Precificação de carbono e descarbonização de edificações: limites do SBCE e a necessidade de policy mix no contexto urbano de São Paulo

Abstract

The dissertation examines the limits of the Brazilian Greenhouse Gas Emissions Trading System (SBCE), established by Law No. 15.042/2024, as an instrument to induce the decarbonization of the building sector in the urban context of São Paulo. The central hypothesis is that carbon pricing, when implemented in isolation, has a structurally limited capacity to drive change in sectors characterized by diffuse emissions, in which responsibilities are shared among multiple agents along extensive value chains and assets with a lifespan of fifty to eighty years. The research adopts a qualitative and exploratory approach, combining comparative document analysis with a case study of the municipality of São Paulo. The theoretical framework articulates the concept of policy mix (Howlett, 2011), which assesses the coherence between objectives, instruments and institutional context, and that of polycentric governance (Ostrom, 2010), which underpins the multiscalar analysis of responsibilities over diffuse emissions. Four international experiences are examined, the European Union, California, Chile and Colombia, selected because they represent different scales of governance and contrasting stages of regulatory maturity. The temporal scope of the comparative international analysis and of the Brazilian regulatory framework covers the period from 2015 to 2025, extending to January 2026 for documents related to the SBCE and to urban policies in São Paulo. The results indicate that the carbon price signal reaches the building sector predominantly through the pass-through of costs to emissions-intensive inputs, such as cement and steel, a channel that persists even under free allocation of allowances. The cases showing more consistent progress combine carbon pricing, binding technical regulation and redistributive reinvestment of auction revenues. In São Paulo, the regulatory framework is relatively advanced regarding operational emissions and urban form, but lacks requirements for life-cycle assessment in permitting procedures and specific regulation of embodied carbon in construction materials. The dissertation concludes that the effectiveness of the SBCE in the building sector depends on the construction of a coherent arrangement of instruments, articulating binding technical regulation, redistributive financing and urban policies, with a central role for the municipality as an institutional translator of national economic signals into concrete territorial transformations.