UXA2023 Nova Franklin, James Elks, Katie Eyles - Collaboration!! Reducing embodied carbon together.

Interested in how government + design + sustainability experts came together to co-design a "world-first" tool to tackle global warming? If so come along to this talk for an up-close look at how we managed to achieve the impossible —> getting agreement on a way forward when all of the experts told us this was NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN.

Transcript

1. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. www.captionslive.au | captionslive@outlook.com | 0447 904 255 UX Australia UX Australia 2023 Thursday, 24 August 2023 Captioned by: Bernadette McGoldrick & Kasey Allen
2. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 117 Next up, we have got two talks left to finish us off for the day. First up and both of these have an environmental sustainability theme to them. Our first talk we will hear from Nova, Katie and James who will talk to us about the work that they have been doing to reduce embodied carbon emissions. Please join me in welcoming Nova, James and Katie to the stage. (APPLAUSE) JAMES ELKS: Pleasure to be here. We will present in order. We will have some awkward standing while we talk. (LAUGHTER) Lovely to see you all. I am James Elks, head of product develop at NABERS, the National Australian Built Environment Rating System. We rate the sustainability of buildings. How much energy or water does it use, or waste or maybe what the air quality is? We are everywhere across Australia. All of the large commercial buildings that you see around here, all of the office towers that you probably inhabit some days of the week probably, maybe not. They will have NABERS ratings. I am here with my colleague, Katie Eyles, and Nova Franklin. Climate crisis, Texas, February, everything froze. 400,000 people
3. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 118 without power. Bushfires, we saw crazy bushfires in Australia a few years ago and also recently, only a couple of weeks ago we saw the devastation in Maui. We saw California, the Canadian wild fires that happened earlier this year with the incredible photos of New York City and the orange haze, like we saw in Sydney. Heatwave, it has been hot, like the hottest ever, so 6 July this year, we saw global average temperatures at the highest they have ever been in history. They broke the record that was set the day before and that broke the record that was set the day before. Also, low lights from this year, floods in India, Pakistan, China, South Korea, Japan and the Philippines, extreme heat and drought in Uruguay, Middle East and North Africa. We saw Cyclone Freddy, a five week long cyclone, the longest in history that smashed Madagascar and Mozambique. That is just this year. We have seen more stuff in the last week, right? We all read the news and it is depressing. This is happening because we are putting greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide up into the air and it warms the atmosphere and it is leading to wild weather. That is the worst part. Don't forget today is about an exciting story about how we are doing something about this and lots of people are now. We will vote, so I want everyone to think of everything that uses energy, globally. Buildings use energy, cars, buses, trains, manufacturing, industrial processors, agriculture machines and we will do a standing vote. I would like you to stand up and if you can't put up your hand perhaps. What we are going to vote on is how much of carbon dioxide or greenhouse gases, how much comes from buildings? I will count up and you will sit down when you get to the number that you think it is. Percentage of just greenhouse gases from buildings as opposed to everything else. It is not zero and it is not a trick question, it is not 100%. Sit down if you think 5% emissions comes from buildings as opposed to everything else. 10... I have gone too far, no! (LAUGHTER) guess what, you are all right, it was 38%. I am very
4. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 119 impressed. (APPLAUSE) Incredible crowd, well educated. We can divide this up into greenhouse gases that come from when the buildings have humans in it with airconditioner and lights and things like that. Embodied carbon, the greenhouse gases emitted when the building is being built, the sand and cement and concrete and steel and that kind of stuff. What is embodied carbon? To take an example, a simple example is a brick and we all know a brick - yes, good. To make a brick you have to dig clay out of the ground, ship that to a manufacturing site and make it into a brick. Then you put it in a kiln and heat it up. Then you have to take to the building site and lift it and put it on the building and then repair that over 100 years or more if you are lucky. At the end of its life you have to get rid of that. At all stages there are greenhouse gases emitted through the different processes involved in those different things. What is the problem? Right now there is no globally agreed standardised method of measuring emissions from this to compare it. That means there is no way to fairly compare buildings. That is a problem because if you don't know what good looks like, and you don't know what bad looks like, then you can't do things like drive policy and you can't do funding and you can't do competition. There is also a huge range of stakeholders here. You can imagine the people making the bricks but the people operating the buildings and in those buildings and everything in between. Those people, they largely need to agree for us to do anything when it comes to embodied carbon. Many of them are direct competitors. This is something we need to work on now. If we are designing a building now and there is lots being designed now, it is going to be five years before that is built. We are locking in decisions now about what that building is constructed out of. 2030, which is a major milestone when it comes to limiting global warming out of the Paris agreement, that is only
5. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 120 seven years away. This is not something we can afford to take our time with, we need to do something about it now. Someone needs to do something about emissions. Enter NABERS. In partnership with Meld Studio and Thinkstep ANZ, asking questions to industry like "Do you think we should do something about embodied carbon? What solutions would you like to see to support a change? Is NABERS, who focuses on measuring and comparing buildings, are we the right people to bring some of those solutions to life?" This talk is about how we engaged 200 plus people from 150 plus organisations across Australia to figure out how we can drive down embodied carbon in buildings. We are not the only ones working on it. There is lots of people playing here. We need to do it without doing this. I will read this one out for those of you who are on the line, How Standards Proliferate is the title. Situation, 14 competing standards. 14 ridiculous! We need to develop one universal standard that covers everyone's use cases. Soon, situation, there are 15 competing standards. I will awkwardly sit on the stage with Nova and pass to my colleague, Katie Eyles. KATIE EYLES: Thank you. I am going to talk about how we worked with the construction industry to create a framework for our embodied carbon rating tool that can be used across Australia. First a little bit of context, what is NABERS and how can we help? This is what we do in a nutshell when we create environmental ratings for buildings. We create a scenario where you can be rated from one star, maybe are you just beginning your sustainability journey to six stars, or great, you are a market leader. People can see where does my building sit? That might be for energy or water use or indoor environment quality but now we are looking at creating something like this for embodied
6. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 121 carbon. Having a ratings system like this is really useful because if you are constructing a building, you can have in your strategy where do we actually want to be? If we want to be at a six star rating, we know what numbers we have to meet as we are actually constructing the building. A little bit of context as well around this specific project that we are talking about during this presentation and what kind of phase of the project we are talking about. We are talking about the initial discovery work and then the testing and its rating that we have done, based on the initial discovery work. We have spoken with innovators and done a bunch of workshops with industry and we have figured out what is actually needed in this space and then tested what are the fundamentals of what we need. We haven't quite gotten yet to finishing the actual build it stage. That is what we are doing at the moment. We just started a couple of month ago. What we are talking about today is really about that initial discovery and testing and iterating on what are the main themes we need to do. About two years ago we started working in this space and we looked at the construction industry and we thought wow, that is a pretty big and complex situation, where do we even start? If you think about when you are creating a building, there are so many people involved in what that actually looks like. Starting with planning, for example, like what is in the construction code, in terms of what a building needs to do or function like, then there is architects, you have construction companies and the builders that actually choose the materials that go into the buildings and then you have got the companies that actually create those materials - the cement manufacturers, the steel and aluminium manufacturers, so what are they doing, in terms of creating products that then dictates what can or can't be built? Huge complex situation, where
7. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 122 do we start? We started with talking to people that were innovating in the embodied carbon space. We chose to start with the innovators because they could give us a really good idea of how they were already making headway, what approaches are they taking? What impact have they been able to make so far? What lessons have they learned and how can we join forces with them, rather than doing something like what James had on his slide and starting to compete with anyone that is already doing good work. Once we spoke with those innovators, we had a really good idea of what the kind of lay of the land was like, in terms of what is happening at the moment and who do we need to speak to? We were able then to actually start on engaging really broadly, so spoke with over 200 individuals who work for more than 150 organisations, did heaps of workshops and all this kind of stuff. I will talk through how we did that process of really engaging broadly to figure out what to do together. One of the most important things that we learned, when we spoke to those innovators at first was that this whole area of embodied carbon, especially two years ago, it has changed a bit now, people have learned more, but especially two years ago, embodied carbon was seen as a huge problem, but very few people really knew what they could start doing about it, or how to start making a positive impact. A lot of people wanting to do something but how to do something or what to do was a really big question. For us, that meant that when we were speaking to people, doing workshops, we had to make sure that we were helping scaffold information in a way that helped people build knowledge on the spot and be able to make informed decisions about how what we were doing might impact them or what needed to be done, just so that they could really simply gain a lot of understanding during maybe a two hour workshop
8. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 123 and have an informed opinion there on the spot. So that fact of having to help everyone along on this journey of gaining a lot of knowledge really affected how we went about the research process. One big example is that when we were out there engaging with all of these different parts of the industry, we did that group by group in workshops, with people altogether. For example, maybe a group of architects, or a group of developers or builders, and the reason why we did that and met with everyone together was because knowledge was so patchy, doing that meant that everyone in the room brought the bits of knowledge that they had and we could put that together and everyone could understand each other and learn together, basically and form the picture together. Really important when knowledge is sparse. What that did mean, if we are meeting with a group of architects, for example, is we do have direct competitors in the room together. On the one hand, you could think maybe that will make people clam up, they won't want to be as honest, but actually for us, it was really helpful. There were a lot of key decisions that we needed to make about what direction we should head in and having competitors all sitting in a room together and learning together and hearing each others perspectives meant that they were more willing to compromise because they understood where everyone else was coming from and they could all see the bigger picture together. That was a really useful thing for us. The other thing that was really important as well, if everyone's learning together and getting up to speed with content, technical content on embodied carbon on the spot was making sure that people who were - I don't want to say under duress, that is probably too strong but people learning on the spot and trying to get up to speed on the spot might be quiet in terms of sharing their opinions because they are thinking, processing and it is a bit harder to have a strong say on the spot
9. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 124 like that. We made sure to ensure we had a lot of activities, like quiet thinking time, or written brain storming and stuff like that to make sure we got out what everyone had to say, rather than just the people who were more comfortable talking loudly. We went through all of those workshops with hundreds of people from hundreds of organisations and based on that, we were able to cocreate with them 10 proposals for what we thought an embodied carbon measurement tool should look like and on the screen, we have got a blurred example, that is supposed to be blurred because we thought a lot of text might be a bit distracting. Just to give you an idea of what those proposals looked like, they all had a context for why is this one of the 10 most important things to consider, if you are looking at embodied carbon? They all had a short and clear proposal, a simple statement of this is what we intend to do about this and they all had a rationale as well, so it was easy for anyone to go in and see this is why this is here, this is the decision and here is the rationale so I can go back and understand why that is the decision. We co-created those 10 proposals with industry and then we went back and tested them again with everyone to make sure that we had interpreted it correctly, the information that they gave us, and to see if there were any tweaks that we needed to make. I just have here an example of - I mentioned before that we needed to be really careful to make the information that we were sharing really clear and to the point because it is very technical. There is so many issues involved, everyone is learning. This is an example of how we did try to scaffold information to make it super clear. This is one example of the kind of decision that we had to make, it is a little complex because embodied carbon is generally a little complex. Bear with me. One of the things which we needed to decide was, if we are measuring embodied
10. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 125 carbon in a building, how far into the future should we go? The first and most obvious option is once the building is built, we stop and we measure the embodied carbon in all the materials it took to create the building. Or you could go a little bit further into the second one and say, actually, we should measure the embodied carbon in the building, but also the embodied carbon in the use of the building because there is trade-offs that you could be making, for example, if you build with double glazed windows, maybe you need more energy to run the building because it won't be as efficient as triple glazed windows for heating and cooling but double glazed windows will save on your embodied carbon in the build because there is less material. Potentially, you might want to look at the building and use as well. There is a third scenario where you go all the way to the end and say, no, we should even be looking at what happens when the building is demolished? Is it built in a modular way so that it can be taken apart and the bits and pieces can be reused elsewhere, or are we sending a bunch of materials to landfill and what does that look like and what trade-offs are you making when you build it? There is three potential options there. We then tried to say what are the pros and cons of each one and make that crystal clear. You can see on the left just the build is in green. That is the decision we took because it is simple and it is making a big impact now which is what we need, impact ASAP. The further into the future you get, the more you are making predictions, they might be wrong, it is not stuff that is really necessary right now in terms of making a big immediate difference. We used this strategy, like with every decision that we had to make, basically to keep everyone focused on what is this specific simple point? What are the simple options and the pros and cons? We are not discussing a bunch of different things and getting a bunch of different
11. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 126 arguments all mixed up together, it is just what is our decision on this? Later we worry about the details, now as we go through the build, we worry about the details but at least in the initial what direction are we heading in? We know what clear decisions we have to make. Another really important thing that we did when we were going through this discovery phase was, because it is such a technical area, we had one main technical consultant but we also hired two additional technical consultants who we knew to have different views to the first consultant. We did that to make sure that we were uncovering all the potential issues and to make sure the industry trusted us because they could see we are exploring every angle and making sure we can get this right and uncover every technical possibility. Initially, the consultants thought they wouldn't be able to agree with each other, but by creating the proposals with industry, going through and testing them again, keeping on discussing and altering them, we did actually manage to get to a place where everyone broadly agreed. Once we got to that place where everyone broadly agreed, we published a public consultation paper with because we were committed to making sure that anyone that had any skin in the game could give us feedback on this. We got an amazing response to the consultation paper about 85% of the responses that we received were either positive or very positive, which is pretty unheard of for public consultation and it was a real point of celebration for us and also the industry because, at the start of this two years ago, no-one thought we would all be able to agree but it showed we had gone on a journey together, co-designed it and managed to agree. This is just one example of one of the things that someone said in their response to the feedback "Having a consistent, robust approach is integral to starting momentum". Exactly what we are trying to do, start a
12. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 127 momentum in the right direction, yes, definitely a moment of pride for us and also the construction industry broadly who has given us so much of their time throughout this process. I think probably the last thing to mention is as we went through this process, we were focused on what our users needs are, what the industry needs, what is going to be useful for them? But we also had north star objectives for NABERS. What does NABERS need to be able to actually produce this and maintain it over time? If we're not capable of producing and maintaining it, trying to do something that is useful for everyone else is just not going to work out. These are just a couple of examples of those north star objectives that we had. Supporting behaviour change urgently to reduce emissions now and solving the biggest problems now. Having these meant that - of course as you go through the research process and talk to people, it's really easy to find out all this stuff and start going down rabbit holes with "No, we need to worry about this and that" and getting into a lot of details. Having the north star objectives just meant we always had something to look back at and be confident and say actually, no, we don't need to get carried away for sidetracked by these things right now, because is it helping us solve the most urgent problem immediately? If not, let's put it in the later pile and forge ahead. Having our objectives really helped to ensure that we could actually carry through and get the process on the move. That is the lot from me and James at NABERS. I will hand over to Nova and she can tell you what it was like being our design consultant. NOVA FRANKLIN: Thank you, Katie, that was so good. I will talk to you about what else we did. There is a lot on what Katie talked about on how to get people to agree. I will add flavour and detail and talk back to some of the things that Katie covered. I went to the mega meet-up which was
13. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 128 really cool and Alexandra, who was there, and I did this talk and she was like "You're making it sound too easy". I just want to note that this is a simplified version of what we did and whenever you are making huge change, it is a complex layering of things that you do that gets you to the end point. It is not one thing, it is all of the things, it is everything, everywhere all at once. How do you get people to agree? I always - pretty much whether I am working on a social problem or a sustainability problem - start with setting some rules of engagement but I never tell the people they are rules because who wants to follow a rule? I just said it as here is a guideline for today. There are some that I always cover. The first one is always be kind. We want to leave here today feeling like we're better friends than when we came in. We know there are people in the room who won't necessarily agree with each other and that is OK, but nobody wants to feel bad at the end of this. Keep that in mind as you interact with each other. Then I love it when people disagree, it is really helpful and you can see we had the three consultants who had diametrically opposed views. One guy at the end said "Nobody punched each other even though we don't agree". I have had two people in a workshop sitting next to each other with bright red faces but having a civil conversation because we did this. Then we asked people to make space for others. I am noisy and I talk a lot. If you are like me, then wait for others to speak first and then they will probably say what you would say anyway and then fill the space. Katie talked about the last one about allowing time for people to write down their thoughts and make notes before we had a conversation. I say we will do that but you will be tempted to talk but that is quiet time, so keep it quiet during that time. I set those expectations and we did this on that project in all of the interactions we had, it worked really well,
14. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 129 nobody got punched. The other thing is to give everybody effected, everybody who has skin in the game, who would care about this thing, a voice. That doesn't mean - there is thousands and thousands of people in the building industry, this doesn't mean we have to talk to every single person. We have to talk to people who represent all of the different types of people. Katie has spoken through some of the different people, who they were. There is people who make the decisions and they are the ones who would buy a NABERS tool. There is project teams and they were like let's not make this building so big and then there will be less emissions and builders and there are others along the way. Policy makers. We really hope that the policy makers will look at this and go "You should do this on your building". Give everyone effected a voice. Make ideas easy to digest. I love that picture because there is like nothing extra in it. It is simple and paired back and that is the task, right. If you come and chat to me about embodied carbon later, I might blow your brain up by mistake. I will try not to but this stuff is super complex. How do you make it so people can have an opinion and when it is all new and they don't know? One of the things is stripped back language. Take out every word that doesn't need to be there. Put your hand up if you have ever trained to be a yoga teacher? That is me. OK, good. (LAUGHTER) I can't do it. I did pass the exam but you have to just use so few words to tell the person to move their body. It is really hard. And so that is really important when you are writing something, it is difficult for people to understand, more words blow up their brains, so get rid of a lot of the words. Stripping back the ideas as well. We had nine proposals and one of them was a road map, so 10 proposals. In the beginning, a lot of them were intertwined and we had to get to a point where each one was like this is a thing and it relates to all the other stuff but we had to pair it back
15. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 130 so people could understand it and make an informed decision on it. That was really hard. You saw when Katie showed the blurred out, on purpose, proposal but there was a context, so people don't know, tell them a bit about the thing, then show them the thing you are asking them to decide on and we had a rationale which is why have we gone this way? Because you all told us this is the way we need today go and that helped people go you have had that feedback and I don't need to give that feedback and I get where you have gone to there. Make ideas easy to digest. We started with a list of six common needs or principles that everybody agreed on. Even though there was a lot of disagreement in this space, we knew if we started with things that everybody wanted, we could move from there and some examples have some of those things is you would not be surprised to hear if you are building a tool to reduce embodied emission, you want it to be impactful. Nobody wants to do this thing for fun, it is not fun. For example, you want it to be streamlined so everybody has a job and they have hundreds of things they do in their jobs in measuring the embodied emissions or embodied carbon is a small part of their job. Make this thing go in and do it as fast and accurately as possible. Hook it up to other systems and then you can come out and do something else. It needs to be streamlined. Everyone agreed on that one. It had to be consistent. There is no point two people going in and measuring the same building and going "I think you have X amount of carbon coming out of that building" and someone else go "No, it is Y amount". That won't work. A set of principles that everybody agreed on was a great place to start and we could use those principles. Sarah had a similar chart that she used, so it is like this is what we all agree on and if we need to make some decisions, so this is an option and this is an option, we can then compare how good our decisions are against the stuff
16. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 131 we agree on. If we are thinking about which emissions should we measure? We are going just measure the ones from the building, is that impactful? What if we keep measuring more stuff, is that more impactful? Yes, and you can then take an average and go where shall we go? It is not as simple as having one green and one orange. Across these things, these different levels of goodness changed. That is not a real example, I made that up. That is from another example. Indicatively, go from where everybody agrees and use that to evaluate your options on which way you might go forward. Listen and evolve. Everybody has said that today. Everybody does that. There is a term called console told, where you decide what you want to do and you go here it is, cool, great, bye and you go build it. That is not this. We had people whose whole businesses or whole industries could be at stake if we measured this in the wrong way because people wouldn't want to buy their product. Maybe people would buy lots of concrete and not lots of wood if we got this wrong. It is really important to get that right. We kept going back and going that's a show stopper, what if we do this? Then we ended up with a comment like this at the end which is "Thank you for adjusting this based on our concerns. It's not perfect but I can live with it". That is a paraphrase. That was someone who, at the beginning, we were worried was going to block the whole thing. That was just amazing when that person said that. That wasn't the punching person either. The other thing is to make a start and build from there. This is a big thing, you want to get rid of as much carbon from the atmosphere as you can. The reality is if you don't make a start because you make something that is just so complex, you can't reduce any carbon. We really did take a decision to make a start and build from there. We had nine paired back minimum viable ideas that created a product but we also had this thing,
17. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 132 and I don't know how it happened but it ended up being a massive get out of jail free card for us. We had a road map, so we had - here is where we are going to start. We will do these things but it is really not perfect, it is not going to hit everything for everyone and there is more carbon that we can capture in the future when we expand. What we are committing to is in 18-24 months, we will have used some of these decisions and these are the ones we will review. People can go OK, so I didn't get exactly what I want for my industry here, potentially, but I get that in 18-24 months we are going to have another crack at it and you have heard me and I appreciate that you have heard me and I can see that you have. That was an amazing learning on this project. We wanted to leave lots of time for questions. We got about 10 minutes. There is a stooge in the audience who has a question in case you don't have any. I think you will have questions, I am sure of it. That is not the stooge. She got the briefing of "Don't go first". >> Really interesting talk. My question is about that tradeoff that you mentioned with the glazed windows, like did you do - where did you go with that? I am a huge fan of the idea of double glazing. Is there a solution that doesn't penalise double glazing for embodied carbon? NOVA FRANKLIN: Really great question. We did hear a lot of people go "But if you only focus on the embodied carbon, the durability of the building, you will make other compromises and that will make the building worse to run later on" and there were people who said that but they weren't the people who made the decision on what the building - how the building would be built. It was often people around that and when we actually said to the people like the builders and architects "Is this a thing and will this happen?" And they were like "No, it won't happen because
18. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 133 everybody cares about reducing the carbon up-front but they also care about how the building will run" and it will be a sensible decisions will be made. JAMES ELKS: That was probably the wrong conference for the double glazing question, firstly, but we used those sort of principles again to actually measure that and see, again, where should we place this? How much of an issue is this? Also the road map. One thing that is in the road map is looking at that exact issue, because of our amazing framework, are people now building cardboard buildings because they have super low embodied carbon, but cost lots to operate because they are made out of cardboard? We will be looking at that kind of stuff in the future. KATIE EYLES: In terms of the requirements in our building code, it would actually be illegal to do something that is highly inefficient anyway, so yay. JAMES ELKS: This is a good question for design and I think it is the right question. NOVA FRANKLIN: That idea of ask the right people who know. Sometimes people go - when you ask them something they go "Old people wouldn't like that" and you when you go and ask someone who is an older person and it is like "I love that idea and I would love to give that a red hot go" there is a lesson in that as well. >> I am just wondering, in terms of tradeoff, where does the role of aesthetics come into this? This kind of discussion or conversation, because in the past we have had buildings that have been made with
19. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 134 massive amounts of embellishment and adornment. In terms of the tradeoff and scale of functional, sustainable and also really good to look at for communities, etc., is that something that is considered? JAMES ELKS: Yes, and no. Whilst we think the framework is really important and it is, it is not the be-all and end-all. So one thing we had to be clear about was our framework is about measuring and comparing embodied carbon, going back to what is the actual thing that we are trying to do and there are other people out there who will look at things like what does good architecture look like? What is the function of this building? They will make the trade-offs and we have seen project teams and builders say I don't care what the embodied carbon is and I want the embellishment and that will happen and other people are like I want super low embodied carbon and I want the cool architectural stuff and clever engineering and architectural people will figure out how to deliver that. >> I want to build on from that question. As a regulator, part of the government, you can then decide if it is not a three star, four star rating thing, it can't be built, maybe, or you can't have a certain type of tenants. I know for government services they won't go into a four or five star minimum, so you start getting nothing but big square buildings that is the lowest embodied carbon that looks shit. You can't really say we don't decide that, we just talk about the capturing thing but if your policies and your regulations link then to actual policies that say OK, you, Mr Builder, are going to choose to build a four to five star thing because otherwise you won't get these tenants which is very lucrative, do you know what I mean?
20. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 135 JAMES ELKS: Does anyone have an answer that is short? NOVA FRANKLIN: The manufacturing industry is moving on this stuff and you can now get low emissions concrete and they are starting to make products that are lower emitting. What the people who are commissioned the buildings and the builders will do is our system will help them to see which products are lower carbon and they will have a number of decisions to make. They need their building to look good to get it tenanted and the they need it to be low carbon. They will make trade-offs but the world is about trade-offs. They are already making trade-offs because of dollars, or because of other things. This is just one of the pieces of information that helps them to make a really good decision. As I said, it is really encouraging because we are starting to see and we will see a lot more low embodied emission building products into the future. >> My question is in the same trend of that. You have created this sort of star system. Were there any proposals in this project that you have participated in where, are there any repercussions of building not following the calculations and were there any proposals that were sent as a result of this? JAMES ELKS: The short answer is no, because we are not the government, we are not the regulator, to be specific, I guess. NABERS, what we are really good at is measuring how efficient buildings are for the different sustainability things and then saying if that is good or bad. We are not the people who will be able to write tickets and be like it is too much embodied carbon. No, that wasn't part of our proposal but, yes, I expect other parts of government will be considering policy around that.
21. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 136 NOVA FRANKLIN: We had those people in the room who might make those policies in the future but they haven't made them now. Does the NSW point to NABERS - but it is not saying go look over there and you have to have that star rating but one day in the future, they probably will. I hope they will. >> My question is totally different to all that stuff. I am curious about how you ended up engaging a designer to do a big chunk of this work as opposed to the industry consultants or someone outside the design space? JAMES ELKS: That is a reasonably easy answer. Typically, NABERS, in its history, would convene a panel of experts and they would be engineers and really smart people and we would make our way through to this decision, but one of my - one of the things I brought into the role, I am only a few years into this role is saying "No, when we do projects we have to speak to people who are impacted to figure out what should we be doing and should we be playing in this space"? It was unclear whether we were the right people to do that and we found a pretty decent design consultancy to help us. NOVA FRANKLIN: Pretty decent, I guess. >> I have a question and I have an apartment building which was built seven years ago and it has greenhouse - like the science - this building is green. What they did, they didn't install half of the ACs on the whole buildings, especially on the sun side. This is a green label and then people in a couple of months when they get the keys, they install their own ACs. What I am thinking about, if you created the stars system, and these
22. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 137 buildings will achieve like five stars but in two months it is like no, guys, right now you are one star because of these issues. How can you suggest how the builders - how to prevent this situation in the future? KATIE EYLES: Correct me if I am wrong, James. JAMES ELKS: Firstly, that is a sucky situation, sorry. KATIE EYLES: It comes down to the difference between policy and regulation and the rating tool. The rating tool is a handy way to measure and know what the situation is and then, in terms of regulation and what is actually required in buildings, those are other rules that could be made which can make use of rating tools. Do you guys have other stuff? NOVA FRANKLIN: Yes. We did spend a lot of our conversations going what could go wrong? If we measure in this way what are the perverse consequences? Some of the things were the building won't be as durable, so make it out of matchsticks, the building won't be able to be repurposed. When you build a building, sometimes you want to move the car park out and put something else in or move the stairs or add extra layers, so people were worried about those things. Our tool at the moment does not address those things but we are doing some background calculations to see the effect of how of what is going on and we can monitor that and then we can adjust if we need to. Is that fair enough? KATIE EYLES: The road map addresses that, yes. STEVE BATY: Thank you all. (APPLAUSE)