The European Commission referred Portugal, Greece, and Malta to the Court of Justice of the European Union for failing to transpose Directive 2023/2413. The directive requires member states to update their national legislation to accelerate the rollout of renewable energy sources across all sectors of the economy. The deadline passed. The three countries did not comply.

The directive is not limited to electricity generation. It sets binding targets and obligations for heating, cooling, transport, industry, and buildings. Within that scope, there are specific requirements on energy efficiency in construction, streamlined licensing procedures for renewable energy projects, and the integration of clean energy systems into building supply chains.

Portugal is not alone in its non-compliance. The Commission opened infringement proceedings against 26 of the 27 EU member states in 2025 for failures in transposition notification. The only exception was Denmark. In Portugal's case, the process escalated to court with a formal request for financial penalties.

The Portuguese government maintains that the directive has already been transposed through earlier legislation and will present its case to the Commission. Brussels ruled that the notification was incomplete.

The legal proceedings do not suspend the underlying obligations. While the regulatory standoff persists, projects involving self-consumption, energy communities, and storage infrastructure continue to operate in a grey zone — without the simplified licensing rules the directive was designed to provide.

For years, the European model operated on a familiar cycle: climate targets were announced, deadlines were negotiated, and delays were tolerated. That cycle is ending. The Commission has begun treating climate legislation as enforceable legal obligation, not political intention. Member states that fail to transpose face court. Those that delay lose regulatory and financial ground.

For the construction sector, the impact is not abstract. This directive is one of the instruments shaping how buildings will be designed, licensed, and operated across the EU. It defines standards for integrating renewable energy into buildings, sets efficiency targets for heating and cooling systems, and establishes criteria that directly affect how materials and building systems are specified.

The delay in transposition creates real uncertainty for those designing and supplying. Projects that depend on self-consumption systems, energy communities, or environmental certification are suspended between what the directive requires and what national legislation has not yet incorporated. That gap has a cost: missed deadlines, blocked financing, revised specifications.

What the Portuguese case also reveals is that regulatory risk does not only come from new legislation. It comes from the speed at which rules already approved in Brussels reach the ground. Companies operating under the assumption that the regulatory environment will remain stable are exposed. The directive exists, the deadline has passed, and the court has been engaged.

For manufacturers and construction companies with operations or ambitions in the European market, the signal is clear. Certifications, EPDs, and carbon inventories have moved beyond optional differentiators within the EU supply chain. They are becoming baseline requirements for market entry.

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You know what's better than having one client win an iF Design Award? Having two!

The German iF Design Award has existed since 1954 and is one of the most recognized design competitions in the world. This year's ceremony took place in Berlin on April 27. Brazil broke its own record, taking home 112 awards in this edition. Three of them went to our clients.

1. Casa Alvorada, a project by D76 Incorporadora, won in the architecture category and also took home the iF Gold Award in the interiors category. The Gold is the highest level of recognition in the competition. Out of more than ten thousand global entries, only 75 projects receive that seal.

UGREEN worked directly on this project with a full consultancy scope: bioclimatic analysis, thermal and lighting performance analysis, and a carbon footprint assessment of materials. This last deliverable produced a report mapping the embodied carbon of every material used in the project, from the primary structure and secondary structure through to the finishes.

The low carbon footprint of the materials was one of the factors the jury weighed. So was the logic of the floor plan: the house was designed to last three generations. With minimal interventions, the space adapts from a couple's home to a family with children and, later, to elderly residents. Technical decisions were made to reduce cost and rework over decades.

2. Roca Cerámica, an UGREEN partner since 2019, was also recognized. The award went to the immersive brand experience created at their stand at Expo Revestir 2025, in the Interiors — Trade Fair Exhibition category. Roca arrived at this recognition carrying a consistent track record: it was the first ceramic tile manufacturer in Brazil to conduct a Life Cycle Assessment and reduced its emission intensity by 33% between 2020 and 2024. A brand with that level of technical evidence stands out at an event of this scale. The design award was the visible result of a process that had been built over years.

When an architect or engineer defines the water strategy for a project, they are rarely thinking about the worst case.

They are thinking about the typical rainfall event for the region, the expected consumption pattern, the applicable standard. That logic is rational. It is also where many projects fail when climate shifts the baseline.

The G-Cans exists because Japan decided to do the opposite.

The structure sits 50 meters underground, in Kasukabe, 30 kilometers from Tokyo. It spans 6.3 kilometers of tunnels, five water intake shafts reaching up to 65 meters in height, and a central water tank the size of two football pitches. When the rivers of the greater Tokyo area reach critical levels, water enters the system, loses velocity against 59 concrete pillars, and is pumped out into the Edogawa River before it can cause damage.

The system was engineered to withstand typhoons. Not the average event. The worst event on record.

The design decision was not technical. It was about what level of risk the city was willing to accept. The engineering came after. What the G-Cans reveals is not that Japan has more money or more advanced technology.

It is that the starting question was different. Instead of "how much does it cost to build adequate protection for current conditions?", the question was "what is the cost of having no protection when conditions change?". That inversion shapes the outcome. Projects built around the second question arrive at solutions that are more robust, more expensive upfront, and far cheaper over time.

Most of the world has learned this lesson the hard way.

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, it exposed a flood protection system that had been underfunded and undermaintained for decades. The infrastructure existed. The commitment to it did not. The reconstruction cost ran into the hundreds of billions of dollars — a figure that dwarfs any investment in prevention that was never made.

For those designing buildings, the practical reading sits in two places.

The first is drainage at the site and immediate surroundings: rainwater harvesting systems, soil permeability, sizing of retention and attenuation tanks. These elements are routinely treated as end-of-project details, resolved after the major decisions are already fixed. As extreme weather events become more frequent, that detail becomes structural risk.

The second is property value. Buildings in areas without adequate water management already face depreciation in markets with a history of flooding. That discount is likely to grow as insurers and lenders incorporate climate risk into their pricing models.

The G-Cans is exceptional in scale and investment. But the logic behind it applies to any project, regardless of size.

The difference is when the question enters the process: at the beginning, when change is still possible, or later, when the cost of not asking shows up on the bill.

Hong Kong has the most expensive real estate market in the world. And part of its population sleeps in 2m² coffin cubicles.

This is not a metaphor. These are metal or thin-wood compartments carved out of subdivided apartments, with no ventilation and no natural light. Around 220.000 people live this way today. Some pay the equivalent of $400 a month for one of these spaces.

The most common explanation is that the island simply runs out of physical space. That’s not the reason.

Hong Kong’s housing prices are high because the system was built to keep them that way. The British colonial government structured revenue around selling expensive land. The state became financially dependent on high property prices to fund infrastructure. And a real estate market dominated by a handful of large developers learned to control supply to keep demand consistently higher than availability. Neither side has a real incentive to bring prices down.

The result is a market where the average property price reaches 25 times the annual income of local residents. In the United States, that ratio averages around six. In Los Angeles, one of the most expensive cities in the country, it sits at twelve.

The problem is not a shortage of space. It is that housing became a financial asset. And when that happens, those with less money end up paying more for less.

Watch the full video on YouTube and understand how Hong Kong’s housing crisis was built, what keeps it in place, and what it reveals about the direction some of the world’s fastest-growing cities are heading!

Disclaimer: The video is in Brazilian Portuguese, but simultaneous translation and subtitles are available in multiple languages.