Making the Business Case for Sustainability

About this course.

Sustainability now makes commercial sense because the forces that once made it optional have hardened into real market and financial pressures. Energy and other input costs matter to the bottom line; clients, tenants and investors are asking for it and paying attention to it; finance is increasingly linked to it; regulation is tightening; and the physical effects of a changing climate are showing up as insurance, warranty and resilience costs. For a construction or property business, treating sustainability as purely an environmental cause misses the point that it has become a straightforward question of competitiveness, cost and risk.

The starting position is that buildings and construction have a very large footprint. The sector is among the biggest users of energy, water and raw materials in Australia and one of the largest producers of waste, and buildings account for a substantial share of national energy use and emissions across their lives. Anything with a footprint that large is, by definition, a large pool of cost — and where there is cost, there is opportunity to reduce it. A building that uses less energy and water costs less to run; a project that wastes less material costs less to build. The environmental logic and the commercial logic point in the same direction.