The growth in global demand for “green” office buildings has slowed after Donald Trump’s assault on environmental protection policies caused a slump in interest in the US, according to a survey of construction industry professionals.
Building occupiers and investors across North America and South America expressed significantly lower growth in demand for green commercial buildings, a shift that “seems to be in response to a change in US policy focus”, according to a survey of members of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (Rics). Reported demand across the rest of the world also fell, albeit not as sharply.
Residential and commercial buildings together accounted for 34% of global carbon emissions in 2023, according to the UN Environment Programme. The majority of those emissions came from heating, cooling and powering buildings, although about a fifth came from construction.
The UN said there was a “critical need for accelerated action in the buildings sector to meet global climate goals”. However, the Rics survey suggested global construction industry professionals were experiencing slower growth in demand.
Green buildings can use a range of techniques to cut their environmental impact, ranging from using materials that reduce high-carbon concrete, to cutting water use, cutting heat lost through windows, and using renewable energy. Energy efficiency improvements in particular also help to cut operating costs.
Nicholas Maclean, Rics’s acting president, said: “It seems to me that what we’re seeing at the moment might be a blip.
“The people who are going to end up using these buildings want them to be sustainable. Everybody, frankly, knows this is the right thing to do.”
He added that green office buildings tend to have a “competitive advantage” in attracting higher rents, because of demand from large-scale corporate tenants, in particular.
There were still more US respondents to the survey who reported growth in interest in sustainable commercial buildings. However, the balance of building professionals across the continent reporting higher demand fell sharply, from 25% to 11%.
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Outside North and South America, the balance reporting growth in demand was 40%, still down from 48% in 2021, the first year of the survey, but far above the US.
Kisa Zehra, Rics’s sustainability analyst, said government policy and regulations have a “huge impact on the confidence of the market”. The Trump administration has made a concerted effort to dismantle a huge range of environmental protections put in place by Republican and Democratic predecessors, undermining confidence in green standards.
Rics also highlighted a decline in the number of construction industry professionals who measured their projects’ embodied carbon, such as that emitted in making materials such as steel, glass and concrete, or in the construction process itself. Forty-six percent of construction professionals reported not measuring embodied carbon, up from 34% the year before. Only 16% of respondents said carbon measurement meaningfully informed material choices in project design.
