Report: ESG and sustainability
The ESG report will become part of Placepoint Fusion. The report itself is not finished, but everything it builds on is available today: energy labels, certifications, technical building regulations, year built, natural hazards and public transport coverage. This page goes through the registered sustainability picture theme by theme.
The report is coming, the baseline is here
The report gathers the register-based sustainability picture for one property or a whole portfolio in a single document, from the property you have open in the Property panel or from the company in the Company panel. Until it is ready, you do the round below yourself, tab by tab and map layer by map layer, or let Placepoint AI put the document together. It is the same data in all three cases. The difference is who writes it.
The themes below are the same ones that recur in reporting to owners, lenders and auditors. Energy labelling, environmental certification, technical building regulations, year built, natural hazards and public transport coverage are all register data, and they are in the console from the first click on the property. Actual energy consumption, emissions and a finished greenhouse gas account are not, and this page says so too, theme by theme.
See also: Assessing risk on placepoint.no.
Registered about the building, or measured in it
This is the distinction a professional draws before anything else, and it decides what the report can be used for. What is registered about a building sits in a public register: the energy certificate with its rating and issue date, the certification with its scheme and level, which technical building regulations the building was designed to, the year built, and which hazard zones the site lies in. All of this can be checked, has a known source and a date, and can be pulled for thousands of buildings at once.
What is measured in the building sits nowhere until someone reads a meter: actual energy consumption in kWh per m² per year, peak load, emissions split across Scope 1, 2 and 3, waste volumes and water consumption. A report built on registers answers the first with certainty and the second not at all. That is worth saying out loud, because the two are easily mixed up: an energy label is a calculated rating for the building fabric and the heating system, not a measurement of what the tenants actually use. A building with rating C and round-the-clock server operation uses more than a building with rating E and office hours.
The consequence for anyone reporting onwards: the register part is the documentation, the measurement part is something you pull from your own meters, from the district heating supplier or from the tenants. Frameworks such as GRI and methods such as CRREM require both, and the CRREM curve cannot be calculated without actual consumption. The registered baseline still tells you which buildings in the portfolio are worth measuring first.
An energy label tells you how the building is built, not how it is used. Use the rating to rank upgrade needs, not to state consumption in a report that requires measured figures.
Who this is for
Managers who report the portfolio to the owners, banks that price green loans and need to document the climate footprint in the credit case, investors screening before a purchase, and advisers delivering the ESG part of a due diligence. The seller runs the same round before the property goes on the market, so that a weak energy class or a missing certification does not come as a surprise during the bidding.
The data baseline is the same wherever in the country the property lies: 3.5 million matrikkelenheter and around 320 main map layers in 18 categories. See Placepoint in numbers for the full overview.
The checklist
| Theme | What you look for | Where in Placepoint |
|---|---|---|
| The energy label | Energy Rating, heating rating, issue date, validity | The ESG tab in the Building panel and the Property panel, Enova Energy Labelling |
| Certifications | BREEAM, Svanemerket, LEED, scheme and level | The ESG tab, Environmental Certifications |
| Technical building regulations | Which TEK the building falls under, and the date the registration builds on | The TEK sub-tab in the Building panel |
| Year built and age | When the building appeared, and what that says about upgrade needs | Building age, the Overview tab in the Building panel |
| EU taxonomy | Where the building sits against the criteria for completed buildings | EU-Taxonomy-Buildings |
| Climate-related natural hazards | Flooding, landslides, quick clay, sea level and storm surge | Risk, the Risk category |
| Public transport access | Walking distance to a stop, what you can reach within a time budget | Travel distance, Public transport stops |
| Portfolio level | The same reading across everything a company owns | Company panel, Filter, Projects |
You turn the map layers on from Map layer in the left menu. See How to use map layers if you have not done it before.
The energy label
The question is simple to ask and surprisingly laborious to answer by hand: does the building have a valid energy certificate, what rating does it have, and when does it expire? The rating decides what the bank prices, what an institutional tenant accepts, and which buildings come first in the upgrade plan.
