Good afternoon, everybody, welcome to the BXP second annual ESG investor webcast. I'm Doug Linde, the president of Boston Properties, oops, BXP, and also a director. With me today will be Ben Myers, our SVP of Sustainability, Amy Gindes, an SVP in accounting, and Blake Levitt, a VP in construction, who are leading our DEI initiative. Before we begin, I just sort of wanted to give you a little bit of context on the approach that BXP is taking to ESG. I think it's really important to appreciate that these are very distinct initiatives, and there is no one person at BXP who is responsible for all of them. It is true that much of our reporting is done through Ben Myers' team in the sustainability segment. He really is leaning on the work that Blake and Amy Gindes are doing for the DEI, as well as the work that our corporate council and our board does relative to governance. I just wanted to sort of step back for a minute and give you a perspective on how the board thinks about ESG. Again, they really do divide it up. We have a committee, which is referred to as the Sustainability Committee, that is chaired by Diane Hoskins, who is the CEO of Gensler, which is the one of the world's largest architectural firms, if not the largest. She is joined by a woman named Mary Kipp, who's the CEO of Puget Sound Energy. They really do have, I would say, not only a passion for what's going on in the world, but also expertise that they can bring, and assist Ben as he thinks about and frames the issues that BXP is dealing with on a day-to-day basis. Blake and Amy, work with our human resources team, which is led by a woman named Donna Garesche. Donna, and myself, and Owen, when it comes to sort of the goal setting, and the tracking, and the intentionality of things from a DEI perspective, really report to our compensation committee, who takes, again, a very explicit and intentional, perspective on how we are doing. We actually have specific goals that we are measuring against on a quarterly and an annual basis, and we move those goals depending upon how things are going in the positive or the negative direction, as we think about what is going on. I would also note that the governance committee has a social perspective with regards to how our board is put together. I think we have 9 independent directors. four of them are female, and we have two ethnically diverse directors, now that Tony West, who is the Chief Counsel of Uber, has joined the board as of a couple of weeks ago when we had our annual meeting. Those directors also represent many of the regions that we are in. Tony is obviously works for Uber and is in the San Francisco region. Mary Kipp is in Seattle. Diane Hoskins is located in Washington, D.C. Joel Klein, who runs our compensation committee, is in our New York region, as are a few of our other directors. I am sitting here in Boston. We have a pretty explicit and intentional process for trying to achieve a diverse, both from a regional perspective, from a racial perspective, from a gender perspective, board that is sort of overseeing all of the work that we do with ESG. With that, I'm gonna start this afternoon's conversation with Ben, who's gonna spend some time talking about sort of where we are and where we have come from a sustainability perspective since we last talked to you about a year ago. Ben? Doug, thank you for kicking us off and that helpful description of ESG roles at BXP. As I was getting ready for today, I was thinking about our first investor presentation focused on sustainability way back in 2017. I was reflecting on this journey, this tremendous journey we've taken, and I was struck by this really special program and platform we have at BXP, a company characterized by integrity and long-term ownership, and this long-term investment philosophy focused on the highest quality premier workplaces. BXP has been a sustainability pioneer, and our leadership in sustainability predated a lot of the popular ESG frameworks of the day, the requirements and best practices, which have been changing and always have a new name or new requirements. During my time at the company over the last 10 years, sustainability and ESG stakeholder interest, the expectations have all increased significantly. As a result, our company's focus on ESG issues has evolved. Today, what I intend to convey and what I really want to get across are three main points. We've been increasing our ambition and stakeholder alignment. We've been focusing on decarbonization at the sustainability desk. We've been managing transition-related risks. Without any further ado, I will commence the presentation. This is a level-setting definition on sustainability. It's real estate that is sustainable as a result of investment, development, construction, and operational activities that meet the needs of the present without compromising the future. Bit of a take on the Brundtland Report sustainability definition. At BXP, our sustainability strategy includes three pillars: climate action, resilience, and social good. We're going to talk about a lot of the climate action and some of the resilience work today, and we're also going to talk about how we conduct our business in a manner that contributes to positive economic, the social, and environmental outcomes for our clients, shareholders, employees, and the communities we serve, our stakeholders. I should mention here in the bottom right, we have the UN Sustainable Development Goals. We do align our business activities and goals with the UN SDGs, and we disclose that alignment within our annual ESG report, which we published on Earth Day. Our team reports directly to senior management. I report directly to Doug Linde as the SVP of Sustainability. We like to say our program covers the boardroom to the boiler room. We truly have board-level engagement with the most senior level, with a Sustainability Committee of the board of directors. We have many corporate functions involved in our sustainability work, including HR, legal, risk, IR, marketing, internal audit, and others that help inform what we're doing on a day-to-day, and also as we annually report and disclose KPIs. At the operational level across the company, we have a sustainable operations committee that these are people with generally senior roles, senior decision-making authority on how we operate our buildings. It's a lot of people that are involved, and at the core, we have our sustainability team, with responsibilities that include environmental performance, management, technology and innovation, renewable energy development and procurement, ESG reporting, analysis and certifications, and stakeholder engagement. Our focus on environmental stewardship has been good for our business. We are focused not on just the awards and saying we're number one, but really the impact and the quantifiable metrics. Some of these metrics I'd like to just briefly highlight is that we've cut our energy use intensity 39%. That's KBTU per sq ft. It's an intensity basis below a 2008 base year. This is all 2022 data. We've decreased our emissions intensity 75%. That's Scope one, two, and three emissions from energy-related operational activities, also in an intensity basis, kilograms of carbon dioxide per sq ft. We've reduced our water consumption on intensity basis 45% below the same 2008 base year. We've increased our waste diversion 31%. 86% of our eligible portfolio today is certified either ENERGY STAR, LEED, and/or Fitwel. We now have 93% of our assets that are certified at the highest LEED Gold and Platinum levels. We're not just certifying green buildings, we're typically certifying them at the very highest levels. Annually, we avoid approximately $40 million in energy-related operating costs as the result of hundreds of energy conservation measures across our portfolio. We also avoid $3 million in annually recurring water-related expenses from water-related operating savings from water conservation projects. We've also issued $5.1 billion today in five separate green bonds. Our ESG ratings are summarized here. We have a AA MSCI rating. We rank very highly in Sustainalytics and the S&P Global ratings. We also have a very high ranking, and we've earned the GRESB Green Star for 11 consecutive years and hold the highest five star rating. The GRESB scores, trending back from 2017, are shown on the left. As I mentioned, there are a number of awards that we've received, and we're happy to receive these awards, but it really is the impact that matters most. A few that I'm proudest of are America's Most Responsible Company's distinction. In the 2023 list, we ranked number one in the real estate category out of 400... a total of 500 companies. We're also named to the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices, which is a very competitive index, and we're pleased to be recognized there. Ben, just to stop for a minute. We have obviously a number of ESG-oriented investors that are on the phone right now. From your perspective, what do you think they should be most focused on out of all of the sort of, you know, quote-unquote, data that we are providing to the various systems, which is the slide that you know, on the previous slide, and then these awards that we're getting, which are, I think, the sort of the analysis of the data we