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Sustainability Introduction
The major contribution that the real estate industry can make to the creation of a sustainable environment is widely recognised, and with this in mind the property investment industry has continuously increased its efforts and activities in this area in the past years. As a consequence, sustainability reporting has become a natural part of a company’s annual reports and sustainability initiatives have advanced to play an important role in the operational performance of real estate investment vehicles.
The growing interest led to the discussion of introducing mandatory reporting regulation at both country and EU level with potentially significant implications for the non-listed real estate investment sector. A recently adopted directive requires EU member states in this respect to transpose national law to enforce reporting on environmental, social and employee-related, human rights, anti-corruption and bribery matters.
These guidelines were constructed to cover similar topics, summarised under the ESG framework, and its underlying business models, outcomes and risks of these policies and therefore function as forerunner to future regulatory requirements. It is essential to successfully include sustainability into a long term strategy as well as translate that strategy into annual objectives and targets for implementation. While sustainability has long been understood as reducing the consumption of environmental resources, that definition is now being expanded to also include governance as well as social indicators. In this new context, the level of information required is increasing, so there is a need to balance the delivery of comprehensive data on the one hand but also to not become too granular.
The INREV Sustainability Reporting Guidelines have been revised to form a disclosure framework that delivers meaningful data to increase visibility and insight into a vehicle’s ESG efforts and also details their next course of action for improvements. They aim to provide a coherent framework for ESG reporting in line with annual financial reporting and present a clear picture from the vehicle’s strategy through to environmental key performance indicators.
To allow easy implementation and consistent reporting methodologies the INREV Sustainability Guidelines have been aligned with current industry standards that are widely adopted in the sector (see chapter 4 Alignment with industry standards).
References in Sustainability Reporting Guidelines:
The Sustainability Reporting Guidelines include references to other industry standards which are implemented in the non-listed real estate industry; GRESB, GRI and EPRA. The references should support fund managers employing same information to different standards and making logical links in their vehicle documentation. The references only intend to show a topical overlap, they do not refer to identical information. Therefore being compliant with the INREV Sustainability Reporting Guidelines does not automatically lead to compliance with the referenced standards and vice versa. Information that applies to the different standards needs to be processed individually. Merely referring to an attached document – such as the GRESB survey – does not fulfil the principles of the INREV Sustainability Reporting Guidelines and is not sufficient to claim compliance.