Competitive collaboration drives green leadership

Competitive collaboration drives green leadershipCompetitive collaboration has delivered new draft standards for carbon neutral buildings and precincts, and is “normalising” the net zero emissions goal, says outgoing chair of the Property Council’s National Sustainability Roundtable, Bruce Precious. The GPT Group’s national manager for sustainability and property services, Precious says 2016 was the year in which net zero became “normalised”.Australia ratified the Paris Agreement in November, and leading institutional property groups are setting more ambitious targets than the ‘net zero by 20’ goal specified.”It wasn’t that long ago that some people would roll their eyes at net zero carbon targets. Now industry leaders realise that net zero is an appropriate and achievable goal,” he says.Investa has recently announced that its portfolio will be net zero by 2040, and that it would use science-based targets to get there. Mirvac’s This Changes Everything strategy outlines a commitment to achieve ‘net positive by 2030 and The GPT Group also has a net zero target.Precious says his company’s focus is to “get to net zero as soon it is commercially reasonable”, and this involves three strategies: energy efficiency in buildings, onsite renewables and “cleaner and greener” energy supply. The GPT Group’s GreenPower currently sits at around 23 per cent, Precious says. Together these strategies have delivered a 56 per cent carbon reduction on a 2005 baseline.Precious says a significant industry milestone in 2016 was the release of the Australian Sustainable Built Environment’s High Performance, Low Carbon report, which he says will provide the guidance to “allow the leaders to lead, and to outline the measures that will bring the laggards along over time.” These measures include a review of the Building Code of Australia, which aims to eliminate “worst practice”.The 2016 Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark (GRESB) report named the Australian and New Zealand property market the world’s most sustainable again, but warned that there would be “no rest for the world’s leading region” as governments “develop more aggressive policies to achieve the goals of the COP21 climate agreement.”One of the Australian property market’s strengths is in its “pervasive spirit of knowledge-sharing”, the GRESB report notes “companies and funds in Australia and New Zealand are competitive, yet they also are unusually open to exchanging experiences and insights. Competitors frequently work together to address new issues”.Precious agrees.”We have a long history of collaboration” which stretches back to the Property Council’s work with the Building Greenhouse Rating system, the forerunner to NABERS Energy. “Members of the Property Council recognised that they needed to manage carbon and energy in a proactive way,” Precious explains. “Building Greenhouse Rating provided a market benchmark to encourage better energy efficiency and reward high performance office buildings.”Today, he says the National Sustainability Roundtable is a “clearing house of information” for the industry and continues to play a pivotal role in driving change, especially in “identifying the key strategies to allow net zero carbon to be achieved at the lowest financial impact.This collaboration was at work throughout the year as the industry worked with the federal and NSW governments and the Green Building Council of Australia on draft national carbon offset standards for buildings and precincts.Precious says the standards have the potential to create the “next big shift” in the market allowing tenants to start demanding carbon neutral buildings.”By demonstrating that a 5 star NABERS building on 100 per cent renewables is cheaper to run than a 4 star building on black energy, we’ve been able to achieve alignment with our members, and to get their support for the draft standard,” he says.Precious says Roundtable members are “very keen to see the draft standard turned into a pilot” and will be encouraging the industry’s leaders to seize the opportunity, which he says “may drive the next wave of market transformation.”