provide, and then they sort of come up with their own, you know, quote-unquote, "black box" results. From your perspective, what, where's the importance here? I think what you want to look for is a consensus opinion, because every rating system has a slightly different methodology, and there's been well-documented divergences between certain ratings. A company may do very well in one framework and not so well in another. I think you do want to look at a, at a wide range of ratings, and that's why we have these four here. We see investors using some, one or two of the different ratings. From my perspective, Doug, today, the most robust and rigorous ESG rating system for real estate is GRESB, because GRESB collects so much data, operational data, policy-related data, how you're managing your portfolio, and how your portfolio is performing. There's nothing like that that's specific to real estate. If you're looking more broadly at comparing a real estate company to other industries, for example, GRESB is not helpful. It could be a mix, but for real estate specifically, I'd point to GRESB. I should also mention here our ENERGY STAR Partner of the Year award. We've won Partner of the Year now for five consecutive years, and ENERGY STAR remains a very important piece of our operating energy management practice. We use ENERGY STAR scores to benchmark and determine whether or not our assets are performing efficiently. Also, I should mention, in 2022, BXP received Nareit's most prestigious award, the 2022 Office Leader in the Light Award, which is the highest achievement for all office REITs and real estate companies responding to the GRESB assessment. I mentioned our ESG report that published on Earth Day. It's available at bxp.com/commitment. It has a lot of information. If you have questions on the report, please do feel free to reach out to me directly. We are, A, increasing our ambition and stakeholder engagement. That's the first area I want to focus. I wanted to look back just briefly at our trajectory of sustainability goal setting. These are public sustainability goals that we have announced going back to 2015, when we established our first targets with a 2008 base year, with an energy use reduction target, greenhouse gas emissions, water use reduction target, and a waste diversion target, all with different degrees of reduction and target years. 15 by 20, for example, with energy use, is a 15% reduction by 2020. In 2016, after measuring progress from 2015, we had met our energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and water use targets early. Good news is, you set targets. Bad news is, you've now hit your targets, you have to reset them. We got a little bit more sophisticated in how we set targets, doing more modeling, more probabilistic target setting. Understanding at the asset level, how we're performing at the regional level, what we could reasonably achieve, and rolling everything up to the portfolio level to try to get as aggressive as possible. We set new targets in 2017. We increased our energy use reduction to 32% by 2025, up from 15% by 2020. We set a greenhouse gas emissions target, Scope one, two, and three emissions, a 45% reduction by 2025. Water use, we increased to 30% by 2025, and we increased our waste diversion rate. In 2019, we met our second greenhouse gas reduction target early. We established a science-based emissions reduction target at 1.5 degree level, that target included a 39% by 2024 reduction in Scope one and two and emissions, and a 14% by 2025 reduction in Scope three emissions. 2020, we established a carbon neutral operations goal. That's for Scope one and two emissions. I will speak more about that goal today. We reset our waste diversion target to 60% by 2025. It was the first target we struggled to meet for a variety of factors related to the waste management industry and tolerances around contamination. That has been a challenging target. Today, our target stands at 60% by 2025, down from 65% by 2020. We established a building certification target in 2021, 87% by 2025. We remain on track to achieve our science-based target and our target neutral operations target, and we disclosed comprehensive Scope three emissions for the first time in 2021. In 2022, we met our second energy and water targets early, and we commenced the SBTi Scope three net zero target approval process. Increasing ambition over time, we have a relatively long history of setting public goals. Ben, just describe the interplay between the goals that you come up with and the conversations that you have with the Sustainability Committee and with, you know, the senior management team, relevant to how you get there, what the risks are, and how, you know, much pushback there is from the internal team on how and when we set these goals? Everyone at BXP is highly opinionated, I appreciate that. It makes us all better. None of this has been like a top-down decree. "This is what you will do." Everything has been highly collaborative, working across the regions, down to the individual level, to get buy-in. My personal belief as a manager and someone who leads this work is, if you don't get the individuals with agency to fully buy in, you're not going to be successful. We've spent a lot of time in person, meeting with people across the country to get these goals approved. I will say, what changed between the setting of our first round of targets and the second round, is that first round, we sort of looked historically on how the company had been performing and then extrapolated based on a reasonable assessment of how much CapEx we were going to deploy, how much energy conservation work we were going to do based on historical averages. The second round of investments, the second round of goals we made were much more specific, where we looked at lighting energy use, HVAC energy use. We looked at controls and real-time energy management and tried to estimate what impact we could have in all those different energy use categories at the asset level, based on historical improvements we had made at the asset level. We brought that data back to the regions and showed how we had developed our models and showed the asset level reductions that were necessary. We made some adjustments in certain places where there wasn't consensus, and we got to consensus. It has been highly collaborative, Doug, and I think that's one of the reasons we've been so successful in meeting our targets early and staying on track with our more ambitious targets, like carbon neutral operations. Stakeholders and stakeholder alignment are critical as well, and we have four groups of stakeholders: clients, investors, employees, and communities. Clients in greater numbers have established ESG or sustainability strategies and are connecting the dots between their stated objectives and the real estate decision making. They are looking for net zero real estate. They want to understand how their buildings are performing, and so we're getting a lot more requests to engage and furnish data to our clients. Investors have also not been shy about their aims to catalyze the net zero transition, along with positive social, environmental, and economic outcomes. We do a fair amount of investor engagement to talk through our programs and what we're doing and how we're aligned. Our employees want to work for an excellent organization that has purpose. That purpose includes doing our part to advance climate action, resilience, and social good strategies. Our communities, the race to decarbonize, is very much on. The cities where we operate have carbon neutral 2050 targets, and there are a range of policies, climate-related policies, and building performance standards that we're having to meet. We're spending an awful lot of time engaging with our communities to help them understand the role of the built environment, the role of utilities, the role of suppliers and vendors in decarbonizing the built environment. One way we gauge what matters to our stakeholders is through materiality assessments. We updated our 2019 materiality assessment in 2022. These are the results of our materiality assessment. I'll just point out a few themes we saw. First of all, more people responded than ever. We had 97 total responses. We had 16 clients surveyed and responded, 20 community members or policymakers, 45 employees, and 16 investors respond to our survey. Appreciate those of you who responded. We saw that economic performance continues to rank number one. No surprise there. It is mainly due from a very high rating from employees and investors. What was interesting, too, here is you can see carbon emissions at number three. Carbon emissions is the most important material topic to our external stakeholders when the scores are summed up for clients, investors, and community groups. When you back out BXP employees, carbon emissions goes all the way to the top. Since 2019, we've seen rising interest in equal pay. It had the highest increase, followed by walkability, community involvement, and human rights. Since 2019, because we updated from 2019 in 2022, the largest declines were in environmental impact, the life cycle of the materials used, cyber risk and security, which surprised me, access to public transportation, and waste. Just a last note on themes