Whitepaper | Decarbonization
The Delivery Gap in North America
Why real estate’s “paper targets” are becoming harder to interpret – and easier to misprice
Decarbonization is no longer just a question of ambition versus delivery. In North America, it is becoming a question of visibility, comparability, and control.
Conflicting market signals, fragmented regulation, and inconsistent performance metrics are making it harder for investors to assess risk and act with confidence.
This paper explores what that means for asset value, and what to do about it.
The challenge is not just delivery. It is clarity.
Across real estate, the gap between decarbonization targets and actual performance is well understood. What is less widely recognised is how that gap behaves in North America.
Regulation is not converging. It is diverging.
Performance is not easier to measure. It is harder to compare.
Market signals are not aligned. They are often contradictory.
For investors, this creates a different kind of risk. Not just whether assets will decarbonize in time, but whether it is possible to accurately assess progress, benchmark performance, and price transition risk in the first place.
The paper is written by EVORA’s senior consultants and directors, drawing on years of hands-on experience supporting real asset investors, as well as insight from work across thousands of assets. It is grounded in both deep industry knowledge, and the practical delivery challenges clients are facing today, and is part of our wider Insights programme.
“The Delivery Gap”
Written by: Marianne Fabius, Bhoomika Brahmbhatt, and Lucy Davies-Knight
With contributions from: Paul Sutcliffe, and Nick Hogg
This paper focuses on the North American market. You can find our European analysis here.
Download the paper
EVORA Insights: The Long View
Real asset investment is shaped by forces that unfold over decades. Yet much of the conversation still revolves around short-term signals, compliance cycles, and surface-level metrics.
The Long View is EVORA’s quarterly deep-dive series, developed as part of our wider Insights programme – including investor roundtables, research, and expert-led discussions. Each edition takes a single theme and examines it through the lens of long-term real asset performance, value, and resilience, drawing on EVORA’s work across global portfolios.
EVORA works with investors, owners, and operators across global real asset portfolios, combining sustainability advisory, managed services, and data-led insight.
The perspectives in this series are shaped by EVORA’s in-house specialists working day-to-day across investment strategy, asset management, decarbonisation, data, and reporting – grounded in live client challenges rather than theoretical models.
This series is where we step back, connect the dots, and look beyond the immediate horizon.
