Editor’s Note

As we step into 2025, in this, our annual Awards issue, we celebrate significant achievements in the sustainable building environment over the past year, and the inspiring innovations and trends that continue to shape our future.

Our editorial advisory board has grown to include some new faces: Anelisa Keke, Brian Unsted, Andre Harms, Ilse Swanepoel and Yogesh Gooljar (page 4). Although far from new to South Africa’s green building sphere, their input and expertise is a valuable and welcome addition.

In November last year, GBCSA’s extremely well-attended 17th Green Building Convention – themed Zero+: Net Zero Today, Climate Positive Tomorrow – delivered much food for thought, with high-quality content from leaders in this space, as well as lively panel discussions and engaging conversations. We lead this issue with a bumper section on the annual GBCSA Leadership Awards, bestowed at the annual Convention Gala Dinner. As the sustainable building movement grows, so too have the awards categories: GBCSA has included a few more accolades to “extend the acknowledgement beyond the AP community to include property owners, sector leaders and broader project teams”. Read about the awards – and their very deserving recipients – on page 10.

Moving further afield, WorldGBC weighs in on COP29, held in Azerbaijan in November last year. Turn to page 38 for more on their call for governments to #BeBoldOnBuildings in their updated national climate action plans (due this month under the Paris Agreement), and their take on the summit’s successes and potentials for further development ahead of COP30 in Brazil later this year.

Liberty Two Degrees’ Brian Unsted was also fortunate to attend COP29, through the Alliance for Climate Action (ACA) SA, and shares his insights into, and experiences at, the global event on page 42.

Making a difference always begins at home, and as GBCSA’s own Georgina Smit, Head of Technical and Executive Director, puts it, “You keep yourself on the cutting edge of best practice only by hanging around the best practitioners.” For Georgina, connecting with our green community helps shape her strategic thinking (page 44).

Add a healthy dose of enthusiasm and creativity to innovation in the sustainability arena, and you’ll be describing the Greenovate Award winners for 2024 – on page 48, we present the top young students who are paving the way for a better future.

Annually, the South African Property Owners Association (SAPOA) Convention brings together the foremost real estate leaders in South Africa to deliberate on the industry’s future, exchange insights, and explore new trends. A highlight is the SAPOA Awards, which honour excellence and innovation in the property industry. You’ll find all the 2024 winners on page 54.

As we move into the upcoming year, we’re eager to watch the boundaries of sustainable building expand, delve into environmental challenges and opportunities, and share remarkable achievements such as these with you – here’s to helping our people and planet thrive.

Mariola Fouché
Editor

Chair’s Corner

I would like to take this opportunity to wish all our readers and members of the green building community a prosperous new year, and I hope 2025 brings you the very best.

As 2025 dawned, we awoke to the news of the devastating fires ravaging Southern California. Fires across Los Angeles have destroyed almost 12 000 structures across 155 square kilometres, taking the lives of at least 25 people.

As with all disasters of this nature, people want answers and there has been much inquiry and speculation, and many accusations have been flung. While climate change is part of the explanation, one analysis that caught my attention was by historian Victor Davis Hansen, in his podcast on “The Daily Signal”1, where he described it as a “systems collapse”. He listed a number of systemic failures, but two struck me. The first is that California refused to do controlled burns to create fire breaks for both human health and environmental reasons, thus impacting their ability to fight fires with practices honed over decades. The second was the draining of the 443 million-litre Santa Ynez reservoir to do repairs in the middle of fire season, leaving the firefighters without water in the hydrants above the Pacific Palisades.
The reference to a system collapse reminded me of systems thinking, a course of business study I dabbled with some years ago. Systems thinking is a comprehensive analytical approach to understanding and resolving complex problems. It differs from regular analytical methods that study the individual components of a system in that it involves studying all the components, their interrelationship and their feedback loops within the given system. The fundamental approach is such that you can apply it to any process, industry or domain.

So, Victor Davis Hansen’s use of system collapse coupled with my dabbling in systems thinking got me pondering the challenge of our municipal infrastructure. A new study from Sol Plaatje University2 identifies several components of the challenges our municipalities face, such as funding allocations, under-capacity – specifically in managerial roles, political pressures and complex bureaucratic structures, to name a few.

If you think of municipal infrastructure as a system, and the components highlighted above as interlinked with, or interrelated to, each other, the system is designed or meant to deliver an outcome – in this case, a sustainable infrastructure capable of delivering appropriate municipal services to its residents. Then, it is helpful to consider that this system operates and exists in a given context. Context, in this case, can be thought of as a particular ideology. Victor David Hansen went on to contend “that anytime an ideology trumps empiricism, meritocracy or investigatory efforts or just disinterested inquiry, and knowledge, then you’re going to have a disaster”.

I contend that one of the failings of the system is that our local leadership is stuck in an old ideology, or “statist orthodoxy”3 that does not offer them what we need to face a challenging future. Admittedly not easy, but we need to change the ideology, orthodoxy or context the system is trying to operate in, to improve our outcomes. For sure, you can make changes to the components of the system to generate improved outcomes, but I contend that changing the context in which the system operates acts on all the components in the system, resulting in quicker improved outcomes.

If we are going to halt the decline of municipal infrastructure and deliver municipal services to all of South Africa’s residents, then our leadership needs a new paradigm, which is seeing the private sector as committed partners to a growth-seeking and development-delivering South Africa. The article where I found the useful words “statist orthodoxy” highlighted that it was this change in attitude towards business that unleashed growth in China and India, as well as the idea that “faster growth is the best way to cut poverty and ensure that countries have the resources to deal with climate change”.

André Theys
GBCSA Chairman