with “suggestions” on how you should do your job is irritating, it is worth understanding why buildings evoke these sorts of passionate, emotional reactions. We live, work, learn, heal, and meet inside them. Some of our dearest memories are made indoors, and increasingly, we are becoming an indoor species .

I recently read a book that has been on my reading list for months now: How Bad are Bananas?: The carbon footprint of everything by Mike Berners-Lee. Yes, that name is famous but that is not why you need to pay attention to this book. You need to pay attention because the message conveyed in this book, and Mr Berners-Lee’s other work and advocacy, is absolutely worth heeding.

Data is the foundation of transparency and action towards decarbonisation. Without an accurate assessment of how much energy a building consumes — where, when, and for what — planning capital projects for decarbonisation will yield wasteful, misdirected expense and effort. However obvious this statement may seem, our experience at arbnco has revealed that most property owners and managers on the leading edge of the transition to carbon-free operations struggle with patchy data availability, poor data quality, and inefficient manual data management processes. The bad news is that these are ubiquitous issues, and it is easy to get discouraged, even cynical, about improving data coverage and quality. The good news is that real world organizations have faced these challenges and arrived at a better place. We believe that turning this corner requires, in part, some data coverage myth busting. A discussion about data coverage may never be “fun”, but there are more reasons for optimistic than most people believe.