Announcing the ESG Proptech Report – Building the Future 2024
By Lisa Reynolds, CEO of GBCSA
In January this year, Guy Grainger, Head of Sustainability Services and ESG within Real Estate advisor JLL, predicted that 2024 would be a tipping point year for green property and construction. Specifically, according to Grainger, 2024 was the year in which going green with design, construction and existing assets, changed from defining the sector’s leaders, to being a requirement for doing business within the sector.
We in South Africa have always been quite strong-minded about doing things in our time, and in ways that make sense to us. Our built environment sector doesn’t reflect the same urgency or ubiquity in its current attitudes towards green. At least, not yet.
Conditions are starting to emerge within the market that might change that. We’re seeing this through a combination of environmental carrots (and a growing desire from investors for seeing some climate awareness within the companies they choose to support), and regulatory sticks, from the Carbon Tax Act, through EPCS, to the JSE’s ESG reporting guidelines.
The future that we at GBCSA hope to see (and motivate, fight for, pull, push, partner or drag into being), is one where the merits of green building draw the market into being one step ahead of any green government regulation. Increased asset performance, climate resilience and green earnings premium on investments are just some of these merits.
South Africans are also quite strong minded about being told what to do, especially when we’re not completely sure of why we’re being told to do it. Sharing that ‘why’ of green building, in terms of benefits to businesses, people, and planet, is part of our core mission at GBCSA.
The future that we are working towards is one where the local built environment looks at greening as an opportunity to build more resilient and responsible business models. These are business models that are better suited to a changing world, and where compliance with regulation becomes easy because the core work of greening asset portfolios and business plans has already been done.
We have no illusions about the fact that it takes more than one voice to move a market, and especially more than one kind of voice. It takes partnerships, forged around the meeting of many schools of expertise around a common message.
The Building the Future Report represents such a partnership. GBCSA is proud to partner with REdimension Capital and Rand Merchant Bank in producing this important piece of research, which will be published in the coming month.
The report is REdimension Capital’s ongoing project to demystify and make accessible the wondrous world of innovation, smart design, and smarter management that is proptech. Now in its second iteration, it is more comprehensive than before, and aims to offer a specific set of integrated green content to the market.
This has been achieved by widening the circle of expert inputs to include GBCSA, discussing green building certification and its implications, and Rand Merchant Bank, unpacking the complex world of sustainable finance and its emergent trends.
This report presents a holistic view of critical green partnerships. It connects the techniques and technologies of high-performance proptech solutions with the green certified buildings that support, and are supported by them. And to close the partnership loop, it links these buildings with sustainability-driven funding and funders.
This report also serves as a clear and accessible primer on green building certification, green proptech, and green finance for the built environment, within the overall lens of ESG in South Africa.
It is intended as both a point of departure for those grappling with green for the first time as well as a platform to bring together experts across industry silos. Many of us specialise in one of the three report facets but may not have realised the depth of the connections between our fields of expertise, and the opportunities this holds.
For those new to green building, the report includes comprehensive references and resources within each of the report partner organisations.
You could look at this report as something of a compass: necessary to start a green journey well, and helpful to return to along the way to refine direction and route.
It has been a privilege to be a partner in the process of its creation.
Markets are not very responsive to lone voices in the wilderness, and the South African construction sector can sometimes feel a little resistant to change.
But the South African construction sector is, simply, a collection of individual business owners, who have braved a tough environment, and hostile and unforgiving conditions to create their enterprises, and found the grit, skill, and smarts to keep them going in the face of intense challenge.
I’m willing to bank on their collective wisdom. Once the arguments are clear, the data available, and the benefits obvious, I believe that we’ll reach our own tipping point for green property and construction. Maybe we’ll need an extra year or two, maybe we’ll need more partnerships that produce more accessible and integrated resources like this one, maybe we’ll need juicier carrots, more solid sticks, and louder celebratory tambourines.
What I don’t doubt is that we will, in the South African construction sector, achieve a green business model that centres sustainability and allows businesses, people, and planet to thrive.
Download the full report here