The event was hosted by Lauren Poon, Senior Associate at CallisonRTKL, along with speakers Araceli Camargo, Co-Founder of Centric, and Ed Dixton, Head of ESG-Real Assets at Aviva Investors.

At the start of this year, Larry Fink, boss of the world’s largest asset manager BlackRock, wrote in his annual letter that climate change “has become a defining factor in companies’ long-term prospects”.

Certainly, over the last couple of years, ESG has started to inch up towards the top of the agenda in finance,  especially as investors are now looking for more sustainable long-term investments that are not at risk of becoming stranded assets as the world shifts to a cleaner and greener future.

But real estate has some catching up to do, though efforts to increase investing and developing with ESG principles in mind have been made over the last few years.

However, being able to measure ESG across real estate assets is still a hurdle that the real estate industry needs to get over, according to Ed Dixton, Head of ESG-Real Assets at Aviva Investors.

Being able to measure and demonstrate to investors the impact real estate has is crucial to allow investors to judge how well a real estate asset is performing ESG wise. This is especially important because property will be competing against other asset classes for investors’ ESG funds.

One measure that may be increasingly important from a health and social perspective in a post-COVID-19 world to define, is measuring how a building and our urban environment impacts human health. Happily, some progress is being made here.

Centric co-founder Araceli Camargo revealed that through continued research her team had identified common stressors that affect our day-to-day stress levels. These include air, noise, light and thermal pollution – all factors the urban environment can play its part in reducing by designing buildings and cities with these things in mind.

Tracking how a building reduces air pollution internally and externally, for example, would offer a tangible measure of how it is an asset class that can deliver measurable ESG performance metrics that investors need.

However, more work towards devising an overall ESG framework for real estate and our urban environment will be needed.

Click here to watch the full webinar on Knowledge Finder.