10 April 2012 – More evidence has emerged that Americans are driving less – showing a massive 23 reduction in car use in the case of young people, and taking to their bicycles instead. Read More  
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By Lynne Blundell 15 March 2012 – There was a clear message at Green Cities this year –the era of a community revolution powered by technology is here. This message was there in the sessions, it was buzzing in conversations during the tea breaks Read More  
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14 November 2011 – General Electric and global banking group UBS has tipped US$200 million into Shai Agassi’s Better Place, the electric car charge company on the verge of gaining a significant foothold in Australia. Read More  
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26 October 2011 – From The Atlantic: Toronto has been aggressive about it: they have a new, comprehensive green roof law, the first one in North America. Like all laws, it’s complicated, but new building permit applications for residential, commercial, and institutional developments must now have green roofs. New industrial developments (as of April 30, 2012) will soon have to be green, also. The law states a minimum roof size, so it doesn’t apply to gardening sheds. And the larger the roof, the greater the percentage of it will have to be green. People can opt out, but they have to pay toward a fund. Efforts are already paying off: Green Roofs for Healthy Cities is reporting that the law has resulted in more than 1.2 million square feet of new green space planned on new commercial, institutional, and multi-unit residential developments. It will also keep enough rainwater runoff out of the lakes and rivers to fill fifty Olympic sized swimming pools. It’s reduced the... 
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By Tina Perinotto 25 October 2011 – The forecast for sustainability in property is: prepare for takeoff, and don’t bother holding back. In an incisive and wide-ranging report from Jones Lang LaSalle’s  October issue of the quarterly Global Sustainability Perspective, the view is that property will be at the pointy end of the social, ethical and environmental changes already under way and set to accelerate. Read More  
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By Tina Perinotto 7 October 2011 – At last the Australian sustainability industry is starting to gain an insight into the worth of its people. At least in terms of salaries and roles, thanks to the first comprehensive survey of green jobs. It’s good news for property, money wise. Read More  
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By Tina Perinotto 23 August 2011 – Sustainability is the number one opportunity for the property industry over the next five years, according to the latest Construction Sentiment Monitor from Davis Langdon. In fact one of the biggest risk to the industry was the slow moving understanding of the imperatives of sustainable change, the report said. Read More  
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By Tina Perinotto 22 August 2011 – Davis Langdon has released a report analysing the impact of the carbon price on the cost of construction materials. The upshot? Not much at all, especially after industry assistance, the company said. The big question then is, will the carbon price achieve its aims of stimulating changes in design of buildings and in choice of materials? Read More  
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17 February 2011 – FAVOURITES: A landmark study from leading investment analyst Mercer into climate change risk has recommended that  institutions shift up to 40 per cent of their investments into “climate sensitive” assets. Read More  
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By Tina Perinotto 6 May 2011 – Favourites: Jon Jutsen’s company  consults to around half the top 50 companies on the Australian Stock Exchange and about one third of the top 200.  Energetics helps them devise their energy and carbon strategy and provides the technical, financial and commercial services to implement it. “That’s our model and for a lot of companies we assist them from strategy through to implementation and also their monitoring and verification,” Jutsen says. The model works. Set up 27 years ago, Jutsen says it is now the largest specialist energy consultant in Australia, with 120 people after a growth spurt of nearly 15 per cent in the past year. The company recently won the “Best value professional services company” in the BRW Awards for Professional Services Excellence, and was shortlisted for four other awards in the competition. Energetics clients are liberally peppered through the property world – AMP, Colonial, Stockland and... 
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6 May 2011 – Bluescope Steel last night won the Insurance Council of Australia Resilience Award Competition with an innovative home design, by Caroline Pidcock of Pidcock Architects, aimed at preparing Australian communities for extreme weather conditions and assist disaster affected families to remain in their own homes post-disaster. The design addressed five major weather events: hail, inundation, bushfire, extreme rainfall, and cyclone, in a sustainable context. Ms Pidcock said Pidcock and Bluescope were able to work together to integrate durable materials into a very good design that understood the problems to be addressed and was inspired by this. Prize for the winning entry was $50,000 from the general insurance industry. Bluescope’s winning design was inspired by the recent Queensland floods, which affected many of the company’s customers and some of its staff. The company took elements of its existing building products range (such as cladding, roofing) and incorporated well... 
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2 May 2011  – Jeremy Grantham is chief investment officer of GMO Capital which has more than US $106 billion in assets under management. In this article for The Oil Drum he catalogues many of the issues related to resource depletion. As the publication said in its introduction, he is doing so as the “head of a firm whose objective it is to increase financial capital.” “Rapid growth is not ours by divine right; it is not even mathematically possible over a sustained period,” Grantham says. The sooner we develop a “develop a thoughtful energy policy and give up our carefree and careless ways with resources..the lower the cost will be.” According to Grantham: “Accelerated demand from developing countries, especially China, has caused an unprecedented shift in the price structure of resources: after 100 hundred years or more of price declines, they are now rising, and in the last eight years have undone, remarkably, the effects of the last 100-year... 
