The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) has published a new global guide called 'Sustainability practice for surveyors' alongside its 2025 UN Global Compact Communication on Engagement report. The guide aims to give surveyors a shared foundation for embedding sustainability across the full asset lifecycle, from investment and design to construction, retrofit, and end of life. It focuses on four key issues: climate change mitigation, adaptation and resilience, circularity and resource use, and biodiversity. The UN Global Compact report shows how RICS is backing these principles through practical work like whole life carbon assessment, the Built Environment Carbon Database, the UK Net Zero Carbon Buildings Standard, and residential retrofit standards. RICS says sustainability is not a separate specialism but a cross-cutting responsibility for the whole profession. The guide includes a seven-step workflow to turn sustainability objectives into real outcomes, covering context, scope, data, assessment, advice, action, and learning.
