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.
ULI Greenprint launched the Global Green Building Policy Dashboard in January 2023 to help real estate ESG teams more efficiently navigate regulations across 47 markets globally. With the launch of this updated version, the dashboard has expanded to cover 71 jurisdictions total in a web-based tool that enables users to filter by region, location, and category of regulation. Several regulatory changes emerged in those 12 months, underscoring that jurisdictions are rolling out and tightening regulations. A few highlights include:
- The State of California passed AB 2446, which requires building owners to reduce embodied carbon emissions by 40 percent by 2035. The dashboard also includes the planned amendments to CALGreen, which limits embodied carbon emissions per project in commercial buildings larger than 100,000 square feet and school projects larger than 50,000 square feet.
- The City of Berlin, Germany enacted several regulatory updates over the past year including Climate-Neutral Berlin 2045 with interim milestones of CO2 emissions are to be reduced by at least 70 percent by 2030 and by at least 90 percent by 2040 compared to 1990 and the Building Energy Act (GEG) which applies to all of Germany and aims to phase out all oil and gas heating systems.
- Singapore enhanced its Building Control regulations which apply to both existing and new buildings and requires a submission of the plan to meet the minimum environmental sustainability standard along with their building plan, and upon project completion requires they must submit their declaration and as-built submission form. The dashboard also includes the updated Electric Vehicles Charging Bill which requires certain developments to include electric vehicle charging.
“The Global Green Building Policy Dashboard uplevels the industry given that most ESG teams don’t have the capacity to create similar compliance tracking tools on their own,” said a ULI Greenprint member who uses the tool with their team. Users can view summaries of regulations related to building certifications, climate resilience, electric vehicles, embodied carbon, energy, emissions, and renewables. The dashboard can also help ESG teams coordinate compliance with other parts of their company. Giuls Kunkel, Associate Director of ESG at MetLife Investment Management, has found tremendous value in the tool. It allows for ease in researching and scaling green policies across their diverse portfolio and has helped them identify possible future transition risks, and they can accomplish both tasks in hours instead of the days it used to take.
“This dashboard is a great example of how ULI Greenprint creates resources and service offerings that respond to real estate members’ evolving ESG needs,” said Blakely Jarrett, Senior Director of ULI Greenprint.” “We were especially proud that over 80% of the jurisdictions added in this version of the tool are in Europe and Asia-Pacific, reflecting ULI Greenprint’s continued growth in those regions.” ULI Greenprint will continue to expand this dashboard annually with updated regulations and additional locations globally. If you have any questions or feedback on the dashboard tool, please feel free to reach out to [email protected].
