The built environment and sustainability

The dictionary definition of “sustainability” is an adjective that implies “able to continue over a period of time”. However, the term “sustainability” is increasingly being considered synonymous with its prefixed descriptions of “environmental (or “ecological”) sustainability”. However, the impact of environmental sustainability goes well beyond that – a real estate development can be “sustainable” commercially and from a long-term TCO perspective if it addresses the other definition of the term: “causing, or made in a way that causes, little or no damage to the environment and therefore able to continue for a long time”.

This assertion isn’t very far-fetched. Take an area like energy management for example. While they vary based on source energy costs from one geography to another, in a typical building, energy/utility costs are 30-40% of total facility running costs. Energy management is also a key determinant of a building’s carbon footprint. By rationalizing energy management, asset owners can realize the dual benefits of rationalized operating expenses (and, by extension, TCO and return on investment of the asset) and contribute to a reduced carbon footprint. 

Here’s an insight to put this into perspective: Edward Mazria is an American architect and the founder of a think tank called Architecture 2030 which promotes thinking on new-age approaches to minimize the ecological impact of buildings. There are three points of view presented by Mazria that indicate the scale of ecological impact from buildings:
a. In the United States, it is estimated that buildings account for as much as 48% of all greenhouse gas emissions
b. 40% of this total consumption can be attributed just to building operations. That’s heating, lighting, cooling, and hot water
c. Some larger developments in cities (or what he calls “Oversized Footprint Buildings”) have a disproportionately higher ecological impact. The example he gives is from New York City, where “only 2% of buildings are larger than 50,000 square feet, yet this small percentage is responsible for nearly half of the city’s building sector carbon emissions” . This is an important statistic in the context of designing megaprojects to support the world’s sustainability agenda

Throughout my FM career, I have approached sustainability not as an added cost, but as the core enabler of smart living. As I continue to work on diverse projects across commercial, infrastructure, logistics, residential, leisure and mixed-use asset classes, my aim is to get more people to support the main objective of the facility management profession: solidifying our effect on projects, cities and a country's economy. Therefore, if we direct our attention to megaprojects, we can multiply the impact of FM.