The Urban Land Institute (ULI) has kicked off a new project in partnership with several major real estate organisations – including Allianz Real Estate, Catella, Hines, Redevco and Schroders Capital – that will support the built environment in Europe on its urgent journey to carbon neutrality.
The project, titled Fast-track to Decarbonisation: An Integrated Roadmap for the Built Environment, is part of ULI’s focus on decarbonisation as one of its global priorities as the institute delivers its mission to shape the future of the built environment for transformative impact in communities worldwide.
Fast-track to Decarbonisation aims to support the industry across Europe to speed up and scale up the decarbonisation process by analysing and consolidating the real estate industry’s approach to net zero, assessing progress and the impact of industry frameworks, as well as identifying urgent gaps and barriers that need to be bridged. The anticipated output will be a roadmap to enable the industry to accelerate progress and present an effective and efficient united front to support decarbonisation in collaboration with other stakeholders, such as tenants, the insurance sector and energy and infrastructure/mobility providers.
'A lot is already happening in the industry,' said ULI Europe CEO Lisette van Doorn. 'Many investors and managers have already announced net zero carbon targets. However, many experience significant challenges when trying to implement these pledges. These range from legacy regulation or insurance issues holding up new innovations, current real estate valuation approaches not addressing the risks appropriately – hence complicating the business case for making the necessary investments – to lack of knowledge and expertise across the value chain and alignment issues between tenants and landlords.
'These issues show that the industry must collaborate and collectively work through the issues in order to scale up new innovations and speed up the process. Thanks to the early support of these leading, influential real estate companies, we can get started on this important initiative straightaway with more partners also looking to join us on our journey.’
