Gensler London’s Commitment to a Sustainable Workplace
New to the U.K. market, the NABERS Tenancy Certification aims to help owners and tenants measure their buildings’ environmental performance and identify areas for improvement.
At Gensler, we pride ourselves in creating innovative and sustainable designs for our clients. Recently, we turned the spotlight on our own workspace at No. 6 Moretown, London, achieving a NABERS UK Tenancy Certification of 3.5 stars for our energy consumption.
NABERS, the National Australian Built Environment Rating System, is still new to the U.K. market and is driven by ambitious net-zero emissions targets. Designed to help building owners and occupiers measure and communicate their buildings’ environmental performance and identify areas for improvement, NABERS is a valuable tool for promoting transparency and accountability in sustainability practices, beyond the broader targets of existing certifications, like BREEAM or LEED. Further, whilst a typical EPC rating from A to G does provide information on a property's energy efficiency, this is design-based and only assesses how a building should perform in principle. NABERS, on the other hand, is performance-based and measures actual energy usage.
Our drive to pursue NABERS stemmed from a desire to understand and improve our environmental impact. Often, in architecture and design, the focus is on the initial creation, but we wanted to ensure our building performs well post-occupancy too. By assessing our own office, we aimed to demonstrate our commitment to sustainability to both clients and employees, and to identify and address inefficiencies in our energy consumption.
According to Construction News, approximately 30 new buildings have achieved a NABERS design review target rating in the U.K. so far, and in the year ahead we will start to see how these buildings will be rated based on their in-use performance. Since the NABERS expansion to tenancy ratings in April 2023 in the U.K., we are one of the first tenants to have gathered the full 12 months of energy consumption data and fully certified our office spaces.
Receiving a 3.5-star rating places our London office above average, which is a great achievement considering our building maintains its original 1980s façade and the assessment was conducted on a ‘second life’ building already in operation — rather than a new building designed for NABERS performance criteria.
Through this data collection process, Gensler London gained valuable insights into our energy use patterns. First, the process revealed that power usage is driving overall consumption, which is particularly high on the 5th floor. Lighting loads on the 3rd floor are also much higher than on other floors.
After measuring the London office’s baseline performance and identifying these high-use areas, we are examining the changes necessary to achieve a 4-star or higher rating — which is reachable by improving our performance by just 6%.
The Journey to Certification
Embarking on the NABERS certification process was a detailed and structured endeavour for Gensler’s EU sustainability team. Here are the steps that we took, and you can take to embark on the same journey:
- NABERS UK Assessor Licensing: We enrolled a team member to complete their assessor training and exam to equip them with the skills needed to assess buildings according to NABERS standards. You can find your own assessor online through NABERS.
- Project Registration: The assessor registered our office, No. 6 Moretown, formally entering it into the NABERS certification process.
- Data collection: This step involved a thorough evaluation of data related to energy consumption, metering, and occupation of our different office spaces.
- Submission for Audit and Certification: Finally, we submitted our findings to NABERS for an L1 audit and were awarded our NABERS certification.
Towards a More Sustainable Industry
Complementing our existing BREEAM (interim) and Fitwel certifications, this NABERS rating milestone is a testament to our proactive approach towards offering a more sustainable workplace for our employees. Alongside this goal, we continue to be committed to designing spaces for our clients that are as efficient and as sustainable as possible. Gaining insights into the process itself has equipped us with the experience to be able to help our clients navigate their own certification while it remains relatively new to the market.
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