28 Mar 2018
Climate change. Globalisation. Rapid urbanisation. Technological innovation. Resilience. Human rights.
These are some of the global megatrends reshaping the world, and the property industry.
The Green Building Council of Australia’s vision responds to this changing world: Healthy, resilient and positive places for people and the natural environment.
Our vision looks to the future. The next revision of Green Star must do so too.
The last revision to Green Star, launched in 2014, presented four easy-to-use rating tools that address the majority of Australia’s built environment.
Industry embraced these rating tools – and the numbers don’t lie.
At the start of 2014, we had 646 Green Star certified projects. Today, we've just cracked 1,750. That’s more than 1,000 buildings, fitouts and communities.
Thirty-seven per cent of Australia’s office space is Green Star-rated and more than 725,000 Australians work in Green Star offices. A further 42,000 people live in Green Star apartments.
More than 425,000 people are moving into Green Star-rated communities, and 1.3 million people visit a Green Star-rated shopping centre each day.
These are laudable achievements – but we can’t afford to rest on our laurels. Decisions that we make today will shape the future of countless generations.
What does the built environment that we want to live in look like?
We believe it means places that enhance health and wellbeing, celebrate culture and community, and connect with nature.
It means places that are resilient to future environmental and economic shocks.
It means carbon positive and biodiverse places that give more back to the environment than they take.
This is our vision of our future built environment.
Which is why the next version of Green Star must be future-focused.
We want your support as we redefine world leadership and best practice, expand Green Star’s scope to encompass more social sustainability issues and incorporate new requirements that encourage ongoing operational performance.
And we need your insights as we look to integrate tenant impacts into our buildings, and building impacts into our precincts.
Most importantly, we want your support to ramp up Green Star requirements in line with the 1.5°C trajectory set out in the Paris Agreement.
We want carbon positive buildings.
We want world leading Green Star rated buildings and fitouts to be fully powered by renewables from 2020 onwards.
And no new or existing building with a Green Star rating should emit carbon from operations by 2030.
We launched two critical documents at Green Cities recently. The first, a vision document outlines our vision for the next version of Green Star. The second is a two-page summary of our upcoming carbon positive roadmap discussion paper.
We will be hosting a webinar on the 23 April. We’ll also be hosting feedback sessions throughout the country in May and June to hear what you have to say.
We’re in this together – and it’s only by working together that we’ll realise this vision for a healthy, resilient and positive future.