Our Workspace and Facilities Management Committee held its first meeting of the year on March 23. The meeting focused on the “E”, environmental pillar of ESG with a presentation delivered by guest speaker Gábor Szarvas, CEO of Greenbors Consulting and Chair of the EU Taxonomy working group of the Hungarian Green Building Council.
His presentation covered, among others, environmental sustainability and green building rankings with a special focus on the energy crisis, EU regulations, and global challenges such as the decarbonization of buildings, and office management with respect to biodiversity.
Mr. Szarvas also stressed that today, buildings are responsible for almost 40% of global energy-related carbon emissions, the latter being one of the main "drivers" of climate change and global warming. Therefore, it would be crucial to effectuate a life-cycle analysis on buildings in terms of environmental impacts, expanding to their entire life cycle from the production of building materials to the dismantling.
Mr. Szarvas also said that the EU's regulatory package, the Green Deal, aims to channel financial resources into sustainable investments. This includes a reporting obligation, which already covers companies operating in the financial sector. From 2024 it will also apply to large companies, regardless of their activities, and the scope of the companies required to produce an annual sustainability report is planned to be expanded soon also to certain SME-s.
Sustainable reporting, however, requires defining what is green and sustainable, as this will be the basis for the various certification schemes and the position of supervisory bodies. From this point of view it is the EU Taxonomy framework that would have a decisive role, as it aims to provide clarity to all regulators, public authorities and market actors on the content of the ESG framework.
To read the summary in Hungarian, please click here.
For more information about the 2023 program of the Committee, please click here.