It is my pleasure to provide you with an update on Vicinity Centres’ (Vicinity) progress in our Sustainability journey through Vicinity Unwrapped – Our Sustainability Story.

At Vicinity, our focus is on creating market leading destinations, and beautiful places where people choose to connect and experience best in shopping, dining, leisure and lifestyles.

Bringing our purpose of Enriching Community Experiences to life, we see our centres as a positive force for creating sustainable destinations and shaping better communities. In this way we aim to create shared value – positive outcomes for our stakeholders and for Vicinity – the guiding principle behind our Sustainability strategy.

During the year, we have continued to embed our Sustainability strategy and its objectives into key areas of our business. Our focus is on building a low carbon and climate resilient portfolio and strengthening our local communities in a targeted and strategic way, positioning us to create long term and sustainable value for our business and securityholders.

Our Sustainability journey is not a path we walk alone. It is a truly collaborative effort with our partners including our retailers, suppliers, and local community organisations, and a highly dedicated team.

On behalf of the Board, I would like to thank everyone personally for their passion and commitment to making Vicinity and our broader community stronger and more sustainable each year.

Peter Hay                                                                             Chairman, Vicinity Centres

As the CEO and Managing Director, and Chair of Vicinity’s Sustainability Committee, I’m pleased to report to you Vicinity Centres Sustainability approach and performance to the end of FY18.

When I joined Vicinity in January 2018, I was honoured to be a part of a company that is a global property sector leader in sustainability. I believe that having a strategic approach to sustainability is an important driver of our overall performance and is essential to delivering strong and sustainable growth.

FY18 has been a great year for Vicinity, further cementing our position as a leader in sustainability in the property sector.

This year, we announced Australia’s largest shopping centre solar program with plans to invest $73 million in installations across the portfolio. Already underway, this program will reduce Vicinity’s exposure to volatile energy markets and reduce our carbon emissions, while delivering strong investment returns. We also continued on our journey of better understanding our exposure to climate-related risks and measures we can put in place to strengthen the resilience of our centres.

Improving opportunities for unemployed and disengaged youth is central to our community focus. We successfully implemented a nationwide fundraising initiative ‘Light the Way’ to support our corporate community partner Beacon Foundation and raise awareness of the work we are doing together to guide young people towards meaningful education and work opportunities. We also launched our Reflect Reconciliation Action Plan as the first step in our reconciliation journey to create a more inclusive workplace and deliver positive outcomes for Indigenous people in our communities.

Our efforts during the year have been recognised by the investment community, with Vicinity being included in various leadership categories within the Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark and ranked the third most sustainable real estate company globally by the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices.

It is an exciting period to be part of Vicinity and I look forward to updating you on our progress in the years ahead.

Grant Kelley                                                                          CEO and Managing Director, Vicinity Centres

Vicinity Unwrapped is Vicinity Centres’ (Vicinity or the Group) key platform for disclosing our environmental, social, governance and long term economic information and performance.

The information within this site should be read in conjunction with our 2018 Annual Integrated Report and 2018 Corporate Governance Statement, available through our Investor Centre.

The content on this site has been prepared in accordance with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Standard at a core level.  The site discloses our performance and management of issues that are material to our business and our key stakeholders. The GRI Content Index can be downloaded here.  

Information on this site covers all retail assets under our operational control as well as the corporate offices we occupy to run our business. Refer to our 2018 Sustainability Reporting Criteria for further information on our reporting scopes and boundaries. All performance data contained within this site is based on the financial year, the 12 months ending 30 June 2018 (FY18), or as at 30 June 2018, unless otherwise stated. Our performance is updated annually. The FY18 Sustainability Performance Pack can be downloaded here. 

A number of our environmental and social disclosures are externally assured by Ernst and Young. The External Assurance Statement can be viewed here.

Your feedback is important to us. You can contact us or provide any comments you have via sustainability@vicinity.com.au.

*Calculated using the London Benchmarking Group methodology and includes Community Investment ($2.17M), foregone revenue ($1.8M) and fundraising activities ($378k). http://www.lbg-online.net/