Our Head of Strategy and Impact Australia, Nicole Sullivan, brings strategic, data-driven insights to her work with clients. We catch up with her about sustainability strategy, green building, responsible procurement, and the benefits of collaboration.
Please tell us about some of your clients’ strategic sustainability work.
We work with clients like InfraBuild and Lendlease who are leaders in their field. They're doing really strategic work. We also deal with companies who are still exploring what sustainability means for them. Those clients are exciting too. Because they’re asking, ‘what does sustainability mean for my business? Is it relevant?’ When we do a Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) workshop with a company they’ll often realise that yes, this is directly relevant to what they do – and there are parts they’re already doing. And to see those light bulbs turn on is great. Their efforts saving energy or working with their community: that's sustainability.
How are clients approaching their sustainability strategy?
One tool is materiality assessments. This is a way to understand what topics matter most to a business and their stakeholders, and plan strategically from there. This allows for data-based decision-making even on strategy. thinkstep-anz is big on data. You can do that in strategy by doing great stakeholder engagement and consultation in your materiality assessment. It's another lens to look at your business; a very informative one.
I like to tell clients to focus their effort on where it matters most. They can develop sustainability roadmaps from there – continuing what they’re doing well and focusing on new areas.
And how do those strategies lead to the work that businesses are doing?
We’re doing lots of work in decarbonisation. We work with clients and support them to develop broad strategy and look at where to take that in terms of sustainability. We can do carbon footprints for products or whole organisations.
We also work on responsible procurement, which more and more companies are looking at. Responsible procurement is about being socially and environmentally responsible. Every company has suppliers, and we help them develop a strategy to engage with those suppliers, collaboratively, so they can succeed together. There are so many opportunities in procurement.
So collaboration sits nicely inside strategic thinking?
Yes, absolutely. We're working with one building products association developing a new toolkit to help their members comply with Green Star rating requirements. We’re working with them in a bespoke way, that works in their industry, for what their members need – not just telling them what they need to do. Industry associations need to enable their member companies to be able to engage and improve, not just make sustainability barriers that they can't climb.
The Australian built environment industry has a reputation for extraordinary collaboration. That's why Australia consistently leads the GRESB rankings internationally – because our industry collaborates so well.
Tell us more about embodied carbon (emissions from the materials and products a building is made from)
It’s a big thing our Australian team are working on, in response to climate change legislation. We have many clients who work in the built environment (including government entities, building product manufacturers, developers and builders). They're all grappling with carbon.
Operational carbon (carbon emitted through powering and lighting the building) is dominant, it could be around 70% of the impact of an average new building. So that's important. But we know how to solve that. It's a matter of powering everything with renewables and making your building as efficient as possible, so it needs less energy.
The problem we can’t currently solve is embodied carbon. We don't know how to get to net zero on embodied carbon other than getting Climate Active Carbon Neutral Certification and buying lots of offsets. But that's not the answer. So we're working on embodied carbon because it’s the question people don't know how to answer.
How do you deal with those tough questions?
We use our technical knowledge and understanding of sustainability. But also we partner with organisations and their stakeholders – collaboration again!
We often work on answering questions that people don't know how to answer, or that they thought were too hard to do internally. It might be how to develop policy about carbon. What's the right approach to measure embodied carbon in buildings? For commercial clients, what are their opportunities and barriers dealing with an issue, like decarbonisation? Or what claims can a business make about carbon in their products?
The beauty of what we do here is we can cover everything and everyone – the full spectrum. Big and small; standard approaches we know succeed or developing new solutions. It’s exciting to work on these problems.