here. All four stakeholder groups ranked indoor air quality in their top 10, we still see IAQ in a post-pandemic era, as something that's important to our stakeholders. Stakeholder engagement has increased as well by partnering with other industry organizations and groups. We joined the Better Climate Challenge from the U.S. Department of Energy. We are a partner in that challenge, and we're committed to reducing emissions 50%, Scope one and two, over a 10-year timeframe. We became a partner of NYSERDA's Empire Building Challenge and are working with NYSERDA to advance decarbonization of thermal heating systems in New York City. We've also partnered with ULI, the Urban Land Institute, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and CRREM, the Carbon Risk Real Estate Monitor, to develop CRREM curves for North America, a very important exercise, given the uptake and adoption of CRREM and CRREM-related pathways. For those of you unfamiliar with CRREM essentially defines decarbonization pathways to meet the Paris Agreement for U.S. real estate assets and, really, global real estate assets. The U.S. CRREM curves need some work, we are committed to helping to define CRREM curves in North America. An example of a project that's we're working on as part of these partnerships is the decarbonization of 601 Lexington Avenue in New York City, a 1.7 million sq ft asset. You can see here a series of projects that we've completed and a series of projects ahead. The biggest one that ahead is this electrification of the heating systems. What we're trying to do here, what we will endeavor to do, is recover more heat from the central condenser loop, which is being ejected through the cooling towers, to replace what we would otherwise get from steam in the perimeter radiant systems. With this type of project, we can cut steam use approximately 30% as really strong economic performance. We've seen other initiatives in this building also reduce our reliance on thermal energy. We converted all of our chillers over to electric modern drivelines, and that had a huge impact on steam use, cutting steam use 60%. You flash back to 2016 timeframe, we cut steam use 60%. Now it looks as though we can cut steam use as much as another 30% in this building, which is very exciting for me. These are not lighting retrofits, you'll notice. Those projects are done. We are not doing those simple projects anymore. We're having to get more creative. We're having to partner with groups like NYSERDA and others to work through some of these things. It is a more technical exercise, and it's also, I think, the work that we need to scale across the entire built environment, not just BXP. There's a, there's a lot of work out there, a lot of opportunity that remains. I think 601 Lexington Avenue is gonna be a demonstration of what can still be done in the built environment. Ben, just before you go on, I think it would be helpful for you to explain sort of our perspective on this, which is that this is a proof of concept exercise where, you know, we could probably do this in all of our central plant buildings, but we're sort of saying, "Okay, let's make sure it actually works, that the technology is delivering the reductions in consumption that we're looking for, and then we'll move forward." What's your perspective on sort of those types of opportunities? Yeah. Well, Doug, it's no secret I'm a heat pump evangelist. I believe in the heat pump, the power of the heat pump to electrify the built environment. You're right, we haven't deployed heat pumps for this particular application, a water source heat pump in an existing mechanical plant to recover heat for thermal heating. This is a new concept. We hope it works. I think there's gonna be involvement from a number of partners to get this thing done, and if it does work, it can scale. The real question I have is the viability of a pathway to fully electrify large assets in cities that in colder climate zones, like Boston and New York, where there are real grid monetization challenges and real capacity challenges, keeping up with the demand of thermal electrification for heating, as well as the growing electricity demands for transportation. My number one concern is that we're gonna bump up against that constraint as we seek to electrify more assets, and that could be either for operating assets or new development. Excited about this pilot, this proof of concept, and its ability to scale to other buildings, as you mentioned. Second, I want to highlight our decarbonization focus. As I mentioned, in 2022, it was the first year we disclosed comprehensive emissions for Scopes one, two, and three. We disclosed all these Scope three categories shown here. I'm gonna unpack some of the Scope three, category two, capital goods, which is 15% of our total emissions footprint. I will say, of our inventory, only 6% of our emissions are from Scope one. That would be the combustion of natural gas on site and the combustion of a very small amount of diesel for standby generation backup power. 55% of our total emissions are from downstream leased assets, so that would be tenant-controlled power use in their space, primarily lights and plugs. 14% of our emissions is Scope two energy. That is either electricity or steam for the operation of central plants in our buildings to deliver HVAC to our clients. I mentioned our carbon-neutral operations commitment. It includes actively managed office buildings. It includes emission Scope one and two. Our strategy includes energy-efficient operations, 100% renewable electricity, electrification where possible, and carbon offsets. I wanted to detail today the contribution of each of these strategies towards meeting carbon-neutral operations. On the right, we have this graph. What I'm showing here is, in the dark blue line, our energy use intensity of our portfolio, which has declined from 94.9 in 2008 down to 58.1 in 2022. Our carbon intensity, measured in kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent per sq ft, which has declined from 9.2 down to 2.1. Just to note, for the emissions nerds out there, I'm one of you. This is a market-based emissions accounting at the 2.1 level, but it does include emissions from Scope one, two, and three in this chart, for our properties. Hey, Ben, on the efficient operations side, can you just sort of describe the give and the take between high quality indoor air, running machines, and honestly, what we're seeing today relative to the different ways our buildings are being occupied, and how that is gonna sort of play into how we can reduce our kilowatt hours? Yeah, that's a great question, Doug. I think there's a balancing act that every commercial operator tries to do between comfort, indoor air quality or ventilation, and energy use, right? There is a tension between those three nodes. I worked with Jim Whalen, and we talked about this quite a bit, and he developed a great diagram that we've presented many times. This tension is real, and as you increase ventilation rates, you're often increasing energy intensities because you're having to condition more air. That is why laboratory and life science uses have higher intensities, because you're conditioning more air to do more air changes in the space. That's extreme case. What we're seeing, you know, is the ability to modulate ventilation air to an appropriate level, given the population in the building, in the space. You can do that a few different ways. You can monitor populations, you can do population counting, head counting, or you can use indoor air quality monitoring. We've deployed 500 indoor air quality sensors across our portfolio to get a sense of how effective our ventilation is. What we found is through the real-time indoor air quality data, as well as surveys we've done of our building mechanical systems and how much ventilation air we're delivering to our spaces, that we're over ventilating, and we're over ventilating quite a bit. I think something we're working on is how we can do a sort of demand control ventilation strategy, not just at a conference room level, but at a floor level or at a stack level, to be more precise in how we're ventilating to conserve energy use. There are real calls to continue to over ventilate, I think that we need to be very thoughtful in how we ventilate and make sure that we're really looking at the parameters of air quality through air quality testing, through air quality monitoring, instead of prescriptively dumping 30 CFM of outside air per person, just based on a very high population density that may not be accurate into our buildings because it's tremendously wasteful. Just to explain to everybody listening, why over ventilating is expensive. It means what then? More energy use, more operating costs. Right. It means we're running our fans at higher speeds with a need for more energy to do that, right? If you have a very slow-moving fan at a low speed, it takes much less energy to run that. Therefore, if we're pushing a lot of air and said, we are effectively using more energy for what many people would probably deem as a wasteful exercise. Yeah, it's fan power for sure. It's also natural gas in gas-fired boiler plants where we have those, or steam from a central distribution facility. It can be electricity consumption at terminal boxes and spaces to maintain temperature set point. There's several ways we use energy when we increase ventilation. It adds up. Our pathway to carbon-neutral operations, and this is based on Scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions intensity across our actively managed office portfolio. Showing here a 2008 base year. Moving forward, about a third of our total carbon emissions intensity will be cut through energy conservation alone. We really want to highlight this. You know, a full 33% is met through energy conservation, a lot of that is ventilation, as Doug mentioned. It's also the lighting projects that we've done and other drives and controls and HVAC projects, central chiller plant upgrades, modernization. 