Sustainability is no longer a new concept. However, applying, measuring and reporting on the sustainability initiative is still a somewhat confused and subjective issue. There is a huge variety of sustainability guidelines and green building schemes of differing natures, meanings and wordings. Despite this, there is no one guideline providing a crossreference between corporate social responsibility and green building performance to help the commercial property market completely incorporate sustainability into their activities. Therefore, this paper intends to link sustainability, real estate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) and sustainable building in order to help companies internalise this concept in all areas of their operations aligning it with their strategic planning. From desk-based research, this proposal examines and compares key aspects of the main schemes in existence, which are currently evolving in the definition, assessment and report of sustainability at the corporate and built environment level. This approach provides key information to help professionals get a better understanding of the specific changes which sustainability brings about in their corporate process, strategies, investment decisions, daily business operations as well as their property management. The insights presented here can support real estate companies to develop comprehensive communication flows and tools for the measurement and disclosure of sustainability data.

Greenfield Shopping centre development. The integration between environmental features, building design and investment analysis at the decision making stage. The Shopping centre is a long term investments in which Greenfield development decisions are often taken based on risks analysis regarding construction costs, location, competition, market and an "expected" DCF. Furthermore, integration between the building design, project planning, operational costs and investment analysis is not entirely considered by the investor at the decision making stage. The absence of such information tends to produce certain negative impacts on the future running costs and annual maintenance of the building, especially on energy demand and other occupancy expenses paid by the tenants to the landlord. From the investor´s point of view, this blind spot in strategy development will possibly decrease their profit margin as changes in the occupancy expenses have a direct outcome on the profit margin.In order to try to reduce some higher operating cost components such as energy use and other utility savings as well as their CO2 emissions, quite a few income properties worldwide have some type of environmental label such as BREEAM and LEED. The drawback identified in this labelling is that usually the investments required to get an ecolabel are high and the investor finds no direct evidence that it increases Market Value. However there is research on certified commercial properties (especially offices) that shows better performance in terms of occupancy rate and rental cost (see Warren-Myers, 2012 for a detailed discussion). Additionally, Sayce (2013) says that the certification only provides a quick reference point i.e. the lack of a certificate does not indicate that a building is not sustainable or efficient. Based on the issues described above, this research compares important components of the development stages such as investments costs, concept/ strategy development as well as the current investor income and property value. The subjects for this analysis are a shopping centre designed with passive cooling/ bioclimatic strategies evaluated at the decision making stage, a certified regional shopping centre and a non-certified standard regional shopping centre. Moreover, the proposal intends to provide decision makers with some tools for linking green design features to the investment analysis in order to optimize the decision making process when looking into cost savings and design quality. K e yw ords: shopping centre investment, green building, real estate development, passive strategies design, decision making A rticle C lassificatio n : Real estate development

In the last five years, the Brazilian shopping centre sector has grown about 32% of gross leasable area (GLA) as a result of the expansion of some existing shopping centres and the construction of 94 new ones. This increase has come up due to two mains factors: [i]-the volume of retail sales has risen according to the enhanced consumption of Brazilian families, especially the ones included in the Class C; [ii]-higher Companies capitalization caused by the offer of shares in the stock market and foreign companies investments in the domestic market. This situation has been generating more energy demand to provide comfort inside the shopping centre building and consequently, the increase of operating costs. Research made by PROCEL indicates that 40% to 60% of these costs are caused by the air conditioning system. In view of the average management of a Brazilian shopping centre, this increase has a great impact on the operation budget and can reach up to 45% of the costs paid by the tenants to the landlord. According to these issues, this paper provides an overview of Brazilian shopping centre sector over the thermal comfort, based on the assumption that the right application of bioclimatic comfort strategies can increase profits by reducing energy costs and as a result, the shopping centre operating costs.