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Australian-headquartered multinational Lendlease has tasked its peers with stepping up their decarbonisation efforts, setting the bar high in a talk at Climate Week NYC.
The firm said it was “throwing down the gauntlet”, charging those in the real estate and construction industry with addressing the largest source of the sector’s carbon emissions: Scope 3 emissions.
Scope 3 emissions are the indirect emissions that result from an organisation’s product life cycle and account for the majority of most firms’ carbon footprints. While Scope 1 emissions relate to the direct result of an activity, such as burning fuel for a car, and scope 2 arise from indirect consumption of an energy commodity, such as using electricity created by burning coal, Scope 3 are more removed, and therefore often less easy for an organisation to track, yet they have a big impact.
Lendlease estimates that approximately 90 per cent of the firms’ total carbon emissions are Scope 3 emissions – from upstream activities like the manufacturing of building materials – and downstream activities, such as a tenant’s emissions from the use of electricity.
The use of carbon-intensive materials in real estate, such as steel, cement, aluminium and glass, make them a particular issue for the industry, as well as the fact that there’s limited guidance around Scope 3 reporting within the sector.
Lendlease said that it’s time for this to change. With 40 per cent of global carbon emissions emanating from real estate activities, it will be almost impossible to make meaningful headway on emissions reductions if real estate fails to tackle Scope 3.
Lendlease is advocating for the establishment of “consistent and comparable Scope 3 reporting boundaries” across the real estate sector, and has laid out its own plans in the Lendlease Scope 3 Emissions Protocol V.1, which was released to the public during Climate Week NYC.
In releasing the protocol, Lendlease is advocating for others in the industry – including developers, builders and construction material manufacturers – to commit to addressing Scope 3 emissions, and is proposing the creation of an industry-wide data-sharing platform to share verified Scope 3 emissions data among the real estate sector.
Cate Harris, head of sustainability at the firm and the Lendlease Foundation, remarked on the standard she hopes the firm is setting with the release of its Scope 3 plans.
“The protocol is a seminal piece of work on our pathway towards our target of Absolute Zero – with no offsets – by 2040,” she said.
“We want the protocol to spark conversation and engagement across our sector, to help drive to a consensus on how to account for and report on Scope 3 emissions. If we can achieve this, then we can collaborate as an industry to solve the two big systemic challenges: the decarbonisation of harder to abate materials, and the digitisation and sharing of Scope 3 emissions data,” Ms Harris added.
Jeremy Hutchinson, group head of supply chain at Lendlease, acknowledged that addressing Scope 3 emissions will be no easy feat.
“We do not underestimate the challenges in decarbonising harder to abate materials and we continue to work with our supply chain partners who have aligned aspirations on emission reduction targets, supporting their investment and innovation in decarbonisation,” Mr Hutchinson said.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Juliet Helmke
Based in Sydney, Juliet Helmke has a broad range of reporting and editorial experience across the areas of business, technology, entertainment and the arts. She was formerly Senior Editor at The New York Observer.
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