32% on top of that will come from grid and district steam improvement. The grid has a carbon emissions factor that is based on the amount of renewable energy and other energy sources on the grid. Steam has a carbon emissions factor based on the fuel inputs and how efficiently it's distributed to buildings. We see those have moved historically downward as more renewables have come online and as steam generators have switched from very carbon-intensive fuel oil over to natural gas. There's now a lot of discussion around the next phase of transition, particularly here in Boston, with Vicinity Energy to an eSteam product that will be greenhouse gas emissions free. There's green power procurements. This is voluntary procurement through a variety of modes. I'm going to outline another 27% of our reduction, and what's left over is about 8% of our carbon emissions on an intensity basis from 2008 that we'll meet using carbon offsets. We have not yet procured offsets. We are making every effort to procure as few offsets as possible through energy efficiency. Our clean energy procurement strategies, This in the stack here, is the green power procurement we're talking about, that 27%. Include, first of all, the efficiency reduction, where you don't need to buy clean energy for the third we're reducing through efficiency. Building power that's procured by BXP, we have a range of green power options. There are opt-in tariff programs that we're taking advantage of on the West Coast. We have additionality source renewable energy certificates that we're pursuing. This would be new capacity that we bring online, primarily for our Boston portfolio, our Massachusetts assets, and then unbundled renewable energy certificates that'll cover the rest of our needs in Boston, New York, and D.C. It's a combination of those three sources. We have our client power, which is procured by the client. We have client power procured by BXP that gets pushed to Scope 3 emissions. We have carbon offsets for what remains of the steam, the steam that if we can't source eSteam or green steam, we hope we can, but we may have to use carbon offsets for about 20,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, to handle Scope 1 emissions from steam, gas, and diesel to hit our 2025 goals. We're also doing quite a bit of on-site development. In 2010, we developed our first solar array on site. It was 110 kW ground mount at Weston Corporate Center in Weston, Massachusetts. At the time, it was the largest privately held solar array in Massachusetts, which is hard to believe. Since then, we've developed 8 megawatts of on-site systems, including garage-mounted canopies, which get us a lot of capacity. You can build, you know, 500 kW up to 1.5 megawatts on top of a garage, versus, you know, much smaller capacities on rooftops, where rooftop areas is much more limited. We've also got about 5 megawatts in the pipeline, so we'll have approximately 13 megawatts in service by the end of 2024. I mentioned the VPPA. That's another 24 megawatts that we're in the market trying to source now for our portfolio. We're also focused on climate tech innovation, and I see this as another way that our company can lead on decarbonization. In 2022, we made a modest investment in a climate tech fund led by Energy Impact Partners. We wanted to be part of a broader decarbonization ecosystem, that was the purpose. We wanted to understand where the capital was going and what the opportunities were for BXP. EIP, Energy Impact Partners, has traditionally been a utility lab and has a growing focus on the built environment, and we believe that partnerships with EIP's LPs and portfolio companies will help BXP address operational and supply chain emissions over the long term. You know, a couple of companies we're really interested in here, obviously Measurabl. We work with Measurabl closely. They had a exciting press release today about their most recent raise. Sublime Systems manufactures green concrete. They're right here in Somerville, Massachusetts. We're excited about the progress they're making. It's an area where we see a need for technology progress and innovation. A few others we're meeting with and in talks with to see how we can partner to advance decarb. I think one of the big and exciting parts of this partnership for me is we are in the room with utilities, talking about the grid edge, talking about building decarbonization, and there is a very urgent need for building owners and utilities to work together in decarbonizing the built environment, and EIP is a tremendous place to do that work. Another area we're focused on decarbonization is embodied carbon. A lot of the focus historically has been on operating emissions, so that's the use and maintenance of buildings, so energy-related emissions, et cetera. That's really where the focus has been, embodied carbon is everything else. These real estate assets have many life cycle stages. I mentioned our focus on Scope three, Category two capital goods. It was 15% of our emissions footprint in 2022. These are emissions resulting from things like concrete and steel on new development. We are advancing our understanding of embodied carbon by doing life cycle assessment on every project. This is a future potential development at 343 Madison Avenue, where we've done some of this analysis, where we collect what are known as EPDs, Environmental Product Declarations, and we use the EPD forms to calculate the global warming potential of all the materials on the project. We end up with a much better idea of where the emissions are, and this case is about 39,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent for a project that is close to 1 million feet, just shy of 1 million feet. You can see about 5% of that is transport to the site, about 1% is the use, 2% is the end of life, and 92% is the product stage. That's the manufacturing extraction of the materials. This building has a carbon intensity of 46.7 kilograms of carbon dioxide per sq ft, just from embodied carbon. 14% of that's the enclosure, 5%'s the foundations, and 81% is the structure. The structure is where the hotspots are, and just to hammer that home, this shows the metric tons of carbon dioxide from structural concrete and structural steel, the number one and two most carbon-intensive sources of materials. That is where we're focusing our efforts at the moment. What can we do to green our cement mixes? Looking at greener concrete designs and mix designs, and ways to reduce Portland cement in our concrete, and ways to source steel, both structural steel and other metals, from suppliers with EPD forms. They give us the EPD, we look at the global warming potential, and we're factoring that into our decision making. Now, obviously, cost is also factored into that decision making. It's just we're trying to drive transparency, just like the LEED rating system drove transparency around recycled content, VOCs. Now we have this tool to drive transparency on embodied carbon, and I'm excited about the possibilities because we've been meeting with concrete suppliers, ready mix designers. We've been meeting with steel suppliers, and they are eager to position themselves as the providers of low-carbon alternatives to the status quo. Another example I wanted to point out is One Forty Kendrick Street, which to me represents the potential, the enormous potential to decarbonize existing buildings. This is the most challenging of all, I think, decarbonization efforts, is these existing buildings. This is a 20-year-old office building, highlighted in red, in Needham, Massachusetts, where we partnered with Wellington Management to develop a net zero strategy for this building. We brought them a few options: a green option, a deep green option, a net zero option, and they fully bought in to going all the way with net zero. The net zero strategy includes new air handling units with advanced superblock heat recovery, the electrification of all the thermal systems, envelope improvements to the roof and wall insulation, lighting upgrades, and 1.3 megawatts of on-site solar on the garage and the roof of the building. The mantra for this project is build tight, ventilate right, energize with sunlight, and we will have a net zero operational project, we hope, around kicking off later this year. We're building it now and should be operational, fully operational, certainly before the end of this year. Just before we go. I just want to make the following comment, which is: Here's an example of a building that we didn't have to do any of