The ESG tab in the Building panel is the place to start. At the top you see how many energy certificates we have found, with Turn on map layers to put the energy labels straight into the map. The Energy labels card shows the rating on the scale from A to G together with the heating rating, and next to it sit the issue date, category, material and year built. The Enova sub-tab lists the certificates from Enova SF with rating, who the certificate belongs to, issue date and building category. Click a row to expand it. A certificate older than ten years is no longer valid, and is marked as such.
The two ratings answer different questions. The Energy Rating runs from A to G, where A is best, and says something about the energy standard of the building fabric and the heating system. The heating rating is a colour scale from red to green, where green is best, and a good heating rating means a large share of the building can be heated with something other than oil, gas and electricity. A building can have a good energy rating and a red heating rating at the same time, and for an owner phasing out fossil heating it is the second one that is the shopping list.
If the property has several buildings with a certificate each, the panel tells you when some of them have expired. That is the most common source of error in a portfolio report: a building without a valid certificate is not the same as a building with a poor rating, and the two must not be merged into one breakdown.
If you want to read a whole area instead of one building, Enova Energy Labelling is the map layer that does it. Every building with a certificate gets a symbol coloured by its rating, and the filter narrows on Energy Rating (A to G) and Heating rating. Turn on the filter for D to G, and you see the upgrade need across a district at a glance. The layer is updated weekly, and the dataset is described under Enova Energy Labelling.
The energy label is stored against the building, not against the individual unit. For buildings in mixed use that gives coarser resolution than the individual certificates in the Enova register, and it is normally the most recently registered certificate that applies.
Certifications
The second question in an ESG review is whether the building is third-party certified, and under which scheme. The certification is often a requirement from a lender or a tenant before a building is considered at all, and it is documentation in taxonomy reporting in a different way from energy labelling.
The ESG tab in the Property panel shows certification status as icons: active certifications in full colour, certifications the property does not have registered, greyed out.
| Certification | What it means |
|---|---|
| BREEAM | Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method. BREEAM-NOR is the Norwegian adaptation and the most used scheme for Norwegian new builds and major refurbishments |
| Svanemerket | The official Nordic ecolabel, with requirements for resource efficiency, climate impact, materials and indoor climate |
| LEED | Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, a global scheme that is most visible in Norway on international head offices |
| TEK | Which Norwegian technical building regulations the building falls under |
Environmental Certifications is the same information across a whole area. The layer covers the three schemes, and the legend separates BREEAM In-Use from BREEAM NOR, BREEAM International and BREEAM Communities, so you see what kind of certification it actually is. The filter narrows on Certification and Level. The data comes from Building Research Establishment (BRE), Miljømerking Norge and U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), and is updated monthly. The fields are listed under Environmental Certifications.
The schemes are not interchangeable in a report. BREEAM-NOR is adapted to Norwegian climate and Norwegian regulations, Svanemerket covers annex 1 of the EU taxonomy for the construction of new buildings, and LEED is a design tool that assesses energy modelling rather than actual consumption. If the report says "certified" without saying which scheme and which level, it cannot be used.
A greyed-out icon means we have not registered the certification for the building, not necessarily that the certification does not exist. Confirm against the certification body's own register before you build anything on it.
Technical building regulations and year built
The pairing of year built and technical building regulations is the cheapest indicator of upgrade need there is, and it exists for every single building in the country. The regulations tell you which rules the building was designed to, and therefore which insulation level, which airtightness requirements and which ventilation solutions were the minimum at the time.
The TEK sub-tab in the Building panel shows which technical building regulations the building falls under, with level, type and the date of the framework permit the registration builds on. A building put up under TEK17 sits at a completely different energy level from one from 1985, and that difference is most of the explanation when two buildings in the same street have ratings B and F.
Building age colours each building footprint by its first year of registration, in the bands 1700 to 1900, 1900 to 1950, 1950 to 1980, 1980 to 2000, 2000 to 2010, 2010 to 2020 and after 2020. The data comes from the matrikkel via Kartverket, the building geometry from FKB, and the layer is updated daily. The filter narrows on Building Type. The fields are listed under Building age.
For a portfolio this layer is the fastest route to a first draft of which buildings carry the maintenance backlog and which risk becoming a stranded asset: older office buildings with heavy fabric and fossil heating, where the upgrade cost can exceed the gain. Combine age with energy rating, and the ranking almost writes itself.
