E N V I R O N M E N TA L L E A D E R S H I P
It’s not a man’s world. It’s a world where the unique strengths of men and women work together to solve our biggest environmental challenges. In Poland, female professionals have in many ways been responsible for the green in green building. As early advocates, impassioned educators and trained architects, females have been behind the helm of a trend that will see nearly three quarters of next year’s Warsaw new office market certified to a green building standard. To recognize these ladies’ achievements, Cleantech hosted sixteen professionals over two days at the Hotel Le Regina in the style of Vanity Fair. TEXT BY WOJCIECH KOŚĆ P H O T O G R A P H Y B Y B E ATA J A R Z Ę B S K A CLOTHING BY BIZUU S H O T O N L O C AT I O N AT M A M A I S O N H O T E L L E R E G I N A WA R S AW S T Y L I N G B Y K ATA R Z Y N A Ł A S Z C Z hair & makeup by A N E T A K A c P R Z A K W I T H T H A N K S TO O U R PA R T I C I PA N T S
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E N V I R O N M E N TA L L E A D E R S H I P
It’s not a man’s world. It’s a world where the unique strengths of men and women work together to solve our biggest environmental challenges. In Poland, female professionals have in many ways been responsible for the green in green building. As early advocates, impassioned educators and trained architects, females have been behind the helm of a trend that will see nearly three quarters of next year’s Warsaw new office market certified to a green building standard. To recognize these ladies’ achievements, Cleantech hosted sixteen professionals over two days at the Hotel Le Regina in the style of Vanity Fair. TEXT BY WOJCIECH KOŚĆ P H O T O G R A P H Y B Y B E ATA J A R Z Ę B S K A CLOTHING BY BIZUU S H O T O N L O C AT I O N AT M A M A I S O N H O T E L L E R E G I N A WA R S AW S T Y L I N G B Y K ATA R Z Y N A Ł A S Z C Z hair & makeup by A N E T A K A c P R Z A K W I T H T H A N K S TO O U R PA R T I C I PA N T S
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People
F E AT U R I N G : A gata W r ó bel ( P olnord ) A gnieszka K ozłowska - K orbicz ( M inistry of E nvironment ) A neta W ięcka ( I nstitute of R enewable E nergy ) A nna C zy ż ( H ays P oland ) D evin S aylor ( S kanska ) E wa R utkowska - S ubocz ( D entons ) I sabelle C lerc ( A E W E urope ) J oanna S chulders ( U B M P olska ) J oanna W is - B ielewicz ( T U P ) K atarzyna Z awodna ( S kanska ) K inga A nasiewicz - Z aręba ( V estas ) K inga N owakowska ( C apital P ark ) M agdalena S tretton ( A rcadis ) R egina G ul ( J ones L ang L a S alle ) R enata K usznierska ( D T Z ) S vetlana R obinson ( F uture 4 B uild )
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Anyone with an interest in sustainability should have dropped by the Warsaw Le Regina Hotel on two occasions this summer, when sixteen leading female professionals in construction, real estate and renewable energy were taking part in Cleantech’s cover project. But it wasn’t about the cover. It was about honoring these ladies for their professional achievements. For two days, Le Regina Hotel hosted an elite group of women whose business expertise and environmental awareness has made them leaders in their sector. These including the leading female professionals in sustainable development, environmental consulting, wind power, real estate and environmental law. These women are astute business leaders who know how to succeed and fierce stewards of natural resources, true environmentalists. Their achievement demonstrates that environmentalism has become a thread in the fabric of our lives that can’t be dis-entwined. This, of course, wasn’t always the case. FOUR YEARS, AN EPOCH Ewa Rutkowska-Subocz, head of the environmental protection and natural resources practice in the Warsaw office of Dentons, a law firm, spent a year in Belgium as a student. “This was before Poland joined the European Union. Back then, environmental law wasn’t even a common practice in Western Europe, let alone Poland. No one was interested in legal environmental issues, nor did they consider them important,” Ms. Rutkowska-Subocz said. Today, she says, environmental legal issues show up in a number of otherwise non-environment related legal cases: for example managing risk when a transaction concerns contaminated 46 | CLeantech |FALL 2013
land or the environmental impact assessment procedures that are mandatory for many types of investments. Magdalena Stretton, the director of environmental business at Arcadis, an engineering and consultancy firm, agrees that environmental issues permeate the business at every level. Her daily practice is environmental consulting, and she leads a practice that provides technical expertise to renewable energy and transport infrastructure projects. Often times, environmental ideas were imported into Poland from abroad, where several of these ladies have spent time during their careers. Joanna Schulders, head of the project department at UBM, a developer, whose portfolio includes LEED Silver and LEED Gold-certified office projects Poleczki Business Park in Warsaw and Alma Tower in Kraków, brings with her years of experience working in Germany, one of Europe’s top markets for sustainable buildings. Germany has also shown fortitude to transition their energy economy away from fossil fuels toward renewables in a policy project known as Energiewende. Ms. Schulders was heavily influenced by the environmental business practices she learned in Germany. On an operational level, recalls Katar-
zyna Zawodna, regional director at Skanska Property Poland, it took only a few years for environmental thinking to manifest itself as a daily reality in the real estate sector. “Four years ago, when I first started to talk about buildings’ certification, it was a very foreign concept. Today, it seems, all new office buildings are certified. An entire epoch has passed,” she said. “These sustainability measures aren’t raising development costs much, but have become necessary for new buildings because they do have an effect on energy cost and service charges. So green buildings are going to be in demand from tenants, which will give further momentum to developers,” said Regina Gul, senior project manager and a BREEAM/LEED expert at Jones Lang LaSalle, a real estate agency. For Anna Czyż, senior consultant and team leader in the construction and property division at HAYS, a human resources company, the cycle of change has been even faster. “I’m coming across issues of energy efficiency, renewables, sustainability in buildings. From the perspective of human resources, it’s changed so quickly: two years ago, when we were looking for an architect with experience in sustainable buildings, there were very few in Poland,” she said.
