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Global alliance targets billions in funding to decarbonise buildings at scale
A global alliance of green building organisations has launched a sustainable finance call to action aimed at bringing the vast majority of buildings up to modern sustainability standards.The Building Transition: How to Scale and Finance an Inclusive Transition for the Built Environment report focuses on the 75% of lower-performing buildings that have not yet adopted green building practices.
The initiative is led by the UK’s Building Research Establishment, the Green Building Council of Australia, the Singapore Green Building Council, the US Green Building Council, and Alliance HQE-GBC France. It seeks to close the gap between top performers and the rest of the market.
The building sector accounts for a significant share of global emissions. But while high-performing buildings have access to green finance and resources, most buildings remain locked out due to a lack of capital. This call to action lays out how to attract capital to this large untapped segment. The report offers key recommendations to address this challenge:
- Policy and taxonomy reform: Stronger policies and taxonomies that direct capital toward underperforming buildings, and context-specific, performance-oriented criteria tailored to diverse building types, ensuring investment reaches all buildings.
- Global decarbonisation standards: Defining a credible decarbonisation transition and providing common standards, metrics and decarbonisation tools that can be used globally while allowing for harmonisation across diverse assets and geographies.
- Resilience in finance: Incorporating adaptation and resilience in real estate finance to account for the impacts of both acute and chronic climate events. Currently, this is not a common practice in real estate finance, and lack of resilience makes lower-performing buildings, the ‘other 75’, more vulnerable to becoming stranded assets and suffering from climate impacts.
The new call to action builds on the Financing Transformation: A Guide to Green Building for Green Bonds and Green Loans report, which outlined how green building certifications – such as LEED, BREEAM, Green Star, Green Mark and HQE – can set the benchmark for sustainable investments. This new report aims to ensure that financing solutions are inclusive, enabling more building owners to access the funds needed to make meaningful improvements.
