From narrative to data-driven ESG reporting: How PATRIZIA Infrastructure leverages GRESB to improve sustainability outcomes

ESG in focus: PATRIZIA Infrastructure has embedded sustainability into all levels of the organization, with four corporate goals: 

• Be a leading sustainable investor in real assets with a consistent UN PRI 5-star rating from 2025 onwards
• Be an employer of choice in the real assets sector, where everyone feels included, represented, and valued equitably
• Be a leading global impact investor in the real assets sector with a meaningful part of its AuM in impact investments by 2035
• Achieve net-zero-carbon status across its corporate operations and real assets portfolio by 2040, or earlier 

PATRIZIA Infrastructure is a global investment manager that has developed an internal data-driven framework to baseline the sustainability performance of its infrastructure investments across different sectors and geographies. 

PATRIZIA sees the GRESB benchmarks and data as an invaluable annual review process that informs its internal models on the ever-changing stakeholder requirements. By participating in the GRESB assessments, PATRIZIA has been able to identify areas of improvement and set sustainability goals for its investments. For example, the assessment process has provided insightful information for the firm to improve its KPIs around policies and metrics related to topics such as female representation within the senior management of its investee companies and the investigation of its impact on areas of high biodiversity sensitivity. 

Since joining GRESB in 2019, PATRIZIA has been focused on deepening and expanding its ability to understand, model, and drive value creation and positive outcomes through its investment portfolio. The GRESB assessment process has proven helpful in informing and validating the results of the firm’s internal baselining and remediation work. Specifically, PATRIZIA has taken steps to better drive its sustainable performance outcomes through three key areas: 

• Creation of a dedicated Sustainable Transformations function to identify the key sustainability gaps in the firm’s investments and ensure that the investee management teams, alongside the asset management teams, shape and execute on suitable remedial projects.  
• Creation of an internal “Positive Outcomes Matrix” to focus the firm’s efforts on an overarching set of mid-term metrics to guide and cascade prioritization to its operations and those of its investee companies. The metrics inform PATRIZIA’s top-down discussions with employees and investee companies on a broad range of ESG topics, such as decarbonization planning, DEI targets, socio-economic planning, and strengthening its biodiversity protection measures.  
• Strengthening of key processes and tools around ESG data management to address the increasing need for verifiable, granular, and high-frequency data.    

“The GRESB commitment to continuous improvement in terms of materiality of ESG topics is extremely useful in informing our internal frameworks. In turn, this guides the prioritization of our asset management efforts to drive continuous improvements in sustainability across our real assets investment portfolio,” said Aaron Scott, Head of Sustainable Transformations at PATRIZIA Infrastructure. 

PATRIZIA’s perspective on ESG reporting and benchmarks is constantly evolving, with a view to continuing to exceed stakeholder and regulatory needs. The firm has always taken a data-centric approach to ESG, which has prepared it well for the increasingly data-driven nature of ESG reporting. However, there remains a challenge in keeping pace with the strong expansion in the scope and depth of the data required to meet all the rapidly expanding reporting requirements. 

PATRIZIA found that the scope of ESG data has clearly expanded strongly within the “E” of ESG around better and more robust decarbonization planning and capturing of biodiversity impacts. Within “S”, the firm has also witnessed a strong requirement for better KPIs aligning to DEI topics, such as the unadjusted pay-gap ratios and representation of women within the senior management of its investee companies.    

A key evolution identified by PATRIZIA has been the shift from simple quantification to a result-oriented framework, which represents a shift from simply assessing if a metric exists to increasingly focusing on the actual results of the metric itself. 

“The pivot from transparency to actual performance measurement is essential to accelerate across a broader range of ESG metrics if the industry is to collectively meet ambitious goals. We believe in hands-on asset management and work closely with our investee company teams to shape and drive actionable plans that drive the desired sustainability performance improvements,” said Scott. 

“As the EU taxonomy expands and investors seek higher allocations to ‘Sustainable Investments,’ ESG reporting will become even more demanding from a scope, depth, and frequency point of view, with quarterly substantiation of some data points being required as the basis for regulatory reporting,” he continued. 

PATRIZIA believes that industry-specific reporting frameworks can add value in ESG reporting if they provide the specificity and granularity of metrics to drive transparency and accountability for ESG performance. 

“GRESB plays a role in driving industry action through the transparency and comparability of industry-specific results that spur competition between industry participants to deliver on continuous improvements. This, in turn, adds significant momentum to our collective progress towards asset-level, product-level, and broader, more universal ESG goals,” said Scott. 

“However, industry-specific frameworks ultimately only add value if the outputs can be readily converted to the major universal reporting frameworks such as the EU non-financial system, GRI, or the SDGs. In other words, so long as measurement frameworks are interoperable, they should be additive to the efforts of our industry to contribute to the ESG goals society has set for itself,” he continued. 

Interoperability between industry-specific and other reporting frameworks is not only key for the purposes of driving desired actions through coherent transparency across reporting parameters, but it also helps relieve the reporting burdens on the various reporting entities. Ensuring that reporting frameworks feed into a consistent data chain and that consistent taxonomies are applied should reduce the need for duplicated data capturing and validating by every reporting entity.  

“GRESB supports this with the alignment of its assessments and Standards with other important ESG frameworks, and with its mapping of data requests against the GRI taxonomy,” Scott concluded.