As the world goes toward net-zero targets, a critical question emerges: how do we properly account for carbon emissions across time? Should we treat carbon emitted today the same as carbon emitted 30 years from now?

In this episode of The Property Pod, we explore groundbreaking research from Oxford D.Phil candidate Jimmy Jia, who is revolutionizing how we think about carbon accounting in real estate and finance.

Jia's research tackles a fundamental problem: current carbon accounting systems like Life Cycle Assessment simply add up all emissions from "cradle to grave" without considering the time value of carbon. This creates a massive blind spot when evaluating projects like passive houses, which require higher upfront carbon emissions but deliver significant savings over decades.

Using a real case study of a passive house built at New College Oxford in 2024, Jia demonstrates how financial accounting principles—including discount rates and time-value concepts—can be applied to carbon flows. The result? A new framework that aligns carbon accounting with International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS).

The implications are profound: for the first time, investors and policymakers could have compatible tools to evaluate both financial returns and carbon impacts using the same time-based logic.

This conversation with Jimmy Jia reveals why the future of sustainable finance depends on solving this accounting puzzle, and what it means for real estate investors, policymakers, and anyone trying to build a net-zero future.

Disclaimer: The audio and the transcript of the intro and the outro were generated using AI.

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