Q&A With Professor Stuart Brodsky on Climate Change

The operation of buildings is one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions of any sector in the world. Blueprint was fortunate to have the opportunity to sit down with Professor Brodsky and have a conversation about the intersection of climate change and real estate. Professor Stuart Brodsky is the Director of the Center for the Sustainable Built Environment at NYU and also directs the sustainability curriculum for Schack Institute of Real Estate graduate and undergraduate programs.

JB: Thank you for joining me today Professor Brodsky. I was hoping to start off by hearing about your background working in sustainable real estate.

SB: Sure. I was doing research in graduate school in the early 90s on the environmental impact of buildings and started to study and look very carefully at the issue of embodied energy and embodied carbon in buildings and building materials. While I found that that was an important and compelling issue to study, what I found was that the majority or the bulk of a building’s environmental footprint in buildings is related to building operations. Specifically, the energy that we consume in the operation of a building requires the burning of fossil fuels which creates greenhouse gas emissions. Across the globe, on average, building energy consumption and subsequent greenhouse gas emissions represents 39% of global greenhouse gas emissions. This means that despite the common perception that automobiles and transportation are the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions, buildings actually rank the highest.

JB: Climate change knows no borders and one sector will not be able to save the world. Since real estate does contribute significantly  to greenhouse gas emissions, is there any positive change or any areas that still need vast improvement?

SB: Well, even within real estate, we can not look at it as one sector. Many different sectors and subsets of their submarkets within the real estate industry  have different types of stakeholders with different degrees of responsibilities, opportunities, threats, and risks associated with climate issues. The one set of actors in the real estate industry that has been behaving in sync with each other most towards sustainable goals I would say are the real estate companies who are responsive to the interest and demand of institutional real estate investors. Specifically capital that comes from pension funds, foreign wealth, sovereign wealth funds, labor unions, insurance companies, etc. And these actors have been receiving pressure from their stakeholders to make their buildings ‘greener’. Unfortunately, what is viewed as ‘green’ has largely just been scratching the surface. We need to be much further along in focusing on not green buildings but specifically the carbon performance of buildings. And perhaps some of the features associated with green are a distraction and take our eye off the mandate to focus on carbon emissions. So the market overall has responded incrementally. And that’s simply not enough.

JB: How can these large institutional real estate owners and developers be incentivized to go further than some of these ‘green’ initiatives that seem to be more of a marketing opportunity, and truly focus on limiting carbon emissions which is a direct cause of global temperatures rising?

SB: So the question for real estate owners is a combination of identifying what’s good for them financially and, frankly, if they  seek to contribute towards a harmonious future for people across all generations. It is highly likely that if you have a building that isn’t particularly energy efficient, regardless of its age, you can implement strategies to make the building more energy efficient that have less than a three year return on investment. So if you’re just a business person and separate out from your business decisions anything having to do with with with morals and ethics (which by the way we we obviously need to teach a lot more often, because we don’t teach it at all it would seem to me), the business case for energy efficiency is clearly there. 

JB: To wrap things up, is there anything else you think people interested in how we can combat climate change should know? 

SB: When I started working in this area professionally in 1989, I was at the Environmental Protection Agency, and would reach out to the owners and operators of big commercial buildings in New York and Chicago and elsewhere. It was a misperception, but people were not particularly thrilled to hear from me because I was from the government and that suggested something bad rather than good. However, anyone in the business today that was in the business 20-30 years ago would share with you that it’s phenomenal how far we’ve come, and they would have never believed the changes were coming. That’s something to celebrate, but we have to be confident in recognizing that we’ve barely scratched the surface and there is so much more that we can accomplish. We have a lot more to gain than we do to lose from tackling climate change.