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Sustainable Retrofit of


Buildings By Robert Peto, President RICS


Retrofitting buildings sustainably is the key challenge for the property and built environment industry in the UK today. The question is, are they ready? The answer is sadly, probably not. The recession and consequent downturn in the property markets has taken the focus off sustainability and focussed it very firmly on the bottom line, whether it is for households or commercial property.


That is not to say that it is completely off the agenda. Some of the largest property companies are reviewing their portfolios to ensure that they are sustainable, partly to meet their corporate social responsibility commitments and also because there is a growing belief that sustainable properties will retain or possibly even improve their value in the longer term and that greener buildings get a better quality of tenant, leading to longer rental periods and potentially less voids. Although this is still to be “clinically proven”, as it were, forward thinking investors can see the writing on the wall in terms of climate change, shifting social attitudes and changing regulation and as such and this is impacting upon their appraisals of investment worth. Where this is happening, it is my personal belief that in the short to medium term this will translate into market value. The only sad thing is that not all purchasers (especially domestic owner occupiers) make rational pricing decisions based on sound research and experience.


As I said though, for the time being this is only a theory for the UK market, although there is some evidence in research carried out by RICS on the US and Dutch markets that this may be the case. These research


|112| ENVIRONMENT INDUSTRY MAGAZINE


reports can be found at: www.rics.org/sustainabilitypractice . Unfortunately at the moment data that might help to prove or disprove these assumptions in England, on the energy efficiency part of sustainability, is locked away in the government’s database of energy performance certificates.


It is in the area of energy efficiency that the UK government has set its policy to make improvements, following cues from the UN and the European Parliament on CO2. It has done this through setting extremely tough and binding CO2 reduction targets in the Climate Change Act which came into force in December 2008. Its aim of achieving a 34% reduction in CO2 overall by 2020 was challenging when it was first published. However in the light of the recent recession it seems an impossibility, let alone the 80% reduction required by 2050 in the Act. This is particularly the case as around 47% of emissions are estimated to come from property, and largely from heating and hot water in the domestic sector.


With 26 million existing properties, 6 million of which are considered hard to treat because they are solid wall pre1919 buildings, and currently a historically low numbers of new build, means that it is the buildings standing today that will make up the majority of the total (somewhere around 70% even in 2050). This places the challenge of improving our CO2 profile firmly on the existing property stock.


There is no doubt that the government has its part to play and it is certainly not all about property. Notably, around 80% of the current energy supply still comes from

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