Climate change, sustainability and decarbonisation are among the most pressing issues facing the built environment this century, and fast becoming a major concern for the real estate industry as a whole.
Net-zero commitments, fast-moving sustainability requirements and reporting standards, alongside growing tenant demands for more sustainable buildings are colliding with rising energy prices and the all too real consequences of a changing climate with extreme weather events such as flooding.
For Dutch cooperative lender Rabobank, a signatory of the Paris Agreement, the fundamental challenge was how to embed this climate commitment at the heart of its own office buildings in the Netherlands. What does the Paris climate pledge actually mean for its 125-strong office building portfolio? And how do you break these decarbonisation ambitions into actionable goals, with measurable KPIs to track progress?
The legally binding Paris Agreement sets a global framework to avoid dangerous climate change by limiting global warming to well below 2°C. While Rabobank had already drawn up a CO₂ dashboard to monitor energy-related data from its portfolio, it did not contemplate interventions on the circular economy, biodiversity or climate adaptation front.
Our team of property advisors, digital consultants and sustainability specialists put together a proposal to help the bank develop an all-encompassing sustainability strategy with interim goals focused on four key themes: energy, climate adaptation, circular economy and biodiversity.
Harnessing our proprietary digital methodology, our team carried out an extensive energy performance assessment of Rabobank’s office portfolio, highlighting that about half of the office building portfolio was in fact consuming more energy than expected.
Project Summary
125buildings
790,000m2GFA
