Chapter 3: GRESB - Driving Sustainability Performance with Asset-Level Data
CHAPTER 3 SUMMARY:
GRESB: Driving Sustainability Performance with Asset-Level Data
GRESB explores the role of asset-level data in delivering actionable insights that can inform sustainability initiatives and investment decisions. The chapter pays particular attention to decarbonization, due diligence and asset optimization, emphasizing how ESG outcomes depend on a variety of factors, so a one-size-fits-all approach is unlikely to achieve optimal results.
Key findings:
Aggregated portfolio data is not the complete picture. Portfolios do not get decarbonized; individual assets do. ESG initiatives can only be evaluated effectively if a portfolio-level view is complemented by asset-level performance data.
Real assets are decarbonized through interventions such as system upgrades, replacements and retrofits. The choice of interventions, and assets within a portfolio to which they are applied, has an outsize impact on the achievement of long-term decarbonization goals.
Selecting high-consumption assets from otherwise dispersed or average portfolios has a much larger impact than a comparable investment in already-green assets from the same portfolio. Brown-to-green investment strategy results in a 10 to 30 fold greater reduction in energy consumption compared to improving already-green assets.