Sustainability

a) Reduce impact

Development: Carefully evaluate and select the most efficient designs to use low carbon materials and work cooperatively with local communities and contractors to ensure good construction practices across the whole development process.

Operations: Focus on actively raising awareness, improving communication, and changing behaviour around energy, water, and waste consumption across Basecamp properties and offices.

b) Increase energy efficiency and reduce operational energy

Development: Develop new properties to BREEAM Very Good standard or equivalent, to design for performance and maximise the efficiency of assets throughout the life cycle.

Operations: Increase on-site renewable energy production, install high-efficiency fixtures, and gradually shift our energy consumption towards certified renewable power.

From a social impact perspective, Health & Wellbeing and stakeholder engagement are the two cornerstones of our ESG strategy.

The goals for us are to increase health & wellbeing, as well as engagement efforts towards residents, employees, and local communities.

Measure, where possible, the impact of the Basecamp business operations to determine the best mitigation strategies by keeping open communication channels with all relevant stakeholders.

Increasing customer and employee retention as well as evaluating the progress of the decisions taken by the Group through surveys to measure the impact of our engagement and health & wellbeing measures.

Both ESHF I & II participate in the Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark (GRESB). The benchmark collects ESG-related information from all participating entities and assigns a score. In addition, every year, we report on a series of Environmental, Social, and Governance aspects because we believe in the capacity of markets to self adapt themselves to the needs of society, with the help and contribution of governments.

The collection of ESG data is essential to determine a solid baseline for the sector to improve and adopt more sustainable practices. Basecamp believes in the power of disclosure and wants to support this process.

The goal in this respect is to gradually increase ESHF and ESHF II GRESB scores, reflecting our ESG efforts’ intrinsic level.

One of the most compelling examples of stakeholder engagement within Basecamp’s business activities was the project developed in cooperation with the Copenhagen Business School Master’s course: Consulting for Sustainability.

This project saw a group of students collaborating with us to find some potential solutions to the following problem posed:

• How can Basecamp engage its residents to effectively reduce energy consumption (not only in their rooms but especially in the communal areas) and increase recycling efforts?
• Is it possible to create a competitive business advantage from this?

Involving external stakeholders in this process, who are also potential customers, has encouraged our team to reflect critically on the aspects that could improve the Basecamp experience and our sustainability efforts.

The student group proceeded to conduct numerous interviews with different Basecamp team members to collect helpful information from a financial and operational perspective that would help determine the baseline for the project and potential future improvement areas.

The project lasted approx. four months. The final product consisted of an extensive presentation to which all development and operations directors, including senior management, were invited, as well as a management report of about 50 pages.

Another example of Basecamp Student’s strong focus on cultivating relationships with scientific organisations and other related stakeholders is the second project that ran in 2021 with the Ecole Hôtelière de Lausanne (EHL).

The project involved a group of students doing extensive research on the following topic:

Examine how Basecamp Student can evolve its recruitment and talent acquisition strategies to meet the demands of customers and stakeholders (focusing on more client-facing, property-level roles) and identify future trends that may impact talent efforts in the next few years post-Covid-19.

The student group interviewed multiple stakeholders, from EHL industry professionals to Basecamp Student professionals.

The final product was a management report touching on the following topics:

• PBSA market overview
• Hospitality trends
• Talent management
• Employment journey

Within those aspects, the student group analyses how to most effectively integrate health & wellbeing measures and diversity & inclusion principles.

Throughout our properties, Basecamp local teams have created and developed an initiative to reuse items that would otherwise be thrown away.

Specifically, our BaseManagers and BaseBuddies (residents who work part-time at our properties) have created an initiative called Sharing is Caring.

In this initiative, our teams manage the collection of all items our new residents purchase during their stay and prepare them to be reutilised by residents during the next study cycle.

This initiative was also extended to food, as some of our students proactively wanted to reduce food waste at times of high turnover.