Welcome to the second edition of Sustainability Matters, your regular wrap of all things ESG from EG to make sure that you and your business is up to date with the latest news views and opinion about all that is important in the word of ESG in the built environment.
If you missed dialling in to a day of all things ESG with EG on Earth Day (22 April) then you missed out on a whole host of insight and intelligence from a stellar line-up of business leaders and thought leaders.
But, because we’re nice here at EG, we’ve made all of the content easily accessible for you. Head on over to www.estatesgazette.podbean.com and check out all of the Sustainability Live podcasts and it will be just like you were there with us. Keep your eyes peeled on EG’s Sustainability Hub over the next few days too for full write-ups from the event and for our special Sustainability Matters issue of EG magazine on 8 May.
The horrible situation that we now find ourselves in has definitely given the environment a bit of a break, with carbon emissions around the world expected to fall by as much as 5% as a result of the slowdown in non-essential travel and industrial activity. That would be the biggest drop since the end of WWII.
Those wins, however, have come at a cost. A cost to life and to the economy. Lives, we sadly cannot get back, but the economy will need to swing back into action and there will be a lot of national (and global debt) that will need to be serviced and repaid.
The easy option will be to revert to business as usual. To lean on carbon-intensive energy sources heavily. But we can do better than easy.
What if we as the real estate industry and as a powerful investment sector sought to push more capital into sustainable assets? What if governments around the world created stimulus packages that promoted sustainable growth? (See Let’s put sustainability at the heart of economic recovery)
The smart cookies at S&P Global’s Trucost believe there could be a real opportunity for businesses to embrace strategies that decouple growth from emissions and for the investment community to accelerate the flow of capital to more sustainable assets. But, they say, a shift of this nature must be underpinned by economic stimulus packages that promote sustainable growth.
There are, of course, many businesses that have put sustainable strategies at the heart of the businesses and it was certainly heartening to hear Hammerson’s head of sustainability Louise Ellison in EG’s Sustainability Live event say that she did not think that ESG would slip down the agenda in the recession we will enter as a result of Covid-19.
It can’t slip down the agenda. The end of this current crisis will not mean the end of the climate crisis.
“If we don’t do something about [the climate crisis] now, it doesn’t matter who owns what bit of real estate or who’s letting it – it won’t be there,” says Grosvenor’s head of sustainability Tor Burrows. “So we need to hugely ramp up our efforts to start combating it.”
“Covid is horrendous, but if we look for a silver lining, the opportunity that’s come is that it’s completely disrupted business as usual,” she says. “How can we create the new business as usual, getting rid of all the old working practices that probably aren’t fit for the future and what do we want to be doing going forward?
“We’re questioning everything that we’re doing and how we make decisions, and trying to be much more nimble and agile now we’re all working at home. My priority is how do we capture that and make sure we don’t lose that when we eventually go back into the office?”
And we will eventually go back to the office, of course. Perhaps in a different way, and hopefully to offices that start to look a little bit more like Edge London Bridge, the ambitious new offering from Dutch developer EDGE.
“These trying times make the importance of healthier and more sustainable buildings even more clear,” says EDGE’s chief operating officer Boudewijn Ruitenburg.
We couldn’t agree more.
Read all of these stories and many, many more on EG’s Sustainability Hub
To send feedback, e-mail samantha.mcclary@egi.co.uk or tweet @samanthamcclary or @estatesgazette
