Is data sharing key to achieving net zero?

One year on from COP26, where real estate became part of the conversation and demands were made from the next generation to stop talking about targets and just get on and actually do something, it feels like very little progress has been made. We are no closer to keeping global warming within 1.5ºC, still nobody understands how you deal with embodied carbon and there is no universal definition for what net zero actually is.

The industry has nudged forward incrementally, but what we really need, says Better Buildings Partnership chief executive Sarah Ratcliffe, are some giant leaps.

Bim Afolami, chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Renewable and Sustainable Energy and a member of parliament’s Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Select Committee, thinks he has the key to enabling those giant leaps. Stealing a (misquoted) phrase from his hero politician Lyndon B Johnson, he believes it is time to grab the sector by the balls, as then the hearts and minds will follow.

That grabbing, he says, is set to come in former energy minster Chris Skidmore’s soon-to-be-released Net Zero Review, which will have a heavy focus on the role of real estate.

“Everybody is recognising in government that we can’t just leave this to good people trying to do the right thing across a huge part of the value chain,” says Afolami. “Once we’ve got this review, it will enable us to push a lot of these things forward.”

Forcing change

For Afolami, legislation is the only way forward, particularly when we have a recession that is likely to turn people’s heads away from investing in the environment.

“Government has a monopoly on violence and a monopoly on forcing people to do stuff. There is nobody else in the system who could do that,” he says. “You can only go so far voluntarily because there are a bunch of people who are going to be really struggling for cash flow… so what you’re going to need are pretty set laws that will over time force a lot of this change.”

Largely, the industry welcomes legislation. It wants clarity, but there is also a strong sense that the legislative stick shouldn’t always be thrust at the landlord.

Derwent London’s head of sustainability, John Davies, certainly sees the value in legislation, citing EPCs – regardless of whether the tool is worthwhile – as a legislative stick that has forced action. With a marker set for all commercial buildings to reach EPC B by 2030, landlords have started to take action, shifting the decision upwards to the boardroom, where regardless of the economic environment, finance is found to ensure a portfolio remains relevant.

That said, both he and ZTP managing director Alex Hill believe that the answer to action lies not just with the provider and builder of the space, but with those who utilise the space. The key step in enabling the country to reach its net zero goals, they say, is to force the sharing of energy data.

Hill says: “I personally believe there needs to be a step change in terms of the ‘grab them by the balls’ approach for the occupier, the people who are actually consuming the energy, and we need to say, ‘Look, this isn’t bank details. We’re not talking about your personal data here. It’s energy consumption data and, frankly, it’s not for you to stand in the way of our global shift towards net zero. This is something we have to do and you don’t have the right to prevent us from doing it as a planet, as a country, as an industry.’

“There are too many people standing in the way of that, and we need to become more open-source when it comes to data sharing. It’s all about transparency and collaboration.”

Occupier data

For Hollis’s head of building physics, Jose Alvarez, energy consumption data from occupiers is key to understanding how businesses are operating and being maintained.

“If we don’t know what energy is being used, we cannot do anything to reduce that energy,” he says. “So, the key is to start gathering that information.”

But the likelihood of any government introducing that kind of legislation looks slim, if not impossible, with Afolami labelling it “difficult politically to force people to give away data”.

“What’s probably better is,” he says, batting the responsibility back to landlords, “if you have owners of buildings who embed structures that make it impossible for people to not give data, that is a much easier way of doing it… though I recognise that is often easier said than done.”

The happy halfway meeting point, says the BBP’s Ratcliffe, may be government legislating around the NABERS scheme and requiring property owners to disclose energy-in-use data. She says that the introduction of mandatory in-use performance disclosure on commercial buildings would start to create that lake of data so that, as a sector, real estate can start to use real evidence to improve.

“It’s going to be a bitter pill to swallow for the commercial owners,” says Ratcliffe, “because we know from the work we do at BBP that when you do that disclosure in the first year, it’s not going to look pretty. But we need the industry to be brave and we need to face up to the reality that many of our existing buildings are not performing as they should be and we need owners to be able to say, ‘Yeah, OK, understood. But once we disclose that data, what can we then do to actually increase incrementally year on year?’”

Progress from COP26 may well have been slower than anticipated. A war in Ukraine and a recession have forced people to look more closely at finances and may well have led to a lighter foot on the accelerator, but the landlord community – much of it anyway – continues to push forward.

“It’s a case now of knuckling down and getting it done,” says Derwent’s Davies. “And one of the key aspects that we are still trying to grapple with is how do we actually engage our occupiers effectively to make come alive all the good work we are trying to put into our buildings?”

What is needed now, says Davies, is collaboration. If enforced data sharing is too politically dangerous for our government, then the key lies in owners and occupiers working much, much more closely together.