ULI has earned a 2023 ENERGY STAR® Partner of the Year Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for the fourth consecutive year. The award recognizes ENERGY STAR® partner businesses and organizations in good standing that demonstrate superior leadership, innovation, and commitment to environmental protection through energy efficiency.

The implications of climate change are becoming hard to ignore. The frequency of natural disasters has increased significantly in recent years, with the United States experiencing an average cost of $18 billion–plus from climate disasters per year. As these kinds of events have grown more common, calculating climate risk has become a hugely important task for commercial property owners. The topic was the main theme during a panel discussion at the April 2024 Resilience Summit in New York City.

Eight years ago, the landmark Paris Agreement kicked off a worldwide campaign to reduce carbon emissions. The targets set were big: slash emissions by 45 percent by 2030 and be net zero by 2050. So far, the world is not making enough progress on those lofty goals, and the progress that has been made has been very unevenly distributed. Experts from major real estate firms, including Boston Properties, CBRE, and Community Preservation Corporation, drove home the net zero transition’s importance during a panel discussion at the 2024 ULI Spring Meeting in New York City. They talked about the costs of getting to net zero, what lenders and owners are doing to get there, and the risk of not addressing climate change.

A new global report from ULI and LaSalle Investment Management (LaSalle), a leading real estate investment management firm, offers a new framework to help the real estate industry act on climate risk disclosure data. Across the real estate industry, practitioners understand physical climate risk to assets and portfolios poses a financial risk, but there are still many challenges to acting on the data being collected and disclosed.

Over the last decade, real estate leaders have started to wrap the industry’s arms around what climate change—and the energy transition associated with it—means for the industry. Real estate companies with net zero commitments now account for nearly $1 trillion in market capitalization—well over half of the market cap of all publicly traded REITs. But setting targets is just the start. We’re learning a lot from those leaders moving beyond commitments to the hard work of transforming physical assets.

Real estate developers across the United States and around the world are under pressure to cut the amount of carbon their activities put into the atmosphere.

As global momentum builds for climate action, federal, state, and local governments have introduced building-sector requirements covering everything from energy and water use to green building certifications to climate resilience. The real estate industry is addressing the climate crisis through actions like selecting lower-carbon materials, setting portfolio-wide net zero targets, and increasing procurement of renewable energy. However, ESG teams are spending more of their time on compliance and reporting as regulations expand, which reduces their capacity for implementing projects and reducing carbon.

City is actively working to make its neighborhoods safer and more resilient to extreme rain events

When cities decline, they can take decades to recover, if they ever do. McKinsey’s research suggests that many U.S. cities could experience a steady downward trajectory without effective intervention. We find that some cities may take years to bounce back from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on real estate and the economy. But such a doom loop is far from inevitable; there are many examples of success that we can learn from. Indeed, while U.S. cities will differ from what they were before COVID-19, this is also an opportunity to shape them into more vibrant and equitable places.

Federal funding opportunities through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) are supporting essential investments in green and resilient infrastructure, with the potential to create more livable communities while also supporting successful real estate developments through enhanced aesthetics, improved building user experiences, and operational efficiencies.