As a major property owner across Germany and the UK, we recognise our own responsibility to contribute towards global efforts to address climate change, and to minimise the impact our operations have on the environment around us.

As highlighted within our sustainability framework, our responsibility to the environment has been core to our strategy for a number of years. Our work on materiality has assisted us to start to deliver a roadmap on how we plan to manage and minimise our environmental impact and create a more sustainable future, taking into account carbon emissions, water, waste and energy management and considering the long-term impacts of climate change.

We see our responsibility to the environment as a core part of our overall strategy to transform business parks into quality assets through intensive asset management. The maintenance and refurbishment of existing buildings help to minimise urban sprawl and will contribute to protecting undeveloped land. By recycling existing properties, we conserve resources and minimise the use of materials and energy required to construct new properties. We believe that our wider stakeholders will increasingly recognise the value of maintaining older buildings and extending their use, thereby extending the lifespan of the embodied carbon used in their original construction. Clearly, older buildings have the potential to be responsible for higher annual carbon emissions and the actions we have taken this year look at addressing this point.

Firstly, we have continued the commitment we made a number of years ago to sourcing our electricity for our portfolio from renewable sources. The proportion of renewable electricity against total electricity provision table below reflects our progress across the entire property portfolio. As we acquire new sites, the renewable electricity proportion fluctuates, as we transfer them from their existing energy mix onto our renewable energy platform, once their existing energy contracts allow. We estimate that the business has this year increased its renewable electricity use to 94.6% across the whole portfolio, which reflects the near 100% provision of renewable electricity to much of its portfolio as well as newly acquired sites.

 

Year	2019/20	2020/21	2021/22
Proportion of renewable electricity	85.8%	82.4%	94.6%

 

We have also continued our support to our tenants by continuing to roll out both smart meters and EV charging infrastructure across our portfolio. EV charging stations as well as waste management, emissions reductions and renewable energy initiatives were all key areas of priority for our tenants in our annual tenant survey conducted in June 2021, and we have made progress across all areas in this financial year. We remain on target to have smart meters across all our sites in Germany by 2027.

 

Smart energy meters	March 2021	March 2022
Total number of sites	67	77
Total number equipped	5	12
Proportion of sites equipped	7.5%	15.6%

 

 

EV charging	March 2021	March 2022
Total number of sites	67	77
Total number equipped	1	38
Proportion of sites equipped	1.0%	49%

 

 

Secondly, we have undertaken a detailed assessment of the embodied carbon used within the refurbishment and modernisation of our portfolio. This will enable us to understand and measure the level of embodied carbon used as we extend the life of buildings. In the future, the levels of embodied carbon will be built into our decision-making processes and engagement with our supply chain. This will also form part of our pathway to net zero emissions which is covered in more detail later in this report.

 

Thirdly, we centralised our collection of waste across the portfolio. This benefits us through the calculation of our carbon emissions through waste, which through better data will enable us to understand how we can further reduce emissions through coordinated waste management. We can also now ensure that our recycling rate and waste to landfill are improved and managed as part of our waste reduction processes.

 

Our actions on the use of renewable energy, the assessment of embodied carbon and the centralisation of waste management are reflected in our greenhouse gas emissions, and included in our Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions.