Resilience: Confronting Climate Change and Adapting Your Real Estate Asset Management Accordingly
The real estate sector accounts for more than a third of CO2 emissions in Europe, yet only 1% of building inventory is renovated each year. This reality has led to growing market awareness, with the emergence of new European and national environmental regulations.
Climate Risk: How the Real Estate Industry is Bracing for the Inevitable
Real estate owners are feeling pressure from all sides to take climate change, and its inherent risks, more seriously. Regulators are demanding more transparency surrounding climate risk disclosure, with the UK and New Zealand implementing mandatory climate risk reporting to align with TCFD recommendations. Investors are also increasingly incorporating climate risk and resilience into their due diligence and decision-making processes.
Nature-Based Solutions: The Backbone of Sustainable Investment
Historically, climate-related risks have been mitigated through grey infrastructure such as sewers and HVAC systems, singular in function and difficult to retroactively expand. However, the built environment industry is waking up to nature-based solutions as a multifunctional approach to climate adaptation whilst meeting wider ESG priorities.
To Build Back Better, Invest in People-First Places
Building back – whether it’s our offices, schools, housing or federal buildings – we should ensure that we’re adopting a people-first approach to enhance these spaces. And the past year has demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that fostering health and well-being is not only a moral imperative, but an investment that always pays dividends.
With the environmental impact of real estate now increasingly important to investors, frameworks are evolving to help evaluate and improve the sustainability performance of assets. For example, GRESB (formerly the Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark) is an internationally recognised benchmark assessing the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) performance of property.
The rise of ESG: the evolution of environmental regulations in Europe
The real estate sector in Europe accounts for nearly half of the region’s energy consumption and more than a third of CO2 emissions. Despite this reality, only 1% of real estate inventory undergoes renewal each year. Faced with the climate crisis, European countries have set themselves a common goal: achieving carbon neutrality by 2050.
EU Regulatory Environment Changes (SFDR, EU Taxonomy)
The European Green Deal has launched an ambitious plan to transform the EU economy to a sustainable, climate neutral economy by 2050. To support the plan a range of working groups, action plans and new regulations have been established. All parts of the Green Deal are relevant to real estate, but in particular the outcomes of the EU Action Plan on Sustainable Finance are worth paying close attention to in the coming months.
The three US green building legislation trends you need to know about
This article was originally published in Commercial Property Executive. See original article here. Introduction The United States has not always been a world leader when it comes to buildings that are good for the planet or supportive of human health. Rather, the market has long been fragmented between different regions, with some states and cities […]
ESG reporting has developed into an essential factor in assessing ESG initiatives and communicating on sustainability commitments, and COVID-19 has only stood as a catalyst for this trend. The pandemic has demonstrated to the market that easily neglected ‘non-financial’ factors are equally as important to long-term sustainability of businesses as any financial factors. It is truly an exciting time to be a part of the movement towards knowledge sharing and harnessing new opportunities as means of managing and reporting towards ESG factors.
