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S3E8 - Global Sustainability w/ Joan Ko
34 Plays1 month ago
Do you have someone to call when you don't know the answer?
On carbon?
On Nature Based Solutions?
On sustainable finance?
On circularity?
With so many sustainability regulations and requirements, it's impossible for one person to know it all. But it takes hours to read up on these topics and, even then, do you qualify as an expert?
When we spoke with Joan Ko, she suggested the simplest answer:
Phone a friend.
Today, your network is your most valuable tool. If you don't know, you know who to call. That's the value we add as knowledge professionals.
Sure, AI can give you a summary, a crash course. But you can get far more history and context from a five minute phone call with an expert, and that's what matters.
To make AI more useful, maybe it should tell us who to call? Right now it sends you to a website or Reddit. We need to make people a priority, and that means people who know.
👉 We'd love to hear your feedback, share your questions or comments below.
👉 Like & Subscribe so you won't miss out on our upcoming episodes!
👉 Keep up to date with the Infrastructure Sustainability Council:
Website: https://www.iscouncil.org/
LinkedIn: / infrastructure-sustainability-council
#podcast #infrastructure #sustainability #buildingtomorrow
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Transcript
Market Failures and Sustainability
00:00:00
Speaker
Sustainability problems are market failures. They're market failures. So the answer is market correction.
Podcast Introduction and Guest
00:00:16
Speaker
Welcome back to Infrastructure Connections, the podcast where we explore what makes sustainable infrastructure work. Brought to you by the Infrastructure Sustainability Council, I'm your host, Seth Scott, and today we'll be speaking with Joan Koh.
00:00:30
Speaker
Joan is the climate and sustainability leader for Arup. She is responsible for scaling up Arup's actions on climate, biodiversity, and social inclusion. She's also the deputy chair of the Department of Energy's Sustainability Fund.
00:00:42
Speaker
She holds a master's in engineering for sustainable development.
Networking for Sustainability Trends
00:00:47
Speaker
Hi, Joan. Welcome to the show. Hello. I'm very glad to be here. Glad to have you on.
00:00:53
Speaker
This is going to be a very wide-ranging conversation. um Researching your work, i was struck by how many different topics you touch The environment um used to be just ESG. Now it's biodiversity, sustainable finance, circularity, decarbonization.
00:01:08
Speaker
Sustainability just seems to grow every year. How do you personally manage to keep up with all of those trends and then translate them for your role?
00:01:17
Speaker
When I was um managing projects, I used to read these trends and I'd bookmark them in my browser back in the old days. um i don't have Personally, I don't have time to do that anymore, to do a lot of that reading myself. I'm sorry to all the people writing really excellent things.
00:01:37
Speaker
ah So, I rely on my network. So, I really rely on knowing people who have coverage of a domain and being able to phone a friend at any time.
00:01:48
Speaker
That's what I have to keep active is like my connection and my network because my little brain cannot hold it all. and and you know Maybe that's my job now being ah explicitly like me my job, being connecting people.
00:02:02
Speaker
But for anyone who whose topics are overwhelming, don't feel like you need to get across it yourself.
Human Connection in Innovation
00:02:10
Speaker
Get a good network of people. Yeah, I see that's especially true now that a lot of people are working from home and they're a little bit more isolated from that interaction with individuals. um I find that networking events, just five minutes talking to somebody, I'll learn a lot more about that particular topic than maybe hours of internet searching. I find that extremely valuable. That network is critical.
00:02:32
Speaker
And even if you do, I mean, Copilot makes internet searching and chat GPT a lot easier. But... I would feel a lot more comfortable in an internal, like if you're in an organization where you need to get across the breadth of things, I would feel happier if our AI tools told you who to talk to.
00:02:55
Speaker
Yes. Yeah, because I think the, you know, the goal is in the gaps and overlaps and you need to find, you need to engage the human to work out what that goal is.
00:03:07
Speaker
That's something I'm always pushing is that it's the who that matters and it's the who that's usually missing in any kind of analysis or case study or other kind of description of a project. It's not so much what did you accomplish, but who did it, how did they do it, and who do I talk to to replicate those results?
Joan's Career Path in Environmental Engineering
00:03:25
Speaker
m I think we're still humans, so you feel a sense of comfort if you've talked to someone who's done it before or you trust that person to tell you what the limits of you know, current knowledge or their knowledge is.