these things. We could have simply leased the building in its current configuration. The units on the roof were not at the end of life, but they were moving towards their end of life. We had a customer, a client, who said, "This is really important to us, and we're prepared to partner with you." That partnering with you meant that there were some capital costs that we entered into that we didn't have to enter into. You know, effectively, they paid a modest premium to what they might have paid for a vanilla, existing suburban office building that didn't have that stuff. I think there are tenants, who become clients of ours, who are prepared to do this. There are other situations where our customers/clients are saying, "It's interesting, but it's really not where our focus is." you know, I think we're in the early innings of the kind of change that will occur over time for our ecosystem of developer, owner, and tenant client agreeing that these types of investments are good for everybody as well as good for the environment. Yes. In addition to the capital expense sharing, I'd also note that we implemented a green lease form here with advanced clauses around lighting, power density, plug load density, and Wellington very much partnered with us on that, and how they design their space and how they use the building. Which is another example of how I think landlords and clients are gonna need to work together. You're right, Doug, it's not every client, but I think we're gonna have more of clients that are interested in this type of arrangement, and we want to be here to serve them. Transition risk management. A few words on transition risk management. We have fully adopted the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures and have included TCFD disclosures in our 10-K and in our ESG report. We align on governance, strategy, risk management, and metrics and targets, and we make very, I think, strong disclosures in this space. We will continue to update our disclosures and follow industry best practices on using the TCFD framework. Another important aspect of transition risk management is adapting to regulations, climate policies at the local level, including building performance standards. We've been spending a significant amount of time looking at New York's Local Law 97, which was the first major building performance standard, followed by Washington, D.C.'s Building Energy Performance Standard, their BEPS. Boston now has what's known as BERDO 2.0, its energy performance standard, Seattle also has a building performance standard, Cambridge, Massachusetts, is also implementing a building performance standard. What these standards do is they set either energy or carbon performance targets for certain performance periods, usually out through 2050, with the intent of driving buildings towards net zero operations. Our BPS compliance planning is essentially to minimize any penalty exposure through 2034, at the moment. We've executed transition risk management planning, including exposure across all of our assets and jurisdictions with building performance standards, and we've proceeded this year with retro-commissioning of high-intensity buildings. We are, at the moment, retro-commissioning 9 million sq ft of our portfolio, working across Boston and New York and Cambridge, submarkets, CBD, Boston, CBD, New York, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, retro-commissioning our high-intensity buildings. We're finding some opportunities there as well. We're advancing energy efficiency improvements in assets with exposure, and we're maintaining energy efficiency improvements in compliant buildings. We're engaging our clients and we're implementing green lease language to align tenant landlord efforts in achieving whole building performance targets. This partnership on a new development or a redevelopment, repositioning, like we saw at One Forty Kendrick, is great, but we have a lot of tenants that are in place that we need to work more closely with, and we are working with them to help them understand how we're positioning our assets for compliance with building performance standards. We're also engaging policymakers actively during building performance standard development, rulemaking, and enforcement, and we're exploring alternative compliance pathways for the 2030 timeframe. Our line of sight, given what we know today with these rules through 2030, is pretty clear, and we believe we can avoid most, if not all, penalties. 2030 may require some alternative compliance pathways that we're evaluating at the moment. Here's an example of the kind of communication we're doing on performance standard compliance. We have this table of metrics. We turn over a lot of information to clients in the building that ask for it. We meet with them, we try to talk through what we can do together, how we can partner, what they could be doing in their space, how we've improved performance. This is an example of how we message performance improvement. This is for One Hundred Federal Street in Boston, Massachusetts. The energy use reduction, the carbon intensity reduction, water use reduction, they're all very significant reductions over the last 10 years or so that we can share with the clients, and they're delighted, and we can talk through the projects we've done, and they wanna learn more about what has happened at the asset. Since we've been very active with our management, and we've been actively investing in these buildings and maintaining systems, we have a good story to tell at these buildings, like One Hundred Federal Street. This is a BERDO compliance analysis that we ran internally. We also have multiple models we've prepared, some with external support, some also internally. This is our best estimate of the energy use intensity, which is the dark blue line, the carbon intensity, which is the green line, and the BERDO emissions caps, which are indicated here, they're called out. The cap steps down in 2030. That's that step down of the cap. The yellow line that breaks off of the green line is a worst-case scenario where the grid doesn't achieve its decarbonization aims, or the steam doesn't become any greener. We are modeling best and worst-case scenarios and planning for the worst case and working towards achieving the best. We also point out, you know, all the projects we've implemented at this particular building. From 2010 through 2020, we've achieved a 40% energy use reduction and a 55% greenhouse gas reduction. Very substantial, and that's a location-based greenhouse gas reduction at One Hundred Federal Street. In summary, BXP is a leader in sustainability and ESG. Our leadership is the result of collective action and commitment across the company. Our continued leadership and measurable progress is the result of a long-standing commitment to sustainable development and operations, which has meant increasing ambition and stakeholder engagement. Our decarbonization and transition risk management efforts have really become fundamental aspects of the company's business and our alignment with key stakeholders. With that, I'm gonna pass it to my good colleagues, Blake Levy and Amy Gindes. Thank you. Thanks, Ben. What is DEI, and how is it addressed for the stakeholders that we have, our own workforce, our clients, and our vendors? It's probably best just to start with defining it. With diversity, we're really speaking to the distinctive features and qualities that make us who we are, and we wanna use our unique backgrounds and experiences as a tool for problem-solving and progressing ideas. It's an asset, really. With equity, we're talking about the efforts to eliminate real and implied social barriers and biases in our operations. What we want is a level playing field for everyone. Lastly, with inclusion, we're talking to an environment that fosters a culture of belonging, where specific needs are accounted for. We recognize DEI is not just a cultural enhancement, but it is a cultural transformation, and it takes time. It really is a goal that we want to achieve. How do we get there? Well, in 2020, the DEI Council was created, and we started with creating a mission statement that reads as follows: "To promote diversity, equity, inclusion, and transparency as part of BXP's culture, decision-making practices, and business activities, while also providing a mechanism for positive impact in the community." This essentially guides our strategy moving forward. It also directed us on how to form the different branches of our DEI Council. As you see, we have recruiting and development, our employee resource groups that talk to our culture and decision-making practices, the company policies which speak to the business activities, and then lastly, we have community outreach. As it stands today, we essentially have 39 members on our DEI Council after starting in 2020 with 15 members. Now, these are passionate change agents, and they're diverse in a multitude of ways, not limited to their age, their race, their gender identity. They're separated into these different committees and employee resource groups. The committees are the Recruitment and Development Committee, which essentially focuses on recruiting, promotion, retainment, advancement in the company as well. We have our company policies, which to