CSTB – Cerema partnership around the National Building Database

On December 16, 2024, the CSTB and Cerema signed a framework agreement aimed at jointly strengthening and accelerating the development of the National Building Database (BDNB), the benchmark for buildings in France, and its deployment to support local authorities and real estate stakeholders in their strategies for improving and developing their building stock. This partnership will enrich knowledge of the building stock by combining the expertise of both institutions, particularly on the resilience of buildings to the effects of climate change. It will also promote the dissemination of this knowledge to local stakeholders and enable the development of shared tools.

National Buildings Database: enhanced knowledge of the existing building stock to accelerate the ecological transition

The energy crisis and climate change will require the renovation of a large number of buildings. A detailed understanding of the building stock is an essential lever for facilitating decision-making by public stakeholders, owners, and professionals, and enabling them to develop strategies to best address several priority issues:

• Energy renovation of buildings: by identifying priority buildings to reduce their energy consumption and CO₂ emissions.
• Adaptation to climate change: by anticipating local risks (heat waves, shrinkage and swelling of clays, etc.) using enriched and geolocated data.
• Reducing land artificialization: by providing analysis and diagnostic tools to exploit the potential for better use and development of the existing stock, and to build more informed land strategies

The BDNB is the result of geospatial cross-referencing of public data sources (tax data, IGN data, etc.). This database is then enriched using artificial intelligence, particularly to reconstruct missing data. It thus offers a precise, geolocated, and consolidated view of the entire metropolitan building stock.

Joint actions to enrich the BDNB

This agreement marks a key step in the collaboration between two leading public establishments:

Cerema, with its expertise in planning and ecological transition and its knowledge of territories and their stakeholders, will provide its expertise in the reprocessing of land files to refine the geolocation of buildings, in the integration of this data into digital tools and services aimed at supporting local and national public policies, or in the analysis of the vulnerability of buildings to climatic hazards and their proper adaptation.

The CSTB, a leading scientific and technical player in the building sector, which has so far ensured the development of the BDNB, will continue to mobilize its expertise in building stock data engineering and its multidisciplinary technical expertise to develop expert indicators that meet the needs of stakeholders.

A direct contribution to national objectives

With this agreement, Cerema and CSTB reaffirm their commitment to major national priorities:

• Achieve the renovation targets of 700.000 homes per year as set out in the National Low-Carbon Strategy.
• Reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the building sector by 55% by 2030.
• Combating land artificialization, in line with the Zero Net Artificialization (ZNA) objective set for 2050.

For Pascal Berteaud, CEO of Cerema: "By joining forces with the CSTB, we are pooling our expertise to accelerate building resilience. Our partnership is particularly focused on co-supporting the National Building Database (BDNB), a valuable tool that provides extremely detailed knowledge of building characteristics, enables the simulation of energy performance diagnostics across the entire building stock, and promotes the identification of action points and levers. It thus constitutes, particularly for elected officials and local decision-makers, a real decision-making aid and valuable support in defining their energy renovation and climate change adaptation strategies."

For Étienne Crépon, President of the CSTB: "The complementarity of our expertise will allow us to support local areas more effectively. This partnership will strengthen the decisive contribution of the BDNB as a benchmark public foundation, serving local stakeholders, first and foremost local authorities, and more broadly the general interest. An essential tool for accelerating energy renovation and reducing the carbon footprint of buildings, the BDNB is a powerful lever for accelerating transitions in the construction sector."