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Sustainability at Atisreal: Tim Malthouse and Arlette Anderson Interview

Tim Malthouse is an Executive Director of BNP Paribas Real Estate and Arlette Anderson is BNP Paribas Real Estate's director of Sustainability and CSR. Here are their thoughts on Sustainability at BNP Paribas Real Estate.

What do we mean by sustainability at BNP Paribas Real Estate?

Arlette: For me, sustainability is all about how BNP Paribas Real Estate behaves as a responsible business.  Climate Change is a very serious global environmental threat but, by promoting new sustainable ways of living, working and travelling, we stand to achieve wider benefits to human health and general well-being. 

We have a duty of care towards our natural resources for our own benefit and for that of future generations.  Put simply, sustainability is setting goals to enable people to satisfy their needs and enjoy a better quality of life without compromising the quality of life for future generations.

The built environment is responsible for significant proportion of carbon emissions in the UK.  How exactly have we adapted our services for our clients in response to driving sustainable working practice?

Tim: Whilst we are not an environmental consultancy, we absolutely need to ensure that we are aware of the issues effecting the built environment and gear up to advise our clients effectively.

Arlette: For example, many of our clients' older buildings tend not to be energy efficient due to outdated design.  Significant focus has been placed on the carbon efficiency of new buildings. However, new build represents only a small fraction of the available opportunity to reduce carbon emissions from buildings (only 1.5% of our UK building stock are new builds).

How does sustainability fit with our corporate social responsibility (CSR) programme?  Does it replace it?

Arlette: CSR is a process by which a company manages, measures and reports its commitment to improve its positive impact on society and the environment.  CSR at BNP Paribas Real Estate is our response to Sustainable development - so, to answer your question, the two are intertwined.  CSR is a voluntary action programme that companies can opt to design and implement which drives responsible business practice. 

At BNP Paribas Real Estate, we have chosen to go beyond standard legal compliance (such as environmental and ethical legislation) and have designed a CSR programme to address the interests of our wider society, clients, employees, prospective employees and suppliers.