2025 brought some important changes to the GRESB Real Estate Assessment.
Of all the updates, there’s one emerging theme we’re especially excited to see.
That’s right: one of the leading global commercial real estate benchmarks now includes criteria on biodiversity!
So what do the GRESB Assessment’s 2025 updates mean for your commercial assets? Why is having a biodiversity strategy important? Is this just the beginning for nature and biodiversity in commercial real estate? Keep reading!
New criteria in the 2025 GRESB Assessment: Biodiversity and nature-related strategy
Let’s start with a closer look at how GRESB is including nature and biodiversity in the 2025 Assessment.
Anyone completing the assessment will now be asked:
- If their entity has a strategy to address biodiversity and nature-related issues.
- To describe how the biodiversity and nature-related strategy considers dependencies, impacts, risks, and opportunities.
As this is the first time GRESB has asked for a biodiversity and nature-related strategy, the question is understandably broad. For now, GRESB is simply assessing if you have a strategy in place.
If you do, the follow-up question is open-ended. It’s up to you to explain how your strategy considers nature-related dependencies, impacts, risks, and opportunities.
Changes to the 2025 GRESB Real Estate Assessment.
Why is having a biodiversity strategy important for commercial real estate?
1. The built environment is responsible for significant biodiversity loss
Commercial real estate has a massive impact on biodiversity. Just think about the sheer footprint of buildings, taking the place of natural habitat and contributing to pollution. But by taking the right actions, commercial real estate could become biodiversity’s greatest ally.
2. Biodiversity strategies will become regulatory requirements
If you haven’t heard of the Taskforce on Nature-Related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) yet, you will soon. It’s a set of recommendations that encourage businesses to assess, report, and act on nature-related dependencies, impacts, risks and opportunities.
The TNFD wants businesses to share how they are impacting nature. The goal is to shift financial flows toward businesses that have a positive impact.
With leading green building frameworks like GRESB aligning with the TNFD, nature is set to become a major factor in commercial real estate.
The TNFD is a voluntary disclosure framework. But hundreds of early adopters are already choosing to disclose their impact on nature to investors and stakeholders.
Major funds (think BlackRock and HSBC) and have signalled interest in aligning with the TNFD. This means ESG and asset management teams will soon be under pressure to comply or risk missing out on funding.
Though disclosing nature-related risks and opportunities is currently voluntary in North America, expect it to become a requirement in the coming years.
Just look to Europe as an example. For development projects in the UK, Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) requirements are mandatory. The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) is mandatory for around 50,000 companies in the EU.
3. Nature-related risks can turn into financial risks
When nature-related risks go unchecked, it can have serious consequences for your property.
Operationally, you could face building damage, disrupting operations and increasing maintenance costs. When it comes to landscaping, less sustainable choices can result in higher costs for pest management and water usage.
Nature has an impact on tenant experience as well. Nature-based solutions can contribute to better indoor air quality, mental health, and overall satisfaction. Because of this, tenants are often willing to pay more for a building that takes these things into consideration.
Reputational risk plays a role, too. If your assets could be harming the environment and you don’t have an action plan to reduce that harm, your stakeholders will take notice. A solid strategy will help safeguard your good reputation.
Waiting to implement a biodiversity strategy may put you at risk of regulatory fines down the line. The TNFD’s recommendations are not mandatory right now. But with future regulations looking likely – why not be proactive and manage risks to your assets now?
4. Investors want to know you’re prepared
If the previous reasons haven’t persuaded you yet, we’ve saved the most convincing for last.
Having a biodiversity and nature-related risk management strategy in place is becoming increasingly important for appealing to investors. They want to know that you’ve identified all potential risks and have a strategy in place to manage them.
We’ve already talked about the ways nature-related risks can affect returns. That’s important to investors. Understandably, they want to be confident that they are investing in a resilient property. Give them every reason to trust that your building is a wise investment.
