To get the conversation started ahead of the IPWEA’s Sustainability in Public Works Conference in July 2014, PWPro moderated a roundtable discussion with a group of public works thought leaders about the sustainability challenges facing their sector.
PWPro: Let’s start by talking about the term ‘sustainability’. What does it really mean, and is there a risk the broadness of the term could prevent meaningful action and measurable outcomes?
CD: Sustainability was the buzzword a couple of years ago, but there has recently been a shift to other related terms, such as ‘liveability’.
The language is changing to weave in other benefits of sustainability. I’ve seen conferences on energy efficiency turn into ‘energy productivity’, the City of New York has come out with a ‘resilience strategy’ rather than a ‘climate change strategy’.
I think ‘sustainability’ was a great starting point, but now people are starting to take particular threads and weave them into other areas, through that change in language.
JI: We don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, though. With the clients and partners we work with, there is an understanding of what sustainability means and that it’s about reducing risk, identifying opportunities and looking at social, environmental and economic issues through a ‘systems’ lens.
I think that there is an increasing understanding of the value of sustainability, because there are some practical wins happening, and people are starting to accept that this is part of what they need to do.
CD: I think the point for me is that we just need to keep on doing the work and continuing on under whatever name works. I think the tide of opinion will change over time.
SP: Tracing back to the early nineties, with the Rio Convention, the term ‘sustainability’ was really derived from ecological development, because of a huge concern about the depletion of natural resources. Things such as sustainable fishing, sustainable agriculture and sustainable timber – the community understood the concept when you put it in the context of a particular resource. They get it – we’re depleting the world’s fish stock, we need to do something about it.
Then the term, ‘sustainability’ became such an umbrella term, incorporating the social, corporate and economic, which started to defuse its meaning. Maybe in a move away from it, we will get a richer understanding, but within a particular context.
MH: People sometimes look at concrete, a major building material, and wonder how sustainability and concrete can be used in the same sentence. However, my view of sustainability – from a concrete perspective – is that structures built with consideration to a nominated performance criteria will last longer and have less ongoing maintenance costs, therefore having a positive impact on society, both financially and socially.
What does a sustainable community actually look like, and how can you tell if sustainability has been achieved?
PN: At the City of Canada Bay, we’re definitely heading in the ‘liveability’ direction – focusing on sustainability targets as well as creating connections throughout the community, providing opportunities for people to come together and feel involved.
In terms of measuring sustainability outcomes, we have started to measure water and energy savings, and looking at percentages of public transport usage, and reporting the findings back to the community on a regular basis.
It’s also having the community gardens out there at the local level, having people wanting to be involved in those sorts of things.
Our Rhodes peninsula is one of the areas in the City of Canada Bay that is currently being redeveloped with a sustainability focus. We want it to become a demonstration community – that is, a high-density area that isn’t necessarily in the city, but is a new growth area that can do good things in terms of sustainability, and people can look to it as an example.
JI: Were the sustainability targets developed in consultation with the community, in terms of what the community wanted the City of Canada Bay Council area to look like?
PN: Yes, there was a lot of consultation with the community in coming up with the targets, as well as looking to other councils to see what they were doing, to get a guide for what was reasonable and what was possibly too far out there …
JI: Because that was something I had in my notes, about the definition of a sustainable community being contextual. It depends on the existing community and the area that it’s in, as to how you define sustainability.
How do you prioritise sustainability objectives? For example, is emissions reduction more important than initiatives that contribute to liveability, such as community gardens?
CD: If you start to get really honest about the need to reduce green house gas [GHG] emissions to prevent the two degrees rise in global temperatures, and if you take an equitable viewpoint that we [in Australia] should play our role as a wealthy, engaged nation globally, that means we’re going to have to have pretty severe emissions reduction targets.
At the City of Sydney, we set our target at 70 per cent GHG reduction by 2030, based on 2006 levels. That was the same trajectory as the 80 per cent by 2050, which is the recognised target to minimise climate change by two degrees Celsius.
But we had to be really honest – there was a huge 17 per cent deficit in that target, so we said, okay, we’re going to set a target top-down, and we think that’s the obligation that we should have, as a leadership city. Melbourne and all the other capital cities have done similarly; they have pretty hard targets and having that deficit has actually been a really good thing, because it has really motivated the people involved to squeeze every last kilogram of carbon out of those projects.