date, has essentially focused on vendor diversity, but now we're also looking internally at our own policies. Community outreach essentially speaks for itself there on trying to support the communities that we serve. Now, our four employee resource groups are the women's group, which is Shero, the LGBTQ+ group, which is Proud, the multicultural group, which is Elevate, and then we're very excited to announce Valor, which is our veterans employee resource group, and definitely launching that currently in honor of Memorial Day. Really excited for what new opportunities that's gonna show for us as well. As you can see, the diversity doesn't just go on to the makeup of, and the characteristics of the individuals, but there is organizational diversity as well. We are diverse in terms of tenure, region, department. There's quite a bit, and the reach and visibility in each one of those regions was instrumental into attracting new members and new allies to the cause. As it stands today, over one in four employees are part of this DEI community, and when I say that, I'm referring to the DEI council itself, but also the employee resource group members. You can see that we're creating a stronger BXP. How are we doing that? Well, there's new relationships that are being built every day. There's exposure to leadership. There's new development opportunities and new processes that are being developed. We're simplifying communications and we're operating with more transparency. All good things and moving in the right direction, that is really just inherent to the DEI operation that we have here at BXP. Blake, you know, I'll be honest with everybody. The impetus for all this was what happened with George Floyd, and that's when we sort of, you know, put our heads together and tried to figure out how we could respond to it. It's now been almost three years. What's your perspective on the sort of intensity of the effort that we have today versus where we were? Yeah, that's a great question. I would say the intensity on the effort is still strong, the momentum, it comes in waves, is what I think that we've seen. It was strong, I'd say, for the first couple of years, but the momentum is somewhat to a lesser extent now based on the programming that we have. The intensity of the effort is really creating new programs, new initiatives, new opportunities for people to get involved. Amy and I just finished a tour of the West Coast, visiting those regions as well, because we realized that quantitative feedback is not as powerful all the time as qualitative feedback. We wanted to hear firsthand from leadership and from the ERG and DEI members on what the culture is out there and what would be impactful for them. We're taking that and moving it forward. The structure of the DEI Council is essentially such that Amy and I champion the DEI mission for the committees and for the ERGs. We are supported by various departments. We communicate with executive leadership. Executive leadership takes part in our activities as well. The hope is that we can be the voice of any issues and requests for change, things that are going good and things that, you know, are challenges coming up for BXP in the employment field. We have that line of communication set up, and again, I would just say that this is making us a stronger BXP by doing such. At the end of the day, the hope is that all the DEI aspects are interwoven or interconnected with all the operations that we have here at BXP on a daily basis. What we felt was the best way to deal with that is to impact the decision-making process. We're trying to provide an abundance of options to serve marginalized communities as well as just serve BXP and the greater good from various aspects, as you see here, from qualified diverse talent, existing employees, the opportunities with diverse vendors, and then effective process for evaluating those opportunities. The ERGs speak to our culture. We have training opportunities for hiring and advancement. New criteria for selecting vendors, not only for property management, but also for construction as well, to make sure that we're treating our or doing our social responsibility for the regions that we serve. We have all these amazing initiatives out there, but last year, we realized that we really needed to hone it in. What we decided to do was to create six different focus areas, or you could call it pillars, to guide our process, inform us when new initiatives come up, and really create a mechanism for tracking progress moving forward. We realized that there's more effort on the inward-facing side. However, that doesn't mean there's less importance than with the outward-facing. Both are very, very important to us, but it is quite an effort to treat the employee base at BXP. Whether it be for maintaining advancement in the company, providing educational opportunities, or just engaging overall in the communities that we serve. We take every opportunity we can in order to educate our clients, our vendors, and especially the BXP staff. There's a multitude of ways that you see that here in this, in this presentation, via showing it on the facade of the buildings, flags, even in our elevators. We also internally are using every platform that we possibly can. There is our internal portal. We've done interviews where we can show experiences from senior leadership, and what their experience was coming up through the professional field as well. We have training opportunities for DEI introduction, becoming an ally, unconscious bias, on a regular cadence. The training doesn't stop there. Even our ERGs are being trained. Our ERG leaders, our DEI council leaders, we are trained as well to be better at what we're doing, to be better champions, to be a better advocates for DEI. Through that, and through the programming, you can see here, we've basically tripled or over tripled participation from the inception of all these ERGs, around this time last year. That just goes to show the momentum is good, but we're gonna work to increase it and get more participation. We have quite a bit of programming throughout the year, where the cadence right now is currently one or more activities a month. About one in four employees are part of the DEI community. Having important programming and fun and exciting, and engaging programming like this is important. Not only for the social aspect, but also, to make sure that we have that funnel that we spoke to earlier, where we're able to provide feedback and qualitative information from the employees up to executive leadership. Right now, we're just coming out of Asian American, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander Month, and Memorial Day. We're heading into Pride Month, where we're going to have a parade. We're going to join the San Francisco Pride Parade, later this month. We have Juneteenth to celebrate, in August, we also have Women's Equality Day. We're looking forward and planning for all of those opportunities as well. On an annual basis, we also have a company-wide event. We had a fantastic event with our BXP Proud ERG last year, also with BXP Shero, our women's ERG, earlier this year. We also have quarterly all ERG meetings, and those are in person. Whatever cadence the ERGs decides, they have online meetings, and they do some housekeeping in there as well. All these programs together, what does it mean from a metric standpoint? Well, we would say that there's energy, there's opportunity, and we have repetition. I think the advancement here kinda speaks for itself. We are trending in the right direction toward our goal in ethnicity, ethnic diversity, as well as women in the company, and that's from the total workforce standpoint. When we look at the officer level, we're actually hitting our goals already with ethnic diversity, and we're very, very close with women as well. Overall, even as we look on an annual basis, new hires are fantastic right now, and you can see that there's DEI intentionality in that process, and we're very, very close to our goal with ethnic diversity in new hires as well. We continue to try to keep and grow our existing talent and also expand our pools of diverse candidates. I would say that in addition to CareerSpring, Project Destined is just one way that we're able to do that, which Amy will speak to. Great. Thanks, Blake. Thanks, Ben. As Blake mentioned, we were excited to kick off a partnership with Project Destined earlier this year with our SF team. Project Destined was founded by Cedric Bobo, with the mission of building the next generation of owners and leaders in real estate. Project Destined partners with 250-plus real estate firms and trains 2,500 plus students from underrepresented communities per year. Our hope is that we will endeavor to employ Project Destined students in the future, either through their internship program or permanent full-time employment. A little bit about the competition for those that are not familiar with Project Destined. We had our team did a deal pitch, and the deal pitch was to buy a 30-unit apartment building in San Francisco. We had representation from development, leasing, construction, property management from our SF office, also joining them were our finance and capital markets team. We had a couple of representatives from our