The ROI of Sustainability in the Built Environment
Decarbonizing cities requires bold innovation — and as seen at 2025’s London Climate Week, many of the solutions we need are already here. Now the challenge is to implement them at scale.
During the June 2025 London Climate Week, leaders convened around an urgent question: How can we accelerate the decarbonization of our cities? The answer lies in rethinking energy efficiency. Urban areas, with their density and high energy demand, offer key opportunities for both cutting carbon and costs.
At the Climate Innovation Forum, technologies that can help achieve these goals took center stage. Integrated, electrified and digitally optimized thermal management systems can produce exceptional efficiency gains and resilience benefits. And these systems offer a rare synergy: cutting emissions while improving the bottom line.
The Urban Energy Efficiency Gap: An Untapped Opportunity
The built environment represents a major — and often overlooked — opportunity in the race to net zero. Commercial and public buildings waste nearly 30% of the energy they purchase due to outdated, siloed infrastructure, increasing both costs and carbon footprints.
Globally, buildings account for . This number is projected to rise sharply as the number of data centers — often 10 to 50 times more energy-intensive than other industrial and commercial buildings — continues to rapidly climb. Optimizing energy efficiency can deliver immediate environmental and financial gains.
“It’s really absurd that most commercial buildings using electricity to cool them, continue to eject heat (from that system) outside. At the same time, they’re burning fossil fuels…to create heat for that building. We need to stop wasting energy and start using more sustainable solutions.” ~ Jose La Loggia, Group President EMEA, Trane Technologies
Decarbonization Levers That Deliver Returns
Integrated electrified thermal management systems can provide simultaneous heating and cooling, thermal storage and waste heat recovery. These technologies turn wasted heat into a valuable resource — reducing emissions and saving money.
These advanced heating and cooling systems can be up to 400% more efficient than traditional setups. Instead of dumping waste heat and then burning fossil fuels to create more, these systems recover and reuse energy that would otherwise be lost.
In many cases, ROI on these upgrades is achieved in just two to three years, and in some cases, even faster. They’re not just climate solutions — they’re smart business moves.
Proven Solutions, Real Benefits: Technology in Action
Trane Technologies is a global climate innovator in thermal management solutions. These case studies show how these technologies are being implemented around the globe.
Industrial electrification: Innovative technologies can capture waste heat to cut both operating costs and emissions, addressing heating and cooling inefficiencies in the commercial built environment. In Oss, the Netherlands, Organon’s pharmaceutical campus replaced three fossil-fuel boilers with high-efficiency heat pumps. The result? A cleaner system that saves nearly 243,000 cubic meters of gas each year — all while maintaining strict manufacturing standards.
Waste heat recovery: Industrial-level electrification (heat pump replacing fossil boilers, for example) can create sizable energy savings along with rapid decarbonization. At Derby College in the UK, a new network of air- and water-source heat pumps captures wasted heat and uses it to provide heating and hot water across the campus. The technology upgrade cut energy use by 790,000 kWh and reduced emissions by 160 tons annually.
Smart controls: AI-enabled controls take these gains even further, learning how buildings use energy and adjusting in real time to cut both waste and emissions. Trane Technologies’ 2025 acquisition of BrainBox AI brings autonomous HVAC optimization to approximately 40,000 connected buildings and over 2 million pieces of equipment supported by Trane Technologies. This technology can create up to 25% in additional energy savings while reducing emissions by up to 40% through predictive, self-adjusting algorithms.
The Future is Now
“The technologies to really decarbonize our cities already exist today. The issue is that we need to scale them and for that we need policymakers, industry leaders and communities working together to embrace this vision.” ~ Jose La Loggia, Group President EMEA, Trane Technologies
By combining innovative technologies like thermal management systems with digital optimization, cities can convert today’s energy waste into tomorrow’s competitive advantage. Business leaders who act on these opportunities will capture both financial and climate dividends while building healthier, more prosperous communities.
And beyond the immediate gains, embedding sustainability into strategy can also lead to long-term competitive advantage and growth for companies. Our own trajectory demonstrates the impact: our Sustainability Commitments have put the company on track to carbon neutral operations by 2030. We have already cut operational greenhouse gas emissions by 44% from our 2019 baseline and increased renewable electricity to 68% of our global use. And as our carbon footprint has decreased, revenues have consistently grown, generating a 286% 5-year total shareholder return.
As Jose La Loggia reminded London Climate Week delegates, the technical hurdles have already been cleared, and scale is the next frontier. Of course, scaling isn’t simple: Every building has legacy systems, budget constraints and local regulations to navigate. But those barriers aren’t insurmountable — they’re solvable.
The technologies to decarbonize our buildings already exist. The question now is how quickly we can put them to work. The climate won’t wait. Fortunately, with the solutions we have at hand today, we don’t need to.
If you’d like to dive deeper into the solutions and real-world results behind these technologies, we invite you to read Trane Technologies’ latest Sustainability Report.