3 takeaways for real estate from the UN’s climate report
Every six or seven years the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nation’s scientific body, releases a report that summarizes the climate crisis and provides recommendations on what governments and industries need to do.
The message from that report is clear. Everyone needs to be working toward a net-zero future. Especially, hard-to-abate industries and massive greenhouse gas contributors like real estate. The newest IPCC report is a reality check. Here are three takeaways for the built world:
Advances in sci-fi tech are needed. The good news is that a lot of the tech we need already exists. Even so, “stopping climate change will still be complicated and expensive, and long-term emissions cuts may rely on technologies, like carbon dioxide removal, that are still unproven at scale,” according to the MIT Tech Review’s analysis of the IPCC report. The report emphasized that carbon capture and storage technology will be essential for a net-zero future. Though carbon capture isn’t widely available or cheap to implement yet, investment in the tech has hit record levels. In some buildings, carbon capture is already getting used — like this apartment tower in New York City.
Near-term decisions have significant impact. Another recommendation from the report pushes governments to reform their cities so that low carbon choices become easier and cheaper for everyone, according to BBC News. This includes focusing on energy efficiency — a strategy for cities and real estate that’s ready now. The world is expected to build as much wind and solar capacity in the five years between 2022 and 2027 as it did in the past decade, according to the MIT Tech Review. An important part of near-term solutions like this is better financing, the report said, to offset initial upfront costs and accelerate adoption.
Renewables make economic sense. Two-thirds of renewables added in 2020 were lower in cost than the cheapest new fossil fuel option. According to the IPCC report, in the last decade the cost of solar has dropped by more than 85 percent and wind energy costs have dropped by about half. It’ll end up costing real estate owners more if they stall on energy efficiency strategies — especially as more cities enact laws aimed at cutting emissions in buildings (like New York’s Local Law 97).
