11.15.24
A global alliance of green building organizations launched a groundbreaking sustainable finance call to action aimed at bringing the vast majority of buildings up to modern sustainability standards. The report, “Building Transition: How to Scale and Finance an Inclusive Transition for the Built Environment,” focuses on the 75% of lower-performing buildings that have not yet adopted green building practices.
The initiative, led by the UK’s Building Research Establishment (BRE), the Green Building Council of Australia (GBCA), the Singapore Green Building Council (SGBC), the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), and Alliance HQE-GBC France, seeks to close the gap between top performers and the rest of the market.
With the building sector accounting for a significant share of global emissions, unlocking investments for the underperforming majority is seen as a crucial step in decarbonizing at scale. This call to action lays out how to attract capital to this large untapped segment, ensuring that decarbonization happens across the entire built environment – not just in the elite tier of buildings.
“Building Transition” identifies a critical gap in the industry – while high-performing buildings have access to green finance and resources, most buildings remain locked out due to a lack of capital. The report offers key recommendations to address this challenge:
“Building Transition” represents a critical step in making sustainable finance accessible to a wider range of building owners, ensuring that decarbonization can happen at scale and in every corner of the built environment.
The initiative, led by the UK’s Building Research Establishment (BRE), the Green Building Council of Australia (GBCA), the Singapore Green Building Council (SGBC), the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), and Alliance HQE-GBC France, seeks to close the gap between top performers and the rest of the market.
With the building sector accounting for a significant share of global emissions, unlocking investments for the underperforming majority is seen as a crucial step in decarbonizing at scale. This call to action lays out how to attract capital to this large untapped segment, ensuring that decarbonization happens across the entire built environment – not just in the elite tier of buildings.
“Building Transition” identifies a critical gap in the industry – while high-performing buildings have access to green finance and resources, most buildings remain locked out due to a lack of capital. The report offers key recommendations to address this challenge:
- Policy and taxonomy reform: Stronger policies and taxonomies that direct capital toward underperforming buildings, and context-specific, performance-oriented criteria tailored to diverse building types, ensuring investment reaches all buildings.
- Global decarbonization standards: Defining a credible decarbonization transition and providing common standards, metrics, and decarbonization tools that can be used globally while allowing for harmonization across diverse assets and geographies.
- Resilience in finance: Incorporating adaptation and resilience in real estate finance to account for the impacts of both acute and chronic climate events. Currently, this is not a common practice in real estate finance, and lack of resilience makes lower-performing buildings, the “other 75%,” more vulnerable to becoming stranded assets and suffering from climate impacts.
“Building Transition” represents a critical step in making sustainable finance accessible to a wider range of building owners, ensuring that decarbonization can happen at scale and in every corner of the built environment.