COP29: In Solidarity for a Green World
The built environment has a critical impact on the environment, which gives it a critical place at COP29.
So, as one of the hottest years on record draws to a close, the commencement of COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan brings an enhanced focus on the urgency for climate action, especially within our industry. ULI aims to support climate action across the built environment and highlight the critical role of COP within the Real Estate Sector.
This page is your essential guide to COP29, seen through ULI’s unique perspective. Explore key events to watch at COP29, and uncover various opportunities to engage with ULI initiatives for a more sustainable and resilient future. Our lineup of upcoming events, webinars, and a wealth of resources—including reports, courses, and books—are curated to enhance your understanding and involvement in these vital areas.
READ ONGOING COVERAGE
Exclusively on Urban Land:
Bringing the Circular Economy to the Built Environment
How do we create more of a circular economy, particularly in the building sector, in an industry as materials- and energy-intensive as construction? Experts speaking at COP28 pointed to two ways: renovating more and using building materials with more recycled content. Learn more about potential solutions and approach discussed on the panel.
Exclusively on Urban Land:
Envisioning the Future of the Built Environment
ULI is committed to sharing our best content throughout COP28. We aim to support climate action across the built environment, highlight the critical role of the Real Estate Sector in the future of our planet, and demonstrate how CRE and sustainability goals align. Read about select events that occurred during COP28 and their relevance!
OPPORTUNITIES TO SUPPORT
Support ULI’s Net Zero Imperative
Help communities worldwide tackle today’s urgent climate and land use challenges by supporting the ULI Net Zero Imperative (NZI). This multi-year initiative mobilizes global expertise to accelerate decarbonization in the built environment. Through technical assistance panels, NZI fosters collaboration on local net zero strategies, builds a network of committed stakeholders, and develops essential resources to drive large-scale building decarbonization.
Support Europe’s C Change Program
C Change is a ULI-led program to mobilize the European real estate industry to decarbonize. We’re a movement empowering everyone to work together for a sustainable future. We connect the brightest minds from across the value chain. We challenge barriers, share expertise, and champion innovation to move swiftly to accelerate solutions that will transform our industry and protect our planet.
Explore ULI Asia Pacific Corporate Program
Our Corporate Program provides a holistic way for organizations to participate in ULI activities, as well as an elevated level of recognition and support. The program aim is to work proactively with our Corporate Members as knowledge partners, enabling us to help leverage our platform to meet your organizations objectives and share thought leadership across the Institute and in our industry.
GET INVOLVED AT ULI
Become a Greenprint Member
With 125+ real estate members to date, the Greenprint community of practice connects regularly on new technologies, ideas, and partners with one another to advance sustainability in real estate. The value of Greenprint membership spans networking, leadership, data tracking, and connectivity to broader ULI efforts.
To learn more about becoming a Greenprint member, contact [email protected].
Save the date for the 2025 Resilience Summit
Save the date for ULI’s Flagship climate adaptation event; convening industry leaders in real estate and resilience from around the world to address the challenges and harness the opportunities posed by climate risks.
Register for ULI’s Global Sustainability Outlook 2025
Tune into this webinar to hear from industry leaders on key sustainability topics for 2025, why they matter, and what actions the industry should pursue moving forward. Additionally, explore past Global Sustainability publications.
Register for Unlocking Decarbonization in Real Estate: From Ambition to Action Webinar
In this session, we’ll explore how to reframe decarbonization as a project development opportunity rather than just a technical or financial challenge. Our industry experts will reveal how aligning the right technical strategies with comprehensive financial evaluations—maximizing incentives, tax credits, and financing—can turn decarbonization from a conceptual ambition into a reality. You’ll walk away with actionable strategies, insights into best practices, and real-world examples of how others have successfully bridged the gap from intention to retrofit. Register now for this exclusive ULI member webinar and gain unparalleled access to the insights that are shaping the future of commercial real estate.
Learn about Climate Risk & Resilience
Learn how developers, designers, and policymakers are reducing the impacts of climate change while enhancing economic stability and social outcomes.
Sign up for the Net Zero Real Estate: Renovating and Building for Profitability Course
Learn about the process of renovating existing commercial buildings, as well as greenfield developments, to a Zero Net Energy Bill and Operational Carbon Neutrality.
RECENT ULI RESEARCH AND INSIGHTS
Insurance on the Rise: Climate Risk, Property Insurance, and Real Estate Investment Decisions
The insurance industry serves an essential function in facilitating CRE ownership around the world. This report outlines the critical intersection of insurance, physical climate risk, and property coverage in the global commercial real estate sector, examining the challenges arising from rapid growth in the number and intensity of natural catastrophes. Recent years have seen insurance costs rise due to factors like inflation, the increasing frequency and scale of natural disasters, reinsurance market liquidity issues, and regulatory constraints. As insurers raise premiums, modify terms and conditions, enact stricter underwriting protocols, impose higher deductibles, and reduce coverage, the real estate industry is challenged to secure adequate coverage that satisfies lender requirements. Further, property owners are finding their net operating incomes reduced as insurance costs increase and – in some cases – are seeing transactions falter or valuations decline.
State of Green: Greenprint Performance Report, Vol 14
The global real estate industry continues to progress toward net zero despite an uncertain economic environment. Explore the industry’s resilient progress towards net zero in our latest report.
