I appreciate that CRREM speaks the language of carbon, energy, and finance simultaneously.
As part of CRREM’s regionalisation strategy, we’re speaking with real estate leaders from around the world to understand how the pathways land locally — what resonates, what needs adapting, and what each market can teach the others. In this installment, we sit down with Tan Szue Hann, Director of ESG Strategy, Fund Management & Investment at Keppel and a member of CRREM’s APAC Regional Advisory Committee, for a look at CRREM through a Singaporean lens.
Tell us a bit about yourself and your role. What does your day-to-day work look like?
Hi, my name is Hann and I am a trained architect, with close to two decades of experience in architecture, real estate development and sustainability. I’m currently Director, ESG Strategy, Fund Management & Investment at Keppel, a Singapore-headquartered global asset manager and operator in real estate, connectivity and infrastructure assets. I also wear the hat of Head of Sustainability for Real Estate at Keppel.
My day-to-day work can be quite varied. It could be helping the team conceive a brown-to-green strategy for potential real estate acquisitions, evaluating climate risks and transition pathways for our assets under management, or pitching our fund products where sustainability generates alpha for our investors. I also champion ESG stewardship and Corporate Social Responsibility for our fund vehicles, including private and listed funds, and can be occasionally found on industry roundtables and panels on sustainability solutions in the region, or organising events for our charity partners. On less action-packed days, I’d be helping the team review due diligence documents, or authoring a tool for tracking and optimising energy use intensity for our assets.
All this plugs into the team’s larger motivation in finding ways to turn sustainability from a compliance exercise into what creates long-term value for investors and society at large.
Why did you decide to become involved with CRREM?
What attracts me to CRREM is its strong scientific foundation, combined with its practical and measurable application. Coming from both an architecture and investment background, I appreciated that CRREM speaks the language of carbon, energy, and finance simultaneously, and forms plausible linkages and relationships between them. This enables sustainability conversations to move beyond oft-quoted aspirations and targets into measurable risk, investment planning and portfolio management.
Being a member of the CRREM Regional Advisory Committee was therefore an opportunity to ensure Asian markets, particularly Southeast Asia with its intense tropical heat, were well represented in the adoption of the tool and the evolution of its methodology. Our vast and diverse geography means that our energy systems, climate conditions and market structures differ from Europe’s, and these variations need to be captured in a global tool such as CRREM.
What is also noteworthy of the CRREM Foundation is that it comprises members who are from investment backgrounds, who care as much about returns as they do sustainability. This makes application of the tool more pragmatic and grounded in the realities of market forces and physical science.
Why do you think science-based transition pathways are particularly relevant for the Singapore market?
Singapore finds itself in an interesting spot — it is one of the world’s most land-constrained nations with a highly-urbanised built environment, but is also an exemplar for the design, build and operations of its buildings. Much of our decarbonisation has come from upgrading existing assets — increasing energy efficiency, electrifying existing infrastructure where appropriate — and making good investment decisions in renewables.
In Singapore, conversations on building certification systems and ratings are now mature and embedded into building code compliance. The greatest value now lies in moving these conversations away from today’s certification, and into an understanding of future performance — five, ten, twenty years from now. Science-based pathways help asset owners identify not just where they are today, but where they need to be in the future. This long-term visibility has now become fundamental to players in the value chain — investors, financiers, tenants and asset managers — as they start planning and assessing their transition risk.
In short, science-based transition pathways, when used correctly, are probably our best chance at predicting the future of our built assets yet.
What role do you hope CRREM can play in accelerating the transition in Singapore?
I see CRREM as a tool not just as a marker of where assets are and where they need to be, but as a guiding pathway for how they can continually improve over time, year on year, month on month, and day by day. Today, investors, developers and valuers have varying approaches towards decarbonisation. CRREM could be the common lingua franca that unites these variations, providing a shared framework that allows these conversations to become more consistent.