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Antony Hing was one of the featured guests at an green building fringe event held in Melbourne in February to co-incide with  Green Cities 2010 conference. By Andrew Starc - 25 March 2010 – Since its widespread establishment in the late 1990s, the internet has opened up a limitless avenue of potential for individuals and organisations interested in promoting environmental sustainability. Now emerging new computer technologies are providing cutting-edge ways for environmentalists to interact, collaborate and spread their message. Antony Hing, a digital media consultant for some of Australia’s largest food and beverage brands, believes that harnessing the power of grid computing, the synergistic combination of computer resources and technology from multiple locations around the world, is key to finding solutions for the environmental problems of the future. “Grid computing will provide a means by which human knowledge and problem solving, otherwise known as the ‘collective... 
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23 February 2011 – The weather is turning bad, with disastrous consequences for food supplies, prices and political stability. Russia, Brazil and most worryingly China, are facing food shortages and soaring prices. Writing powerfully on this topic in recent times has been Paul Krugman in the New York Time, Paul Gilding in Climate Spectator, Andrew Leonard in Salon.com Read More  
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24 March – – Ribena is developing a new strain of climate change resistant blackcurrants as part of a world wide response by the world’s biggest companies to adapt to climate change and seize opportunities, The Economist Intelligence Unit and UK Trade and Investment have found in a new survey. The survey, Adapting to an uncertain climate, a world of commercial opportunities, found that 90 per cent of major global businesses had already been affected by climate change and the major saw it as an opportunity rather than a risk. In Australia, the survey found 45 per cent of companies are actively working on the issue. The report  is based on a survey of more than 700 global executives from industry sectors in the Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa, Western Europe, North America and Latin America. Susan Haird, acting chief executive of UK Trade and Investment said: “Ninety per cent of those surveyed said they had been directly affected by climate change in the past three years... 
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By Tina Perinotto 10 February 2011 – Salaries for environmental professionals in top listed companies have surged ahead of those of their peers in the safety sector by a massive 25 per cent, according to the latest 2011 SafeSearch and EnviroSearchGlobal annual salary survey released yesterday (Wednesday). Average salary for a head of environment role leapt to  $289,000, up from $194,000 in only 12 months, according to the survey, which captures the experiences of 898 people in 62 companies, mostly from the ASX 200. The property sector had also kept pace with the increases, Read More  
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By Michael Mobbs 2 February 2011 – What has growing native pastures and weeds and trees on farms got to do with soil, carbon, governments, red tape, scientists and a tree-planting non-government body called Landcare? Let me tell you a couple of stories from some farmers I know, and how they grow plants, trees and soil.  I call them “carbon farmers” because they grow soil. Carbon is an essential ingredient of new soil and to get it the new soil mostly takes carbon out of Earth’s atmosphere. Read More  
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27 January 2011 – Sustainability has finally made it as one of the big six trends for 2011 and will become a key divider between the “haves” and the “have nots” in the commercial market, according to leading researcher Kevin Stanley of CB Richard Ellis. Mr Stanley, executive director, global research and consulting for CBRE  has named sustainability fourth on his list of the six big trends for 2011.  “Sustainability will have a bigger impact from now on,” he said. “Sustainability may have struggled for priority during the global financial crisis and post the failed Copenhagen negotiations but as this new property cycle picks up it will grow in importance, becoming a central and permanent feature of the industry. “The next round of commercial developments now being designed and approved will all feature high on the well-developed sustainability ratings scale.” And Mr Stanley includes in his forecasts advice for developers to start... 
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By David Baggs, ecospecifier 13 October 2011 – FAVOURITES: Green marketing has increased dramatically in recent years as marketeers have become more aware of the increased importance consumers are placing on the effects of their purchases on their health and the environment. Read More  
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6 October 2010 - A workshop hosted by Paul Edmiston and Lachlan MacDonald of Savills Incoll Australia at the 2010 Sustainable Buildings Conference  highlighted the effect that the drive toward sustainability has had on the property market. The workshop focused on the refurbishment of 170 Phillip St, Sydney, as a case study highlighting the decisions made by the owners, The Law Society. The case study detailed the reasons why the owners performed the upgrade, the key sustainability initiatives adopted into the refurbishment as well as their perspective on the Green Star rating. The case study can be seen further below. The workshop also discussed the effect that the move towards sustainability is having in the areas of leasing, valuation and sales, project management and facilities management. Following are some highlights from those insights. Leasing: An overwhelming majority of Premium and A grade tenants have a green agenda while only a  small minority of B and C grade tenants... 