ULI Global Green Building Policy Dashboard
As global momentum builds for climate action, federal, state, and local governments have increasingly introduced building-sector requirements covering everything from energy and water use to green building certifications to climate resilience. The real estate industry is doing its part to address the climate crisis through actions like selecting lower-carbon materials, setting portfolio-wide net zero targets, and increasing procurement of renewable energy. However, real estate faces a compliance challenge created by evolving government regulations that often differ across jurisdictions. This dashboard serves as a quick reference allowing real estate practitioners to filter by location and see a summary of key requirements related to building certifications, greenhouse gas emissions, embodied carbon, energy, electric vehicles, renewable energy, and resilience.
Working Toward Net Zero: Tenant Engagement Best Practices and Examples
Companies are now motivated to reduce their carbon emissions for the environmental benefits, but the industry faces pressures from investors, local governments, regulators, and occupants to demonstrate progress while meeting diverse demands. Particularly, tenants form a key stakeholder group in reducing building emissions. To create a permanent transition to net-zero, tenant alignment is critical. This shift in emphasis has created opportunities for the industry to undertake new and tenant-specific initiatives to achieve carbon reduction goals.
ULI Australia Webinar: What’s Next? From Net Zero to Real Zero
The built environment contributes nearly 40% of the annual global CO2 emissions. There is a growing understanding that electrification and renewables growth are changing the way buildings consume energy, unlocking opportunities to reduce cost and carbon simultaneously, while even creating opportunities for new revenue streams. Nicolette Maury and Ian Lieblich participate in a panel discussion, hosted by ULI member leader Belinda Bentley, exploring the role that buildings will play in transitioning our energy grid and gain valuable insights into techniques and technologies that can make any building a green building today.
Universal Principles for Carbon Pricing in the Real Estate Sector
This report introduces key principles to guide organizations in the real estate industry. The recommendations are intended to assist companies that are looking to take concrete steps towards advancing their net zero commitments and reducing their carbon footprint. For companies prepared to take action now, this is the C Change report to consider. For more information about carbon pricing and case studies from companies who have already implemented one, see the companion report: Accelerating Accountability: The Case for Carbon Pricing.
The Materials Movement: Creating Value with Better Building Materials
This report provides an introduction for real estate owners, developers, and investors to understand why and how to integrate healthy, sustainable building materials in new and existing development projects. The report highlights best practices for cost-effectively integrating nontoxic, low-carbon materials that help real estate meet sustainability, health, and financial goals.
ULI Developing Resilience Toolkit
View the initial, interactive search and reference tool for development, design, and sustainability teams or other stakeholders to quickly understand design and operational strategies that mitigate risks caused by natural hazards, their potential effects on costs and maintenance, and the co-benefits these strategies can bring.
The Carbon Sweet Spot: Design Tradeoffs for Embodied and Operational Carbon in New Buildings
With increasing emphasis on decarbonization, building owners and developers face myriad choices as they try to balance cost and value and meet social and corporate-level carbon emissions reduction goals. Emissions in the building sector primarily fall into categories of “operational” and “embodied” carbon emissions; combined, they account for nearly 40 percent of global carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. This report presents three hypothetical analyses of buildings in different geographic and regulatory contexts: London, New York, and Singapore. These examples illustrate how real estate decision-makers can navigate the tradeoffs and opportunities that arise when pursuing reductions in both embodied and operational carbon emissions (known together as life-cycle emissions).
Pumping Up Sustainability: Myth-Busting Heat Pumps in Commercial Real Estate
This report seeks to convey up-to-date information about electric heat pump technology, to equip real estate practitioners with the knowledge they need to inquire about heat pumps in new and existing projects. Heat pumps are able to both heat and cool spaces. They offer an electric, low-carbon alternative to gas furnaces, boilers, and air-conditioning (AC) units, acting as all-in-one heating and cooling mechanisms that run in both modes of operation.
Physical Climate Risks and Underwriting Practices in Assets and Portfolios
Physical climate risk data can be a powerful tool for managing asset and portfolio risk and returns. Learn what strategies leading firms are using to manage physical climate risks and navigate market challenges. The latest report from the Urban Land Institute and LaSalle Investment Management builds on their previous report, How to Choose, Use, and Better Understand Climate Risk Analytics, to describe how leading firms are leveraging physical climate-risk data in underwriting practices. With insight into asset- and portfolio-level risk becoming increasingly easy to obtain, new challenges lie in effective interpretation and integration of information into investment practices. Relying on research and interviews with industry leaders, this report provides a nuanced exploration of this emergent issue.
Surge: Coastal Resilience and Real Estate
This report introduces the challenges associated with coastal hazards such as sea level rise, coastal storms, flooding, erosion, and subsidence, and provides best practices for real estate and land use professionals, as well as public officials, to address them.
Get Smart: The Business Case for Grid Interactive, Efficient Buildings
Explore the advantages of integrating grid interactivity with energy efficiency toward the ultimate goal of achieving net zero emissions.
Receiving Community: Building Inclusive Places That Mitigate Climate Gentrification-Driven Displacement
This report defines climate gentrification and describes its impacts on receiving communities. It communicates the value proposition of equitable, inclusive, and resilient development in these communities and outlines specific strategies to minimize climate gentrification–driven displacement.
Members of the press interested in speaking with our sustainability and resilience experts can email [email protected].
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