4 Powerful Approaches for Putting Climate Goals to Action

To bend the curve for mitigating climate change below catastrophic levels, international consensus highlights that the 2020s must be the “decade of action” in which urgent, large-scale climate action is implemented across the global economy. Legislators are attempting to reign in carbon emissions through increasingly stringent regulations in key markets, including new operational carbon limits in New York and Boston, required disclosure of Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions in California, and new energy and carbon reporting policies in the United Kingdom, among a few examples. Building owners, corporate organizations, and the building industry at large have reached a critical juncture for bringing together organizational strategy with design thinking to drastically reduce carbon emissions in the built environment.

Many large organizations have made fast approaching 2025 and 2030 carbon reduction commitments, and the time is now for strategic planning to define actionable goals with implementable strategies for existing buildings and new construction to produce real carbon savings. Gensler’s work on Google’s St. John’s Terminal in New York, for example, highlights how a company with clearly defined organizational goals for accelerating carbon-free and circular design systems can realize these goals in a specific project site. The project represents an example of targeted sustainable design strategies related to operational and embodied carbon reduction, design for flexibility, and closed-loop construction waste coalescing in a singular site through close collaboration between a client and design teams.

As a real estate business leader or building portfolio manager, you might find yourself wondering how to create and implement a sustainability action plan that defines specific, tangible strategies for buildings that achieve broad, organizational targets. Gensler’s Climate Action studio has identified four approaches that put organizations on a credible path to achieving climate goals as sustainable design becomes more fully integrated into business practices.

1. Create a proactive climate action plan with implementable milestones.

Creating an action plan with tangible steps for implementation can make or break even the most modest climate action goals. For example, the recent EY Global Climate Risk Barometer found a “deep disconnect between organizations’ climate and corporate strategy,” indicating that 47% of companies surveyed do not disclose how they plan to pivot their business model and operations to align with stated climate goals. For many companies, making statements is easy, but turning those statements into actionable plans and putting them into motion remains a confusing and fraught process.

Furthermore, these plans must be crafted with an eye toward each company’s governance capacities. Inadequate internal capacity for management and implementation can limit the ambitions of even the best laid climate action plans. Governance issues may be a clear indicator that a critical first step in implementing climate action plans is to increase governance capacity. After all, implementing climate action plans will likely require significant change management within organizations themselves to bring commitments into reality.

Working with The Daniels Corporation, a Canadian real estate developer, Gensler co-developed a portfolio-wide sustainability roadmap to facilitate ambitious whole life carbon targets across the company’s properties. Gensler conducted a series of stakeholder engagement workshops to build consensus regarding aspirations, market impact, and change management strategy to support progress towards decarbonization goals. Gensler also created a Sustainability Framework document clearly defining carbon targets, intended outcomes, specific paths to achieve the goals, and a data collection methodology to track progress. The targets were informed by an evaluation of a select number of existing projects, along with market analysis and projected trends in sustainable construction.

To ease adoption of the data collection methodology, Gensler created a data collection tool that enables project managers and analysts to track key parameters that drive carbon across the company portfolio, providing a deeper understanding of effective design strategies. Gensler worked with The Daniels Corporation and their project partners to ensure that the data collection tool interface is user-friendly and has built-in quality control without sacrificing data richness.