IN THIS SECTION:

What we do

Measurement and reporting

A prerequisite for all other sustainability policies is good measurement and reporting. If you can't measure it, you can't manage it.

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What's the issue

Measurement and reporting on sustainability holds the key to reducing emissions from the built environment. Without it, any attempt to reduce a building's or business' impact on the environment is useless.

At present, there is no clear and consistently agreed way to measure or report on sustainability standards amongst individual buildings, portfolios or on a corporate level.

Why is it important

The lack of agreed measurement and reporting:

Hampers true understanding of how buildings operate in practice;
Compromises optimal policy outcomes through a lack of available data on building energy performance (e.g. zero carbon new build);
Does not permit comparability in sustainability performance across and within key players over time; and
Frustrates efforts by the property industry to convey to Government where interventions should be made, and where the market is better placed to deliver emissions savings.

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What we're doing about it

The BPF works closely with property landlords to establish workable solutions to sustainability policies. We also work closely with stakeholders and other industry bodies to inform policy and develop workable solutions.

Project and portfolio

We are secretariat to and a member of the Green Property Alliance (GPA), which is also made up of the British Council of Shopping Centres, British Council for Offices, British Retail Consortium, Investment Property Forum, Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and UK Green Building Council.

We also are secretariat to the GPA Metrics Convergence Group. The Group's vision is to build on emerging practice to seek to agree a set of sustainability impact metrics which can be endorsed by the GPA, and which are complementary to as many of the existing sustainability measurement and reporting frameworks as possible. A set of recommendations are due in late 2010.

Corporate

We are part of the consortium which is participating on behalf of the UK in the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Consortium and Real Estate Sector Supplement process.

The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) is a non-governmental organisation devoted to making sustainability reporting as routine as financial reporting commonly is in many countries.

The BPF, UK GBC and Hermes have formed a consortium to share costs and resources in providing a UK representative on the Working Group, which is devising with GRI a set of voluntary guidelines for construction and real estate companies to report on their sustainability impact.

Sustainability contact

Patrick Brown

Assistant Director,

Sustainability

pbrown@bpf.org.uk

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BPF in the news - 07/10/11

Property Week - New eco-friendly framework for built environment

Green Property Alliance report 'Establishing the Ground Rules for Property'

Press release - 15/10/10

Property industry launches first common approach to measuring sustainability