Press release

LEADERS AGREE PLAN FOR GLOBAL GREEN BUILDINGS STANDARD

Date

12th March 2008

Description

An international summit of property industry leaders today agreed to develop a global index for green buildings.

Each country in attendance was in agreement over the need for a clear global reporting standard on sustainability to enable genuine comparison, measurement and benchmarking to take place.

Chaired by British Property Federation (BPF) chief executive Liz Peace CBE, the meeting included 20 property chiefs from the UK, Japan, USA, Germany, Italy, Finland, Sweden and Denmark. They agreed that national research on green issues should be shared and that a social networking page – such as Facebook or MySpace – could be the way to do this, ushering in a culture of openness.

Sean Gilbert, technical director for Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) presented the GRI system, which has been used by the Property Council of Australia to develop research across Australian developers. He said that the mining industry was currently leading the way on this, and had been working on an international reporting system for two years.

Peter Verwer, chief executive of the Property Council of Australia said that the 10 biggest property companies in Australia initially had 368 different ways of measuring sustainability. He believes that the big players in the market should look to fund a system which could then get rubber stamped by the EU and accepted by ministers and NGOs across the world.

Sustainability is of course a broad and often vague term, but BPF chief executive, Liz Peace, believes the initial focus should be on key areas such as energy, water, waste and transport.

She said: “Those are the hard measures. There was a variety of opinion on softer measures on harder to measure areas, such as how community friendly a building is or how accessible it is for the disabled. There’s nothing to stop individual countries adding their own soft measures, but we first need to agree a core set of standards. UK companies are hugely keen to develop an international standard. Heads of companies are bemused and confused and just want clarity.”

While Ms. Peace admits that property firms’ concerns lie mainly with the values of their assets, she added: “They want clarity for that exact reason – that it would help establish value. It takes years for aspects of the value to feed through into the overall picture, but I have no doubt that we’ll see an impact particularly across Europe, because of EU legislation like the Energy Performance in Buildings Directive, where values change because of reporting on sustainability. But then good buildings are worth more than bad ones, that’s a fact of life.”

Louis Armstrong, chief executive of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, said: "People are drowning in strategy papers. The idea is to say what real contribution these initiatives will make towards tackling climate change. We need to convince governments to help meet their targets and we need to be able to say those initiatives will make X% difference to a country’s overall target. We need a product that isn’t just a ‘nice-to-have’ process.”

Gualtiero Tamburini, head of Assoimmobiliare, said: “All we’ve experienced so far is numbers than mean nothing. Without a system you cannot compare. Once we have that, we can go to our regional governments and then to the EU with a firm method for dealing with sustainability."

Liz Peace is realistic about how long it could take to achieve a world wide consensus, but she’s optimistic that something may be achievable within a year.

“It’s not going to be quick,” she said, “but if we can get a formal agreement that each country will contribute their industries’ views, then it would be a great achievement and we would definitely have something to show by next MIPIM.”

Sweden - one of Europe’s leaders in green development – agrees, but pointed out that there would need to be understanding of local climates and issues faced by developers in different countries.

Per-Åke Eriksson, chief executive of the Swedish Property Federation, said: “We are in favour of this idea for a common system and have begun the process. We should start with four or five criteria so everyone can be included. Sweden and Finland for example, have very different problems to southern Italy.”

William Kisler, president of the Urban Land Institute, said: “The industry in the USA is reaching out globally and knows that we cannot have separate national standards to sustainability, so being able to measure and compare in a consistent way is vital. I think our members – 80% of our 42,000 members are in the USA – are increasingly global and are seeing different standards across Europe, Asia and Australia and they are keen to converge those standards. Once we’ve agreed on a common set of principles, the rest will be easy. When you come to an agreement, some countries will have a much harder time implementing and paying for the changes.”

Peter Verwer, chief executive of the Property Council of Australia, added: “There’s a tremendous opportunity to develop a standard that will explain the social and indeed environmental governance contribution that major property investors make to the community. To do so, we need to have a common reporting language. Discussions we’ve held today show that there is an emerging mandate to develop such a language. We are already working with the GRI to produce this, but it will much more credible and acceptable if all of the other leadership bodies take part.

“Many of the Australian companies, because they’ve been securitised for so long, and because they’re used to public reporting, have developed systems around financial reporting and see a great need for those to complemented by reporting on social and environmental issues as well. Transparent reporting is a distinct cultural feature of the Australian market, but it’s irrelevant unless it can be integrated into a global system.”

Dr Eckart von Freyand, chief executive of the German Property Federation (ZIA), said: "I think it’s possible and worthwhile but it’s a long way off and we must start as soon as possible. We have undertaken a big survey over abating greenhouse gases in the years to 2020 and 2030 and we are now looking at the study to see what we can do. I think German companies will be open to standardisation and improving by looking outside Germany. I’m not sure we can have just one standard, maybe we need sets of standards for different areas as there’s such a huge range of environments. But we can develop the same principles and come at issues from with the same perspective.”

For more information contact:

Andrew Teacher
Media Manager, British Property Federation
on email ateacher@bpf.org.uk or tel. +44 7841 732 194 while in Cannes

Notes for editors

Think conference in May

The BPF are set to host two sessions at Think, the most influential exhibition and conference on sustainability in the built environment, will take place 7-8 May 2008, ExCeL London. Think provides a platform for debate and ideas exchange amongst some of the industry’s leading proponents of sustainability, over 100 exhibitors and also attracts more senior decision-makers (over 40% of 2007 visitors were senior partner and above) than any other sustainability event.

Visit www.think08.co.uk for more information.

Contact Sam Bompas at FD Tamesis for more information on Think. Email sam.bompas@fdtamesis.com or call 07515 597 557