A decade ago, the Paris Agreement laid out long-term goals for the world to address climate change and its negative impacts, and coordinate to find the solutions needed to succeed.

For the real estate sector, this challenge remains acute. While momentum has built, with energy intensity falling, demand for renewable sources increasing, and carbon emissions stabilising last year [1].all indicating that positive action is beginning to bend the curve, there is still a long way to go.

Instead of falling, emissions from the building sector have increased by five percent since 2015, far short of the 28 percent reduction required by 2030 and three quarters of buildings in the EU remain energy inefficient, yet between 85-95 percent of all buildings existing today will still be in use by 2050 [2].

The real estate industry continues to focus on the importance of decarbonisation

The sentiment among some 50 participants who attended the C Change Forum at this year’s ULI Europe Conference was gauged through live polling. The results revealed that decarbonisation remains an important focus for most companies, despite the current political and financial climate.

45 percent of those polled asserted it was more important, and 14 percent indicated it was significantly more important than it was two years ago, while 36 percent confirming that it remains just as important now as it did then.

However, the realities of the slow progress made by the industry were also apparent. 67 percent of those attending thought real estate’s decarbonisation efforts were moving too slowly, while 17 percent believed the sector to be falling behind significantly.

It’s encouraging that the industry clearly remains committed to addressing decarbonisation, yet further action is required.

The mission

For real estate, the challenges of decarbonisation are significant, but it also offers a multitude of opportunities to lead meaningful change while unlocking value for organisations.

ULI’s C Change programme was established to bring together the whole industry to find the practical solutions needed to overcome barriers impeding progress and, ultimately, speed up decarbonisation.

The interactive workshops held at the C Change Forum focused on several of the programme’s key intervention areas.

Owner Occupier Alignment

A session on owner-occupier collaboration explored how to accelerate demand for low embodied carbon and retrofitted buildings through better understanding and communication of benefits. While these groups often agree on decarbonisation ambitions, industry fragmentation can result in misaligned priorities which slows progress in tackling emissions from occupied spaces.

Piloting the Preserve Tool

A second workshop focused on integrating transition risk into financial decision making and showcased a prototype of ULI’s new Preserve tool. Designed to help property investment professionals quantify the financial impacts of the net zero transition, Preserve promotes a standardised approach to embedding transition risks into investment models, and allow the Transition Risk Assessment Guidelines to be adopted at scale. ULI is currently piloting the tool and inviting asset owners and managers to take part.

Coordinating real estate’s investment voice 

Finally, key industry bodies and market players representing the real estate investment community came together to explore ways to accelerate decarbonisation efforts by reducing industry fragmentation. In the meeting, the attendees discussed the need for the investment community to speak in a coordinated, consistent voice, to amplify existing initiatives, enabling them to achieve their intended impact. 

Next steps

These open and collaborative discussions among professionals from across the value chain demonstrate a vital aspect of C Change in action. As the Paris Agreement’s 2030 checkpoint approaches, this spirit of collaboration embodies what’s needed for the industry to achieve real transformation.

Join the movement!

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Continue to be part of these important discussions and contribute to our mission. Join 300+ senior decision makers, practitioners and ESG experts from across real estate at the forthcoming C Change Summit (27 November, Paris) which takes place at the spectacular Comet Arboretum, Europe’s largest timber-built business campus.

Through interactive workshops, panels and keynotes, the C Change Summit programme will explore several urgent priorities for decarbonisation, including:

• unlocking net zero in occupied buildings
• assessing transition risks in valuations
• managing physical climate risk across the investment lifecycle
• achieving affordable net-zero housing
• making the business case for designing and building with nature

and much more.

Click here to register for the C Change Summit.

For more information on Preserve, visit the website.

If you have any questions or wish to find out more about how to get involved with C Change, please visit https://cchange.uli.org/ or email [email protected].

This is the final in our series of thought leadership blogs on the key topics and talking points from the ULI Europe Conference 2025.

Save the date: the next ULI Europe Conference will take place in Berlin 1-3 June 2026.

References:

[1] Source: Global ABC

[2] Source: Global ABC, European Commission