Why the GREEN CONVERSATION matters
Head of Technical and Executive Director at Green Building South Africa Georgina Smit shares her secrets on how she uses connecting with the green community to shape her strategic thinking.
Last year was a year of flux in the green space. It’s not just the climate that is changing around us, but how business is – and will be – done in the property sector.
Many of these changes have been for the better, like seeing South Africa’s Climate Change Bill being signed into law. Some changes are less positive: 2024 was the hottest year on global record, rising 1.54 degrees above pre-industrial levels.
So how do we know what to trust as a guide to future trends, and trailblazer ideas in such a climate of change?
Let me share my secret for that.
2024 was a real year of connection with the green community. From viewing our country’s work on an international stage at the World Green Building Council Leadership Forum in London, taking a deep dive into specialist sectors of our space at Decorex, or the SAIV conference in the Drakensberg, to simply dropping some eaves while walking the floor at GBCSA’s annual Green Building Convention, last year gave me so many moments to listen and to learn.
I tend to hold myself to as high a professional and intellectual standard as possible. If I’m not working with the keenest ideas, the newest data, or the latest market sentiments, I’m not content. The secret that I’ve found so far in my journey through the sustainability sector is that you keep yourself on the cutting edge of best practice only by hanging around the best practitioners.
It’s never been more apparent that South Africa’s green story has to be everyone’s story. It’s a genuine privilege to be part of this green community, and the sustainability stories that GBCSA supports being written. Here’s to a new year of listening and learning from each other.
These are the top three most important ideas that I’ve drawn from the wealth of green expertise I connected with in 2024:
1. You can afford to go green!
Both leading local players in the sustainable finance space and the plummeting green construction cost premium have demonstrated in many ways that affordable green is no longer a fairytale, but a fact. It costs less than ever to upgrade a project to a green project due to the maturing green construction industry locally, and key banking products and finance accelerators are coming on line to help close the small gap that remains. Ignoring green options because they seem like they’ll be expensive is firmly in yesterday’s playbook.
2. The best climate defence is good climate design.
Architects and energy modellers have long been making the argument for passive buildings that keep their interiors comfortable, ideally eliminating or limiting the need for energy spent on heating or cooling. In our updated climate context, this is more a matter of physical and financial survival than it is of market leadership. A building incorporating passive design to keep the people inside it safe from outside temperatures high enough to be a safety risk – even when extreme weather events have disrupted the local infrastructure needed to run an HVAC system – is a climate-resilient building. A climate-resilient building is a building that can be safely invested in, and underwritten, without the risk of stranding, as our systems of risk and valuation calibrate themselves for a warming world.
3. Climate leadership is rooted in the local.
Talking to so many change-makers at events last year highlighted that we do have the homegrown skills, passion and solutions to effectively tackle climate change. Together, we can make every building a green building in South Africa. Critically, we need to be more cognisant of this with the plethora of international and global initiatives that keep on being created and, unfortunately, often try to “reinvent the wheel”, only to detract from existing solutions and add to market confusion. I think the climate leaders of the future are those who take more people along for the ride on this journey, by learning and leading through doing.