The year built in the register is the first year of registration, not the year of the last thorough refurbishment. A building from 1965 that was fully refurbished in 2019 is still listed as 1965, and Building statuses is where you see what has actually been done to it.
EU taxonomy
The EU taxonomy is the classification system that decides whether an economic activity can be called sustainable, and for property it is the technical screening criteria for construction, acquisition and ownership of buildings that apply. Institutional owners and lenders report the share of the portfolio that is taxonomy-aligned, and the criteria distinguish between new builds, completed buildings and renovation.
EU-Taxonomy-Buildings is the layer used in taxonomy reporting for completed buildings. The data comes from Geodata AS, and the fields are listed under EU-Taxonomy-Buildings. A click in the map gives the details building by building, and the building number is the key onwards to the Building panel.
What the layer does not do is decide the classification for you. A taxonomy assessment requires all three parts to be documented: a substantial contribution to at least one of the six environmental objectives, no significant harm to the others, and minimum social safeguards. The second part pulls in physical climate risk, and therefore the natural hazard theme further down this page. For acquisition and ownership of existing buildings, the main requirement is that the building either has an energy certificate in class A or belongs to the 15% most energy-efficient buildings in its segment, and that is why energy labelling is input data here and not just a key figure. The assessment itself is something you, or your adviser, do separately.
Neither the map layer nor the report is a taxonomy assessment. They give the documentation the assessment builds on, and a greenhouse gas account to NS 3720 must be set up separately in any case.
Climate-related natural hazards
Physical climate risk is the part of the ESG picture that sits in the map rather than in the building. For reporting to a lender, for the taxonomy's requirement of no significant harm and for insurance, the question is the same: does the property lie in a flood zone, a landslide area, a quick clay zone, or within calculated storm surge and sea level rise?
| Map layer | Answers |
|---|---|
| Flood hazard map | Mapped flood zones for the 200-year and 1,000-year flood |
| Caution surfaces, (regulated) water, dams | Calculated extent where flood zone maps are missing |
| Flood areas, flood protection areas, and flood events | What has actually happened, and what has been built against it |
| Landslides | Caution for soil slides, debris flows and rock slides |
| Quick clay, Quick Clay – Caution | Mapped hazard zones and areas that require a geotechnical assessment |
| High tide / storm surge | Sea level and storm surge, climate-adjusted to 2050 and 2100 |
The maps come from the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate (NVE) and Kartverket. The full round through the layers, with an example on a single property, is in Assessing risk, and Report: Risk is the same review as its own document with a map per finding. This page does not repeat it. The ESG report borrows the findings from there and puts them in a climate context, together with the consideration zones from the planning documents.
A caution map is not a hazard zone. It says the conditions may be present, not that they have been mapped and assessed, and in reporting to a lender that difference decides whether the finding should be priced or investigated further.
Public transport access and location
Location is the part of a building's footprint that never changes. An office building with a metro station on the street gives lower travel emissions per employee than an identical building by a motorway exit, no matter how much is done to the fabric, and both tenant requirements and municipal parking standards are built on exactly that distance.
Travel distance in the right-hand tool rail draws an isochrone: the area you can reach within a given time budget from a point you click in the map, along the road network and the timetables rather than as a circle. Select Public transport or Walking, set the time budget, and add several isochrones in different colours to compare travel modes in the same map. It is the most verifiable way to quantify public transport access, because the departure time and the travel mode are stated in the assumptions.
| Map layer | Answers |
|---|---|
| Public transport stops | Where bus, metro, tram, train and ferry actually stop |
| Walking to the public transport stops | Walking distance to the nearest stop in time bands |
| Public transport routes | Which lines pass by |
| Public Transport Density | How many departures the service actually consists of |
The stops and the routes come from Entur, while the walking distance layer is our own analysis across all public transport stops. The combination of stop plus number of departures is the point: a stop with four departures a day is not public transport coverage, and a layer that only shows the points hides the difference.
The isochrone is calculated for the time you set. An evening isochrone and a morning isochrone from the same point can differ by half, so state the departure time alongside the figure in the report.
Portfolio level
The individual property is rarely the question. The question is how the portfolio breaks down, and which buildings pull it down. The method is the same reading as above, run across everything a company owns.
