Africa’s largest pension fund, the Government Employees Pension Fund (GEPF), has become the first South African institution to implement the Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark (GRESB).

Institutional investors around the world use the GRESB to improve the sustainability performance of their investment portfolios and that of the global property sector at large.

“This is a huge boost for responsible investment in the property sector in South Africa and shows that asset managers will prioritise investment into companies with sustainable environmental management. Sustainability is slowly taking its rightful place at the boardroom table,” Green Building Council of South Africa (GBCSA) CEO Brian Wilkinson said.

Assessing where its property portfolio ranked on the global GRESB would enable the GEPF to recognise which of its buildings or property funds were excelling in terms of environmental sustainability and determine where improvements were required.

The GEPF put forward that benchmarking through the GRESB would serve as a catalyst for increased environmental engagement with the South African property sector.

"Increasing demand for green and efficient buildings by blue-chip corporate tenants positions owners of green and efficient buildings to be able to attract and retain a better quality tenant and, in turn, attract higher rentals," GEPF environmental, social and governance manager Adrian Bertrand said.

He added that the benefits of ‘greening’ properties have proven to outweigh the costs, with such properties offering improved environmental footprints, health and productivity benefits for building users, decreased operational costs and fetching higher rent for building owners on average.

"We trust that GEPF’s endorsement of GRESB will encourage the property sector to align itself against global best practice for addressing sustainability issues and, in turn, make South African property stocks increasingly attractive to international institutional investors," added Bertrand.

Significant scope existed for improving the built environment’s carbon footprint, with it currently contributing one-third of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions, while buildings were estimated to consume over 40% of electricity generated globally.