IWFM’s involvement matters because it shifts the conversation away from design and construction, where most of this debate usually sits, and into operations. The letter calls for a long-term national retrofit programme, international collaboration on retrofit delivery, skills and financing, firmer international commitments on whole-life carbon assessment, more transparent reporting across construction supply chains, and wider use of low-carbon materials and circular economy principles.

Andrew Gladstone-Heighton, IWFM’s Head of Policy and Research, said workplace and facilities professionals “have a vital role in turning ambition into practical action.” It is a point worth sitting with. Most of the UK’s carbon reduction target for buildings will not be met by new construction. It will be met, or missed, by what happens to the buildings that already exist, and that is FM territory: how they are run, maintained, retrofitted and reported on, year after year.

The letter lands in a week when building-related climate commitments have come from several directions at once. At COP31, the conference presidency launched the Antalya Compact for Energy Efficient Buildings, setting a target of cutting the operational energy intensity of buildings globally by 25% by 2035. Separately, the UK government confirmed on 12 November that it backs Türkiye’s wider “35 by 35” pledge to raise electricity’s share of global energy use, a commitment framed mainly around homes through the Warm Homes Plan rather than commercial or workplace buildings. The RIBA and IWFM letter sits alongside both, as a domestic push rather than a response to either.

What it asks for is not new, exactly. Industry bodies have called for a national retrofit programme before, and whole-life carbon assessment has been discussed for years without becoming standard practice. What is different here is who is asking. RIBA represents the people who design buildings. IWFM represents the people who keep them running once they are built. A joint letter from both suggests less appetite for treating decarbonisation as someone else’s problem further down the supply chain.

IWFM has said its Annual Sustainability Survey Report and new circular economy guidance for FMs will follow in the new year, which should give a clearer read on how far retrofit and whole-life carbon thinking has actually moved from policy ask to day-to-day practice. Whether government responds to the letter at all, and whether that response goes beyond acknowledgement, is the more immediate question.

Sustainability also features in Smart Buildings Week, running from 23 to 27 November and delivered by The Workplace Event in partnership with IWFM. The week opens on Monday 23 November with a live webinar, Sustainability in Action: Building Resilient, Future-Ready Places, which sits close enough to this story to be worth flagging rather than forcing: anyone following the retrofit and decarbonisation debate this letter has reopened has a natural next stop already on the calendar.

Register your interest for The Workplace Event | The Facilities Event 2027 

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