An example for us is Sydney Park, where we have a storm water catchment project that takes the storm water from a local catchment area, pumps it into the wetland, which we’re using as a bio-filtration plant, and then we’re tacking onto the end of that a tertiary treatment system. We’re looking to develop a recycled water pipeline into the local industrial area as well. So, you’re getting three or four hits and also you’re increasing the amenity of the park as well.
JI: What have been some of the enablers for City of Sydney, in terms of all the different sustainability initiatives? For example, at Sydney Park, what would you say is one of the key things that have enabled that to happen?
CD: First of all, it’s not an overnight thing. We did Sydney 2030 back in 2007. You talked about engagement before, that was the largest engagement the city had ever undertaken in its history – businesses, community, visitors, the whole lot – and the common theme that emerged was that they wanted environmental leadership. We used that mandate to lock in the 70 per cent reduction target, and then started to build a roadmap of how to get there.
It gives me a hook as Sustainability Director to come back to that target and say, if we’re really serious about this, then we have to be looking at these kinds of projects.
JI: Did you look at whether the target was achievable, though?
CD: We knew it wasn’t achievable at that time, based on what we knew and on the cost of the technologies, but we wanted to be honest about it, about the need for the target. We had that deficit of 17 per cent, but technology has moved over time and that deficit has crept down.
PN: I agree with Chris, that it’s not an overnight thing. For us, for example, the Water for Our Community project – part of the City of Canada Bay’s Water Security Masterplan – has been on the cards since 2005, and is just coming to fruition now. The project is about ensuring water security, to maintain our open space recreational assets.
We have recently faced uncertainty with drought and water availability, and with drought and higher temperatures becoming more probable in the future, combined with increased demand for open space from the growing population, we needed to secure an alternative source of water for irrigation – like an insurance policy. The project wouldn’t have been possible without funding from the state and federal governments, in addition to council contributions.
SP: When you set targets, benchmark standards, you have to look at the supply chain – can you actually deliver against those targets?
Some years ago I was involved in energy efficiency standards in the Building Code, and I always remember the industry representatives saying, “That’s all very well, but we actually haven’t got the technology and we haven’t got the product to be able to deliver that.” You might be able to comment, Mark?
MH: I’m probably almost sitting on the other side of the bench here. I’m like-minded, don’t get me wrong – at Xypex we’ve been like-minded for five years, but it has been a battle, because we’re often talking to people who aren’t like-minded. We’re here sitting around this table addressing sustainability because we have a real understanding of it, but if I wind the clock back to five years ago, sustainability was a buzzword that really had no depth.
The facts are that concrete companies, for instance, who make a huge contribution to carbon emissions in this country and in the world, have set benchmarks, and have loosely tried to get there and shown in the first couple of years that they could meet those targets using supplementary materials, which was a pretty easy shift, and it actually shifted their profit margins, too.
CD: By supplementary materials, do you mean converting to fly ash?
MH: Yes. Fly ash, silica fume, slag …
JI: I thought the concrete industry had done that for decades, because Portland cement was typically more expensive than fly ash and slag, depending on market availability?
MH: Some are more expensive; some are less expensive. The likes of silica fume wasn’t used in the marketplace as a substitute for many projects at all years ago, and now, simply because they could boost the content – up to eight per cent of silica fume can be used in concrete, for instance – that simple supplement at a cheaper rate gave them the cost saving, and it actually gave them, in some instances, a drop in performance criteria, and that is my bug.
We should be writing performance-based specifications because, ultimately, it’s not a cost factor; it’s about the extent of the life of the asset, because that’s where the impact hits with councils and communities. We don’t want to see the social impact of having something that should last 100 years, having to be pulled down after 50.
JI: So you’re saying that approaches like reducing Portland cement quantities by using these admixtures are not necessarily the right benchmark or metric to measure sustainability in the concrete industry, because of these long-term durability issues?
MH: Yes, exactly.
JI: Because if you look at the Green Building Council of Australia’s Green Star targets, one of them is around reduced Portland cement, and if you’re using embodied carbon as a sustainability metric, again, you benefit from reducing Portland cement.
MH: My thinking is that we’re falling for the short-term fix, because it was an easy call to make in the early days.
JI: Is there any analysis around a life cycle assessment of using more supplementary cement materials, and what impact that might have on having to replace it in 25 years instead of 30, say?
MH: It would be in research for 50 years, and there’d still be differing opinions.
CD: It’s a similar scenario with LED lighting. We went out to the marketplace and they all said, give us a 20-year guarantee. We couldn’t get a guarantee, because no LED light has been around 20 years. You can do all the tests you like on the durability or whatever, but it’s not a perfect science.
SP: It does bring a behaviour element into it, as well. Even if we do all the right things with building roads and construction, there’s still the way we use them. It’s still the fact we drive cars on roads; we still use buildings inefficiently.
That brings in other council opportunities, to influence behaviour and engage communities. Our councils have experimented with ideas such as talking about ecological footprints, so they can actually get a handle on thinking about the impact of the city or town or neighbourhood.
CD: As Petrina mentioned before, if you’re going to have these targets in place, it’s vital that you report back to the community in a timely, accurate and appropriate manner.
Is there enough communication between local government regarding their sustainability initiatives and challenges?
CD: There’s a great level of communication, and a really healthy competitiveness, for sure!
SL: I want to add that I think it’s significant that the City of Sydney has a Sustainability Director. At a lot of councils there is a part-time Sustainability Officer who sits around the corner and hardly gets noticed. I think the key thing with City of Sydney is that it is a fairly wealthy city and there is top-level support. The Lord Mayor is driving it, and there’s consistency. At a lot of councils we’ve seen, there’s an election and suddenly ‘sustainability’ becomes a dirty word.
JI: In councils, does the Sustainability Officer normally sit in the environment team?
PN: At Canada Bay we have officers with a sustainability focus in two directorates, which work closely together. We have Environmental Engineers in the Technical Services and Operations Directorate, who initiate and implement the larger-scale climate change initiatives and water and energy savings projects. Then, within the Planning and Environment Directorate, we have sustainability officers who look after education and sustainability programs, including the Concord Community garden project.
In the past we had a successful sustainability cross-departmental team that met on a monthly basis. It was really beneficial at the time, when everyone came along and said their bit. They didn’t necessarily have sustainability in their title, but they took on a certain element of trying to achieve sustainability in whatever they did. That approach has led to everyone beginning to think that way – without having it in their job title.
JI: I always find it interesting that sustainability professionals in the infrastructure sector, for example, typically get piled in with the environment staff – when sustainability is actually about good innovation, good technical solutions and cost reductions. You need that interface with the design and construction and procurement teams.
One of my things at the moment, working with clients on projects, is to ask them to get me out of the environment team – sit me with the designers, sit me with the construction guys, because that’s the only way you’re going to be able to really affect change.
What role does – or can – sustainability play in contributing to overall community wellbeing?
SP: Many people would be aware that most councils in most jurisdictions and most states now consult with their communities in their strategic planning process – about what matters to them, what their priorities are and what’s important.
The idea is that all other council plans flow from that broad plan, which covers really the gamut, from concerns around green space and parks, right through to health issues and employment. Most of these plans will have a number of indicators against them, in terms of how they’re going in achieving those plans.
There are challenges in trying to get good indicators that really do tell you whether there’s progress in this area or not, and then the data that you need to measure that.
At ACELG, our interest as a national body is to try and get a few community wellbeing indicators that are measured equally, right across the country, so you have data that you can wrap up and report against national indicators.
MH: What are some of the indicators you are reviewing?
SP: It might be the percentage of green space per person, it might be around services or how quickly you can get to a hospital, or provision of schooling if it’s in a country area. They’re often quite broad and the challenge for councils is that they don’t control all those areas. Some things they do, but for others they’re more advocates to their state and federal counterparts. 
Do you know of any instances in which sustainability objectives could mean a compromise in liveability? Are the two concepts always linked?
