Thank you to those who attended the latest webinar in the Savills sponsored Cambridge University Land Society ESG series, organised by the Society’s ESG & Sustainability Forum.

Measuring the ‘S’ in ESG can lead to unfavourable outcomes, what is the best way to measure social impact? The UK Green Building Council’s framework for defining social value focuses on wellbeing and quality of life improvements in relation to the interests of stakeholders impacted by a property: "In the context of the built environment, social value is created when buildings, places and infrastructure support environmental, economic and social wellbeing, and in doing so improve the quality of life of people…”

In this webinar, held on Thursday 26 May, our panellists discussed the role of social value in the built environment and considered areas such as:

  • the number of terms being used which often get conflated – social cohesion, social value and social capital each have a place in the vocabulary and should be used appropriately, the common factor being that all of them refer to place-based value creation
  • whether ESG is a metric (developed by the financial services sector) that focusses too much on risk mitigation whereas creating social value requires an outcomes-based approach with a longer time horizon for investment
  • social need at a local level being central to creating genuine social value and that it requires collaboration between the public and private sectors, community organisations and charitable actors

The lively debate was introduced by Ian Marcus, President of CULS and moderated by Ami Kotecha, Chair of ESG & Sustainability Forum at CULS and Co-Founder, Amro Partners, and includes perspectives from our panellists:

Eime Tobari - Founder & Director @ COCREATIF Limited , Sophia Gibson - Associate Director, Social Value Lead @ CBRE , Guy Battle - CEO @ Social Value Portal, Pete Gladwell - Group Social Impact & Investment Director @ Legal & General

 

Slides to accompany the webinar can be downloaded here -

Sophia Gibson - Creating social value and the role of social cohesion in the built environment as a contributor to social capital

Guy Battle - Does social value matter?

Dr Eime Tobari - Social cohesion - measuring social value

 

For more information, please contact David Jackson