What if every time we built or retrofitted our homes, the world around us got better?

The Regenerative Places Framework for Housing sets out a new way of thinking about how we plan, design, deliver and steward homes and neighbourhoods.

Its central proposition is simple: housing can do more than minimise harm. Homes and neighbourhoods can be designed to restore and strengthen the capacity of places to support life, while continuing to adapt to changing conditions.

Regenerative housing recognises homes as part of interconnected living systems, shaped by relationships between people, place, nature and resources. It asks us to look beyond the individual building and consider how housing can contribute to healthier, more resilient and thriving places over time.

The Framework provides a shared vision and practical pathways for applying this approach across housing projects, from the earliest stages of planning and design through delivery and beyond handover.

In 2025, the IPCC reaffirmed that limiting global warming to 1.5°C requires deep and sustained reductions in carbon dioxide emissions. Achieving this remains fundamental to avoiding the most severe impacts of climate change, but delivering this scale of transformation demands coordinated action across government, industry and society, supported by credible pathways for deep emission reductions. The built environment sector plays a central role in this transition, with the need to address both operational and embodied carbon, across all asset types and life cycle stages now well established.

The UKGBC published the original Net Zero Carbon Buildings Framework Definition in 2019. This provided industry with clarity on the high-level definition and delivery of net zero carbon buildings, while recognising the need for continued evolution as data, methodologies, and industry capability developed.

This updated framework provides a set of principles and actions to guide the optimisation of whole life carbon (WLC) and manage residual emissions across a building’s life cycle. Its aim is to support consistent, low-carbon decision-making from early design through operation and end-of-life (EOL), and to guide projects in accordance with best practice standards.