SINGAPORE: Cromwell EREIT Management Pte. Ltd., in its capacity as manager of Cromwell European Real Estate Investment Trust (CEREIT), announced that the Manager has achieved a 43% year-on-year improvement of CEREIT’s Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark (GRESB) score, which rose from 47 in 2018 to 67 in 2019.

GRESB is a leading environmental, social, and governance (ESG) benchmark for real assets.

CEREIT retained a perfect score in the ‘Management’ aspect of the GRESB Real Estate Assessment and registered improvements in five of the six other assessment aspects. It made particularly significant progress in the ‘Policy & Disclosure’ aspect, achieving 96 points, up from 52 previously.

CEREIT outperformed its ‘Diversified – Office / Industrial (Europe)’ peer group average overall, as well as in five of the seven assessment aspects, namely ‘Management’, ‘Policy and Disclosure’, ‘Monitoring and EMS’, ‘Performance Indicators’, and ‘Building Certifications’.

These attest to the Manager’s continuing commitment to upholding high ESG standards in all its business activities.

The Manager’s Chief Executive Officer, Simon Garing, commented, “Sustainability is at the core of how we do business. We believe in accountability and measurable goals – the senior management team has key performance indicators focused on specific ESG targets. As part of these targets, a year ago, we stated our goal to improve upon CEREIT’s inaugural GRESB score and today, I am happy to report that we have since delivered on this commitment, and more. GRESB’s recognition of our strong performance validates the effectiveness of our holistic approach towards corporate governance, environmental stewardship, as well as social responsibility. Having a strong sustainability foundation better enables us to fulfil CEREIT’s core objectives of providing unitholders with stable distributions and long-term growth, and we will continue adopting progressive portfolio and asset management practices in order to be a leader in our field.”