SINGAPORE – Mainboard-listed CapitaLand Investment (CLI) is pushing ahead in its decarbonisation by adding key disclosures from suppliers and ramping up green leases with tenants, even though its efforts to cut carbon emissions did not go as smoothly in 2023.
These measures are part of the global real asset manager’s plan to reduce Scope 3 carbon emissions.
These emissions are the result of activities from assets that are not owned or controlled by CLI, but indirectly affects the firm’s carbon output.
The firm’s chief sustainability officer Vinamra Srivastava told The Straits Times in an exclusive interview that the initiatives are important as Scope 3 emissions make up 68 per cent of CLI’s total greenhouse gas emissions.
Scope 1 accounts for 2 per cent and Scope 2 takes up the remaining 30 per cent of emissions.
The firm has expanded its reporting of Scope 3 emissions.
In its 15th Global Sustainability Report issued recently, the firm included three new Scope 3 categories that are key to its operations. They are: purchased goods and operations, fuel- and energy-related activities, as well as upstream transportation and distribution.
The firm also widened the scope of the scope of the capital goods and downstream leased assets categories after a review.
CLI has been disclosing emissions associated with properties that it does not operationally manage as part of Scope 3 disclosures since 2022.
The latest decarbonisation push becomes more pressing as the firm has less than six years to hit its 2030 net-zero goals.
The firm’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 – direct emissions from CLI and emissions that are caused by CLI indirectly through its activities – went up in 2023 by 10.1 per cent against the 2019 baseline.
The rise was led by the 40 per cent growth in CLI’s number of operational properties to 497 in 2023 from 2019, and accounts for the rise in Scope 2 emissions.
Mr Srivastava, who has his work cut out for him, is optimistic.
“If you look at like-to-like same store basis, which is the properties that were there in 2019 and the same properties that are there today as well, absolute carbon emissions has gone down by 14.4 per cent,” he said.
He noted that the decarbonisation pathway would never be a linear decline but would be a jagged line in reality.
