MIPIM UK: As property players congregated at London’s Old Billingsgate events centre on the north bank of the Thames this week for the MIPIM UK Summit, they were not the only gathering of note in the capital’s Square Mile.
Supporters of Extinction Rebellion, a movement using peaceful protests to call for action over climate change, took over streets around the City of London, creating “mass swarmings” that they said would cause “sustained economic disruption to some of the most powerful institutions on the planet”.
Having weaved their way through the crowds to reach their own mass swarming, many MIPIM attendees arrived at the conference with the growing urgency around the climate crisis front of mind.
“We need to pick up the pace,” said Louise Ellison, group head of sustainability at Hammerson, during an EG podcast on sustainability recorded at the event.
“This is happening now, we are all going to be affected by it – the next generation even more so… If there’s a message to take from Extinction Rebellion it’s that there’s a big swelling of interest and concern behind this.
“People are quite scared about what’s going to happen and they feel they’re powerless because they don’t seem to be being represented anywhere, so they’re taking to the streets because they want some action and they want to see something happening.”
Ellison added: “Businesses particularly need to be stepping up to this if we want to be on the right side of the argument.”
Matthew Brundle, associate director at real estate sustainability consultancy Evora Global, said the rising voices of protest should sound a warning for property companies neglecting to build environmental awareness into their businesses and buildings.
“The interesting thing about the Extinction Rebellion group is it’s multi-demographic,” Brundle said. “It’s all age groups, it’s all aspects of society, it’s no longer fringe… You no longer have the privilege of being able to control the agenda and the debate at a comfortable space for your business activities. You have to move and you have to move fast, and I think the danger [for] our clients if they’re not engaged in a proactive way is that the agenda will overtake them and they will be forced to react to things rather than being able to do it in a planned and controlled way where they can invest in the proper things that they should be doing.
“Engage with it, be proactive and look at it as an opportunity rather than as a threat. It will get expensive if you don’t plan your activities correctly.”
For more on sustainability in real estate: EG Sustainability hub
With London’s financial heartland the current target of the protests, the City of London Corporation’s district surveyor and environmental resilience director, Gordon Roy, said the Square Mile’s governing body will step up to the challenge.
By next summer, Roy said, the corporation aims to have unveiled a new climate action strategy that will set it on the path to make the City of London carbon neutral by or before 2050.
The corporation’s main objective is to ensure the City remains the world’s leading financial centre, Roy said, but having “clean, lean and green” buildings is a key part of the agenda. The new skyscrapers rising in the east of the City should be as green as possible, he added, and the corporation is in talks with owners of existing buildings over what can be done to make older properties more energy efficient.
Such retrofitting exercises will not often feel like the simplest option to solve the problem of a building designed without sustainability in mind but Brundle said the seemingly easy way out can have dire consequences.
“The moment you take a building down you are destroying an asset which could be refurbished,” Brundle said. “You have to consider the carbon embodied within the building fabric itself – clearly a lot of modern buildings rely very heavily on steel and concrete and that comes with an embodied carbon impact. My advice would be always to look to refurbish and retrofit rather than immediately go to what might be the easy solution, which is to tear down and start again, simply because of the embodied energy that you need to factor into that decision-making process.”
Marco Abdallah, head of engineering at construction engineer Drees & Sommer, said conversations around sustainability with developers are happening more frequently.
“We see the approach of life cycle engineering coming more and more into projects,” he said. “I believe that clients, owners and investors [are starting] to develop a more long-term view on their assets, and with a long-term view you have to deal with the full life cycle and with the end of the life cycle as well, when it comes to demolition or refurbishment.”
From Hammerson’s experiences, Ellison pointed to changes such as using LED lighting as significant investments that can pay for themselves “pretty quickly”. Effective metering initiatives are also crucial, she added. “It’s all very well putting the kit in and making something run more effectively but unless you’re monitoring month on month… you lose the benefits. It’s very much resource-intensive, watching what’s going on in your building, being interested in your building all the time. That’s what you have to do.”
Government policy must now help to drive the industry and the discussion forward, EG’s guests agreed.
“There has been a long-term trajectory that’s been signalled, which is that the UK government is committed to being a net zero carbon economy by 2050,” said Sarah Ratcliffe, chief executive of the Better Buildings Partnership, a collaboration between some of the largest property owners in the UK.
“That’s a really great intention,” she added. “What we need now, very, very quickly, is more detail on how they’re going to introduce policies that support that ambition. We need to get details about it very quickly and in the real estate sector this is more important than anywhere else because decisions that are being made now about the built environment are going to affect the buildings that we have.
“Let’s not forget we already have 80% of the buildings in the UK that we will need by 2050. So in terms of government policy, looking at new buildings and all the regulations that go around that is important, but having the business drivers in place that drive the existing building stock is equally important. So we need to get those supportive policies, we need them to be more specific and we need it to move fast.”
Hammerson’s Ellison called on the government to lead the way with its own property management. “The government has a significant estate,” she said. “It’s procuring buildings all the time. It’s developing buildings. It’s occupying buildings and really it needs to match its ambition with action in relation to that owner state and show leadership, by setting the highest standards in its ownership, development and occupation of its own estate.”
The panel:
- Marco Abdallah, head of engineering, Drees & Sommer
- Matthew Brundle, associate director, Evora Global
- Louise Ellison, group head of sustainability, Hammerson
- Sarah Ratcliffe, chief executive, Better Buildings Partnership
- Gordon Roy, district surveyor and environmental resilience director, City of London Corporation
To send feedback, e-mail tim.burke@egi.co.uk or tweet @_tim_burke or @estatesgazette
