Among our favourite highlights from the Green Building Council of Australia’s TRANSFORM conference this week were some pointed explosions on the issue of return on investment for clean air, for instance. Ridiculous, was the answer. Or that at Davos, people had Thesaurus apps at the ready to make sure they would not offend Donald Trump. Ridiculous again. Really. It was a tiny slice of the industry’s passion as it continues its forward momentum for sustainability and climate action.
Big among the topics at this year’s Transform conference was mental and physical health, indoor air quality, First Nations-led design, materials and circularity, with a new focus on interiors and fitouts.
Rounding up the first day was a panel on global actions, local impact and driving change for climate, health and resilience, with a panel consisting of Dermot O’Gorman, chief executive of WWF Australia, Dr Bronwyn King, co-founder of Air Club and Carlos Flores, director of the Net Zero Plan Taskforce, moderated by Davina Rooney, CEO of GBCA.
King brought an interesting perspective to the table around indoor air quality and the importance of its effects on health – perhaps one of the most talked about topics we saw at the conference this year. She said health and climate have been reduced to whispers in the hallway thanks to geopolitical pressures.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, King mentioned that “not one event had the word climate in it” after Trump confirmed he would be attending.
“The word climate was wiped from the agenda entirely. I found one or two health events in the world week, but they were sort of just gone. No one was talking about health.
“Everyone had the thesaurus app open on their phone to make sure they didn’t use any of the wrong words, and they could still say what they wanted to say. It was just linguistic gymnastics.”
King, a retired radiation oncologist, had spent most of her life at the lung cancer ward at the Peter McCullough Cancer Centre in Melbourne. After learning her super fund was investing in “big tobacco”, her course of life changed to learning the language, changing her tone and influencing the sustainable finance sector to “do something it didn’t want to do”.
“Many people don’t realise Australia doesn’t have indoor air quality standards at all,” King said. “You breathe in 11,000 litres of air a day, and 90 per cent of the time you breathe, you’re breathing indoor air, yet there’s no guarantee that the air is safe.”
According to King, routine measurement of indoor air quality in common spaces such as schools, public transport, and aged care facilities found that the air was full of pollutants and pathogens. “We just need to get going [on measurements], and we’ll get to the results much more quickly if we work together.”
This was also a theme in a later panel session on rethinking fitouts and circular design, which saw Carolyn Potter, director of workplace strategy and operations at Deloitte and Jack Noonan, the senior VP and head of APAC for the International WELL Building Institute, tackle the same topic.
Noonan started with an explosive response to the questions about the “return on investment”, with “these questions really annoy me, no offence”.
“What the return is on investment on a healthy sustainability fit out [and] healthy indoor air is just absolutely ridiculous. We don’t question the return on investment of clean water out of our house, but we have put some sort of financial metric on clean air. It’s absolutely ridiculous.”
Meanwhile, Carolyn Potter had good results to share from Deloitte’s endeavours in achieving healthy indoor air quality. “This is the first time for us to have air quality sensors that we had control over; we were a little green.
“We didn’t really know what we were buying into, but what we found was, from an operational perspective, it was an amazing tool for us to be able to let our people know that they were actually working in a healthy space”.
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Dermot O’Gorman later shared more from the world forum – about decarbonising transport; “In Shanghai, 50 per cent of cars are electric; 92 per cent of all public taxis and buses. Electrification is going through the roof; 200,000 electric trucks hit the road last year. They are decarbonising their whole transport system at a thousand miles an hour.”
Carlos Flores added that the cost of living crisis and inflation meant that support for sustainability and climate action had gone from around 60 per cent of Australians supporting action even at a cost in 2020 to 2021, down to around 50 per cent today.
Instead, people in the built environment “hold real power to make the future happen” and determine how fast it happens.
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Dr Jefa Greenaway, founding director of Greenaway Architects later wowed the crowd with his presentation of what successful Country-centred design looks like for the built environment.
“This landscape is made up of over 300 distinct language groups and 600 dialects. It is not monolithic. It’s not homogeneous. So that diversity is what we seek to really embrace in all the work that we undertake, and we also need to understand it through the long arc of history,” Greenaway said.
“We undertake projects across the nation. And so importantly, we get invited in, and we’re very much supported by that invitation. We seek to build trust and affinity with the communities that we engage with, and that’s a really significant part of the story of our work.”
According to Greenaway, 70 per cent of Indigenous people live in major metropolitan areas and regional centres, meaning the reality is that all these projects are built on Indigenous land.
“If we change the way we look at things, the things we look at will need to change. And so, the way in which we undertake this work is we don’t build on Country. We design for, with and of Country.
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Bringing interesting case studies from a French-based real estate and investment service firm, Nhood, was Christian Lema, its global head of ESG.
Despite claiming this was his first full presentation in English, Lema was an instant hit with the crowd in his talk about a modular timber project that used low carbon materials, modular construction, reversible design, and was delivered in just three months using locally sourced wood.
This was helped by two laws in France: one that requires the use of low-carbon and natural materials in construction, and another that protects forests through resourcing and supply chain.
He also talked about sustainability in retail, saying 25 per cent more vegetation in shopping centres would yield 20 per cent greater footfall. And “the more you have footfall, the more you have value,” Lema said.
We also caught the GBCA’s update led by Jorge Chapa, its chief impact officer. On top of the nature positive roadmap, the organisation also launched Green Star Fitouts, along with its first project certified under the new national rating tool to measure the carbon and waste impact of interiors.
The project is Dexus’s modular “forever fitout” approach, which was made for the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. It demonstrates how interiors can be designed for reuse and reconfiguration rather than demolition.
Another highlight was a new paper, Keys to Change: Unlocking better, greener Build-to-Rent housing, which sees 16,400 build-to-rent apartments – over a third of Australia’s BtR pipeline – registered to achieve Green Star ratings.
The paper was delivered to try to encourage more BtR developers to bridge the gap and deliver energy efficient and high quality rental housing and reduce risks for housing that developers are meant to hold for decades.