corporate office that served as BXP mentors. Our mentors provided office hours to help guide and provide feedback on the market analysis, financials that included a PowerPoint presentation. It's less about really the deal, but really this practice and discipline of presenting such a deal. BXP competed against JLL, AEW, Eastdil. I will note, we did finish first in round 1 and 3, and I'll just leave it at that. It really was a great exercise for our leaders in the San Francisco office. I do have a quote. I spoke with Tommy Chan recently, who's one of our mentors, and he basically said, participating in this program was the most impactful thing that he's done at BXP. Clearly, a rewarding, you know, experience for both mentors and the students. Our hope is, hopefully, we get to compete again, offer our expertise, and really expand this partnership to other markets at BXP. Our Forward with BXP program, the Community Outreach Committee strives to address BXP's social responsibility of supporting the regions we serve by utilizing the Forward with BXP initiative to create a legacy for DEI for underrepresented businesses and their successes in our communities. Our goal is to place mission-oriented and/or underrepresented minority-owned businesses in first-class office and retail space, with a rental structure that aligns with their ability to pay, then opportunity to compete on a level playing field with their competitors. To date, we have executed on 3 leases under the program. CitySwing in Reston Town Center, which is a Black and women-owned business providing indoor golf simulation. SEO in San Francisco, who prepares underserved students for college and career success. Lastly, we have a signed lease with a mission-oriented cafe coffee shop in New York in the New York region, with a target of opening in September. We're really excited, hopefully in the coming year, to continue to expand the program in our markets.Amy Gindes Amy Gindel, just before you go on. Yes. What I would say is that this particular engagement is very authentic to who we are and what we do, right? I mean, we could write checks to the NAACP or provide, you know, resources to some community group to do something from a project perspective. Our business is leasing office space and retail space in these urban locations, and so what I think we said to ourselves was: Wouldn't this be a way for us to differentiate ourselves in terms of how we are really trying to put our best foot forward from a community perspective? I guess, 'cause I know the answer, but I want you to describe it. It's really hard to find businesses- It is ... that are both set up for doing things in the kind of environments that we operate in and are interested in taking the risk, even if we're effectively giving the space away. Right describe sort of the, you know, the challenges there. That's a very good point. Again, in our recent travels, as we're talking to heads of leasing, I think Rod Diehl had said to me, it is difficult to source and find, and I know we had a partner at one time, Doug, and I think we still do, to help source these deals. I feel like the deals that we've had so far, they've sort of come about. We do have a formal, as you know, a formal sort of online or a way to kind of apply for a program, but I think that's really our struggle, right? I mean, outwardly marketing it, how do we source and really find a good fit for our portfolio and where they are and available? I think it's still a challenge, I think, for the leasing folks, but would love to find more opportunities. Our next subject here I'm covering is supplier diversity, and I know Blake talked a little bit about that, but again, falling under our social responsibility umbrella. In 2021, I think I spoke at the last ESG, our inaugural ESG webcast. You know, we really focused on company policies, and really changing and creating new policies to support this mission. The policies included modifications to the construction RFP process, modifying our bidding policies and our bid approval form. And I think the real intentional add here was encouraging best efforts to include 1 of 3 qualified UBE suppliers in each award process for our property management spend. We really encourage them to source and make sure that we can at least try to bring, again, 1 of 3 qualified to the table. Just for those who may not know, UBE is defined as underrepresented business enterprise. That, for us, and how we're tracking this, includes minority, women, disabled, LGBTQ+, and are veteran-owned. As a result, I think, of this intentionality, we've seen a 34% increase in the number of UBE vendors from 2021 to 2022. I think once we do a mid-year check-in, I think we'll have made even greater strides, and this really is the direct, again, results of our practices and our intentionality. In 2022, we also created a depository relationship with OneUnited Bank, America's largest Black-owned bank, in addition to we had an existing relationship in 2021 with City First Broadway, who is the largest Black-led bank in the US. To date, a woman and minority-owned investment banking firm functioned as co-manager, in our last 4 unsecured senior note offerings. Lastly, I think Blake mentioned, too, from a subcontractor in our construction contracts, we've started to collect data on the number of UBE subcontractors and% of UBE spend for our CapEx, our tenant improvement projects, and base building work. We are still in the process of gathering the data to give us, really, the ability to set meaningful goals, and should have a good baseline by the end of 2023. This is a real area of focus, and I think, Doug, you had said this to me when we first met, back in 2020 and started the council. Just talking about this, making people aware, and when they think about procurement and looking at engaging future suppliers, that I think, you know, certainly trying to diversify our supplier base is top of mind. From a charitable contribution perspective, this is pretty just a snapshot, and this is kind of where we're a little more passive. We do, while we give and donate to DEI-associated initiatives and firms, there is also a volunteer aspect and component that we do track. While we may be giving money and writing checks, we have a lot, you know, some of this is interactive with each of our regions, which is great. We had a goal of 33% of all charitable contributions to be allocated to DEI-associated initiatives and exceeded that, and we had almost 53% on average across all of our regions. Just kind of wrapping up here from goals, and as Blake talked about, we really organized and changed how we thought about our goals and really kind of created these areas. When we think about what's filling sort of those buckets, and what we're doing, that they kind of check one or many of these boxes here. Just to kind of touch on a few, I think, a big thing that we did this year was offer company-wide DEI educational sessions, including topics, as an introduction to DEI, unconscious bias, and allyship are the three that we're going to run this year, and we actually started and did run the intro to DEI last month, which that was pretty successful. Under recruiting and development, we're focusing on evaluating platforms on a formal mentorship program. We're actually, this year, just really gathering again, what we might want to present to the executive team and hopefully launch in 2024. We have heard a lot, again, as Blake mentioned, coming up through the ERGs. We do a lot of informal mentoring, but maybe putting something more formal in place would be great for our organization. We'll continue to foster growth in our four ERGs. Have a goal to deliver, you know, always effective programming, trying to measure that by participation and listening to our membership of what they like and they don't like about the programming, and engaging employees just across our organization in our, in our DEI mission. We're also focused on, as I mentioned earlier, expanding our Forward BXP program, and continuing the growth in our number of UBE suppliers that we do business. Lastly, I think this is an important piece, more in the governance and transparency, is we're collaborating with our head of corporate communications and a third party to provide more transparency to our DEI mission, our council, our ERGs, our goals, and our achievements on our corporate website. That's going to be a great addition, and hopefully, that'll be coming in the next quarter or so here. As we all kind of mentioned here, we're approaching our 3-year anniversary of the formation of our council. I, for one, like, when I say we, a collective group that includes a lot of individuals, are immensely proud of all we have collectively accomplished. Worth repeating, we're still trying to keep the intensity and the focus up. Our work is not done. DEI, along with, which is a subset of our ESG strategy, but it's an important part of what we do and how we are differentiated, how BXP is differentiated, I believe, in certainly the market. We're going to continue to tackle this work with purpose, intentionality, authenticity, and transparency. I think we're, you know, still always looking forward and looking forward to our next chapter for what our council will accomplish and really focused on mission-critical work