2025 brought some important changes to the GRESB Real Estate Assessment.
GRESB, a mission-driven organization, provides actionable ESG data to financial markets, making it a key player in these updates. The GRESB reporting process runs from April 1 to July 1 each year, providing a structured timeline for real estate participants.
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 GRESB biodiversity!
So what do the GRESB Assessment’s 2025 updates mean for your real estate assets? Why is having a biodiversity strategy important? Is this just the beginning for nature and biodiversity in the real estate sector? Keep reading!
UPDATE: Looking ahead to the 2026 GRESB updates, the assessment framework continues to evolve with even greater emphasis on measured environmental performance. The 2026 standard introduces scored recognition for embodied carbon measurement and enhances the net zero framework to strengthen credibility requirements.
These changes signal GRESB’s commitment to rewarding real-world outcomes over documentation alone, with indicator weight adjustments that elevate performance expectations across the board. Despite growing momentum around nature-related financial disclosure, GRESB 2026 does not introduce a biodiversity or nature-related performance indicator. More importantly, it does not score nature risk management yet.
What’s new in the 2025 GRESB Real Estate Assessment
Biodiversity and nature-related strategy now included
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.
This is a major shift in GRESB standards, opening the door for in depth analysis of how nature and biodiversity influence ESG performance.es.
Changes to the 2025 GRESB Real Estate Assessment.
Why a biodiversity strategy matters for commercial real estate
1. The built environment is driving biodiversity loss
Real estate development benchmark results have shown that real estate investments can dramatically affect 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, the real estate company managing those assets could become biodiversity’s greatest ally.
2. Regulations and investor frameworks are evolving fast
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.
In 2021, more than 1,200 real estate investors, companies, and infrastructure funds participated in the GRESB assessment, showing its growing influence.
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 international reporting frameworks like GRESB aligning with the TNFD, nature is set to become a major factor in real estate investments.
The TNFD is a voluntary ESG 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) have signaled interest in aligning with the TNFD. This means investment managers and asset managers 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 lead to financial loss
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 water consumption or energy usage.
Nature has an impact on tenant experience as well. Sustainability performance can contribute to better indoor air quality, mental health, and overall satisfaction. Because of this, tenants are often willing to pay more for buildings with green building certifications.
Reputational risk plays a role, too. If your real estate 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 and that you’re prioritizing material issues in your ESG reporting.
Some even see it as a competitive advantage in attracting investment.
Why do investors care about biodiversity? Alex Mclean (Alvéole) and Dan Winters (GRESB) discuss.
How to get started with the LEAP approach
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 framework to help with this.
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.
This is the kind of asset level data that fuels strong GRESB reporting.
2. Evaluate your dependencies and impacts on nature
Look at how your assets use natural resources. This includes everything from energy consumption to water usage.
Then consider the ways your activities could harm nature, like causing pollution or disrupting 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 improve your GRESB score or support your investment type?
GRESB offers a growing number of analytical tools to help real estate firms manage and report on these risks.
Hot tip: At Alvéole, we have a tool to help you identify and assess your buildings’ nature-related risks (providing the kind of validated data the GRESB rating process depends on).entify 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.
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.
Practical tools to support your strategy
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 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 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 biodiversity entering the assessment, and TNFD gaining momentum, biodiversity is becoming a permanent feature of GRESB development benchmark evaluations.
Investors are asking for actionable insights, and final results will increasingly depend on how well you integrate nature-related risks and opportunities into your strategy.
You don’t need a complete strategy tomorrow. But it’s coming sooner than you might think.
Participants receive more than a score, they gain visibility, market recognition, and the ability to make smarter investment decisions based on clear and consistent performance indicators.
This is your chance to get ahead in the GRESB reporting process, improve your own score, and build a future-ready portfolio.
