Earlier this month, I attended the 2024 EPRA Sustainability Summit held in London to discuss all matters sustainability in the listed real estate sector. The summit this year, titled, ‘Stakeholders and Listed Real Estate: Innovating together for a sustainable future’, focused specifically on the importance of industry-wide collaboration to empower sustainability efforts, especially important amidst evolving economic and environmental challenges. I would like to extend my thanks to the EPRA team for organising this insightful event.

The Summit brought together industry leaders, economists and sustainability experts to discuss broader economic changes and the sustainable energy transition. Speakers and participants alike shared useful insights on sustainability strategies, investment opportunities and ESG regulations in the real estate sector.

The Power of Collaboration

Collaboration emerged as a key theme during the event. Indeed, I found Chris Kane’s keynote speech particularly impactful, learning from his wisdom on rethinking commercial real estate. Chris highlighted insights from his latest publication ‘Where Is My Office?’ in which he draws on his knowledge and experience in commercial property to investigate what the 21^st century workplace needs to look like. In particular, he drove home the importance of collaboration between landlords and tenants, dissolving the historic barrier between both parties. Chris called for a redefinition of tenancy, reimagining ‘tenants’ as ‘customers’ and outlined his belief that collaboration between customers and landlords is especially important for navigating sustainability, with consumers often absent from the table.

This really resonated. At Sirius, our stakeholders (in the broadest sense) are right at the heart of our ESG strategy and our framework has been developed to put their interests at the heart of our decision-making. Clearly, engaging key stakeholders including tenants facilitates the multidimensional thinking necessary for real, tangible progress on sustainability.

Navigating Sustainability Reporting

One of the other themes that arose during the event was that of sustainability reporting and disclosure. It’s a fact of life that all listed businesses have to undertake a significant amount of regulatory reporting, but how can this be best navigated? Reporting is a complex space requiring increasing amounts of specialist resources – but one point that shone through during the event is that as sustainability leaders, we mustn’t let the regulatory disclosure burden bury our ability to tell impactful and inspiring stories. At Sirius, we aim to provide a balance between quality reporting on our ESG strategy and ensuring that we are telling compelling stories about our environmental and social impact that will inspire our people and other stakeholders too.

Beyond the EPRA Summit

How does real estate sustainability reporting fit into wider sustainability discourse? It would be remiss of me not to mention broader conversations around sustainability this autumn. Indeed, global progress on sustainability goals has been in the headlines with the COP29 held earlier this month in Baku, Azerbaijan, and COP16 Biodiversity Conference, held in Cali, Colombia in October. Clearly, international cooperation is fundamental for developing an effective global sustainability strategy, however the outcome of these conferences has had very mixed reviews – to put it lightly! The $300 billion climate aid deal signed at COP29 received significant criticism from developing nations with some branding it a ‘disaster’ – and critically, India rejected the adoption of the deal. At Sirius, we watch these developments with interest and regardless of the broader geopolitical landscape, we remain committed to building a sustainable future based on sound economic foundations.

At Sirius, we continually strive to strengthen our ESG practices, working to become a more collaborative, sustainable business. You can read our latest ESG Report 2024 here.