greensynergy

This is a more complete version of Peter’s ICLEI 2009 Presentation. Other parts to follow. Thanks to ICLEI (International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives) for permission to reproduce this presentation.

This presentation was also made as the keynote address to the Coffs Harbour Vision 2030 Community Conference in May 2009. Peter is my PhD supervisor.

To see each slide, click in the main window to advance to the next one.

From The Australian July 29th:

THE Rudd government’s decision to enshrine practical sustainability training for apprentices as a key pillar of its new “green jobs” initiative has been deemed a “smart option” by two young apprentices.
Joel Scotton, 20, and Jesse Hollis, 22 — both Bovis Lend Lease apprentices — are working on the construction of a 26-storey commercial building in Sydney’s CBD at 420 George Street.

The men thought the new initiative, although not directly creating new apprenticeships, would give an advantage to younger workers and create a better future.

“It will give them an edge. It’ll give them a better advantage. It’s a positive step,” said Mr Scotton, a third-year apprentice carpenter.

Mr Scotton said the transition to a low-carbon economy would bring a significant change in attitudes and practices among tradesmen.

“I think it’s actually a big change in skill set. I think anything we can do to cut back on carbon waste is a good thing. I was very lucky to be trained in sustainability as part of my apprenticeship. It’s great to see training like this coming up. It gives us a great future.”

Mr Hollis, a fourth-year apprentice carpenter, said the change in skill set was minimal and easy to grasp, with the environment the real beneficiary.

“It’s not a fundamental change. I’m not going to have a dig at the government. Personally, it’s not hard to work green,” he said. “I love Australia. It’s beautiful. And I don’t want it to get ruined, you know, so stuff that I can do in my workforce to make it better (will make) a difference.”

Under the scheme, Australian apprentices in a range of sectors, including building and construction, will start to receive additional “green skills” training from January next year.

The move is one of four key pillars in the government’s new “green jobs” package. Other measures in the package include 6000 new jobs allocated to environmental sustainability in priority areas; 4000 insulation installation training positions going to the long-term unemployed and a 26-week “green job” training course for long-term unemployed youth.

Its great to see that the attitudes of newcomers to the industry are so positive about the environment. The apprentices comments have a deeper subtext: “green skills” are not a big deal, and have been taught as part of their mainstream training – as it should be! But given that sustainability is so obvious to these young men, why does so much of the Australian building industry still fight against such change?

With the Building Code of Australia looking to strengthen its energy efficiency requirements, the building industry is mounting rearguard action to limit their effects. In my daily work, I’d have to say that most developers/builders only seek to comply with regulations, but no more than required. There is a long way to go before the majority of the industry adopt what is so obvious to the two young men quoted in the Australian article.

We just recently moved to a new (old) house on the edge of the village of Sawtell from about 1km from up the road. We are about 600m from the village and beach and 200m from Bonville Creek and 50m from Sawtell Reserve. We are amazed at the birdlife here: we are not “twitchers” (bird watchers) but look like becoming twitchers by default. We have seen:

Rainbow lorikeets and a range of colourful relatives; ducks; banded honeyeaters of several types; wattle birds; butcher birds; sea-eagles (my favourite); pelicans; plovers; sand-pipers; brush turkeys; fairy wrens of several types; ibis; cormorants; herons; magpies; black cockatoos; galahs and several others which I don’t know.

Can’t wait to find out about what snakes live in the area this upcoming summer!

Earlier this year, big storms lashed the mid-north coast of NSW. Over several weeks I saw king tides remove several metres of sandhill on the beachfront at Sawtell beach, including many quite old banksia trees. South of Sawtell at the northern end of Bongil Bongil National Park, the Bonville Creek estuary was dramatically re-shaped, wiping out the breeding ground for the endangered Little Tern, re-orienting the main channel of the creek, and removing a 100m long sand spit and its coastal heath.

