At the Sustainable Real Estate Forum during London Climate Action Week, UNEP's Gulnara Roll, Head of UNEP's Sectoral Transition Section, delivered a clear message in her opening keynote: the future of climate action will be built, quite literally.
Addressing investors, developers and real estate leaders, she highlighted the central role of the built environment in both the climate challenge and the climate solution. Buildings and construction account for around 37 per cent of global CO₂ emissions and nearly half of global material extraction, making the sector critical to achieving global climate goals.
Ten years after the Paris Agreement, emissions from buildings continue to rise. Under the IEA Net Zero Emissions scenario, the sector now needs to reduce emissions by 56 per cent by 2030 just to get back on track.
But investment is not being held back by capital alone. Research presented during the forum showed that investors increasingly cite a lack of property-level climate risk data and inconsistent disclosure frameworks as among the biggest barriers to scaling climate-resilient real estate.
As Roll noted:
"The gap on the chart is not a statistic. It is the investment opportunity this room is sitting in front of."
Nearly 3 billion people will need adequate housing by 2030, while almost half of the buildings that will exist in 2050 have yet to be built. But the transition is not only about new construction. In cities like London, trillions of dollars' worth of existing real estate will still be standing decades from now. The challenge is not whether these assets remain in the market, but whether they can withstand rising temperatures, more frequent heatwaves and other climate impacts while continuing to deliver value. Retrofitting and upgrading existing buildings is therefore not simply a climate imperative — it is one of the defining investment opportunities of the coming decades.
The solutions are already known: scale up deep renovations, replace fossil-fuel heating and cooling, accelerate clean energy deployment and invest in resilient, future-ready buildings.
Read UNEP's Q&A on the Global Status Report for Buildings and Construction 2025–2026 to explore the data behind the buildings transition and the pathways to a zero-emission, resilient future.
