Good morning, everyone. Thank you for having me here today.
My name is Anna Murray, and I'm the vice-president of sustainability for Bentall Kennedy. Bentall Kennedy is a Sun Life investment management company, one of the largest global real estate investment advisers, and one of North America's foremost providers of real estate services. We serve the interests of more than 550 institutional clients. Our investment management group has approximately $46 billion of assets under management.
Bentall Kennedy is a member of the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment, and is a recognized responsible property investment leader. It has been ranked among the top firms globally for the global real estate sustainability benchmarks for over eight years.
Regarding a bit about sustainability at Bentall Kennedy, as we know, buildings account for approximately one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions and consume approximately 40% of global energy. There really is an incredible opportunity here to reduce the real estate industry's overall environmental footprint.
At Bentall Kennedy specifically, we aim to help lead the global movement for sustainability, climate action and environmental progress, which also strengthens the long-term value generation and competitiveness of commercial real estate. As physical, regulatory, reputational environmental, social and governance risks are being increasingly felt in this industry, real estate professionals, as the building owners and operators, are in a unique position to address these risks. By doing so, we're not only mitigating risk, but also safeguarding and increasing the value of the assets that we manage over the long term.
Our team's focus is to manage environmental, social and governance risks to generate long-term returns for our clients. As part of this, we look to drive green strategies, which create value by reducing the risk of building obsolescence, saving energy, decreasing costs, and driving revenue by satisfying tenant and resident demand. We focus on smart strategies and designs to keep buildings at the forefront of technology through our culture of continuous innovation and entrepreneurship.
We also have a wellness-focused strategy that contributes to the retention of tenants and residents and sustained investor return over a long period. Specifically, our initiatives include green building certifications; energy efficiency training; energy, water and waste audits; data management benchmarking; target setting; and external reporting amongst others.
I also want to take a minute to talk about a few additional initiatives that Bentall Kennedy is involved in that are contributing directly toward the Canadian Paris climate change commitments.
As part of the United Nations Environment Programme's finance initiative, or UNEP FI, we are on their investment committee as a member. UNEP FI is a partnership between the United Nations Environment Programme and the global financial sector, which includes insurance, investment and banking. We work with UN Environment to understand today's challenges, why they matter to finance, and how we can actively participate to address them.
As a committee member, we have a global mandate to drive adoption of sustainability in real estate investment and property management. We share responsibility for developing and monitoring the UNEP FI sustainability strategy for the investment industry while engaging with leading global investors to address pressing sustainability issues.
Last year, we were elected as co-chair of their property working group. The property working group's objective is to address the most imminent challenges in the field of sustainable real estate investment. I was in Paris last week for a round table with our global counterparts to discuss our current strategy as well as our long-term strategy.
As part of this group, and in our role as co-chair, Bentall Kennedy drives innovation in responsible property investment by facilitating access to relevant information and best practice, and collaboratively developing the necessary tools to enable property investors and professionals to systematically apply and integrate ESG criteria into investment and lending decisions. We also collaborate, as I mentioned, with our global counterparts.
Of note for the committee today is that, as part of my role as co-chair, I've undertaken a global survey representative of over one trillion dollars' worth of assets under management in Asia, Europe and the Americas. The survey is focused on global investor focus on sustainable real estate, and the results will be available in the new year. It will not only dictate our strategy as part of the property working group, but will also help to inform global investors as to market-competitive strategies.
Finally, in terms of the task force on climate-related financial disclosures, Bentall Kennedy is one of the original participants in the real estate pilot group. We're currently undergoing this pilot as one of 13 other global participants, and the results will be available in the new year. For those of you who are unaware of this pilot, approximately 20 asset managers worldwide joined UNEP FI's pilot project to implement the recommendations of the task force on climate-related disclosures. The pilot will specifically develop scenarios, models, metrics and, ultimately, a risk assessment tool that will enable investors to assess climate risk across their portfolios. Upon the conclusion of this pilot, the results will be made publicly available in an open-sourced format. We're looking forward to seeing those results also in the new year.
Thank you very much.