Lendlease delivers on both its 2020 climate and social pledges

[SINGAPORE] Zandra Loke organised a tour of Chinatown in August 2025 for residents of AWWA’s Home & Day Activity Centre, working with the AWWA team to map the route for wheelchair access and build it around touch, smell and taste as much as sight. One resident on the tour told her it had been eight years since their last visit to the neighbourhood.

“Building an inclusive society comes down to purposefully creating meaningful moments where everyone feels seen, valued and genuinely connected,” said Loke, senior analyst at Lendlease Reit, the group’s Singapore-listed real estate investment trust. “Events like these remind us that true inclusion goes beyond physical accessibility.”

Lendlease traces that kind of work back to a decision it had made in 2020, to pursue environmental and social goals side by side.

It received this year’s Impact Enterprise Excellence Award (Large Enterprise).

By 2025, Lendlease aimed to deliver A$250 million in social value through its partnerships and community work. Social value is calculated by asking participants what changed for them, a new job, new skills, better access to something they needed, and how much that mattered to them, then assigning it a dollar figure using a globally recognised valuation method, verified independently by consultants Social Impax. Lendlease beat that target, delivering A$284.6 million in verified social value, 13 per cent over its goal, reaching 250,000 people in eight countries.

In Singapore, Lendlease Foundation launched a partnership with Dignity Kitchen in FY2022, sponsoring training for 40 people with disabilities through its train-and-place programme. Lendlease Reit later took on the relationship, which has since generated close to A$2 million in social value. Thirteen Lendlease Reit staff took a hands-on culinary class there, some using their own SkillsFuture credits to join. In February 2026, Lendlease Foundation pledged a further S$40,000 to AWWA’s Home & Day Activity Centre, a one-time donation for wheelchair repairs, custom fittings and other mobility equipment.

On the environmental side, Lendlease set two carbon targets in 2020 under what it calls mission zero. Net zero covers Scope 1 and 2 by 2025, and the tougher absolute zero covers the full supply chain, Scope 3, by 2040, with no offsets allowed.

Lendlease hit net zero on schedule in FY2025 and reached 100 per cent renewable electricity five years ahead of a separate 2030 goal. Lendlease Reit reached its own net-zero milestone in FY2023, two years early, and scored 93 out of 100 in FY2025’s GRESB assessment, the industry’s standard benchmark for real estate sustainability performance, against a 2024 average of 76.

The 2020 announcement wasn’t a starting point, according to Darryl Stuckey, Lendlease’s head of corporate sustainability. He traces the company’s approach back to its founder. “Lendlease’s sustainability journey has been shaped by a long-standing belief that business should create value beyond financial returns, a philosophy embedded by founder Dick Dusseldorp,” Stuckey said.

Absolute zero is the harder half of that 2020 promise, embodied carbon in concrete and steel that the industry hasn’t solved yet. Lendlease published regional roadmaps for it in 2021, and Stuckey said the company is now working with customers, partners and suppliers to push decarbonisation across the built environment.

“Sustainability remains central to how Lendlease designs, develops, constructs and invests,” he said, “creating resilient, low-carbon and inclusive places that deliver long-term value for stakeholders”.