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By Tina Perinotto 14 October 2010 – Alfonso Ponce Alvarez was one of the speakers at the World Green Building Council Congress in Singapore in September.  He spoke with The Fifth Estate on his work with the United Nations to develop a common carbon metric and on green building drivers in Europe. Following is an edited transcript of the interview. The Fifth Estate: Please tell us what your work is about Alfonso Ponce Alvarez: I work for the French Building Research Centre, under the authority of the huge Ministry for Sustainable Development in France, which is the result of a merger between the Ministry for Construction, Transportation and Urban Affairs, the Ministry of Environment, and the Ministry of Social Affairs. So my organisation is placed under the authority of this ministry.  So we are 900 engineers, five different locations in France, one in China. We do fundamental research on buildings and infrastructures, and we get money from the French Government for that. We... 
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By Tina Perinotto 1 July 2010 – Here’s a small but powerful pointer to keep in mind if you have any doubt about the way risk management is going in the capital markets: 12 per cent of all institutional and private investment dividends in the UK come from a single company – BP. Or they used to, until BP stopped paying dividends in the wake of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster. Since then its cost of capital has soared, and some observers say this global giant may soon face bankruptcy over the environmental catastrophe. Even more alarming is that most of the developed world’s institutional investors are still wedded to fossil fuels, a source of income and energy that – in climate and cost terms – is looking increasingly risky. Here’s another possible pointer for our new Prime Minister: Norway is using its sovereign wealth extracted from stiff fossil-fuel taxes to wean the country off carbon dependency. Sharing this startling, and somewhat scary, investment scenario... 
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For 10 years the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment has had a significant influence on urban design in the UK. Now Garnering attention from Australians for its achievements, many urban leaders in this country are now calling for a local n Australian equivalent of CABE to be established. At a meeting held at Melbourne Town Hall on 22 April, 45 people met to discuss both the concept and plan for action for CABE DownUnder, the working title of an urban transformation initiative with aspirations of emulating the work achieved by its UK counterpart. One of the founding members of the group, architect Bill Chandler says that CABE DownUnder has been inspired by the work of its UK counterpart, but the group has a far more humble genesis. “We’ve been holding informal meetings each second Tuesday since the mid 80’s, sometimes three3 people attended, sometimes 50 people, the group came out of these discussions. It is a voluntary exercise for the most part, a network of like... 
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Brief – 25 July, 2010 – Members of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum have agreed to embark on a project to create up to 20 low-carbon model cities using energy-efficient technologies including smart grids and renewable power generation. Announced at APEC’s forum meeting in Japan 19 June, the 21-member body will set up a task force to choose cities for the Low-Carbon Model Town Project within the next three years. Japan’s trade minister said after the forum that Tianjin, in north-eastern China, is likely to become the first city picked for the project, with Vietnam and Indonesia also expressing interest in participating. The model cities will build infrastructure, including housing and transportation networks, by using various technologies to curb greenhouse gas emissions. For example, a smart grid can tap into renewable energy sources such as solar and geothermal power, and rules may be introduced to require homes to use advanced insulating materials and energy-efficient... 
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The seeming decline of the American economy has helped foster a climate of denial with regard to climate change. Colm McNaughton of Eurekastreet.com.au writes that it is our ability to express and understand current global events, including climate change denial, within a new narrative not borrowed from those rooted in ancient Greek and Hebraic storytelling that will be required to develop the imaginary space to surmount the challenges of the 21st century. Click here to read the full article Below are comments left in response to the article: Dawn Baker28-Mar-2010 Thank you for your use of one of the most powerful metaphors, ‘stories’ by which we can see ourselves within our interpersonal and social environment. I wonder what a new story would look like? How will we begin to slow down the new shiny metaphors which capture and titillate without nourishment? What would the Bro Grimm say? I bet the Greeks knew about the dichotomy of the eternal external chase vs the ability and value... 
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by Andrew Starc 14 May, 2010 - How did Australia create sustainability programs that lead the world? This was the question being discussed by some of Australia’s leading sustainability minds at the Optimising Sustainability Performance conference hosted by the 3 Pillars Network in Sydney on 13 May. “Simplicity,” was the number one critical factor, said Caroline Noller, newly appointed sustainability manager at Australand after 10 years at the helm of GPT’s sustainability unit. “One of the challenges is that sustainability is so big and complex. Our number one objective is to make things clear and simple.” Asked to name three critical success factors for sustainability programs, Dr. Noller also highlighted the role that clear communication and successful monitoring have on achieving value added outcomes. “Clear communication to the value drivers of the business that you work in is critical – that is, what sustainability can add and how it adds value to a business. “Also,... 
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