Gensler London’s Commitment to a Sustainable Workplace
New to the U.K. market, the NABERS Tenancy Certification aims to help owners and tenants measure their buildings’ environmental performance and identify areas for improvement.
At Gensler, we pride ourselves in creating innovative and sustainable designs for our clients. Recently, we turned the spotlight on our own workspace at No. 6 Moretown, London, achieving a NABERS UK Tenancy Certification of 3.5 stars for our energy consumption.
NABERS, the National Australian Built Environment Rating System, is still new to the U.K. market and is driven by ambitious net-zero emissions targets. Designed to help building owners and occupiers measure and communicate their buildings’ environmental performance and identify areas for improvement, NABERS is a valuable tool for promoting transparency and accountability in sustainability practices, beyond the broader targets of existing certifications, like BREEAM or LEED. Further, whilst a typical EPC rating from A to G does provide information on a property's energy efficiency, this is design-based and only assesses how a building should perform in principle. NABERS, on the other hand, is performance-based and measures actual energy usage.
Our drive to pursue NABERS stemmed from a desire to understand and improve our environmental impact. Often, in architecture and design, the focus is on the initial creation, but we wanted to ensure our building performs well post-occupancy too. By assessing our own office, we aimed to demonstrate our commitment to sustainability to both clients and employees, and to identify and address inefficiencies in our energy consumption.
According to Construction News, approximately 30 new buildings have achieved a NABERS design review target rating in the U.K. so far, and in the year ahead we will start to see how these buildings will be rated based on their in-use performance. Since the NABERS expansion to tenancy ratings in April 2023 in the U.K., we are one of the first tenants to have gathered the full 12 months of energy consumption data and fully certified our office spaces.
Receiving a 3.5-star rating places our London office above average, which is a great achievement considering our building maintains its original 1980s façade and the assessment was conducted on a ‘second life’ building already in operation — rather than a new building designed for NABERS performance criteria.
