Green Bond Guidelines for the Real Estate Sector updated

GRESB recently released the 2016 update to the GRESB Green Bond Guidelines for the Real Estate Sector.

The guidelines are geared to real estate sector market participants originating and/or investing in green property bonds. Green bond issuance in 2016 currently stands at slightly above $50 billion and is on pace for $80 billion by year end—a record setting level. Key growth areas include China and Mexico.

Over the past several years, green property bonds gained greater traction, with the real estate industry emerging as a key sector. “Climate change and societal efforts to reduce carbon emissions have become one of the big investment themes,” said Nils Kok, CEO of GRESB. “Alternative investments such as green bonds, used to fund environmentally-friendly projects, have emerged as a market-driven way of bridging the financing gap by directing capital to companies with projects that can slow carbon emissions as we work to avoid environmental catastrophe.”

To read more about the GRESB Green Bond Guidelines for the Real Estate Sector, visit gresb.com.

New York City has two very large buildings dedicated to answering the 911 calls of its five boroughs. With more than 11 million emergency calls annually, it makes perfect sense. The second of these buildings, the Public Safety Answering Center II (PSAC II) is located on a nine-acre parcel of land in the Bronx. It’s an imposing 450,000 square-foot structure—a 240-foot-wide by 240-foot-tall cube. The gleaming aluminum cube risesthe equivalent of 24 stories from behind a grassy berm, projecting the unlikely impression that it might actually be floating. Like most visually striking structures, the building has drawn as much scorn as it has admiration.