SP: It’s an interesting consideration. Western Sydney, for example, was the food bowl of Sydney once, and now we’re seeing it just really being developed. We could have an indicator for Sydney around not having very high food miles, but here we are putting housing on our agricultural land and pushing our food supplies further away. That sort of feels like a compromise. You want more housing and more residences in Sydney, if you’re in the development industry, but then you also have to compromise those things.
Traffic congestion is another one. We’re encouraging higher densities with our urban areas, but all these new apartments have at least one car space, so you’re getting a lot more cars on the road, so we’re having a more compact city that has some environmental benefits in terms of reducing the footprint, but traffic congestion is going to become more of an issue for liveability because we haven’t invested in public transport.
CD: It’s a hard question, because it depends on the scale and on whether you assess it in a local context, or the district, or the city.
What you can find is you have this lower-grade building stock around the city that might be old, it doesn’t have air conditioning and all those kinds of things, so it actually uses not as much energy. Then you go and knock it down, build a five or six Green Star building, but it uses probably three or four times more energy than the building that was there before. But then again, is it better that there are people in offices there, close to each other, rather than building the same building somewhere else? You get a different answer depending on the scale.
What can public works professionals do right now to enhance the sustainability of structures and communities, including with regards to climate change resilience?
SP: Jane, this might be a good chance for us to talk about our new adaptation tool kit?
JI: Yes, I was thinking the same thing. RPS Group was engaged by ACELG and nine councils to develop a manual for embedding climate change resilience into local government. We’re currently in the process of finalising that, and it includes more than 50 case studies, and Stephen has been involved on the focus group as well. It offers practical guidance around what other councils are doing and looking at steps that they have undertaken in different functional areas. So, whether it’s in the emergency services, land-use planning …
SP: … bush fire risk, heat stress …
JI: Yes. It will be a really good tool that public works professionals can pick up – or anyone in council can pick up – and say, this is an area that we could potentially be looking at.
Essentially, it’s a step-by-step process. It looks at what different embedding models there are from an entire organisational point of view.
From our research into what councils are doing there are about four different models. It could be, say, a departmental approach focused on, for example, flooding issues and coastal hazards.
So, the first thing for the council is to look at what kind of approach they want to take to embedding climate adaptation. Once that approach has been selected and they take stock of what is already happening in that council, then they look at the different case studies and are able to implement some of the embedding activities that relate to the model they want to choose.
SL: This question really gets back to the core goal of the IPWEA Sustainability in Public Works Conference in July, where we’ll be hoping to identify things that delegates can take back to the office – to their council or employer – and start implementing straightaway.
A lot of these conferences are very much a wish list: someone should do something about climate change … blah, blah, blah. Let’s pick up the ball and run with it ourselves – what can we do now to try and make a difference?
Some of the ideas that I had – and you might like to discuss these further – would be around considering uncertainty.
In the past, we designed on the basis that the future climate would be the same as the past climate, or future conditions would be the same as the past. Well, that’s no longer true. Now we’re designing and building things for an uncertain future. How do we allow for that? By enhancing resilience and taking every feasible opportunity to enhance infrastructure; by avoiding maladaptation – you know, avoiding decisions that future generations are going to regret; and by keeping your options open as long as possible.
This comes back to uncertainty, and avoiding what’s called ‘stranded assets’ – things such as irrigation assets in an area where there is no longer any water, for example.
We need to change our thinking about planning and delivering assets to account for the fact that the future is uncertain. Even designing and building assets for a shorter timeframe – perhaps instead of building bridges that last for 100 years, we build them to last for 30 years, because we’re reasonably confident about the next 30 years, and after that we can pull them down and build something else.
Or, who knows, perhaps we will no longer need bridges in the future?
CD: That’s not necessarily a conversation most people could easily take back to the office!
If we want practical things, we’ve got to talk about climate change flooding, for example. I think that is a really practical one that people can take back to the boss, in terms of climate change scenarios.
What are the scenarios looking forward for their area? What are the rainfall intensity changes? What are the sea level rise levels, the flooding levels?
That should be front and centre for councils. If it’s not, they’re really putting themselves at risk.
The IPWEA is holding its inaugural Sustainability in Public Works Conference this 27–29 July. Registrations are now open. Find out more at ipwea.org/sustain2014
