Following recent changes to GRESB’s governance, systems and strategic priorities, as well as impacts to GRESB’s data quality assurance, Mirvac have decided to suspend reporting to GRESB for two years.
GRESB has been a valuable tool in helping to increase standards and disclosure across the property industry globally. GRESB was established in 2009 by a group of large pension funds who wanted to have access to comparable and reliable data on the ESG performance of their investments. The platform was acquired by GBCI in 2014, and has since grown to become the leading ESG benchmark for real estate and infrastructure investments across the world covering US $5.3 trillion in real estate and infrastructure assets held by more than 100 institutional and financial investors.
in 2020, a number of GRESB members were not satisfied with the reliability of the benchmark results, the verification of input data, inconsistent application of definitions and issues in aggregating results.
GRESB was acquired by Summit Partners in 2020 and the management team are seeking to address their quality control and reliability issues.
Whilst Mirvac did not refer to any specific issues with GRESB they indicated that there were a number of differences in priorities between its strategy and the GRESB strategy, which have made it difficult to target and achieve top quartile GRESB performance.
Mirvac advised that despite the move, it is committed to transparency on its sustainability performance and will continue to proactively share ESG performance data through indices reporting, annual investor toolkit, ESG events on key topics, and through engagement with interested securityholders.
Mirvac’s discloses its climate-related risks and opportunities in line with the recommendations set out by the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) and otherwise in line with expectations from the UN Principles for Responsible Investment, the UN Global Compact, the Global Reporting Initiative, National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting, the London Benchmarking Group, and RE100.
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