Greenprint Foundation Merges into ULI
The Urban Land Institute has taken over the activities and assets of the Greenprint Foundation and transferred them into the new ULI Greenprint Center for Building Performance, the two organizations announced late last week.
January 23, 2012
By Scott Baltic, Contributing Editor
The Urban Land Institute has taken over “the activities and assets” of the Greenprint Foundation and transferred them into the new ULI Greenprint Center for Building Performance, the two organizations announced late last week. The Greenprint Foundation, based in New York, will not continue as a separate entity, Trisha Riggs, ULI vice president for communications, told Commercial Property Executive. “Greenprint’s activities will now be part of ULI.”
The ULI Greenprint Center will become part of ULI’s Climate, Land Use and Energy initiative, where it will continue the Greenprint Foundation’s mission. That mission is “to lead the global real estate community in the use of greenhouse gas reduction strategies that support the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change goals for global greenhouse gas stabilization by 2030.”
Greenprint Foundation president & CEO — and ULI trustee — Charles Leitner III will chair the ULI Greenprint Center and also serve as co-chairman of the advisory board for ULI’s CLUE initiative.
The measurable aspect of the Foundation’s, and Center’s, goal is a 50 percent reduction in building emissions by 2030. According to ULI, the energy used in buildings represents one-third of all current global energy consumption. Measurement has been central to the Greenprint Foundation, which is best known for its Greenprint Performance Report, which incorporates the Greenprint Carbon Index, a tool used by foundation members to gauge relative progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
The report’s second annual volume, issued in 2011, had results for more than 1,600 properties in the Americas, Europe and Asia 334 million square feet of commercial space. The report showed a 0.6 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from the previous year on the like-for-like portfolio of submitted properties.
The report’s international scope and size “make it one of the real estate industry’s largest, most verifiable, transparent and comprehensive energy benchmarking tools,” according to the ULI.
Carbon-equivalent emissions are measured in kilograms per square meter of space per year, and the analysis is conducted for each building or group of buildings, and then reported in the aggregate for each property asset type: office, industrial, retail, multifamily and hotels.
The Greenprint Foundation was founded in 2009 by longtime ULI member Ronald Weidner, who will serve on the ULI Greenprint Center’s advisory board. With ULI’s resources, Weidner said, “the ULI Greenprint Center will lead the global property markets in reducing greenhouse gas emissions in a meaningful and measurable way. More important, it can help change the behavior of the population at large.”
The Greenprint Foundation’s member organizations are Aetos Capital, AvalonBay, Beacon Capital Partners, Blackstone Group, DEXUS Property Group, Douglas Emmett, Equity Office Properties, GE Capital Real Estate, GLL Real Estate Partners; Hines, Jones Lang LaSalle, LaSalle Investment Management, Paramount Group, PATRIZIA Immobilien, Prologis, Prudential Real Estate Investors, RREEF, Sonae Sierra and TIAA-CREF.
