October newsletter
Good Monday morning everybody!
We like to think that you’re having an amazing start of the week as you’re scrolling our latest blog article on your devices while sipping your first coffee of the day!
From google and linkedin insights, we are delighted to acknowledge that the engagement with our online readers, not only clients but also interested professionals who wait for our regular industry updates, has significantly grown over the years.
It is then with great pleasure that this time our Managing Director and Founder Antonio Messina would like to personally address E.S.G. Solutions’ 5,000+ linkedin followers and for once go beyond our usual short and punchy blog articles, to produce a more structured monthly newsletter – with the usual hyperlinks that make so easy to find immediately the correct reference if you have any doubts, or would like to go deeper into the subject matter. From the next post we’ll go back to our colleague Rutuja Dongare’s Carbon Clarity series, which as a reminder will continue to be published until the Christmas holidays and possibly beyond.
We’ve got a busy October ahead, so let’s try keeping you up-to-speed with some key topics of the ESG agenda that we are covering these days. Here’s Antonio’s top-5 updates for your consideration: 1) ESOS; 2) BREEAM; 3) GRESB; 4) CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY ENVIRONMENTAL CONSULTING SOCIETY; 5) THE DISTRICT 2025 IN BARCELONA.
ESOS (Energy Savings Opportunity Scheme)
Important legal compliance update about mandatory energy auditing required every 4 years for large enterprises in the UK (ex lege Energy Efficiency Directive 2012/27/EU). The Environment Agency (EA) has recently announced that from this month they are introducing a new way to sign in to the Manage your Energy Savings Opportunity Scheme reporting system (MESOS), using GOV.UK One Login. This is the new secure way to access government services and will be rolled out across more services in the future. They are offering to ESOS participants and accredited lead assessors early access to the new sign in process in MESOS, so that they can connect their MESOS accounts to the GOV.UK One Login before this change is rolled out to all users. You may be asked to enter your email address and confirm your identity using your existing MESOS password and two-factor authenticator app (2FA) for your ESOS accounts, keeping in mind to act fast because the ESOS Progress Update 1 is due by Friday 5th December 2025. If you would like to hear more details about your organisation’s ESOS compliance, please reach out to our colleague Anna Rinaldi who is project managing six ESOS Progress Updates deliveries in Q4 2025, or have a look at our previous blog articles: the last one in particular can be found at this link here.
BREEAM (BRE Environmental Assessment Method)
The next BREEAM Assessor Quarterly Update will be held on Thursday 23rd October 2025 to provide the latest news as well as a space to address questions from the accredited assessors’ network. It is worth noting that BREEAM International and UK New Construction v.7 are now open for registrations, with the new Platforms also becoming live. BREEAM In-Use (i.e. the certification scheme for existing buildings in operation) will follow-up soon, you can find here a handy guidance regarding the transition from v.6 to v.7.
GRESB (formerly known as the Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark)
The final 2025 GRESB Benchmark Reports are now available. This year’s GRESB Real Estate Assessments reflect an industry staying the course on responsible investing, even amid market uncertainty and geopolitical headwinds. A total of 1,002 fund managers, including 84 NEW fund managers, completed 2,382 assessments, with 239 entities participating in the inaugural Residential Component.
GRESB members delivered stronger results across the board, with Standing Investments average scores rising to 79 (+3.1 vs 2024) and Development average scores increasing to 87.9 (+2.1 vs 2024).
With over a decade of personal experience in GRESB, this has been by far the best year for our own GRESB clients, as all of them but one have increased their score and have also either improved or not decreased their star rating from 2024: a clear reflection of the synergy created with their sustainability teams and the commitment to progressively improve management and performance, as more robust practices are put into action, ensuring that ESG performance is measured with greater accuracy.
We have been notified that regional and global sector leaders will be contacted in the coming weeks and will be publicly announced later in October. Without disclosing anything before it becomes official, we expect some extraordinary outcomes from our 2025 effort. Just to mention a few remarkable Client stories that we feel particularly proud of:
- CATEGORY “SIMPLY THE BEST”
Five funds are waiting to be awarded the coveted “GLOBAL SECTOR LEADERSHIP” status, with 5 Development Benchmarks and 3 Standing Investments Benchmarks being 5-starred.
- CATEGORY “UP-AND-COMING”
A Vietnamese entity has confirmed all its Green Stars, increased its scores from 2024, narrowed the gap with its peers based in more mature markets such as China, Japan and Singapore in “Standing Investments” and has even outperformed its Peer Group Average in the “Development” Benchmark!
