INSIGHT
I
I believe that this green swan/black swan mindset is the precipice we find ourselves on in the green building space. Which mindset will we choose to embrace? We can fall prey to the messages of impending doom, seeing the economic and social landscape after Covid as a wasteland – by focusing only on the extreme hardships. Or we can see it as a land of opportunity. These are the kinds of rugged landscapes in which all of the world’s early inventors and innovators have birthed discoveries. They are the rough terrain that the green building movement has cut its way through over the past few decades. And although the progress might sometimes seem slow, it is incremental, and the seeds planted are beginning to grow into opportunities.
I believe that this green swan/black swan mindset is the precipice we find ourselves on in the green building space. Which mindset will we choose to embrace? During World Green Building Week in September 2020, GBCSA ran a webinar that reviewed the organisation’s past challenges and successes over the last 13 years since its inception in 2007. GBCSA’s CEO, Lisa Reynolds, later reflected on the shifts that have taken place in the green building space during that time. We all need to do a whole lot more to shift the status quo if we are going to achieve the world’s targets of net zero for all buildings by 2050 – a mere 30 years away. And it’s exciting to see the GBCSA ramping up their plans too with goals to launch a new single rating tool (which encompasses all types of buildings) to replace the current suite of rating tools. This new tool will require more ambitious targets to be met, to shift the green goal posts up several notches in the coming years. For now, we pause for a moment at this year’s 2020 GBCSA Convention and reflect on how we can continue to turn the impossible into the possible. And if not quite there yet, then the “near possible”. As usual, within the pages of +Impact Magazine, we present some projects which are already paving the way forward – from greening industrial buildings to universities, to imagining the office space of the future, to indoor air quality and healthy buildings – to name a few. We also feature inspiring interviews with some of Convention’s keynote speakers and a piece on the financials of building green. It is a story unfolding, an ever-growing (ever-greening) one. Incremental footsteps on the path to sustainability.
Rising up
t’s hard not to feel pulled down by the weight of the world at the moment. Many of us are fighting tooth and nail to keep our heads above water. But, as “sustainability’s godfather”, John Elkington so eloquently explains, Covid was not a “black swan”* event. A black swan event takes us by surprise, has an exponential impact, and is something we fail to properly understand afterwards, thus setting ourselves up to fail again. On the contrary, experts and leaders foresaw Covid before it happened, but they failed to act. Elkington instead suggests that Covid could be a “green swan” event. A green swan embraces the opportunity of a black swan event and delivers exponential progress instead of disaster. A green swan is a paradigm shift. It is a new mindset that challenges everything we know, and one that encourages us to find opportunity in chaos and profound difficulty. (You can read more in our convention special report on page 20 for an expanded interview with John Elkington).
Mary Anne Constable Editor www.thepaperarchitect.com
*Nassim Nicholas Taleb introduced this concept in his 2007 book, The Black Swan.
POSITIVE IMPACT ISSUE 0.8
17