Start in the Company panel: the Properties tab lists what the company owns directly and through subsidiaries. Filter gives you the selection across the map, Tags marks the buildings you have assessed, and a project keeps the portfolio together between sessions. If the list is to leave the console, Datasets takes it in as its own layer with your own columns alongside the register data.
The ESG reading itself you do with the map layers rather than panel by panel: Enova Energy Labelling filtered on D to G shows the upgrade candidates, Environmental Certifications shows which buildings are already documented, and Building age says which vintages dominate. Report: Portfolio is the same portfolio with other key figures, and Monitoring tells you when something changes on a property you follow.
Coverage varies between buildings. A portfolio where 40% of the buildings lack an energy certificate gives a breakdown that looks better than it is, so always state how many buildings the figures build on.
The report itself
The report is built as a breakdown with a list underneath, not as a description building by building. The summary comes first, with the breakdown of energy ratings, the share of certified buildings and the buildings that pull the portfolio down. Then come the themes one by one, with source and date for each item.
| Section | Content |
|---|---|
| Summary | Breakdown of energy ratings, share of certified buildings, and the buildings that pull it down |
| Energy | Rating and heating rating per building, issue date, which certificates have expired |
| Certifications | Scheme, level and date per building, and which buildings have none registered |
| Building stock | Year built, technical building regulations and floor area, as a breakdown rather than a list |
| Climate-related natural hazards | Flooding, landslides, quick clay and storm surge per property, with a map per finding |
| Location | Walking distance to a stop and what can be reached by public transport within the time budget |
| Appendix | Source and date for each item, with a link to the tab or map layer it came from |
| Not investigated | Measured energy consumption, Scope 1-3, taxonomy assessment, greenhouse gas account, condition |
The last row is the most important. It is the scope limitation, and it always belongs, because that is where the work on your own measurement data begins. The appendix, in turn, is the point of generating the report from the registers: every figure points back to the certificate, the certification register or the map layer it came from, with the date the information was retrieved.
Create the report today with Placepoint AI
Placepoint AI has access to the same sources as the tabs and map layers above, and writes the document from one prompt. A 25-page sustainability report for a head office in Oslo, with matrikkel data, BREEAM certification, ownership structure, tenants and a travel time isochrone, is in Examples and tips. The prompt does not need to be longer than this:
Create an ESG report for [matrikkel number, address or organisation number].
Include the energy certificate with energy rating, heating rating and
issue date, environmental certifications with scheme and level, technical building regulations
and year built, climate-related natural hazards (flooding, landslides, quick clay, storm surge) and
walking distance to a public transport stop. State the source and date for every figure, and
clearly separate what the registers hold from what requires your own measurement data.
If the answer is going into your own template, ask for a table instead of a PDF, one row per building: building number, energy rating, heating rating, certificate date, certification, year built, technical building regulations. If it concerns a portfolio, swap the matrikkel number for the organisation number, and ask for the breakdown first and the list afterwards.
If you are in the map, the Agent does the short lookup without switching tools: "What is the energy rating of the buildings on this property, and when do the certificates expire?" gives rating, heating rating and issue date as text with links. The map moves to where the matter is.
Related surfaces
- Building panel - the ESG tab with the energy label, Enova and TEK, one building at a time.
- Property panel - certification status and energy class for the whole property.
- Map layers - energy labelling, environmental certifications, building age and EU taxonomy across a whole area.
- Analysis - Travel distance and the isochrones behind public transport access.
- Assessing risk - the natural hazard theme reviewed on a single property.
- Managing and monitoring a portfolio - the same reading across everything a company owns.
- Report: Risk - natural hazards in full, with a map per finding.
- Report: Portfolio - the same portfolio, other key figures.
- Report: Due diligence - the ESG track as part of a full transaction review.
Data sources
- Enova SF (energy certificates and energy labelling).
- Building Research Establishment (BRE), Miljømerking Norge and U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) (BREEAM, Svanemerket and LEED).
- Kartverket (the matrikkel, building age, high tide and storm surge).
- Geodata AS (EU-Taxonomy-Buildings).
- The Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate (NVE) (flooding, landslides and quick clay).
- Entur (public transport stops and routes).