For two decades, sustainability in Latin American real estate was filed under corporate goodwill, a line item developers trimmed first when budgets tightened. That calculation has broken down. Floods, hurricanes, and heat waves now hit markets that never planned for them, and the buildings designed without resilience in mind are the ones that stop producing revenue. Alicia Silva Villanueva, who has worked on more than 500 certified projects across the region and is the author of Leap the Gap, argues that the conversation has moved from environmental virtue to something far harder for an owner to ignore: whether the asset keeps operating after the storm.
Resilience Is The New Language Of Risk
The merger of sustainability and resilience is recent, and Alicia treats it as the defining shift of the past few years. “If we want a future and if we want to resist what’s coming our way, we need to be ready,” she says. The resistance she describes is not abstract. In commercial real estate, failure looks like a tenant unable to operate, a warehouse underwater, a hotel closed for a season. “A lot of people in LATAM have struggled to invest in their buildings, especially in sustainability, because they think it’s more expensive,” Alicia says. “The time has come when people are realizing that if they don’t invest in resilience, in sustainability, in water savings, in energy efficiency, they might not have business continuity.”
The regional evidence is unforgiving. Acapulco, a city that historically did not plan for hurricanes, lost the majority of its buildings when one arrived. Hotels in Cabo that had planned ahead shut down, waited out the storm, and reopened as if nothing had happened. The difference is not luck. It is envelope design, window specification, and emergency planning decided years earlier by someone willing to spend money on a risk that had not yet materialized. “There are places that have never had hurricanes that all of a sudden have hurricanes and they just never thought that it was important to have a good envelope for your building,” Alicia says. “And now you don’t have a good envelope. You’re gone.”
The Business Case Has Finally Arrived
What changed the mood among owners was not advocacy. It was liquidity events. Two real estate investment trust (REITs) sold in Mexico after investing heavily in sustainability, and the returns reframed the entire category. “People are mind blown because all the money that they invested in sustainability was paid more than tenfold,” Alicia says. That is the moment a nice-to-have becomes a valuation input. For developers planning an exit, and for REITs marking portfolios, the argument is no longer about carbon. It is about what the asset fetches.
An industrial park Alicia worked on makes the same point in operational terms. Flooding had been identified as an extreme risk, so the design included stormwater management. When a major thunderstorm hit, every facility around it flooded and shut down. The park kept running. “The storm passed, we were fine, nothing happened. Everybody around was completely stuck. They had a lot of losses,” she says. Competitors noticed, and the asset’s value rose accordingly, because a tenant will pay for the certainty that production continues. This is why Alicia has reframed her pitch to developers as a question about foregone value rather than obligation. “How much money are you leaving on the table by not taking action?” she asks them. “That’s one of the biggest statements that just drives them crazy.”
Decarbonization Is A System, Not An Energy Bill
Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) version five ties roughly half its credits to decarbonization, and Alicia is candid that she initially misread what that meant. “I thought at the beginning when this decarbonization work came out to the market that it was just another word for the new generations to understand energy efficiency,” she says. Working through decarbonization plans in practice changed her view. The scope now covers the grid, transportation, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) refrigerants, embodied carbon, last-mile delivery, and the supply chain feeding the building. For portfolios reporting to investors through frameworks such as the Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark (GRESB), the embodied carbon actions her clients submitted earned points that pure energy efficiency work no longer generates on its own.
The timeline is the uncomfortable part. New construction has had 40 years of efficiency research and technology behind it. Existing buildings, where decarbonization bites hardest, have had nothing comparable, and there is no 40 years left to catch up. Waste is becoming the next frontier – particularly for stadiums, hotels, and industrial assets – and circular economy requirements are entering national regulation alongside the certification standards. Alicia frames the material constraint plainly: the world is building the equivalent of 60 Paris-sized cities every year, and there will not be enough material to continue that way. Her team is now designing integrated waste management systems for a stadium, mapping every waste stream and coordinating with the city, which is the kind of mandate she never expected to hold. Climate assessment tools have become granular enough to identify which part of a building will flood, letting designers place expensive equipment accordingly. “Before we just had a screening for ‘What was my risk?'” she says. “Now we can be very granular and really go deep into where you should do certain things.”
That precision is what finally moved the skeptics. Alicia describes clients who dismissed sustainability as a passing fashion now arriving at her door asking for it, because the data supports a decision rather than a belief. The mountain still looks steep to owners at the bottom of it, but the tools for the climb exist, and the penalty for standing still is now measurable in valuations and lost operating days.
Follow Alicia Silva Villanueva on LinkedIn for more insights on green building certification, decarbonization strategy, and resilient real estate in Latin America, and read her book, Leap the Gap.