Will compact cities impact activities? Important urban sprawl regulations are set to dampen land take, defined as the conversion of agricultural and natural land into urban artificial land - the first driver of biodiversity loss. In its Soil strategy, the European Commission has set a non-binding objective of "no net land take by 2050", while the same target became part of the French law in 2021. This paper paves the way for an investigation of the consequences of such law for French economic activities, via the channel of commercial real estate costs. Using cadastral data and geolocated information on French firms, we develop accounts tracing back the annual use of built-up land (a stock) and the annual land take (a flow) by 80 economic subsectors. In a "double materiality" perspective, we use this new database on the one hand to explore the heterogeneous contribution of economic activities to land-take. On the other hand, we investigate the transition risks faced by economic sectors - which rely on the use built-up land for their production - in a scenario of increasing land prices induced by the NNLT policy.

This study exploits a quasi-natural experiment on the announcement by Singaporean’s government to spend 100 billion Singapore dollars to combat sea level rise (SLR) threats. We find that public housing prices dropped by 5.8% and 2.3% in the SLR areas without and with the government’s adaptation measures, respectively, relative to the non-SLR areas. Freehold properties benefit more from the adaptation strategies than leasehold properties. There was no significant drop in prices of freehold properties in the SLR areas protected by adaptation measures. We derive a low post-announcement long-term discount rate of 2.36%, which may induce the adoption of climate-related projects.

I study the impact of sea level rise (SLR) on commercial real estate (CRE) pricing and commercial lending. Using novel property level sale transactions from 2011-2018, I find that commercial properties exposed to a 6-feet sea level rise are sold at a 6% discount. This discount appears to be driven by local buyers and buyers’ brokers that are more sensitive to climate risks. In addition, discount significantly rises after an extreme hurricane, suggesting that salient risk impact pricing. Likewise, lenders require higher down payments for properties exposed to SLR, and this requirement is amplified following an extreme hurricane. These findings suggest that commercial real estate investors and banks are becoming more cognizant of the risks posed by sea level rise.