Sustainability

As a major industrial property player that provides buildings for public tenants, we bear a significant social responsibility. With more than 23,000 people visiting our buildings every day, the good choices we make will have a positive impact locally, nationally and globally. For us, this means having sustainability as a guiding principle.

Sustainable development can be defined as development “that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. This has been our philosophy from day one and guides every choice we make.

But what does it mean in practice?

Climate and the environment
During the UN Climate Change Conference in November 2021, the UN’s member states emphasised the need for major investments in measures to mitigate climate change. Public Property Invest owns 61 buildings and we have set a goal of all our buildings being environmentally certified according to our sustainability strategy by 2026. This will require major investments every year – a process we have embarked on to help implement the green transition.

We will map energy consumption, water consumption and the waste-sorting rate in all our buildings. We use an energy management system (EMS) to monitor these factors to establish how well we are doing each day and use the results to prepare an environmental strategy for each individual building. We hire external consultants to establish which measures will produce the most sustainable solutions, as well as the best results in the short and long term.

Social
In line with our focus on social sustainability, our buildings must be places where all our tenants are happy and enjoy a good quality of life. We ensure that the buildings are designed to be attractive and accessible to everyone regardless of their needs, and provide high-quality and healthy solutions and high usability. We facilitate user involvement and participation during the tenancy, and find optimal solutions in close collaboration with each tenant.

Financial
In accordance with our focus on financial sustainability, our community buildings must help our tenants achieve their goals. We design and tailor our buildings to serve as a tool to help our working tenants fulfil their social mandates – by, in other words, using space as a strategic tool.

The most sustainable buildings have already been built, the independent research body SINTEF concludes in a report from 2020:

«If we are to achieve ambitious climate goals through actions such as cutting emissions from buildings, it will be more effective to refurbish existing buildings than to build new ones.»
- SINTEF

Our role

Everyone can contribute to the sustainable development of the society we live in, through the choices they make each and every day. We are acutely aware of our responsibility for spearheading the transformation of our industry together with other professional property players. This means refurbishing the buildings we own instead of building new ones, and ensuring that our tenants achieve their goals and that we have environmentally aware and sustainably minded tenants. We must also give our tenants the best advice to ensure that their organisation always has efficient buildings with happy and productive staff. This will enable us to make our buildings as sustainable as possible.

90 per cent of our tenants are public-sector enterprises that manage socially beneficial and socially essential services. Many of our tenants are the very institutions that underpin our entire democratic welfare society. They rightly make high demands around environmental, social and financial sustainability – requirements that we have to meet in order to successfully implement our own business strategy.