as we continue to serve you, our investors, our employees, suppliers, partners, and the communities in which we operate. Again, thank you, guys, for the opportunity for Blake and I, especially, to kind of highlight DEI and all of our work that we've done to date. With that, I'll hand it over back to Doug for Q&A. Thanks, Amy. Thanks, Blake. We've had a couple of questions that I've tried to answer sort of on the way through the presentations, but there are a few others that have come through that I will ask, you know, the our BXP speakers to chime in on. The first one is really for you, Ben, which is the question was asked whether or not the political climate and the politicization of ESG is affecting what we're doing. My sort of brief comment would be: we happen to live in and operate our assets in areas where I think that the issues associated with that are less critical. In other words, there's less pushback from a community perspective. We are, you know, I would say, not doing anything differently on a relative basis because we think what is being asked of us from a community perspective is important, albeit, I would tell you that we have a practical perspective on what the issues are that we are being asked to address, and the ways in which the various communities are trying to enact either legal constraints or other manners of enforcing activities, which may not necessarily be totally thought out. We are trying to impact those thought processes before the laws or the rules become permanent. So I don't think we're changing things. Ben, you should talk a little bit about the give and take between what people would like to see relative to the elimination of fossil fuels and the practicalities associated with operating in our geographic areas, AKA, what the climate is in the Northeast. Most importantly, the practicality of the ability for the generators of power and the transmitters of power to actually provide all of the, quote-unquote, "green power," if it were, in fact, available, to all these jurisdictions. I don't think there's an appreciation of the challenges there, and we happen to be a great partner with the utility that is operating in New England, Eversource, and have a sort of a front-row seat on the challenges that they are having with regards to those issues. Yeah. Well, I think there's two big questions there. I think the first, I'll take the ESG one and the politicization of ESG as a whole. I'd say it's not changing our strategy at all. We're continuing to stay the course. What it may change is our communication. I think it emphasizes the need to be very clear about what ESG or sustainability or DEI means to our organization and be very specific about the impact and the why behind what we're doing. I think when people don't understand a term, it can be politicized, and people can make it mean what they want it to mean. When you start calling it woke capital, it gets a lot of people excited. We're not changing our strategy. That's the first thing I'd say there. On electrification and electrification challenges, I mentioned some of this in my earlier remarks, grid modernization increases in demand are going to mean more capacity, which means more substations, more distribution, more transmission. We have not been building a lot of transmission in this country since the 1960s and 1970s. This report from Princeton University shows that we need to build at a rate of 2.3x, the current rate of transmission development through 2035 to meet our 2050 targets. We need a lot more transmission to be built, and I think a lot of people underestimate the amount of development, the amount of copper, the amount of wire, the amount of real work and infrastructure it's going to require to electrify. You know, secondarily, we have local capacity constraints. You know, one we're handling in partnership with Eversource in Cambridge, Massachusetts, we're building a vault for a new substation, which solves a community environmental justice issue. You know, several real estate companies involved in this transaction, we're siting it on our site and building this huge vault for a substation that will go underground, which is a great partnership, I think. You know, that solves 1 problem, right? The utility, Eversource, to meet their 2040 electrification projections, what they're going to need for transportation and building electrification, will need to add another 10-15 substations in the greater Boston area. Building out this infrastructure is going to be very, I think, contentious in certain communities where we have to add these substations. It's going to require collaboration and partnerships with real estate, perhaps with other owners, to get this work done. I think that the hearts are in the right place on climate action and wanting to decarbonize. When you look at the practicalities of eliminating the last 5% of fossil fuels from buildings, either from steam distribution or on-site natural gas, you're having to dramatically increase the standby electrical systems to meet peak demand on cold days in climate zones like Boston, New York. You're talking about 20%-30% of system capacity just there for the peak hour of the peak day, doing nothing but requiring standby capacity on the grid, which is not an efficient use of capital. It certainly doesn't dramatically impact emissions reductions. I think it's a mindset that we're going to mature out of, where net zero needs to be solved on a building-by-building basis, so every building is fully electric, fully net zero. We're going to have to think more holistically about how we decarbonize the built environment at a systems level versus individual buildings being perfectly net zero and fossil fuel-free. Thanks. Blake and Amy, a question for you. You both use the word intentional a lot in your remarks. I think that as an organization, we at BXP has really tried to be intentional in all the initiatives that you described with regards to DEI. My sort of question is one of the pipeline of human capital, and part of the obviously, the initiatives you're dealing with are recruiting. Traditionally, the real estate industry has not been an industry that has been very hospitable to ethnically diverse populations. I guess my question is: Are you starting to see any real changes, and what are we doing, as an organization to, you know, try and improve upon the future population at BXP relevant to people coming into the industry that we operate in? I think it's, there's probably two responses there, or two portions of the response there. One is in-house here at BXP. What are we doing to eliminate our own social biases that may be conscious or unconscious? We say more unconscious, right? What are we doing that internally? That is through the exposure and through the training that we're going through, and the participation in the training that we're seeing. That is part of the decision-making process in that tree that we showed earlier. We need to talk to, okay, well, what about the pipeline of people coming in? We need to increase that. Well, there's only so many different options, and much of our model is, you know, gathering employees from other organizations that have experience, not typically, you know, right out of school in some of our departments that we have here. How do we provide more exposure to them to what we do here? I think it's going to be partnering, and I think Amy and I would agree with this, it's going to be partnering with organizations like Project Destined, like CareerSpring. Things that we can do, that we provide what's free to us, which is our intellectual value and our experience, and we can show that to them. We have two kind of things going on here. One is to get the pipeline of employees in, once they're evaluated, kind of use that intentionality, and we'll say the word, intentionality, to say, "Okay, we have a qualified candidate here that is of a diverse background, we need to consider them for a certain position, provide the opportunity for them." Amy, do you have anything to add? I was just going to add, too, I think from, you know, HR's perspective, as you saw, you know, over the last year, we've worked specifically with, you know, diverse recruiting organizations, and it's our communication with these organizations, too, of what we're looking for, when we want to source and make sure that the candidate pool is diverse as it can be. Also just tracking that and really understanding, which our talent acquisition group does, is what type of, you know, people are responding and submitting, you know, resumes and applying for our positions, and what does that pool look like? I think availability continues in some areas in our business, tends to be an issue, but we're trying as best we can to widen that net and, you know, attract as many diverse candidates as we can. Okay, great. Thanks. Well, we're gonna stop there. We've been going for about an hour and a half, which I think was our limit. I hope everybody appreciated the intensity with which we think about and practice our ESG work at BXP. And we look forward to seeing some of you, I can't believe I'm saying this, next week, at REITWeek in Manhattan, and we'll be ready to answer one-on-one questions, if you have them. Thanks for your participation, and and have a great summer. Thanks.