00:03:40
Speaker
And I think a lot of what we do in sustainability is change. A lot of change is leadership, which means you need to kind of make new stories that don't exist, that make sense for people and you have to do it That's a human to human exercise.
00:03:57
Speaker
Tell us what your passion for sustainability started as and what's driving you today. I'm Chinese, first generation Chinese, which means that and when it came time to pick a high school, ah university career, I wanted to do teaching in English literature.
Global Sustainability Solutions at Arup
00:04:17
Speaker
My parents said, maybe you should do engineering or dentistry or law. So so I ended up choosing environmental engineering, which is quite, it was quite a new, um specialism in but in engineering at that time because it could connect to my um interest in telling human stories and also have that um technical depth to it. So that I thought, like let's let's be a niche in that technical environment place where it's very human orientated. Aspects of engineering.
00:04:57
Speaker
Yeah, I'm glad you did. And now you're working on a global stage. um So tell us a little bit about your current role and what do you feel that you see that's different between what you saw working in just Australia and now working globally? a lot of my job is making sure that best of acceleration happens. So I take a very high view, um take a top view, trying to see the patterns. So if I see really ah interesting patterns Green roof incentives in Seattle, then bring them to Melbourne as quickly as I can.
00:05:33
Speaker
We have been doing work on power stations in Australia. We're currently moving that over to Europe. So all of that um connection making. In terms of specific levers I have, Arup has a strategy.
00:05:46
Speaker
um We've set aside investment for that strategy and my job is to pick winners. So when I see those good things, I think that needs more you know light, nutrients, growth, fertilizer platform, then I funnel our resources and attention and people into that opportunity. And then concurrently, I say, look, that maybe not so much. Maybe the timing's wrong. Maybe some geopolitical issues might have cropped up. We're going to gradually remove the light and the fertilizer and the curation from that area. So it's ah it's a kind of soft but still very directed way for us to find the good things and then accelerate them.
00:06:23
Speaker
and then try to let go of the things so that we can focus really well. So that's the job within
Innovative Practices and Lessons
00:06:29
Speaker
Arup. And then what when I speak to people outside of Arup, they rely on me as being like the Google of Arup. So if they need something, I can quickly direct them to the right people at the right place.
00:06:41
Speaker
Yeah. So what do you see as solutions out there that have that you've seen internationally or that other countries are doing really well that you think you could bring back to Australia? One of the ones I'm really interested in is voluntary nature markets. so in the UK, Arup has been setting up voluntary nature markets. The governance of those, we've come at it from a digital point of view, a modern market instead of everyone walking every single tree and scurric of land.
00:07:11
Speaker
to provide confidence to investors that investments are being made. We're using digital modeling and other um crediting and integrity mechanisms. And in the UK, that's been working particularly for like nutrient management, stormwater management, trying to work out to the extent those sorts of things can transfer to Australia.
00:07:32
Speaker
um Everyone from our experience, You get a certain way thinking about and drawing it on paper, but it's not until you actually do it that you can work out the real issues. So um the people who are most interested in Australia are the water authorities. The people – and New Zealand's the same. We've talked to water authorities in New Zealand. They know that the best use of the land isn't planting trees to sequester carbon.
00:08:03
Speaker
But if that's the only financial incentive, then there's a lot of pressure to do inappropriate use of land for carbon.
International Infrastructure Strategies
00:08:11
Speaker
Wouldn't it be great if you could see what the actual value of that land is from you know development and nature and stormwater management and um ah nutrient management and kind of stack all those values so that you can get really the full value.
00:08:28
Speaker
ah full value of that land funded in multiple different ways. So that's the kind of idea. That's one solution that I'm quite interested in. Another one which Australia is exporting to Europe in particular at the moment is we've gone through a huge infrastructure investment across the nation.
00:08:47
Speaker
And most of our government clients have been quite canny in thinking these aren't just like city shaping, they're actually economy shaping investments.
00:08:59
Speaker
And if I can use the billions of dollars of purchasing power of these projects, I can signal to the market what I want done. And so Australia's been very sophisticated about the evolution of the materials and the supply chain they want through the big infrastructure builds of Australia.
00:09:20
Speaker
and The ability to cross, you know to engage with materials providers between projects and to share innovation and risk. Australia's been doing that very well, moving that over to Europe where most of these materials providers are headquartered anyway, is also something that we should be very proud of and be very proactive about doing.
