Picton Property Income Limited Sustainability Report 2021

PictonProperty Income Limited Sustainability Report 2021

22

Environmental Focus

Introduction

Approach

Sustainable Buildings

Our Employees

Stakeholder Engagement

Appendix

Environmental Focus Our environment continued Biodiversity

Biodiversity initiatives have a positive impact on the health and wellbeing of our occupiers as well as being good for the environment. This is an area in which we and all our stakeholders have a growing interest, and we are excited about driving forward our initiatives across our portfolio.

Biodiversity is now recognised as one of the biggest sustainability themes of 2021. We have been a supporter of encouraging biodiversity within our portfolio for several years now. As previously reported, we installed two beehives at Queen’s House, Glasgow. The population of the hives has more than doubled in size since installation, helping promote the pollination of surrounding plant life. The installation of these beehives also proved to be a huge success in engaging our occupiers in workshops and presentation events and provides scope for potential workshop events with the local community. We want our buildings to contribute positively towards the natural environment and we believe that there are opportunities to introduce even more biodiversity initiatives across all our property types – industrial, offices and retail/leisure.

During 2019 and 2020 we started to introduce such measures on a case-by-case basis. We now intend to develop a more structured approach, with clear overall targets for all our properties based on obtaining specialist advice and support. This will provide us with a detailed roadmap of how to achieve our targets and a means of measuring our progress. During 2020 we undertook biodiversity surveys across several of our properties with landscaped areas. As a result, we have installed features to encourage more wildlife, such as bug hotels and bird boxes. We have also made changes to the way in which we look after our landscaped areas, for example different planting or lawn mowing procedures. We were pleased to see these measures taking effect in locations such as Parkbury Industrial Estate, Radlett, Colchester Business Park, Colchester, Pembroke Court, Chatham, Gloucester Retail Park,

Gloucester, and Nonsuch Industrial Estate, Epsom. We engaged with specialists from landscaping businesses and wildlife trusts to help shape our approach and have gained valuable knowledge, which we will apply at our other properties. It was encouraging to see that these initiatives were warmly welcomed locally and generated interest from our occupiers and visitors. We will continue to actively publicise these features as we move forward. During 2021 we will develop a Biodiversity Policy covering our business and buildings. We will continue to undertake biodiversity surveys across our sites and carry out the recommendations arising from these. We will increase our engagement with our occupiers by making biodiversity a specific item of discussion in our building management meetings, and look for ideas to improve biodiversity and raise awareness.

We will investigate charitable bodies linked to biodiversity for further consideration in respect of future funding support. As members of the Better Buildings Partnership, we will look to embrace its ideas and aspirations towards biodiversity and use its knowledge and support to help achieve this.

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