As we celebrate The Climate Pledge’s fifth anniversary this month, we caught up with key leaders at some of our signatory and partner companies to learn about their progress and their vision for the climate future. 

JLL's decarbonization strategy has made it a leader in the commercial real estate sector. We sat down with JLL’s Chief Sustainability Officer Erin Meezan to talk about why meeting JLL's climate commitment requires reshaping the entire commercial real estate industry—and how the company is rising to the occasion.

The Climate Pledge: Can you tell us a bit about JLL's history with sustainability and your goals for the future? What milestones have you accomplished to date?

Meezan: JLL has always been pretty ambitious about sustainability. We’ve set ambitious targets and goals that have led the industry. We were the first in the commercial real estate industry to adopt a science-based, net-zero target and were among the first wave of pioneering companies to test that process.  

We’re committed to a 51% absolute reduction across Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions by 2030, and achieving net-zero emissions by 2040. As of last year, our Scope 1 and 2 office emissions were down 35% from our 2018 baseline. We’re working with our landlords to include efficiency in leasing, and moving into more efficient buildings. We're deploying and shifting our energy use from fossil fuels to renewables; as of last year, 37% of all global electricity we use is from renewables. We’ve set a World Green Building Council target to get our managed office spaces to net-zero by 2030, and we're on track to deliver that, which is very exciting.

The Climate Pledge: How have you approached reducing emissions for your own offices versus those that you manage for clients? 

Meezan: Because of the spaces we manage for our clients, Scope 3 accounts for 99% of our emissions. When we set our net-zero target, we decided that we’d treat the work we did to reduce emissions from our own 330 offices globally as a learning lab. Those learnings informed how we advised and worked with clients on their decarbonization plans. So, we basically hired ourselves. We put together a full-service, multidisciplinary client team, and they developed an end-to-end approach to building sustainability into every phase of the journey, from pre-site selection through leasing, workplace experience, sourcing, designing, and construction. 

We’re not just reducing emissions for ourselves, but learning and taking it to clients and teaching them how to do it, too. Often clients come to us for leasing, and we have to teach them that just abiding by green leasing criteria won’t achieve their sustainability goals. Reducing building emissions takes a systemic approach. It’s a new way to think.  

The Climate Pledge: What are some of the challenges to reducing carbon emissions that are specific to the commercial real estate sector?

Meezan: The pathway to net-zero buildings is clear. We know it's about reducing energy consumption in the building; switching to renewables, and ultimately on-site generation; and credibly offsetting any remaining emissions. Where companies struggle is assembling the right teams, and making sure they’re embedded across every stage of building services. It’s important to acknowledge internally that this goes above and beyond what we're typically asking our real estate teams to do. Before you get to the tactics, you have to create a designated team that’s structured in a cross-functional, multidisciplinary way. 

The industry still struggles with a massive awareness gap. We’ll tell people who’ve been in commercial real estate for their entire lives that the operations and construction of buildings accounts for nearly 40% of global carbon emissions, and they’ll be shocked. They don’t realize we’re in a sector where our work in climate really has an impact, and that we can’t afford to wait. We’ve taken it upon ourselves to be leaders, to show the rest of the sector how to do this work, and to demonstrate what the opportunity is. 

The Climate Pledge: Let’s talk more about that opportunity. Are you seeing increased demand for lower-emission buildings, and how are you positioning yourselves to capture that demand?

Meezan: There’s been a massive acceleration in demand over the past couple of years, and frankly a lot of companies aren’t ready to meet it. More than 6,000 companies have adopted science-based targets to reduce their emissions, and the vast majority of those commitments were made over the past two years. For most companies, building emissions aren’t the first part of operations that they’re focused on mitigating, but they are ultimately an important part of meeting Scope 1 and 2 targets. 

We’re in a situation now where demand for low carbon buildings is about to significantly outstrip the supply. We conducted research in 21 cities globally and calculated that 30% of the projected demand for low-carbon spaces will not be met by 2025 based on corporate sustainability commitments and the current levels of office stock and the development pipeline. When you get to 2030, the data shows a gap between demand and supply of 70%.

We’re working with both owners and tenants to reduce that gap. Building owners have been reluctant to invest in emission-reduction projects because they feel like the incentives aren’t in their favor. Now we’re taking this research to them and showing them the market opportunity that’s there if they move quickly. On the tenant side, we’re advising clients that they can’t afford to wait. If they wait until 2030 to look at their building emissions, there’s a chance there won’t be any lower-emission building stock available to rent. 

The Climate Pledge: What lessons from your work with JLL do you think would be transferable and useful for other businesses across industries that are embarking on their own climate commitments? 

Meezan: First, when you’re setting commitments, be as bold as your organization will allow you to be. Those bold commitments are catalytic. They force focus and resources inside of organizations just by virtue of how big they are. And they have the potential to have a really great ripple effect beyond that. When JLL set a net-zero target, no one else in our industry had set a climate commitment. Fast forward four years and most of our largest competitors have their own commitments because we put them in a position to compete with us. The boldness of our commitment changed our industry and continues to do so today.

The second biggest lesson is that once you get into implementation, you cannot wait for the perfect data. There is no perfect data. We could put unlimited money into trying to get the exact data that we need for all of the offices globally, and it will never be enough. So don't wait for that. Yes, you have to have data quality. Yes, it needs to be digitized. But as you're gathering and improving data, start testing components of the strategy to reduce emissions. It will never be perfect—you just need to get going. That’s how you learn.

Learn more about how JLL partners with clients to reach sustainability goals here. You can also download JLL’s performance report and read about its sustainability program.