00:09:42
Speaker
oh that's good. That's really good. What are the some of the projects that's really impressed you with their outcomes or originality and sustainability?
Reducing Carbon in Engineering
00:09:51
Speaker
Oh, the Copenhagen Metro. This is an amazing story. It's on the website, although you don't really get the feel for it until you get someone telling the story. In Denmark, the Copenhagen Metro authorities, Metroringen, sorry, I don't speak Danish, um wants to halve the embodied carbon of an underground metro.
00:10:15
Speaker
They set that as an ambition the Arup team, that's a real that's a really difficult task. wish we woho But it was a whole of team question.
00:10:28
Speaker
And it took, I think it took, i could I'm not understanding this, one mechanical engineer to think about why are the service voids underneath the tracks this big? all right.
00:10:41
Speaker
And it was because they needed it that big for people to access those service voids. And then when they looked at it and looked at um whether not in the existing metro people were actually going down there, they weren't. So we're able to negotiate them not to be for human safety.
00:10:57
Speaker
so And that removes the volume. It removed the need for the fire systems and that removed that. And it kind of got smaller and smaller. Oh, it doesn't need to be under. It could be over now. And suddenly, instead of going down like three, so you know, many, many depths, they were able to lift the whole line up one level. which save saves a huge amount of tunneling, staircases, services, and the whole line has been moved up.
00:11:23
Speaker
And they designed out the carbon by questioning. so but but the client allowed them to go look for that solution. So we get told this story.
00:11:34
Speaker
So it's not a sustainability consultant who is trying to make efficiency gains everywhere. We get told this story from, look look at the carbon that we saved for the client. But I'm like, you've missed a trick.
00:11:46
Speaker
How much did you save in money terms? So I'd love to hear from
Creative Use of Materials in Construction
00:11:51
Speaker
them. How much money and time i'm security of program did you so did did you realize through that?
00:11:58
Speaker
Do you think it would have come up in the design otherwise without that sustainability component consideration? No, because it drew innovation, right? Something needs to drive innovation.
00:12:10
Speaker
Like it could, it's a hard question. Someone needs to ask a hard question so that we don't go back to copy paste. And so who, yeah where does that innovation come from? Well, one of those initiatives that I saw that you had on the website was that, um I mean, I like to have a cup of coffee in the morning, but I would have never guessed that those coffee grounds could be used to make biochar as a supplementary cementitious material.
00:12:34
Speaker
Tell us a little bit about that process and how that came around. It's one of those ones where like, I don't know, but I know the right person, Seth. But but um that is a research project that RMIT and University of Melbourne have been doing.
00:12:51
Speaker
RMIT and University of Melbourne, look at coffee grounds, Melbourne, the land of coffee. This is going to be meaningful and fun. Let's bring it into our projects for concrete cementitious material. yeah We could definitely use that here in New Zealand. We've got a lot of coffee.
00:13:06
Speaker
Oh, yeah. yeah It's going to smell great, isn't it? That tunnel will smell amazing. I'd like to think so. I'll wake you up in the morning commute just going through the tunnel.
Arup's Emission Reduction Goals
00:13:18
Speaker
yeah So between that um that question about carbon savings in that project and then between finding solutions with cement, understand that Arup is actually targeting a 70% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2035. How is that expected to be achieved?
00:13:37
Speaker
We're a consulting company, so... Scope one and two, the familiar language of what, you know, the fossil fuels you burn directly and the fossil fuels you pay someone to burn for you, for example. um It's really about our flying and our flights.
00:13:53
Speaker
We have a flying budget and the flying budget is challenging. And it's not just about looking at the offsets and paying it and having a fund. It's ratcheting down the amount of flying you do every year. which forces the consolidation of meetings. It forces um stacking of multiple uses into one. forces choosing. it kind of forces an internal trading market of, I've run out of flight allowance.
00:14:21
Speaker
How about I trade you a promotion and your team for a flight? to like You get the trading system. all So that's number one. That was hygiene, hard but necessary. And then the second one is our purchasing.
