Advocacy
Summary
Everything Lend Lease Corporation does, and our capacity to meet corporate objectives and achieve commercial success, is in some way impacted by government legislation, policy and activity – we work across highly regulated sectors including workplace relations, environmental compliance, occupational health and safety, corporations law, taxation law, aged care regulation, to name but a few.
Our operations and commercial success are also impacted by many other stakeholders, including industry, the media, and most importantly the communities in which we work.
Lend Lease has a history of calling for change. In its earliest days, founder Dick Dusseldorp worked with government, unions and clients to advocate for safer work practices, more flexible working conditions, employer-led superannuation contributions (before the legislation), and the opportunity for employees to share in the company profits.
Dusseldorp overlooked competitive tensions, realising that sharing best practice amongst competitors would lead to lifting industry standards.
Our people continue to emulate that philosophy with the development of Lend Lease led programs such as BuildSafe which started in New York in response to the high number of safety incidents on work sites. This program has spread across the US and BuildSafe Dubai was launched in 2008. We will continue to advocate the development of BuildSafe around the world, bringing the industry together with government and health and safety agencies to make worker safety a priority.
While Lend Lease has been working towards improved environmental performance for some years, developing our response to climate change has taken on real urgency and we are partnering with some of the world’s leading thinkers on the built environment, climate change and sustainability to ensure our sector makes a meaningful contribution to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.
According to the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group (http://www.c40cities.org), cities and urban areas consume 75 per cent of the world's energy and produce up to 75 per cent of its greenhouse gas emissions. Buildings alone contribute up to 80% of greenhouse gas emissions in cities.
Our response to the climate change challenge stems from the premise that we first need to fully understand our carbon footprint to address it. We are driving energy efficiency improvements through all our projects, offices and assets and we have ramped up our measurement and reporting systems to ensure we have benchmarks against which to improve. Not just our own benchmarks but industry wide measurement that will monitor and calibrate the activity of the whole sector.
That’s why we advocate for one industry standard and have worked closely with partners and stakeholders over the past two years on the development of international greenhouse gas emissions reporting standards to be adopted by global reporting frameworks and governments around the world.
Regulation and legislation in our key areas of operation has already taken force and, as in the food industry which has for years been required to disclose information on its products to ensure the long term health of consumers, buildings will also be required to disclose information such as energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, water use and waste. In some places they already are. Governments around the world are imposing regulation quickly and the industry must have the benchmarks and standard reporting in place to address its impacts.
We have developed a carbon calculator that will be used by the world’s first climate positive precinct developments (clintonfoundation.org/ cci) – 16 projects around the world in different climates and environments - standardising the measurement and reporting of energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions for the first time at a precinct level and using it to develop precinct wide energy, water and waste solutions.
Our advocacy strategy is based on a combination of prevention and cure: a better built environment means working towards new rated green buildings and refurbishing old buildings to meet green building rating standards and reduce emissions. We recognise that we must turn this into a business opportunity to ensure the sustainability of Lend Lease businesses in the new carbon market.
We have developed a solution, in partnership with environmental engineer WSP Lincolne Scott and its specialist sustainable design service group, Built Ecology that will drive deep, fast, cost-effective emissions cuts in non-residential buildings. The Efficient Building Scheme is a sector specific cap and trade scheme which will also deliver jobs, innovation, productivity and health benefits, while increasing asset values, yields and returns. Hear more about the Efficient Building Scheme by clicking here.
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