The fight against climate change is a team sport. We need to come together and combine our expertise if we want to stand a chance of making a dent in global carbon emissions.

When it comes to running energy efficient buildings, this couldn’t be more true. There are many stakeholders involved, who bring knowledge and expertise from a wide variety of perspectives.

Energy data alone doesn’t cut it. It very often calls for the context that relies on more anecdotal or subjective information that has been built up over many years and sits in areas of the business other than the sustainability team. The problem is this information is stored in notepads, emails, ticketing systems or even worse, inside people's heads.

That’s why we’ve built Data Point Annotations.

Our brand new feature is embedded throughout the platform and allows all users to add information about particular anomalies, outliers, events, variances or anything else worth sharing.

In our last blog about sustainable CRE, we looked at the value of investing in environmentally sustainable buildings. This time, we’re going to focus on one of the challenges of building a sustainable CRE portfolio: namely, how to ensure your tenants use your building in an environmentally-conscious way.

Whether you are a CRE landlord, owner, investor or asset manager, this should be of interest to you. Why? Because the activities of occupiers could make up as much as 70-80% of a building’s total carbon footprint (source: EG). So even if you have a host of green building certifications and have installed super-efficient main building services , how your building performs depends significantly on how your tenants operate within it.

This is known as the ‘'performance gap’: the difference between how a building should perform when it’s designed, and how it actually does perform when it’s occupied.

Last month, the BBP - whom we have been working with since 2016 (https://fabriq.space/blog/better-buildings-partnership-reebooted/) - officially announced its partnership with NABERS to bring their incredibly successful building performance rating standard to the UK. Currently operating in Australia and New Zealand, NABERS comes with a proven track record of bridging the performance gap between building design and in-use operational energy consumption.

NABERS energy ratings measure and verify the actual energy use of existing buildings, providing a rating from 1-6 stars and helping building owners to accurately target, measure and communicate the energy performance of their buildings

The interest in ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) investing has really accelerated in the last few years — this Google Trends graph shows that quite clearly:

What kickstarted the Net Zero movement?

Since Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ hit our screens in 2006, the devastating impact we have on our planet has become widely accepted and understood. Thankfully, the climate change sceptics are now few and far between. But awareness of the issue is one thing, for a long time we lacked any notable action.