Buildings currently being constructed at an increasing rate in developing countries are locking the world into high greenhouse gas emissions for decades to come, the world’s leading authority on energy has warned.

Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, told the Guardian that the world’s number one priority in tackling climate change must be to ensure those buildings meet higher standards of efficiency and safety.

“This would be the single most important step I want governments to take, and they can take it tomorrow,” he said. Politicians could enact higher standards in regulations immediately, though ensuring they are always enforced might take a little longer and involve cooperation between different authorities.

“There are many economic benefits to mandating standards, and this can be done by governments very easily,” said Birol. “They would have positive effects on growth, improve the conditions of the population [including their safety] and to do it they just need to make different government departments work together.”

In the developing world, and even some richer countries, building standards are often lax and frequently ignored. This has led to tragedies such as the collapse of the Rana Plaza factories in Bangladesh in 2013, which killed more than 1,100 people and injured thousands more. Just weeks ago, more than 50 people died as an illegal apartment building in Nairobi fell down.

If higher standards were enforced, not only would people benefit from greater reassurances against such needless disasters, but the buildings would use less energy and this giant source of carbon emissions would be vastly reduced, according to the IEA. Better windows, more efficient air conditioning systems, thicker walls and higher quality of materials and design would all result in efficiency savings, and make life healthier and more pleasant for the buildings’ occupants.

Birol also highlighted the need to reduce emissions from transport around the world, calling for far greater investments in electric vehicles and public transport, particularly in developing countries.

“Although there has been progress in electric cars, we are not there yet,” he said. About a million electric vehicles are now in use, showing strong growth in the past few years, but still not enough to make a real dent in transport emissions. “This is still lagging behind the Paris targets.”

In Paris last December, world governments forged a historic agreement to hold global warming to no more than 2C above pre-industrial levels, by mid-century. This will require steep emissions cuts, which were not specified in the accord, but most governments have put in place national targets running to 2025 or 2030 that will require most of the reductions experts say are needed to meet the Paris target.

Birol called on governments to provide greater incentives for key emissions-reducing technologies, such as electric vehicles, greater energy efficiency, and renewable power.

He added that technology for carbon capture and storage (CCS) was running well behind where it needed to be in terms of implementation, if the Paris targets are to be met.

The technology, though technically proven and discussed for over a decade as a potential way to reduce emissions on the scale needed to avoid dangerous levels of climate change, is still in its infancy in terms of commercial implementation.

Last year, the UK government controversially pulled the plug on two of the world’s most promising CCS schemes. The Treasury said the £1bn price tag for a competition to prove the technology was too high, and there are now no current plans to practise CCS in the UK, a move that scientists have said risks leaving the UK running behind in the green technology economy.

The IEA report on the technologies needed to implement the Paris accord, entitled Energy Technology Perspectives: Towards Sustainable Urban Energy Systems, is published on the organisation’s website on Wednesday.