“Four years ago, when I first started to talk about a building’s certification, it was a very foreign concept. Today, it seems, all new office buildings are certified. An entire epoch has passed” Katarzyna Zawodna, Skanska Property Poland
People
Katarzyna Zawodna
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Svetlana Robinson 48 | CLeantech |FALL 2013
People
Joanna Wis-Bielewicz
Magdalena Stretton
Anna CzyĹź
Renata Kusznierska www.cleantechpoland.com | 49
Kinga Nowakowska
Regina Gul
Aneta Więcka
Joanna Schulders
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Agnieszka Kozłowska-Korbicz
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Devin Saylor
Isabelle Clerc
Agata Wr贸bel
Ewa Rutkowska-Subocz
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NEW FRONTIERS, NEW CHALLENGES The “green” in business keeps growing, annexing new previously virgin territories. Renata Kusznierska, soon to take over as head of retail agency at DTZ, a real estate services company, says the retail sector is now embracing green certification at top speed. Whether it’s BREEAM-In-Use for existing properties, or LEED-Platinum for new ones, the trend is here to stay. “Today, you can pick your jewelry and clothes from LED-lit displays, something that retailers used to dismiss, but the LED technology is no longer an unattractive cold light,” Ms. Kusznierska said. Next in line is residential. Although great strides have been made in commercial construction, Poland has yet to adopt widespread environmental best practices for residential units. “It’s time for residential developments to get on board,” said Agata Wróbel, formerly of Polnord. Polnord is an office, retail and residential developer and the company now stands to deliver what might be Warsaw’s leading sustainable residential development scheme. It’s called Port Praski, to be developed on the premises of a former river port, a brownfield project. Away from the city, Joanna WisBielewicz is project director at EkoMiasteczko Siewierz from TUP, a development company. Siewierz is a town of 5,500 people in Silesia, southern Poland where TUP is developing a wholly new, sustainable district (see p. 60). “Sustainable city is foremost about creating communities where people want to live, work and spend their free time. That’s why cafes, parks, amenities and services are part of the solution. Our project will create entirely different expectations toward living standards in Poland,” said Ms. Wis-Bielewicz. The
“I’ve always been an environmentalist at heart. You need to believe in it to work in it” Kinga Nowakowska, Capital Park Siewierz project will be exactly that: a community, she adds. Kinga Anasiewicz-Zaręba and Aneta Więcka are two examples of women taking leadership roles in renewable energy. Ms. Anasiewicz-Zaręba is an up and coming business coordinator at Vestas, a wind equipment manufacturer, managing sales in a sector that since 2005 has trended consistently upward. Ms. Więcka, in turn, is doing work behind the scenes at the Institute for Renewable Energy, lobbying for regulations to improve the renewable energy investment climate in a coalfired economy. For Devin Saylor, director of sustainability and commercial development at Skanska Property Poland, there’s a great need for educating tenants to reap the benefits of an emerging renewable energy economy. “If the systems in the buildings are misused, the building underperforms. You need to ask yourself questions: is it the facility manager mishandling them? Is your energy model off? Well I think it’s tenants that need educated in most cases,” Ms. Saylor said. Slowly, the sustainability trend is reaching back to older properties that investment funds hold. According to Isabelle Clerc, head of asset management Central Europe at AEW Europe investment fund, funds are thus making their older assets more liquid (saleable) in case they sell them on to other investors, but also because funds (as landlords) also wish the charges to be as low as possible, lowering the global rental effort for the tenant.
I CARE FOR FUTURE Now that the first quick growth phase seems to have been completed, it’s time to marry growth with quality, says Svetlana Robinson, event director at Future4Build, a Sapphire Ventures company. Ms. Robinson’s Future4Build, an event for green construction professionals, will take place in Warsaw for the third time this year. “There was a big need to put the construction sector and the services sectors together on the issue of green buildings: how to understand what green construction is and how it changes behavior of the consumer,” Ms. Robinson said. To be held after Future4Build, the most important environmental event is taking place, the 19th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the so-called COP19. Agnieszka Kozłowska-Korbicz leads the COP19 organization team (she’s also the creator of GreenEvo program to promote Polish green technologies abroad). COP19 will gather 10,000 people who will iron out the terms of a global climate change accord. Ms. Kozłowska-Korbicz hopes to stress individual responsibility, via the COP19 slogan “I Care”. “It’s not ‘we care’ because that message dilutes responsibility. It’s the I that needs to care,” she said. At least one of our leading ladies has long been convinced of the good sense in marrying environmental protection to business. “I’ve always been an environmentalist at heart. You need to believe in it to work in it,” said Kinga Nowakowska, of Capital Park, a development company.
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