In 2016, Bouwinvest took a number of significant steps to further integrate CSR into its day-to-day business. Our ESG pillars serve as a guide on the journey we are making with our stakeholders, to combine and integrate our financial and sustainability ambitions to create long-term stakeholder value.
Stakeholder value
In 2016, Bouwinvest introduced a stakeholder value matrix to help the company identify the key issues related to ethics, law, society, compliance, risks and human resources, and devise a strategy to deal with them on an ongoing basis. This matrix will help us to refine our priorities and our ambitions. It will also make us more aware of just how essential it is to integrate ESG criteria in our day-to-day business. Moreover, the matrix will serve as the starting point for discussions with various relevant stakeholder groups.
CO2 footprint Bouwinvest organisation
In 2012, Bouwinvest started to improve the transparency of the management organisation's CO2 emissions. A year later, we expressed our ambition to make our operations carbon-neutral by 2020. We have already made significant progress in reducing our emissions in recent years and we took further steps to reduce emissions in 2016. This year, our efforts had the following results:
Electricity consumption in our head office fell by another 8% in 2016, taking total reduction to 42% since the start of active energy management in 2010.
Changes in waste processing resulted in a decrease in the related emissions of 66% compared to 2015.
The use of more fuel-efficient lease cars (including hybrid and electric lease cars) resulted in stable CO2 emissions, while the number of kilometres driven increased by 2%.
A side-effect of an increase in our international real estate allocation was a 35% increase in CO2 emissions from air travel compared to 2015.
These and other measures led to a total reduction in our total CO2 emissions of 1% compared to the previous year. Carbon emissions intensity, calculated as tonnes of CO2 /FTE dropped by 5%.
Within the Dutch portfolio various measures are taken to reduce energy levels and CO2 emissions. The remainder of the CO2 emissions related to energy usage are offset by purchasing so-called 'guarantees of origin' (Garanties van Oorsprong). This is part of our policy to limit the negative impact on the environment and stimulate the use of sustainable sources. For more information about the environmental impact of the real estate portfolio and the results achieved, see the respective annual fund reports and the CSR performance indicators set out in the annex.
