Your Development

This fact sheet details the role education plays in achieving sustainable and innovative urban developments, and will provide guidance and links on how to develop education programmes for staff and, later, the community to ensure the sustainability goals are supported throughout the development project.

A clear vision from the outset, stating the sustainability goals for the development sets the target. The goals should then be communicated to all stakeholders at every stage of the project, from feasibility planning through to occupation and ongoing management of the community. All stakeholders should understand these goals and many may need educating as to what the goals mean, why it is important to achieve them and how they will be achieved.

Why is education important and how is it effective?

Education is potentially very effective in bringing about changes in business practices. When carefully planned and implemented, education projects can:

• create awareness of an issue
• enhance knowledge and skills of staff and management
• influence values and attitudes of staff and management
• encourage more responsible environmental business practice
• promote operational change in businesses/industry.

Education is most effective when it is combined with tools such as enforcement activities, economic incentives and structural works, such as the installation of gross pollutant traps, bunding etc. However education is often the most effective approach because its impact continues once incentives and the enforcement ‘spotlight’ are removed.

To be successful education must be planned and delivered with clear objectives and strategies designed to impact on those objectives; hence this guide.

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Outline the ultimate goal – A Sustainable Urban development

Using education to move businesses/industry towards sustainability involves actively assisting them to consider the triple bottom line issues of economic, social and environmental sustainability. Business sustainability is dependent on integrating and succeeding in all three areas. As part of the journey towards sustainability education can:

• encourage and assist businesses/industry to comply with relevant environmental legislation
• encourage businesses/industry to move beyond compliance and adopt the best environmental management practices.
• assist businesses to grow economically as well as to improve their environmental performance.
• Assist businesses to increase their market share and at the same time to move towards social and environmental sustainability.

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What is cleaner production?

There are many aspects of a sustainable development as covered in this website: “Your Development”. A key concept is cleaner production, and integrating this concept into the practices of all contractors and businesses involved in the production of the development.

Cleaner production is an overall approach to business management that seeks to reduce the use of energy, water and material resources, and minimise waste and pollution. It involves rethinking products, processes and services to achieve sustainable development. The focus of cleaner production is to avoid creating pollution, rather than try to manage pollutants after they have been created.

Profit is a powerful motivation for business to become more environmentally aware and adopt environmentally sound business practices. Improved efficiency, reduced resource use and less waste generation not only benefit the environment, but also add to the business’s ‘bottom line’.

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Bringing about change

Moving a business/industry towards sustainability and cleaner production requires education, but even more than that, it requires an internal champion in each business. Someone who is prepared to act on the education received and make changes happen.

Bringing about change in organisations is a complex task. It requires perseverance, flexibility and a personal toughness that allows change to continue to be promoted in the face of resistance and slow progress.

Being an agent of change is a leadership role, although the champion may not be recognised formally as a leader. Passion and commitment to the project can be supported and enhanced by a few simple strategies:

• People need real reasons to change; they need to be able to see what is in it for them, and for their business. Make sure your project makes this clear.
• It is very difficult to impose change – it has to be done in partnership or collaboration. Business managers are more likely to embrace changed/improved environmental practices if their representatives are part of the project from the outset. Collaborate, build partnerships and give businesses/contractors ‘ownership’ of the project and any environmental changes that might be required.

Developing ecologically sustainable communities is not business as usual; it represents a paradigm change, and hard action. Education is a key catalyst to managing the change.

Key actions to achieve Sustainable Developments include:

• Capacity Building
• Stakeholder Engagement - Breakfast meetings/an event – accepting that this is not business as usual.
• Recognition/Rewards
• Champions embedded in the business/industry
• Planning
• Evaluation.

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Key Issues

Benefits

The benefit of education is to facilitate and support the delivery of the project. Education should intimately support the vision and objectives of the development.

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Risks

By not educating or engaging staff all that will be achieved is business as usual.

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Savings

Sustainability and bottom line performance goes hand in hand. If all stakeholders are clearly briefed of what is being achieved from the outset, and the vision is shared – then sustainability can be efficiently integrated into the project.

Staff saving, generation Y can be retained and engaged through the sustainability agenda. Staff can be retained for longer if an organisation commits to sustainability and engages staff through education. In a knowledge economy retaining staff converts directly to increased profits.

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Costs

Investing in an education programme – making change takes time, and for all business’s time is money. It is an opportunity cost – time in terms of staff time dedicated to making the change. The early adopters, those that invest in education and change will benefit most.

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Barriers

People are inherently adverse to change. Education can help break down these barriers and facilitate an understanding of why behaviors and practices need to change in order to deliver ecologically sustainable developments.

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Development phase actions

Feasibility

• Industry Best practice – motivate and engage staff to think outside the box – give examples and challenge team to exceed best practice.
• A clear vision in terms of what a sustainable development looks like should be described and included in the feasibility study.
• Aspirations such as carbon neutral and zero waste are noble, but are they achievable? Set clear objectives.
• Is there any external help that can be leveraged such as government programmes or industry association programmes such as the NSW Department of Environment and Conservations Sustainability Advantage Programme.

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Planning

• The education plan should be an integral part of every development phase. At the planning stage there will be quantity surveyors, engineers, architects and designers. All need to be engaged and understand the sustainability vision and goals of the project. The vision and goals will have been written into their project briefs, and the importance of these could be reinforced with a project education programme.
• Planning a project education programme
• Evaluation.

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Design

• At the design stage it is very easy for an architects sketch to steal the show, and for all subsequent designs to be centred around achieving the aesthetic. Education can help at the design stage by bringing together all disciplines to achieve the vision by working in a complimentary way.
• Evaluation.

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Construction

• There may be many external contractors brought in during the construction phase. They all need to understand the vision and objectives of the project. The education programme needs to identify all those sub contractors, and needs to pick them up during the course of construction. This may include a site familiarisation brief, as part of the tender documents, and/or be scheduled into milestones;
• Subcontractors might be a valuable source of information, as they will have seen what has worked best on other sites, and their knowledge and experience could be picked up during evaluation exercises;
• Incorporate a brief of the sustainability principles to be achieved into the site/project brief.
• Evaluation.

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Completion

• Evaluation. Assess how well sustainability principles were taken up and embedded into the project. Develop an evaluation mechanism that will allow improvements to be made for next time.
• A new and innovative development has been constructed; now the operation needs to be considered. A guide to operating the buildings or development could be designed for the occupants. Examples of projects that have had excellent design credentials but have not been operated properly include:
  • BedZED (UK)
  • The Red Centre – UNSW

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DECC booklets on designing an education programme.

DECC’s Sustainability Advantage Website.

‘The Future with Cleaner Production’ published by the NSW EPA