A message from Oxford's Chief Legal Officer
At Oxford, we are committed to strengthening economies and communities through real estate to fulfil the OMERS Pension Promise. Over the past few years, we’ve refreshed our ESG Framework to set even higher standards for ourselves that we believe will both create new economic and social value as well as progress OMERS sustainable investment priorities. We set out our key objectives: integrating sustainable investing, solidifying our ESG data foundation, and decarbonizing our assets. In 2023, we focused on execution, leveraging the foundational work done, and taking meaningful strides to deliver on these objectives.
Internally, we made significant progress in building sustainable investing and operations management capacity across the organization. The Sustainable Investing and Operations Team launched our Global Resource Hub to provide a comprehensive set of tools to guide sustainable investment and asset life cycle management. We expanded sustainability training to 400+ employees through bespoke education sessions and a centralized learning platform to facilitate consistency in understanding and application of sustainable practices. We established our Global ESG Working Group, along with our regional working groups to create cross-functional accountability and support for our sustainability objectives.
We are proactively managing transition and physical climate risks. To that end, we are progressing our decarbonization strategy from planning into execution. We successfully integrated 100% of Asset Managed properties onto our environmental data management platform and developed a powerful toolkit and Carbon Emissions Forecast Model so our property teams can act on decarbonization. We reduced our carbon emissions intensity by 17% from our 2019 baseline.
Our efforts have received recognition from both the industry and our employees. For our sustainability efforts we have been included in Fast Company’s World’s Most Innovative Companies for a fifth consecutive year and were selected as the winner of the UK PropTech Award for Business Transformation for our successful integration of property technology to enhance our business’ sustainability. Our 2023 Employee Experience survey revealed 94% of our employees are proud to work at Oxford against 88% across the industry.
Looking back at our achievements in 2023, we are pleased with the tangible steps taken towards our sustainability goals. Recognizing that sustainability is a continuous journey, these accomplishments have laid a robust foundation for our future efforts. In 2024 and beyond, we will build on this momentum and strive for continued transparency and leadership in the real estate industry. Thank you to our teams for their efforts to turn our sustainability objectives into reality, and to our partners for their support and collaboration. Together, we’re making a difference.
Sincerely, Alysha Valenti Chief Legal Officer
Employees participated in sustainability training sessions
Direct-drive properties integrated onto our environmental data management platform
Reduction in carbon emissions intensity from our 2019 baseline
2023 at a glance
Our corporate, development and property teams took significant strides in 2023 to increase our internal capacity globally to deliver on sustainable investing and operations.
- Developed our Carbon Emissions Forecast Model and Asset Decarbonization Toolkit to help property teams model pathways to net zero and develop bespoke decarbonization plans unique to the specific asset, sector and region, for Asset Managed assets
- Conducted a location-based, desktop physical climate risk screen of our portfolio to assess climate hazards and priority risks across various time horizons and warming scenarios
- Launched our Conscious Inclusion program to provide a variety of learning solutions aimed at upskilling individuals and teams to build a diverse and inclusive workforce
- Onboarded 100% of asset managed assets onto our environmental data management platform and trained our teams on its use, increasing our data coverage from 90% to 96% and receiving the UK PropTech Association’s Transformational Business Award
- Ranked 17th out of 80 category participants in GRESB, the pre-eminent global ESG benchmarking system for real estate funds
