ULI Teams Up With Greenprint Foundation to Form Center for Building Performance
WASHINGTON — The Urban Land Institute is teaming up with the Greenprint Foundation to form the ULI Greenprint Center for Building Performance, a research center about real estate and the environment.
The Greenprint Center is intended to allow real estate professionals to exchange information and measure building and portfolio performances on the basis of energy use and carbon emissions.
The center will be incorporated into the Urban Land Institute’s broader climate, land use and energy initiative. It will carry on the Greenprint Foundation’s mission to encourage the global real estate community to cut buildings’ greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, a goal set by the Intergovenmental Panel on Climate Change.
Currently, the energy used in buildings represents one-third of all global energy consumption, according to the Urban Land Institute, a nonprofit education and research group with nearly 30,000 members worldwide.
The New York City-based Greenprint Foundation is a worldwide organization of real estate owners, investors, financial institutions and other industry stakeholders committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions across the global property industry.
“With the support and resources of ULI, the ULI Greenprint Center will lead the global property markets in reducing greenhouse gas emissions in a meaningful and measurable way,” said Ronald P. Weidner, founder of the Greenprint Foundation and a longtime Urban Land Institute member. “More importantly, it can help change the behavior of the population at large.”
The foundation’s flagship product is the Greenprint Performance Report, which includes the Greenprint Carbon Index that members can use to gauge their relative progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions over time.
The second volume of the report, issued in 2011, included results for 2010 that included 1,623 properties in the Americas, Europe and Asia, and covered a total of 31 million square meters of commercial space.
The report showed a 0.6 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 2009 data on the like-for-like portfolio of submitted properties.
The report provides an open standard for measuring, benchmarking and tracking energy usage and resulting emissions on a building or portfolio.
“The voluntary information exchange between Greenprint Foundation members that informs the report reflects ULI’s time-tested tradition of sharing knowledge for the benefit of the industry,” said ULI CEO Patrick Phillips. “Through the ULI Greenprint Center for Building Performance, we are aiming to fill a void of information on the value of investments in energy conservation and greenhouse gas reductions. We are extremely excited about the ability of this new center to demonstrate that environmentally sound building practices make economic sense.”
The ULI Greenprint Center will assume the Greenprint Foundation’s existing research program and ongoing engagement with real estate owners to develop value-enhancing carbon reduction strategies.
ULI Trustee Charles B. Leitner III, formerly the president and chief executive officer of the Greenprint Foundation, will be the chairman of the ULI Greenprint Center and will serve as co-chairman of the advisory board for ULI’s CLUE initiative.
The center will continue to promote increased awareness of innovative technologies and best operating practices to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions, he said.
“Through this center, ULI can help position the land use and real estate industry as part of the solution to climate change,” Leitner said.