Foundations of Sustainable Real Estate
By: Velorine
Real estate plays a huge role in sustainability. Therefore, real estate professionals have a unique role to play in protecting the environment and advancing equity. Indeed, since they are working with a physical asset–namely the built environment–that uses natural resources in construction and operation, real estate professionals are perhaps the best positioned of all to make a positive difference.
However, in order to use real estate as a platform for positive change, students and professionals need both the fundamentals of commercial real estate and the new fundamentals of sustainability in real estate.
Sustainability in real estate refers to the industry’s environmental and social impacts, and the resulting risks and opportunities these impacts present.
This page provides a quick introduction to the basic principles of sustainable real estate and the most popular certification and rating systems real estate professionals should be familiar with.
According to a Deloitte report Breakthrough for Sustainability in Commercial Real Estate, “commercial buildings account for 18.7 percent of energy usage, 40 percent of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, and 88 percent of potable water consumption in the United States.”
Considering the need to dramatically reduce greenhouse emissions and the use of limited resources, the way buildings are built and operated is of critical importance. The World Green Building Council’s (WGBC) Beyond Buildings report captures the challenge and opportunity with some startling numbers:
- 40-50% of resources extracted for global materials are used for housing, construction and infrastructure
- 75% of the infrastructure needed by 2050 still needs to be built, that’s 230 billion square meters of new buildings to be constructed, the equivalent of a city the size of Paris, every week
- Green buildings will represent an $24.7 trillion investment opportunity in emerging markets by 2030
To protect the climate will require a transition to clean energy, highly efficient buildings made of high levels of (safe) recycled or repurposed materials.
