Office owners and occupiers urged to ‘go green’

[Published January 2011 and updated May 2023] A new toolkit has been made available by the UK Green Building Council (UKGBC) with the aim of encouraging both owners and occupiers of office space in Britain to improve the energy efficiency performance of their buildings.

Non-domestic structures are believed to account for roughly 18 per cent of the country’s carbon emissions and the toolkit outlines a number of ways in which office space can be made less environmentally damaging.

Each of the UK’s top 15 commercial property owners is backing the initiative and highlighting the fact that being more energy efficient is a straightforward and doubly beneficial way for businesses to save themselves money while also helping the environment.

The main focus of the toolkit is on ‘green building management’, which incorporates a variety of ways in which office space owners and occupiers in the UK can communicate and work together more effectively with the ultimate aim of cutting carbon emissions.

“The landlord-tenant relationship is often cited as one of the main barriers to improving the sustainability performance of commercial buildings,” explained Paul King, chief executive of the UK Green Building Council.

“The green building management toolkit is an important and practical step to overcoming this barrier, by encouraging a partnership that can both improve performance and create value for all parties.”

British Land is among the real estate giants involved in the newly-launched endeavour and the company has pointed out that energy savings of as much as 20 per cent have been made at its central London offices since efforts to that end began 18 months ago.

Editor’s notes: The 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference or Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC, more commonly referred to as COP27, was held in Sharm-el-Sheikh which is a short flight from Cairo and, it was there, that several countries agreed to a net zero carbon commitment by 2050.

In February 2023, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) announced its intention to develop a Net Zero Carbon Buildings Standard, together with other institutions included in the UKGBC in order to create an agreement on some rules that will outline the net-zero carbon content of all new and existing real estate, embodied and operational.