Hudson Pacific Achieves Carbon Neutrality Across Its Portfolio

Hudson Pacific Properties has achieved 100% carbon neutrality across its portfolio. Last year, the firm outlined its sustainability strategy in its Better Blueprint platform with the goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2025. With carbon neutrality, 64% of Hudson Pacific’s properties are Energy Star certified and 65% of the portfolio is LEED certified.

“Sustainability has always been a core part of who we are as a brand and because of our focus on West Coast markets where sustainability is a priority, it has been a part of our DNA for a while,” Natalie Teear, VP of sustainability and social impact at Hudson Pacific Properties, tells GlobeSt.com. “Last year, we rolled out our Better Blueprint platform, and we laid out a set of bold goals. One of them was our plan to be net zero carbon in all operations by 2025. We are happy to announce that we got there sooner than expected.”

Last year, Hudson transitioned to 100% renewable electricity, which was its first step toward achieving its goal of carbon neutrality. “We made huge progress toward that goal last year when we converted our portfolio to 100% renewable electricity. When you look at a real estate company’s overall carbon footprint, most of the carbon footprint is coming from electricity,” says Teear. “We realized that it would take longer to address the remaining portion of the carbon footprint, primarily for heating our buildings. Because of the types of buildings that we have, natural gas isn’t as big a part of our footprint as it is for other geographies, but it is still big. In the near term, there is really no way to stop using natural gas because we need to heat our buildings.”

The pandemic actually helped to drive the decision to complete its carbon neutrality goals early. “We realized during COVID earlier this year that our energy use would go up because of things like things like increased ventilation and filtration to keep our buildings safe,” says Teear. “We were also looking at options to neutralize the carbon remaining from our natural gas. We were able to find a way to bring it all down to zero this year, much sooner than expected and more cost effectively than we expected.”

Ultimately, Hudson didn’t want to choose between its carbon neutrality goals and new safety measures for tenants, which would have increased the firm’s carbon footprint. “We decided to do it now because it came down to realizing that we didn’t want to have a trade off between our carbon footprint and the health and safety of our buildings,” says Teear. “We didn’t want to be in a position where to make our buildings safe, we had to use more energy and drive up our carbon. We decided to bring ourselves to net zero now so that we didn’t have to worry about the energy implications that will come from keeping our buildings safe.”

Teear was clear that achieving this goal is not the end of the road for the company in terms of sustainability. There is still more to achieve. “This is just a steppingstone for us,” she says. “We are really interested in leaning further into technology to drive innovative solutions that help us reduce our energy footprint, having hyper efficient building and generating and storing energy onsite. That is really the way that the world is going if we are truly going to fight climate change.”