Kemi’s Highlights from The BPF’s Annual Conference and the Net Zero Pledge
Last week, I attended The British Property Federation‘s first in-person annual conference in three years and joined 200 delegates at the Cavendish Conference Centre, to learn how we can accelerate the transition to a net-zero carbon real estate sector.
The BPF used the event to launch their Net Zero Pledge in order to facilitate collaboration across the sector and to get members sharing expertise. SAY have started the ball rolling and look forward to joining forces with the BPF to host an autumn roundtable for BPF Futures members. We’re planning an in-person session, where attendees will exchange ideas, strategies and learnings on how their firms are and can approach ESG.
Turning back to the event last week, speakers included :
- Chris Stark, CEO of the Committee on Climate Change
- Yael Selfin, Chief Economist at KPMG
- Sarah Breeden, Executive Director, Financial Stability Strategy and Risk at the Bank of England and member of the Financial Policy Committee
- BPF and BPF Futures members
Some of the highlights from the event included:
- KPMG’s Yael shared KPMG’s learnings from their report “New Working Patterns and the Transformation of the UK’s Business Landscape” available here and is well worth a read. KPMG expect Working From Home to continue to have a positive impact on local services within the region’s high streets.
- Bank of England’s Sarah spoke about how important the next decade is for action and shared some insights on how to lengthen the risk management framework to 30 years to measure our impact.
- Chris from Committee on Climate Change advised that while the UK is on course to achieve net-zero it would be a difficult feat and that decarbonising buildings was the next big thing but the sector would need to shift to investing, creating and having solid capital plans for buildings in place. Chris’ suggestions included:
- Do the basics
- Adopt high ambitions
- Minimise use of offsets
- Leadership incentives will need to align with net-zero
- Net-zero matters more at a national and international level, not so much at a business level, so align and where you are considering it, get that heat pump installed and switch to electric cars.
- Cost benefit analysis needs to be rigorous.
Want to talk ESG? Email me at kemi@sayproperty.co.uk
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