There’s just a few days to go before our next masterclass. One of the presenters will be Samuel Allam of Baker McKenzie who on Thursday sent along an intriguing article that he’s penned with his colleagues at Baker McKenzie. It’s their second installment in the new series on Whole of Environment legislation and emerging policy. This piece was on the new Nature Repair Act, which is about to unleash in Australia what’s believed to be the world’s first nature repair market.
In the process, the Act will create an entirely new asset class in biodiversity certificates that can be traded and used to demonstrate a corporate’s environmental credentials. And what’s even more interesting is that, unlike other offset products, these certificates can be traded but they can’t be used to offset the destruction of nature somewhere else.
Thank you Greens and minor parties for the “last-minute deal” that forced the legislation to forbid offsets, the article notes adding an invitation to view the “very clear and broad language of section 76A” of the Act to gain the full import of that word “forbid”.
The article is dense, it’s wordy, it’s intellectual. Our first instinct was to simplify the hell of out it to make sure our busier-than-busy readers could quickly grasp its important message.
But in a discussion with Samuel to chew over the possibilities of a serious sub-edit, he was firm. He wanted this to be an article that readers had to invest mental energy into to grasp. The authors had deliberately planted challenging language that would make readers think more deeply than the usual simple words and short sentences. To want to dig deep to understand the importance of what’s about to happen to Australia’s investment landscape and its natural landscape.
It goes against journalism 101 but we get it.
On a recent episode of the radio program The Minefield. Scott Stephens, co host with Waleed Aly, bemoaned that in his day job editing opinion articles he was constantly appalled by the simplistic language used by the intelligent and thoughtful expert contributors. Single sentence paragraphs, short easy words, nothing foreign.
It was a trend away from deep thinking, even reading, and probably leaves us prey to easy manipulation, Stephens said. The eternal battle between speed and depth.
It’s worth thinking about.
Samuel will be expounding the nature repair Act and other legal matters surrounding our new climate-positive investment landscape on Tuesday. Get your ticket now, by clicking here The Shifting Sands of ESG.
How to snare a $7.5 million grant
Earlier in the week we saw the similar deep passion at work with an academic that had culminated in a grant from the federal government of about $7.5 million.
See the story on Alireza Fini who is associate professor at the School of the Built Environment at the University of Technology Sydney. The deep commitment was obvious. Over six years he’d been pursuing his idea to turn an ancient technology of dowell laminated timber into a mass produced opportunity that could bring down the price of timber used in low or mid rise buildings.
Fini had the industry partners on side, but the missing piece was a company that had the technological smarts to design the facility that could manufacture the product in Australia.
It wasn’t easy. But one day scouring the internet he found an intriguing video of an interesting timber technology and managed to cut and paste a tiny logo that appeared on the screen.
It turned out to be Holmag Ag, a Swiss company of just 18 people working out of a small village near Berne.
It took a while for him to make contact. “They only had a German language website,” he recalls. “I contacted them by email but they did not reply. So I called them. The lady who took the call couldn’t speak English.”
Several phone calls and emails ensued and then finally, on his sabbatical, a visit to the factory, accompanied by one of his industry partners.
What impressed Fini was the “quality of their work; the accuracy of their work; it’s something I had never seen before.”
Even more impressive, he said, was that they were “very humble”.
But how did Fini get the determination to pursue his vision all the way?
With a background that comes from construction project management, Fini places great store on the practical application of academic work – in other words, business value.
For him it’s meant he may not have been able to publish as prolifically as his colleagues in other universities. But attracting and keeping the interest of industry partners was crucial to his goal.
“When you have an industry partner, you need to satisfy that partner. And the way to satisfy them is to see how you can convert [the work] into business [opportunities].
“If you can’t do that they will lose their appetite for engagement.”
His goal is that in 10 years time Australia will have an automated prefabrication industry up and running.
A key barrier though will be the availability of skills. It’s the same barrier faced in other sectors of industry and it applies both to his industry partners and universities. In the latter the marketplace for talented PhD students is global.
“I’m not competing just with UNSW – we compete with the US and Canada.
“If you want to do our high tech R& D (research and development) you need bright minds, various smart people, who are not just smart but also committed to getting the job done.”
It’s that commitment that underpins just about every piece of sustainability success we see.