Real estate is facing a climate crisis, but there might be a way through

We are heading toward climate disaster, and experts predict that by 2030, the effects will be irreversible. The built environment — building, using and dismantling buildings — have a huge impact on climate change. In fact, the International Energy Agency estimates that real estate is responsible for around 38% of total global carbon dioxide, and 36% of total global energy consumption.

TechCrunch+ caught up with Antony Slumbers — the man behind the Trillion Dollar Hashtag — to learn more about what challenges are facing real estate and whether there’s hope. Spoiler alert: There is hope, but we’ll need to act sooner rather than later.

Slumbers told me that there are four major challenges to real estate:

Decarbonizing it
Adapting to the impact of the move to hybrid, distributed and remote working
What to do with a surplus obsolete buildings
Figuring out how to navigate the societal challenge of the three points above

“This really is not an easy problem to solve,” Slumbers said. But there also might be huge potential here: “When you’re talking about the largest asset class in the world, and a fixed timetable, you have the single largest opportunity space in the world, and huge boom time for prop tech.”

Real estate is facing a climate crisis, but there might be a way through by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch