The Carbon March Visits Moosehead Lake, Maine

A few posts back, I depicted climate change concerns within urban planning as becoming the ‘new civil rights movement’. It was a stark metaphor, illustrating the degree to which greenhouse gas emissions within real estate development has become a defining issue for our industry.

The Christian Science Monitor has just devoted lengthy column space to a development dispute in Moosehead Lake, Maine, where environmental groups raised concerns over the potential negative carbon impacts from the proposed 2,300 housing and apartment units. By their calculations, the development would produce 9,500 tons of carbon dioxide annually – putting an additional 1,850 vehicles on the road. A representative from one of the groups cites their concerns as several and interrelated – not only are they unhappy with the the size of the development, but also with its location being far from town and only accessible by car, encouraging lots of driving.

Particularly timely for the Green Journey was the article’s update on states’ efforts to formally tie real estate development activities to climate impacts and state emissions reductions targets.

“Climate change has kind of permeated everything with regard to land use”.
-Scott Morgan, senior planner with the California Governor’s Office, as quoted in the Christian Science Monitor.

Carbon March Status: Regions That Formally Connect Real Estate Development to Climate Impacts

• 35 states have climate action plans or are in the process of developing them.
• Of the above, 17 states have set emissions targets for greenhouse gases. However, far fewer have laws that presently allow direct action on the basis of greenhouse gas emissions.
• California is seen the nation’s leader in pushing towards the inclusion of greenhouse gas assessments within local development plans and taking legal action against municipalities and/or companies, which it believes are not taking sufficient action to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
• Across the US, only California, Massachusetts and King County, Washington have established climate change analysis into the state environmental review process that applies to land development.

In previous posts, we recommended that real estate investors learn about a) any climate change plan in effect in jurisdictions where they develop and operate investments and b) proactively managing the carbon footprint of their assets as the regulatory environment evolves.

So far, there is no need to change that suggestion.

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Please let us know your thoughts. Our Green Journey is a forum for sharing and your perspective is valuable.

Photo credit: Flicker/Jonathon Brennecke - Moose

LEEDing Change

Now that you’ve got LEED all figured out, get ready to change — quickly. And if you haven’t got LEED all figured out, congratulations there is even more to catch up on.

Last night, the Northern California USGBC Chapter put on a presentation of upcoming changes to the LEED rating system. The event was so oversubscribed that the Chapter put up the webcast and slides for dowloading. Here are also a couple of highlights discussed, that are more pertinent to the financial underwriting of green investment properties.

LEED for Existing Buildings: Operations and Maintenance

• First of all, the above title is the new name for the old “LEED-EB” — stressing now the ongoing O&M best practices, not just a series of one-off projects to green an existing building once in its lifetime.
• The USGBC has partnered with BOMA to create some forthcoming green lease language. This language will hopefully align landlords and tenants on minimum expectations about environmentally friendly operating behaviors such as: recycling, mandatory lighting and HVAC shut down and using green cleaning products without VOCs.  Green lease language can also deal with submetering, an interesting point for us San Franciscans, since the California Public Utilities Commission now permits submetering of tenant spaces here. The presenters said that this is a great plus for green building because now tenants will be able to directly see the utility costs that their use of their suite is creating — theoretically giving them a vested interest in agreeing to comply with environmentally friendly building practices.  This may be true. I also quietly reminded myself of some conversations with landlords who were angling to pick up any utility savings as additional net rent, boosting the property’s net operating income. That may also be true in jurisdictions where submetering is not permitted. We’ll see how that shakes out in reality.

LEED Core and Shell Update: “The End of the Glass Office Tower in San Francisco”
This is the rating to watch if you deal with spec office development.

• The Energy & Atmosphere Credit, “EA”, has been tightened up a bit, with a particular San Francisco impact. Basically, the combination of achieving EA credits under the LEED-CS, achieving the LEED Gold rating needed to obtain accelerated permitting here in San Francisco and having to design the building to perform 40% better than Title 24 (the California Building Code) results in, as the presenter put it, “the end of the glass office tower in San Francisco”. In short, the energy efficiency of the building has to be improved to such a high standard, that a glass building shell may not be feasible any longer.
• Anecdotal LEED market acceptance info: the presenter, an architect, reported that his firm is working on approximately 60 office projects here in San Francisco and around the Bay Area. He says that on nearly every single one, developers are requesting some level of LEED certification for the project; underscoring his view that LEED is firmly embedded here in the Bay Area as the market standard for new office construction.

Future of LEED: Carbon Footprint Reconciliation + More
Not only are there a) more ratings and b) changes within the various ratings underway, but there will be an overall system revamp of how all the systems fit together plus more — possibly before the end of 2008.

One of the big upcoming changes will involve embedding a carbon footprint analysis within the LEED rating work towards certification. Last week, I recommended that lenders and investors should reconcile any LEED certification achieved with a carbon footprint analysis of the project. Apparently, this issue has been quietly evolving within the USGBC as well.  It was announced last night that in the future, perhaps as soon as Greenbuild in November 2008, the USGBC will adopt some form of carbon footprint calculation in conjunction with the various LEED updates, so that users can see how their green building design and construction choices actually play out on a project’s carbon footprint. No additional details are available as of yet, but we’ll be birddogging this one quite closely.

Please let us know your thoughts. Our Green Journey is a forum for sharing and your perspective is valuable.

Photo credit: Flickr/hoveringdog - The Park, Nottingham, UK (2005)