Uniform reporting standard increases transparency and helps Aareal Bank achieve its sustainability objectives
Wiesbaden, 08 October 2021. Aareal Bank has joined the Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials (PCAF), a global initiative for standardising the assessment and disclosure of greenhouse gas emissions aimed at the financial sector. By becoming a participant, Aareal Bank has undertaken to introduce PCAF reporting of emissions in its loan portfolio within three years.
In addition, as part of the collaboration between PCAF and the VfU (the professional association of financial sector sustainability specialists in Germany, Austria and Switzerland), Aareal Bank serves as co-lead of the "Commercial Real Estate and Mortgages" subgroup, actively contributing the knowledge gained there to discussions and using it to help shape the content of the initiative's future activities. Additional objectives of the working group are to make the existing PCAF framework user-friendly for local financial institutions and to design tools that enable all participants to calculate their relevant GHG emissions in the future.
Collecting and calculating the emissions data needed for this is a major challenge for the real estate sector and financial institutions at present, and must be solved by working together. The lack of uniform standards that would enable both quality-assured data and comparability across the different institutions active on the market is a particular problem.
GHG emissions are a key performance indicator for managing the transition to a climate-friendly economy. Aareal Bank takes its responsibilities as a provider of global commercial property finance seriously and is currently working to capture the climate impact of the properties in its commercial real estate portfolio. The objective is to continue expanding the scope and level of detail of the data collected, while also enhancing data quality.
PCAF was launched in September 2019. As of now, more than 160 banks and investors have already signed up to the initiative.
PCAF's members are working together to develop the Global GHG Accounting and Reporting Standard for the Financial Industry, which is designed to assess and disclose the GHG emissions associated with their loans and investments.
Further information about the PCAF initiative.