Why do investors care about biodiversity? Alex Mclean (Alvéole) and Dan Winters (GRESB) discuss.
Developing a biodiversity and nature-related strategy: where to start
So maybe you’ve read this far and we’ve convinced you (or you’re at least intrigued). You want to develop a biodiversity strategy and manage nature-related risks for your portfolio. Where do you start? It’s an understandably daunting task.
Like any massive undertaking, it’s best to break it down into steps. The TNFD recommends the LEAP approach to help with this.
LEAP has four phases:
- Locate your interface with nature
- Evaluate your dependencies and impacts on nature
- Assess your nature-related risks and opportunities
- Prepare to respond to, and report on, material nature-related issues, aligned with the TNFD’s recommended disclosures
Let’s break each of these steps down further.
1. Locate your interface with nature
Identify where each of your assets are located and how they interact with nature. Consider how they connect to the surrounding environment and ecosystems.
2. Evaluate your dependencies and impacts on nature
Look at how your assets use natural resources. This includes everything from building materials to water usage.
Then consider the ways your assets and activities could harm nature, like causing pollution or destroying habitat.
3. Assess your nature-related risks and opportunities
Think about how environmental issues could pose risks to your assets. Could you run out of a key resource? Face stricter environmental regulations?
Then think about the opportunities nature could present. Could adopting more sustainable practices save money or make your assets more appealing to tenants or investors?
Hot tip: At Alvéole, we have a tool to help you identify and assess your buildings’ nature-related risks.
4. Prepare to respond to and report on nature-related issues
Finally, create a plan to tackle the environmental challenges you’ve identified through this exercise. Do you need to change certain processes? Adopt new initiatives? Invest in new technologies?
Share your completed plan with stakeholders and keep them updated on your progress.
Using nature to manage nature-related risks: Some practical methods
Even by breaking things down with the LEAP approach, there’s still the question of how. How do you identify the ways your assets interact with nature? How do you prioritize any potential risks in order to act on them?
You’re not alone in this. Working with partners with expertise in this area is a practical way to get started. At Alvéole, we have a few methods we use to gather data and construct a clear picture of an asset’s impact on nature.
Geospatial analysis
We use geospatial analysis to understand how your asset’s location affects nature and vice versa.
We’ll look at what types of ecosystems exist in the area, how big they are, and whether they are shrinking or growing over time. We’ll see how much the natural area has been broken up by roads, buildings, and other human activity. And we’ll examine if there are any species within the ecosystem that are likely to go extinct.
eDNA sampling
To get an idea of how healthy the surrounding environment is, we use environmental DNA (or eDNA) sampling. We have a pretty special way of doing this.
We analyze the eDNA in the honey produced by your building’s rooftop beehive. This shows us which flowers the bees pollinated, which tells us how many different flower species are blooming around a building (aka, how biodiverse the local plant life is).
Honey is collected from an urban beehive to be analyzed in a lab.
Pesticide monitoring
The bees help us out with this one, too. We place a small lab strip inside your building’s rooftop beehive. When the bees enter the hive, they walk over the strip. The strip picks up traces of any pesticides the bees came in contact with in the air, water, or on flowers. From there, we can identify any harmful pesticides and offer safer alternatives.
A lab strip is placed inside an urban beehive to collect traces of any pesticides the bees come in contact with.
Is this just the beginning for biodiversity in commercial real estate?
Short answer: yes.
With GRESB’s 2025 Real Estate Assessment putting a focus on biodiversity and the TNFD gaining traction, you can expect biodiversity to become as important as carbon emissions in the future.
Investors are already asking for biodiversity strategies and nature-related risk management plans. This request will only become more common in the coming years. Expect tenants to start asking for this in the future, too.
Do you need to have a complete biodiversity and nature-related risk strategy in place by tomorrow? No. But it’s coming faster than you might think.
See this as your opportunity to stay ahead of the curve in the industry, keep your portfolio competitive, and support urban biodiversity.
