Climate rules increase pressure to rethink leases - Victoria Towers and Louise Irvine speak to PlaceTech

Commercial Real Estate Partner and Co-Head of Logistics, Victoria Towers, and Commercial Real Estate Senior Knowledge Development Lawyer, Louise Irvine, speak to PlaceTech about how the move to make climate reporting mandatory will obligate landlords to include data sharing clauses in future leases.

Since April 2022, the UK’s largest companies and financial institutions have had to disclose their emissions, ensuring they are in line with TCFD recommendations and, as part of the disclosure, report not only their own emissions but those of their value chain. For real estate, that includes tenants’ emissions.

As such, leases will need to evolve to enable data sharing and, as Towers explains, while we are seeing numerous developers take greater interest in the ‘green’ provisions in their leases, the challenge is including clauses that tenants are happy to agree to.

Irvine goes on to explain that in recognition of the incoming requirement to disclose emission data, landlords and tenants are discussing provisions around the energy providers tenants can use – pushing them towards a greener option.

Irvine comments: “I think [it’s] all very much being driven by knowing that they’re going to have to disclose and work towards targets quite quickly.”

You can read the article in full here, on the PlaceTech website.

Victoria Towers is a Partner in the Commercial Real Estate team and leads Forsters client facing ESG offering. Louise Irvine is a Senior Knowledge Development Lawyer in the Commercial Real Estate team.