ULI Releases Dashboard to Help Members Follow Green Building Policies Globally

As global momentum builds for climate action, federal, state, and local governments have increasingly introduced building-sector requirements covering everything from energy and water use to green building certifications to climate resilience. Real estate developers and owners face a challenge with keeping their portfolios in compliance with regulations that often differ across jurisdictions.

What’s more—these regulations are constantly evolving, and new ones are passed each year, which makes it difficult to plan for and track compliance for building construction and operations. As a pilot solution to this issue, ULI Greenprint partnered with ARUP to develop a Global Green Building Policy Dashboard that allows real estate practitioners to filter by location and see a summary of key requirements related to building certifications, greenhouse gas emissions, embodied carbon, energy, electric vehicles, renewable energy, and resilience.

This pilot dashboard covers 37 U.S. markets and 10 international markets that play a significant role in the real estate industry. Each market will be updated on an annual basis to provide the latest information on policies.

ULI recognized that the real estate industry could benefit from a central source of information on global green building policies. Marta Schantz, co-executive director of the Randall Lewis Center for Sustainability in Real Estate, adds, “This is a great step to help ULI members track and comply with the myriad climate policies affecting real estate across the globe.” The ULI Greenprint Community, which includes more than 120 real estate organizations have already used the dashboard to see how their portfolios could be affected by relevant policies.

ULI Greenprint real estate members provided input on the tool’s design and development, including guidance on methodology such as what markets should be included and which features would be the most useful. ESG leaders can use the tool to get a macro view of markets that are incentivizing or encouraging green investments. Regional asset and portfolio managers can use it to find the policies that affect existing assets. The global green building policy dashboard saves users from the time-intensive task of researching and staying up to date on each city’s policies by aggregating and updating them annually in one tool.

This dashboard simplifies the search for the real estate industry and serves as an important starting point for those looking to dive deeper into local policy compliance. ULI welcomes feedback on the tool, which you can provide at [email protected].