CRREM needs to be perceived not as a pass-fail tool, but as a reference for understanding trajectories, prioritising decarbonisation interventions, and supporting timely investment decisions over an asset’s life cycle. Combined with green rating tools, CRREM could drive value beyond just compliance through helping the market make well-informed, science-based decisions. That’s how we see it at Keppel — CRREM as a useful asset due diligence and asset management tool that guides both decarbonisation planning and capital allocation, as opposed to a dogmatic mandate.
What’s unique about the Singapore real estate market that people outside Singapore may not appreciate?
If one were to look at Singapore just by its sheer physical size, one would miss out on the sophistication and extent of the market. The nation’s AUM of US$5.2 trillion (as at end-2025; out of which close to 4% is constituted by real estate and REITs) rivals Hong Kong’s and Japan’s; our influence comes not just from our domestic market but even more from the capital we manage and deploy globally. Singapore also has one of the highest concentrations of institutional real estate ownership in Asia, a mature REIT sector, strong regulatory support, and a history of pioneering and adopting green building standards across the region.
All this comes about through a collaboration between the government, industry and academia — our public-private partnership. Initiatives that could take years — or decades — to gain traction are spring boarded through a common alignment of goals across these three sectors, making Singapore an effective testbed for new approaches, and indeed, new technologies.
What is therefore uniquely Singaporean is precisely its size, which encourages both efficacy and efficiency, and punching way above its weight.
What opportunities do you see for greater collaboration between the Singaporean market and the global real estate community?
The Singapore real estate market has always embraced new developments in technology and sustainability, while keeping a pragmatic view of what works for our market. It has also always been outward-looking, and we have as much to learn as we have to contribute.
Singapore has numerous case studies, both in assets and portfolios, in demonstrating how sustainability and investment can be integrated. For instance, we evaluate how energy savings in assets such as Keppel Bay Tower, our headquarters and Singapore’s first high-rise Green Mark Platinum (Zero Energy) commercial tower, impact the building’s net operating income and asset valuation. Along with other assets, this presents a ripe case study in how capital allocation in sustainable building solutions contributes to long-term portfolio net zero goals. Asset managers and building owners in Singapore can therefore take a long-term perspective on transition risk and mitigation, which aligns with CRREM’s long-term philosophy.
Equally important is the sharing of transition data, as well as the adoption of decarbonisation solutions. Singapore has always prided itself in being an active testbed for new building technologies, sensing and data collection, with grants actively provided by government agencies for the adoption of these solutions. Available and shareable data can therefore be extended to markets across a climatically-consistent Southeast Asia, which are at differing stages of decarbonisation. This can give us a more informed view on assumptions around grid emissions, operational performance, as well as transition planning.
Conversely, Singapore has also benefited from referencing the European taxonomy and disclosure regulations in framing our investment practices. We can continue to learn from international experience in areas such as embodied carbon (and its valuation), retrofit financing and climate resilience.
Looking ahead, what would success for CRREM in Singapore look like over the next few years?
Success could be measured by the extent of adoption across portfolio managers, but also when the methodology becomes foolproof and embedded into investment decision-making. While it’s already begun, it would be great to see transition pathways informing investment decisions on a more widespread level — being embedded into acquisition due diligence, capital planning, asset management strategies and financing decisions.
At the asset level, it would be good for these pathways to also inform operational decisions around equipment optimisation and end-of-life upgrades, consistent with what assets in Singapore need to do to ensure that they remain constantly refreshed and performative. Operationally, a tighter, more symbiotic integration with green building codes could also encourage CRREM pathway adoption.
In the next few years, it would be great to see portfolios starting to ask, “How can we get ahead of the curve?” as opposed to “What do we need to do to not fall short?”, and have this mentality percolate across regional markets as well. And with real estate portfolios such as Keppel’s looking at CRREM as a value-add tool that enhances assets, as opposed to one that introduces more onerous, we’ll likely see greater adoption across more asset classes as well.