Remnant sand spit after storm damage - the section to the right is still in original form

View from Bonville Headland - the large stretch of open sand in the middle of the image used to be a sandhill up to 2m high with vegetation

As this is literally my backyard, I went for a walk with my youngest son and his friend along the creek today, in the section opposite the estuary entrance.

Bonville Creek Estuary at Sawtell, NSW

I was shocked at the degree of erosion and the number of banksias and other natives had been undermined, and collapsed into the creek. Some sections of the formed walking track had totally been washed out, with deep gullies cutting through where there once was track. The following photo shows the results.

Bonville Creek bank showing fallen trees caused by direct strike of ocean waves undermining the bank

Bank erosion showing sand strata and undermining of trees

The damage has occurred in places where the creekside trees and sand dunes had taken many years to develop. It will take many years to recover.

As to whether the results of these forces of nature are due to climate change or not is open to question. More beach protection measures and re-planting is needed; and we can of course reduce carbon in the atmosphere – and maybe this will prevent more damage in the future.

But the thing that really shocks me is the amount of rubbish dumped in this Council-reserved remnant littoral forest, and the general lack of care by the users of the reserve: local fisherman, walkers, boaties, unauthorised campers, tradies dumping builder’s rubbish and local beer drinkers! This place is beautiful, but so many don’t value it.

Came upon this great article summarising the thinking behind small world networks and their capacity to change behaviour – from a NZ organizational consultant. Has big implications for sustainability culture change. This is the article  from www. kudos organisational dynamics www.kudos_dynamics.com: everything connects

Funny how I came by this: interesting article in todays Australian by Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner about the concept of “nudging” for behaviour change and to guide policy development (from the Book “Nudge” by Thaler and Sunstein)(Click on this link for the article politics-can-nudge-people-to-be-better-the-australian.) Followed up on the book on amazon, and read a review by Duncan Stuart of Kudos Dynamics – which lead me to the Kudos website and a wealth of insight into changing behaviours. Hence the article above!

Greensynergy Consulting will be commencing two new projects from the beginning of August. These projects are concerned with some of the deeper layers of sustainability thinking.

The first is with Coffs Harbour City Council scoping how sustainability can be embedded within the Council organization. The second project is with Dr Kurt Seemann of the School of Tourism at Southern Cross University – this involves researching and writing drafts for a new book on Technacy and Sustainability. (For an explanation of Technacy, go the Publications page, and download the Desert Knowledge Lifecycles report). Both projects will run until later in the year.

Both projects are designed to extend sustainability thinking: one with a practical organizational outcome, the other to extend thinking about the links between technology and sustainability, particularly for designers and educators.

More on these projects as they develop!

On 5th August, 2008, the Sawtell Rotary Clock Tower was unveiled at a ceremony in Sawtell NSW, after five years of planning, design, fundraising, manufacturing and construction. Sponsored by Rotary, the project was a true community project, involving  members of the Sawtell community, Coffs Harbour City Council, the Sawtell Progress Association, Sawtell Public School students, Bishop Druitt College students, and many local consultants and contractors. WE Smith Engineering donated most materials and fabricated the tower.

I was involved initially in the design process with my students from the Bachelor of Technology Education course at Southern Cross University. The student developed design concepts through sketch modelling and presented these to the Rotary Club as design ideas. From these ideas, the Rotarians came up with their own concept. The students produced the drawings for this design for the Development Application.

My involvement after that concerned design and detail development, research on materials and techniques, liaison with Council staff and WE Smiths on working drawing development, and feedback during fabrication.

After all this, erection of the clock and glass panels took one day! On the day of opening, I was awarded a Community Service Award from the Rotary Club of Sawtell, along with Cherelle Brooke from Coffs Harbour Council and Peter Higgins from WE Smiths.

Thanks to the Rotary Club of Sawtell for the opportunity to be involved.

