In the Real Estate Sector, banks and investors face significant obstacles in creating and deploying Green Finance products due to a lack of standard sustainability criteria, widespread data fragmentation, and minimal market awareness. These issues hinder their ability to identify and invest in high-quality sustainable real estate initiatives, subsequently slowing the infusion of capital into the green real estate sector.

How can we revolutionize Green Finance by developing innovative Green Finance products (say Sustainability Linked Loans) that address the challenges of standardization, data fragmentation, and low awareness—thereby accelerating investment into sustainable real estate projects?

Financial institutions struggle to offer green loans and mortgages due to the difficulty in trusting or verifying environmental data from property owners, operators, and energy firms. Without reliable and transparent data, they cannot properly assess risks and benefits, which hinders the approval of green financing.

What groundbreaking solutions can we create to establish verifiable and trustworthy data, enabling financial institutions to confidently assess risks and significantly expand green financing options. We are interested in not the technology such as the usage of blockchain but the mechanism to get verifiable & trusted data (for e.g. Verifiable Identity)?

Both private and public Investors face challenges in finding and investing in sustainable real estate projects due to a fragmented market with no standardized information to identify promising opportunities, resulting from diverse risk appetite. Additionally, the high upfront capital requirements—often influenced by varying regional regulations—act as a significant barrier, limiting access for many potential investors.

How Can We Innovate to Unify the Sustainable Investment Market? - Considering the existing barriers such as high upfront costs, varied risk appetite of investors and diverse regulatory frameworks, how might we employ blended finance (pooling investments from investors with varied risk & return time frame appetites – say Government, Not for Profit, Private sectors etc) to develop a unified platform that simplifies the process for investors to discover, evaluate, and invest in sustainable real estate opportunities? We challenge you to create innovative solutions that integrate public and private capital to make sustainable real estate more accessible and attractive.

Property owners are often reluctant to invest in energy-efficient upgrades due to high initial costs. While traditional methods like offering lower interest rates for the loans for sustainability upgrades are acknowledged, they are not often enough to motivate property owners to act.

What innovative strategies can we develop to provide incentives ( financial & non-financial)/ benefits for property owners, encouraging them to invest in sustainability upgrades and accelerate the adoption of energy-efficient practices, beyond the conventional approach of reducing interest rates? This approach should focus on creative, reward mechanisms and financial benefits that make sustainable investment irresistibly attractive to property owners.