Green leader: Turning climate ambition into operational reality

Technology’s role is becoming pivotal to delivery of green initiatives, writes Katie Whipp.

As COP30 closed in Brazil, UN climate chief Simon Stiell delivered a blunt message: “There is no time to waste with tactical delays or stonewalling. The time for performative diplomacy has now passed.”

The urgency is indisputable. The world is tracking toward up to 2.5°C of warming this century – far beyond the Paris Agreement’s intended 1.5°C limit. The implications are profound: resource scarcity, mass displacement and accelerating ecosystem collapse.

Real estate sits at the heart of both the problem and the solution. With the right tools and policy conditions, the sector could materially shift national pathways to net zero. The challenge is no longer awareness – it is turning ambition into operational reality.

Governments are raising their climate ambition. In the UK, the Clean Power 2030 plan commits £40 billion annually to 2030, while the Energy Security Bill aims to scale heat pump installations to 600,000 per year by 2028.

Ambition collides with complexity

Yet ambition continues to collide with complexity. The 2025 Budget reduced the narrow eligibility for heat-pump subsidies just as uptake needs to accelerate. Full electrification, hampered by the fundamental economics: electricity still costs significantly more than gas, creating friction for households and businesses.

For commercial real estate, this friction isn’t abstract – it directly shapes the cost, feasibility and timing of decarbonisation strategies across portfolios.

Commercial real estate owners increasingly recognise that carbon-intensive buildings are no longer just environmental liabilities, but financial and operational ones exposed to regulation, market repricing, tenant-demand shifts and acute physical climate risks.

Yet progress remains slow because of one structural constraint: the sector still lacks cohesive, granular building-level data.

The OECD’s Future-Proofing Real Estate Investment (2025) report makes this clear. In its survey of 43 institutions: 58% cite insufficient asset-level data, 49% point to inconsistent methodologies and 28% highlight unclear regulatory standards.

As the OECD concludes, without high-quality, harmonised data, market actors “may lack full visibility on future climate-related risks when making long-term planning and investment choices”.

This is now a barrier to capital deployment, resilience planning, valuation accuracy, and ultimately, climate progress.

Digital helps operational delivery

Technology’s role in real estate is not a new one, but its significance is shifting. Historically, digital systems helped owners monitor buildings. Today, they are becoming the most effective way to close the widening gap between climate ambition and operational delivery.

COP30 made one message unmistakably clear: climate action must now be science-led, data-verified and operational. That shift is already reshaping real estate – and it is precisely the space in which re:sustain operates. As a science-led remote energy optimisation platform, re:sustain uses calibrated digital-twin technology grounded in thermodynamic modelling to build a physics-accurate representation of how a building behaves in real-time.

By integrating live data on occupancy, energy flows, equipment behaviour and external climate conditions, the platform reveals a building’s true operational energy profile and pinpoints where carbon and cost can be eliminated.

This allows re:sustain to remotely optimise assets and deliver continuous, measurable reductions long before major retrofit cycles begin – turning climate ambition into operational reality without the need for capex. In a landscape where investors and regulators are demanding scientific evidence, not assumptions – and where capital increasingly seeks demonstrable return and impact – this is the kind of operational decarbonisation that will define the next decade.

Long-term value

These technologies will be pivotal not only for achieving net zero, but also for safeguarding long-term value. As climate-related risks become increasingly visible – and as capital markets begin to price environmental performance directly into valuation – the advantage will sit firmly with owners who are already embedding data-driven transition and adaptation strategies into day-to-day operations.

These leaders will be best placed to attract investment, reduce operational costs, maintain competitiveness and protect assets from the growing pressures of regulation, tenant expectations and climate volatility.

Equipped with the right tools, real estate can become one of the most powerful levers in the move toward decarbonisation.

Katie Whipp is chief business officer of re:sustain