.
Name: Viktor Filipan
Title: Director Infrastructure
Organization: APG Asset Management
.
What sustainability topics are you most interested in?
- Embedding sustainability considerations into capital allocation, transactions, and long‑term ownership decisions, including how sustainability insights are reflected in origination, due diligence, valuation, and post‑acquisition governance in infrastructure investing.
- Measuring and validating real transition outcomes in essential infrastructure, focusing on whether sustainability data captures tangible system‑level change across energy, networks, and other critical assets.
- Linking sustainability performance to long‑term value creation, risk management, and resilience, ensuring metrics meaningfully inform asset management priorities and board‑level decision‑making over full investment cycles.
What motivated you to join the GRESB Foundation Board?
I was motivated to join the GRESB Foundation Board because GRESB plays a critical role in shaping how sustainability is measured, governed, and ultimately used in real asset investing. From my experience as an infrastructure investor and director on the boards of our assets, I see a growing need for sustainability standards that are less focused on compliance, but truly decision‑useful and anchored in real investment and asset management processes.
I am particularly interested in contributing a perspective from the transaction and ownership side of infrastructure investing, where sustainability considerations influence capital allocation, value creation, and long-term risk management. The opportunity to help ensure that GRESB Standards continue to evolve in a way that reflects how assets are actually financed, acquired, managed, and governed was a strong motivation to become involved.
More broadly, I value GRESB’s investor‑led model and its role as a neutral platform for building consensus across the industry. Contributing to the development of standards that support real-world transition outcomes and long-term investment decisions is both professionally relevant and personally meaningful to me.
How does your organization view sustainability and what is your organization’s approach to responsible investing?
APG views sustainability as a core part of its fiduciary responsibility and long‑term investment approach. For a long‑term asset owner, sustainability is primarily about managing risks, strengthening resilience, and ensuring that investments remain robust and future‑proof over multiple decades, in the best interests of beneficiaries.
The approach to responsible investing is therefore focused on integrating environmental, social, and governance considerations into investment decision‑making, active ownership, and asset management across all asset classes. Sustainability is assessed alongside return, cost, and risk, and is embedded in governance, engagement, and stewardship activities rather than treated as a standalone objective.
A strong emphasis is placed on data quality, materiality, and real‑world outcomes. Sustainability information is used to identify and manage long‑term risks, guide engagement with investees and partners, and support disciplined, forward‑looking decision‑making, particularly in private markets and real assets where implementation and execution matter most.
How does your organization use GRESB and its data?
APG was one of the co-founders of GRESB in 2009 and since this time has held various governance positions on the Foundation Board, Infrastructure Standards Committee, and Real Estate Standards Committee.
For infrastructure, APG has strived to increase both GRESB portfolio participation and scores. Since the inception of the GRESB Infrastructure Assessment in 2016 to now (2024), our coverage has increased from 39% to 94% (whilst our portfolio has also tripled in size), and we have increased our NAV-weighted score from 39 to 91.
At a high level, we use GRESB Scores as a proxy for sustainability integration and peer comparisons to help us benchmark our portfolio companies against those in the GRESB universe. GRESB also serves as a holistic starting point for portfolio companies to understand where to focus and improve across the various components. The underlying raw data collected through the survey is also becoming more and more important (i.e., performance-based metrics). APG uses this underlying data in a variety of ways, including calculating our portfolio annual CO₂e footprint, determining alignment with IIGCC’s Net-Zero Investment Framework, feeding into SFDR and EU Taxonomy regulatory reporting, and linking to our second-line ESG risk monitoring tool.
In brief, can you tell us where you think sustainability needs to go in the future and what role organizations like GRESB will play?
The future of sustainability lies in its full integration into investment decision‑making and ownership practices, particularly in private markets and real assets. The emphasis needs to move beyond compliance and disclosure toward ensuring sustainability considerations genuinely inform capital allocation, risk assessment, and long‑term asset stewardship.
This requires stronger alignment between financial performance and environmental and social outcomes, with sustainability data used to support concrete decisions, engagements, and execution over the life cycle of assets. Frameworks like GRESB have an important role to play by continuously evolving to reflect changes in the sustainability landscape, while remaining focused on materiality and maintaining a structure that encourages broad participation at asset level.
In the near term, there will likely be an increased focus on environmental topics where the link to long‑term risk and resilience is most tangible, including net-zero pathways, physical climate risk, and biodiversity. These areas are both urgent and increasingly relevant for long‑term asset owners.