00:14:33
Speaker
So we are having to work quite hard with who we buy things from and consumables. and That's where the most progress
Australia's Role in Sustainability Reporting
00:14:44
Speaker
has made in the most recent year, but I think it will be the hard things that will continue to be the hard things in the future. Now, we haven't gone down the advised emissions route yet, which some people call advised emissions scope four. think Deloitte has a scheme, they call it scope four. think LendLeafs have a scheme where they think about um that influence through the core business. so
00:15:05
Speaker
And we all need to And I think in Europe, Europe, no, UK, there will be mandatory, there have been expectations of mandatory reporting. You're based in Australia, so I assume you're not sailing everywhere. So I really like the idea of having an internal carbon market in order to handle those airline miles. That's a great idea.
00:15:26
Speaker
um you were just talking about um regulations that are coming down the pike. and What have you seen in other countries that you think might be on its way towards Australia?
00:15:37
Speaker
Everything's changing at the moment, Seth. Yes, yes it is. Everything's changing. So it's useful to... and People should know that the mandatory reporting scheme in Australia is actually world-leading.
00:15:53
Speaker
So we have been one of the very first, I think we might be the first country, in jurisdiction in the world to adopt the IFRS, International Financial Reporting of Sustainability, whatever the acronym is.
00:16:08
Speaker
And other countries are looking at us saying, what Behaviors, investment decisions, conversations and governance and team organization changes happen as organizations quantify the financial opportunities and impacts of climate in particular.
00:16:32
Speaker
um The next one people are expecting is nature and then social risk. The nature legislation is more advanced in Europe and in the UK.
00:16:44
Speaker
The net gain requirements, we're trying to learn a bit more about how they've driven decisions, but it's a very, very different context. The carbon border adjustment mechanisms, they've come a lot slower than people have expected. There's lots of talk about um Australia, whether or not we can and take that on. Oh, one of the ones that I think you might say very quickly,
00:17:12
Speaker
is specific policies and targets around electrification.
Victoria's Sustainability Fund
00:17:16
Speaker
So we've had targets about generating energy, but we've got to use that energy at a pace that matches matches the generation.
00:17:26
Speaker
And so I know that the next ah the the last COP in Belem, ah there was murmurings of an electrification target. with Australia in the co-presidency.
00:17:39
Speaker
ah That might come up as a specific thing. so let's not worry too much about counting the carbon. We know electrification will help. So let's get on with that. So tell us on a positive note about the Sustainability Fund towards making a low-carbon, circular and resilient future. What's your involvement and how does that work?
00:17:58
Speaker
um The Sustainability Fund is a Victorian government fund and it's a It's quite special, I think. When we dispose of waste into landfill, you pay a gate fee. In Victoria, that gate fee is put aside explicitly to tackle and to compensate for the on the the outcomes of our unsustainable patterns.
00:18:23
Speaker
And a good proportion of it goes into the sustainability fund. So it's a special fund to set aside to make sure that initiatives related to climate change in the circular economy are given priority and funded.
00:18:36
Speaker
So, i'm there is ah an independent committee of five people and I'm the deputy chair for it. And we provide advice to the minister and the premier about um which things are eligible, which things are supportive have a supportive policy environment likely to succeed, um which things are good uses of that fund. And so, our busy time is um in the lead up to budget time, just providing that advice. We don't make decisions except to make sure that the fund is going well. So, there's a kind of financial governance component of it. We provide advice.
00:19:13
Speaker
What kind of outcomes has that seen? Well, the fund has a really, really great um activities report, which is you know going back to all the people who pay into that fund, which is the taxpayer, anyone who throws ah throws away waste, um the outcomes. So some of the things that the fund enables is VicGrid,
00:19:37
Speaker
the organisation that plans the transmission, are the renewable energy zones, the Recycling Victoria, which is the ah establishment of the container deposit scheme and the multiple different um recycling recycling bins and the cohesion of that. Before that, it was a wild west of anything.
00:19:57
Speaker
ah little Little things, smaller things like ah solar power and virtual power plants as demonstration projects for people to see.
00:20:09
Speaker
A lot of um support for our traditional owner self-determination, so resourcing them to decide how they want to engage in climate and circular economy.
00:20:21
Speaker
So, sadly, sadly, the fund keeps receiving money from our wasteful behavior. We've been hoping that um we are, well, actually, let me let me recast this. The ah the waste being thrown away has now been decoupled from population growth. And you can see it flat flattening and coming down, but it's still there's still too much, too many gate fees being paid.
