Dan Probst leads the energy and sustainability services group at JLL, a global commercial real estate financing and services company. During COP 21 in Paris in December, he spoke with GreenBiz Senior Editor Lauren Hepler at the Sustainable Innovation Forum about forces driving building developers and owners to be more careful about the environmental footprint of their buildings.
"Buildings are, overall, a big part of the problem — they are big contributors (of greenhouse gases), big energy consumers. Some people estimate anywhere in the neighborhood of 40 percent of global greenhouse gases," Probst said.
But current market forces in the building energy include consumers' intense interest in knowing what is in the built environment. Those forces "drive the private sector to say owners of poor performing buildings can now no longer hide. So they’re going to be motivated to improve the performance of those buildings," he said.
That's a good thing: "We need those kinds of market forces to begin to drive owners to want to invest in energy efficiency."