Sawtell Community Rotary Centenary Clock Tower opening (that's me in front of the clock tower with my Rotary Community Service award - thanks to Jane Seemann for the photo)

AusIndustry announced on Thursday 30th October the opening of the long-awaited Green Building Fund. This fund was one of Kevin Rudd’s election promises. It aims to help building owners and managers to gain financial assistance for programs aimed at making commercial buildings more energy efficient and to lower GHG emissions.

You can go here for details of the Green Building Fund Program: www.ausindustry.gov.au

If you are thinking of applying for funding, you will be required to get a NABERS Office Energy rating to establish baseline energy performance. Fortunately Greensynergy Consulting can help you with this – I am an Accredited Assessor – I’m on the list at www.nabers.com.au. If you are interested, please contact me – see my contacts page, and have a look through the rest of my website.

Cheers

Matthew

This is the media release from the Desert Knowledge Co-operative Research Centre for a report which I co-authored.

Housing for Australia’s remote Aboriginal settlements that creates livelihoods – especially for young people – will last longer and deliver a much better return on the public investment.

That’s the finding of a major study by Dr Kurt Seemann and a team from Desert Knowledge CRC, which suggests that the approach taken by governments to remote area housing over many years has contained the seeds of its own failure.

“Traditionally, housing has been supplied to remote settlements based on economic and technical considerations alone. Because it did not factor in the larger social and livelihood issues as well, this may be why housing policy has not been seen as a success either by the communities themselves or by the Australian public at large,” Dr Seemann says.

“Our central finding is that the social success of housing depends on how well the investment reaches into the very fabric of the community itself, not purely on its cost as something that provides shelter or health benefits.”

It has previously been estimated that current and future remote area housing will cost the taxpayer at least $3 billion – but many houses only last for 4–8 years on average, he notes. At present almost 40 per cent of remote housing requires major upgrade or replacement. An important goal is to extend the lifecycle of the remote housing stock.

Emphasis on cost has in the past led to the delivery of houses unsuited to local climatic and social requirements as well as access to minor maintenance resources to facilitate community desire to personalise their dwellings, Dr Seemann says. It also neglected larger needs, such as the importance of generating sustainable livelihoods for young Aboriginal people, and for raising their mastery of technology – known as technacy.

“At the moment there is a rush to supply new and better housing to remote settlements. There is a risk that this housing will only deliver higher costs and reduced social benefits – unless it is better integrated into what remote communities want, need and can sustain under local conditions.” Lacking insights into these issues, much housing policy has been ‘flying blind’, he says.

“There has been a ‘conveyor belt’ mentality, in which housing created for the lowest cost ‘crashed’ off the end of the belt in communities. Little thought was given to best practice management of the asset in the longer term or to linking housing to community livelihoods.

“Instead of asking: How many houses can we get for the dollars? we should instead be asking: Can we design a housing system that both lasts longer and creates sustainable livelihoods? Can we link these goals together?”

The DKCRC team suggests there should be an overhaul of the housing approach by State, Territory and Federal authorities.

They propose that the biggest thing that could be done to benefit both housing and communities is a focus on technacy, the ability to wield technology, for young Aboriginal people from as early as primary school, which would in turn foster local talent in innovation and engage them in locally relevant construction, repair management and design processes about their own future homes and buildings.

Investing in national technacy and innovation standards in education and linking housing resources to local conditions would foster regional livelihood opportunities and talent in leadership succession around essential aspects of technical services and solutions in the desert, they say.

The team proposes that the generation of livelihoods should be a central goal of all future housing approaches and that housing should be better designed and adapted to desert conditions and take into account the wishes and needs of individuals and communities.

The report can be accessed through the Publications Page on this site or directly from:
http://www.desertknowledgecrc.com.au/publications/downloads/DKCRC-Research-Report-29-Housing-for-livelihoods.pdf <http://desertknowledgecrc.com.au/publications/downloads/DKCRC-Research-Report-29-Housing-for-livelihoods.pdf