Social Resilience in Disasters
00:20:51
Speaker
And so the good news is there's a fund for things that matter. Bad news is kind of want that to disappear over time in the long term.
00:21:01
Speaker
yeah You were hoping to price waste out of the market. but Yeah. Yeah, that would have been nice. Although Australia has got much higher waste levies than New Zealand does, and we've seen the difference where there's a lot more recycling and reuse and preservation there than there is here in New Zealand. So it is working. I can tell you it's working because I can see where it's not working.
00:21:20
Speaker
You once said resilience is just as much about people as it is about place. Where do you see the advancement of social issues and sustainability, and where do you see the need for improvement? ACOS, which is Australia's Council of Social Services, did a study one time when a major flood or bushfire happens.
00:21:40
Speaker
In the immediate week afterward, 50% of the community organizations are knocked out. and when And in the recovery time, only 50% of them come back.
00:21:53
Speaker
And so you lose a lot of your social capacity at exactly the time that you need to respond to those shocks and stresses. And so community service organizations need to be need to have a huge adaptive capacity and be able to respond. When they did the social network analysis, the service organizations that bounced back were the ones that were interconnected.
00:22:21
Speaker
but They had people to call on lines of support, refugees, and resilience. The ones that didn't come back were the ones that were isolated and by themselves.
00:22:34
Speaker
So um in terms of resilience and the bouncing forward and the learning so that the the next time this happens, the impact isn't as severe. That's a human that's a human and a community capacity.
Regional Social Sustainability Challenges
00:22:48
Speaker
And you can get, we did a study into you know what shocks and stresses are best best dealt with operationally and through humans, what through hard infrastructure, what through nature, and different shocks would have different characteristics and some things are better addressed not through building but through responding.
00:23:07
Speaker
So that's kind of the human. But in terms of um social sustainability, that is a huge topic. we have i am the senior sponsor for our social ah advisory service at Arup.
00:23:22
Speaker
And it's hugely difficult to have a global discussion about this because in the UK, social sustainability, primary orientation is social value, generating opportunities for people who are not represented in in the economy.
00:23:41
Speaker
In America, in the US and in Canada, it's racial justice. In Australia, it's like we can't get on the bottom line without acknowledging that our First Nations people are not included. So for us, it's self-determination.
00:23:57
Speaker
ah In Asia, it's again different. So every region has a different burning platform and you get very passionate, occasionally angry. All these things are important, but they're all local as well. And so, and yeah, for me, I think the equity the equity issues are the most important.
00:24:19
Speaker
That's important. And it is important to touch on those hot button topics in each country if that's what's important to them socially. So looking out 10 or even 30 years in the future, where do you see us going and and how soon do you see us getting there? When people start juggling all the planetary boundaries, they'll realize the only answer is the circular economy, right?
00:24:39
Speaker
The multitude of waves coming to us, carbon, you know nature, social crisis, all of those things. becomes simple when you and realize the answer is
Circular Economy Advocacy
00:24:49
Speaker
the circular economy. So cut the Gordian knot, the circular economy solves all the problems at the same time.
00:24:55
Speaker
We did a whole series on this podcast on the circular economy one whole season and that was the increasing impression that I got the more we went through it was that circularity solves for a lot of the interrelated problems that we're trying to solve for. It's fantastic.
00:25:12
Speaker
Sustainability problems are market failures. They're market failures. So the answer is market correction. Exactly. Well, what's one thing that you think people could do to actually make a lot of these things happen? and What's your one piece of advice to people listening on where they could focus their energy to make all of this a reality?
00:25:35
Speaker
Believe that you can design out things. carbon, design out nature impacts, design out impacts on humans and people. That means we're not really talking about swapping a traditional thing for a more expensive or risky thing.
00:25:53
Speaker
If you think about what is the problem that we're trying to solve in their context, the solution will be design. And so if you have that faith, you'll be able to drive a lot of innovation and thinking.
Closing and Listener Engagement
00:26:06
Speaker
I like that answer. Well, thank you very much for being on the show. We really appreciate it You're welcome. And thank you for listening to Infrastructure Connections. Please take a moment to follow us wherever you get your podcasts. And we want to know your thoughts. Leave a comment down below or reach out to us at Infrastructure Sustainability Council.
00:26:27
Speaker
Stay tuned for the next episode of Infrastructure Connections.