Jones Lang LaSalle outlines European green ambitions

Global real estate services giant Jones Lang LaSalle has revealed it is to roll out its green property consultancy services in key European markets, in response to growing interest from firms keen to reduce energy bills and carbon emissions across their office estates.

The company's Upstream Sustainability Services division last month launched its Third Dimension sustainability risk mapping service in France and the Netherlands and is planning to take the service into the German market before the end of the year.

The service assesses the environmental risk profile of a building, providing owners, occupants or investors with an understanding of how their property will be affected by changing environmental risks.

"The most tangible example is flooding," explained Alex Edds, associate director at the company. "We assess whether a building could end up in a flood plain in the future as a result of climate change and rising sea levels. We also look at how buildings will be affected by intense weather events, rising temperatures, and social and economic risks."

He added that the company has already assessed 1,500 UK companies using the service and was expecting to have undertaken 3,000 assessments across Europe by the end of the year.

"We are seeing that the results are informing customers' decisions as they integrate the assessments into investment, refurbishment and disposal strategies," he said.

The company is also in the process of rolling out its sustainability benchmarking service across Europe, which provides shopping centres and offices with a means of measuring their environmental metrics such as energy use, carbon emissions and waste levels against the performance of the wider market.

Julie Hirigoyen, lead director of Upstream Sustainability Services, said the benchmarking service had been running in the UK for a number of years and had proved effective at encouraging firms to improve the environmental performance of their property. "We have seen an average 13 per cent cut in CO2 emissions between 2006 and 2008 for those properties that have taken part in the benchmarking throughout that period," she said.

The company is expecting considerable interest in the new services from European customers, according to Hirigoyen. "Generally, the UK market has moved first with green building initiatives, but we are seeing legislative drivers in other European countries that are now driving interest in the concept," she said. "For example, there is the European Performance and Buildings directive and there will probably be a water performance directive soon."