- CATEGORY “DAVID AND GOLIATH”
A hospitality property company in Southern Europe – a Region where our clients’ track records legitimately put E.S.G. Solutions as the leading GRESB advisory firm – has secured a top-3 finish in a peer group of 8 companies whose average AUM is 11.5 times higher than its own real estate portoflio. They have actually already disclosed their remarkable story here, which follows up from a truly innovative ESG multi-project strategy implemented in 2023/24, whose outcomes also led to being shortlisted for the 2025 BREEAM awards.
After all, we still remain the only company at global level committed to investing in the GRESB Accredited Professional (AP) Team Leader training for 100% of the new starters and to introducing the requirement of having to pass the GRESB proficiency exam as part of their probatory period review. If you would like to hear more about our GRESB service offering, you can find me at the GRESB Regional Insights 2025 events, both in Milan (Italy, Thursday 30th October 2025) and London (UK, Tuesday 9th December 2025).
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY ENVIRONMENTAL CONSULTING SOCIETY
Since Day 1 back to 2020 we have been demonstrating our ESG leadership and corporate commitment to our core values by investing in initiatives, events and relationships with like-minded pro-active individuals that share with us the same passion for sustainability and a common sense of belonging.
When the Treasurer of the Environmental Consulting Society at the University of Cambridge (CUECS) reached out to me proposing a sponsorship deal between us, I wanted to know more about them and invited their President here in London to meet our team at the nearby historic Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese pub in the City (built in 1667, one of the first buildings after the “Great Fire”) and hear her out. Ruby Livingston followed up from Isla Higgins’s initial email and explained that, although CUECS has ambitious scaling-up plans, they want to keep access open and free for students. Hence they decided to try and fund their initiatives through sponsorships that could allow them to make a greater impact and include more career panels, networking events and case competitions, while increasing their support for student-directed consulting projects.
Well, we loved it and decided to link our brand to their student association, which seeks to provide talented students with hands-on experience in environmental strategy, consulting and project management – helping them to turn their ideas into tangible impact, while supporting their journeys into environmental careers. I particularly liked the idea of their flagship programme, “Sustain-a-Ball”, providing consulting and sustainability audits to May Ball committees, influencing how some of Cambridge’s largest and most public-facing events reduce their environmental impact. More details to follow, in fact we will be sharing the CUECS Events programme for 2025/26 in due course, with the first two dates being 7th and 8th October 2025 for the Fresher’s Fair and 10th November 2025 for the Michaelmas Careers Panel.
THE DISTRICT WORLD SUMMIT 2025 IN BARCELONA
Last but not least, let me share some thoughts about this amazing event organised by Josep Jorge, who has personally invited me to take part as a Speaker in the Congress that took place from Tuesday 30th September to Thursday 2nd October in at the Fira – Gran Vía in Barcelona (Spain).
I was impressed by the range and depth of ESG topics covered at this 4th edition of The Disctrict Show “Ready, Set, Invest”, attended by 14,537 visitors from 40+ Countries, where Italy was Guest Partner. It was truly the epicenter of the Real Estate industry for Southern Europe, where so many leaders came to share success business cases and discuss about the current market trends and strategies that define the current investment flows, innovations, cross-border collaborations and ESG strategies for our sector.
My panel was included in the “decarbonisation” sessions on Wednesday 1st October, with the main topic being “Taxonomy Under Pressure: Aligning Sustainable Classifications with Systemic Climate Risk”. Together with Verónica Martín, Partner at VMT & Associates, and Manuel Hurtado, Global Head of Intelligence at Accumin, we explored how the taxonomy could evolve to reflect the growing financial instability caused by uninsurable assets, extreme weather events and abrupt market repricing. We examined how taxonomy-aligned real estate investments can integrate resilience and insurability criteria to avoid becoming the next generation of stranded assets. I also covered the new mandatory Sustainability Reporting Standards which are about to be fully implemented in the UK now that the Government has made the final decision to abandon the UK taxonomy for good because of its practical complexity, implementation challenges and regulatory overload.
A recording of the conversation will be made available in the next few weeks, in the meantime feel free to review our LinkedIn posts and Blog articles (here‘s the latest one, which we learn was read by 1,500 viewers within the first 24 hours from its issue!).
