ULI Europe: Carbon Pricing

Webinar Summary: The real estate sector “is going to be hit by a carbon tax in the not too distant future. The sooner we start levying an internal carbon price on our own activities, the sooner there will be greater understanding of how this will impact financial returns.” A senior real estate director, quoted in ULI PwC Global Emerging Trends in Real Estate 2023 Until recently, the concept of carbon pricing has been more prevalent in other sectors such as energy-intensive industry sectors (oil, mining etc.), aviation and maritime transport. But it is on the rise in real estate, through companies putting an internal price on the carbon their portfolios create, or in the form of taxation or regulation by local authorities and national governments.

It is a complex issue, raising difficult questions about how to make polluters in a society pay in a way that changes behaviour, how governments can work together to solve common problems without hindering their economies and how to avoid penalising those least able to pay for energy or reducing emissions. In the ULI PwC Global Emerging Trends in Real Estate 2023 report, we undertook one of the first global deep dives into carbon pricing and real estate as part of the industry’s efforts to decarbonise.