Key Takeaways from GRESB Regional Insights 2025 – London Infrastructure 

On November 25th, with AXA IM, we co-hosted the GRESB Regional Insights 2025 – Infrastructure in London, bringing together infrastructure investors, advisors and operators to unpack this year’s results and what’s coming next for the asset class. 

Our takeaway was simple: the year has been an interesting challenge for anyone with “sustainability” in their job title, but infrastructure is still moving forwards. GRESB ratings are rising, net zero plans are moving from development phase to implementation, and physical climate risk is being treated as a financial question, not a side topic. 

Here’s how it looked from our side. 

Trends – What the 2025 Infrastructure Results are Telling Us 

This year’s GRESB infrastructure benchmark felt steady rather than dramatic, but a few signals stood out: 

• Globally, the benchmark now covers around 186 managers and more than 800 assessments, with nearly twenty new participants joining. 

• Transport and renewable power remain the backbone of the benchmark, together making up close to 40% of reported assets. 

• Average scores increased across the board, especially for funds and development assets, where performance jumped sharply as managers got to grips with newer assessment lines. 

Against a backdrop of higher interest rates, slower deal flow and political noise on sustainability, that level of participation and steady improvement is not to be taken lightly. It suggests infrastructure managers are embedding sustainability into business-as-usual rather than treating it as a passing theme. 

The discussion on net zero felt much more practical than even 12 months ago. Targets are still important, but the question in the room was: where can decarbonisation create value in real assets? Physical climate risk was framed less as a specialist topic and more as part of the wider financial picture.  

Implications – What This Means for Infrastructure Investors 

We heard examples of investors who now only back infrastructure that is fit, or at least adaptable, for zero-carbon operation. This shows up as: 

• directing capital towards clear climate solutions (renewables, grid infrastructure, district energy, digital networks), 

• backing “hard-to-abate” assets only where there is a credible plan to shift technologies and fuels 

• tying decarbonisation to commercial outcomes like winning tenders, securing cheaper finance and opening new revenue lines. 

Taken together, the trend is clear: net zero is being treated as a value and risk question. Decisions about what to own, how long to hold it, and where to invest capex are increasingly linked to whether an asset can operate competitively in a zero-carbon system and withstand more volatile physical conditions. 

The need for collaboration was also discussed. Many infrastructure assets now have several investors around the table, each with their own sustainability expectations. Without coordination, operating companies can end up responding to overlapping questionnaires and KPI requests. That creates noise and takes time away from actual performance improvement. The implication for investors is that aligning expectations and information needs is becoming part of good stewardship.  

Possibilities – How Sustainable Action Help Cut Noise and Focus Action 

GRESB’s roadmap is moving the same direction as these needs. The new voluntary net zero alignment module, built with the IIGCC framework, will sit inside the infrastructure assessment from 2026. It uses data investors already report into GRESB and turns it into a simple view of net zero “maturity” at both asset and portfolio level, without extra fees. That should help shift conversations away from target-setting theatre and towards “what do we do next year, and what capex does that imply?” 

The London session also highlighted several other roadmap items that can help line up investors and reduce noise:  

• earlier access to submitted data for investors, rather than waiting for the final validation window 

• a static fund assessment to reduce annual re-validation workload 

• simplification of dozens of indicators without losing decision-useful content 

• a dedicated, on-demand data centre assessment due in the first half of 2026 

• a longer-term shift towards more performance-based scoring from 2027 onwards, with industry consultation running through 2025. 

At the same time, there was a strong push to agree shared ‘non-negotiables’ and even combine sustainability surveys, so asset teams spend more time improving performance and less time duplicating reporting. Used well, GRESB can be one of the common reference points that allows this to happen.   

Solutions – Putting the Insights to Work 

For infrastructure investors, the message from London was that the tools are catching up with what you need: clearer signals on performance, less repeated reporting, and better ways to talk about net zero and physical risk in the same breath as return and value.  

The solution now is not another framework, but making practical use of what already exists: using GRESB data to understand net-zero maturity, aligning investor requests around a common set of indicators, and turning benchmark results into decisions on asset selection, capex, financing and engagement with operators. 

If you’d like to discuss what these changes mean for your infrastructure portfolio or next fund – and how to put these trends, implications and possibilities into action – get in touch with EVORA and we’ll be happy to talk it through.