The natural next step

After eight and a half years I have left multinational property investor, developer and builder Lendlease for new green pastures. Having previously spent over 20 years advocating for greater sustainability in business from the not-for-profit worlds of WWF and the Green Building Council movement, I had needed to see how the world looked from the other side of the fence. And while I’ve often joked about “moving to the dark side”, Lendlease was anything but. Values run deep in the company, founded by far-sighted Dutchman Dick Dusseldorp who moved to Australia to set up a construction firm in the 1950s, and who by the early ‘70s was already talking about the importance of environmental and social impact, alongside economics – 20 years before John Elkington coined his famous phrase ‘triple bottom line’. People at Lendlease take sustainability seriously, and successive leaders have been prepared to be bold, putting the flag ever higher on the hill. Well, hills don’t get much higher than Lendlease’s Mission Zero, with a target to be Absolute Zero Carbon - that’s Scopes 1, 2 and 3 - by 2040, with “no offsets, and no excuses”.

Of course, as anyone close to this challenge knows, the proverbial elephant in the room is the embodied carbon in building materials – in particular, concrete, steel, aluminium, and glass. And while Lendlease, along with a growing number of its peers and competitors, has been an early supporter of initiatives such as ResponsibleSteel? , Climate Group 's SteelZero and ConcreteZero, it is going to have to look to a broader range of materials solutions to stay on track for that 2040 goal. That’s why Lendlease Europe signed up as a Frontrunner developer of Built by Nature when it was launched in October 2021. Nature cracked net zero carbon, water, and waste long before our species even set foot on the Earth; given that our attempts to create a sustainable built environment could be seen as simply poor imitations, it is an obvious place to look for both inspiration and innovation.

It was nature that inspired me to want to work for WWF when I was a boy, but sadly it’s taken too long for it to ascend the corporate sustainability agenda as a top priority alongside climate action, and we’ve all paid a heavy price. Global wildlife species populations have declined by more than two thirds in my lifetime, and yet it is only now that legislation is beginning to require developers to deliver biodiversity net gain in the UK – and even this is a notable exception internationally. But as I learned at WWF, it is possible to protect the most important natural places and species and pursue sustainable consumption of natural resources at the same time. If done right, both people and nature can benefit.

Building with natural materials, most obviously timber, is of course far from new. The oldest surviving timber buildings date back well over a thousand years, and trees have provided countless invaluable resources for humankind throughout our evolution, from farming tools to ships and aeroplanes. And now, when we find ourselves facing the latest, seemingly insurmountable challenge of how to remove the embodied carbon from our buildings – set to double as a proportion of their total carbon footprint by mid-century – a crucial part of the solution is staring us in the face, and quite literally grows on trees.

Of course, despite the many advantages and obvious appeal of building with natural materials there remain barriers to be broken down, obstacles to be overcome and awareness to be raised. Some of these challenges are universal, others are more specific to a particular geographical, climatic, economic, social or political context. But climate change does not respect such boundaries, and the plight of nature impacts us all, whether it's on the other side of the planet or in our own backyard. We have to think both globally and locally and we have to work together to find solutions; we are all connected, and we are all part of nature.

And that is perhaps the most important point, and opportunity, of all. The havoc we are wreaking on the planet stems from the fact that we have lost sight of our fundamental connection to nature. Our consumption is exceeding the Earth’s ability to produce the natural resources on which we depend for food and shelter, we are exceeding its capacity to absorb the carbon emissions we are pumping into the atmosphere, and polluting and destroying ecosystems faster than they can repair themselves. It’s not surprising that our built environment is a such a major contributor to climate change, resource depletion and pollution – it’s where we, as the most dominant species on the planet, spend most of our time. But if every building could tell its story and show how its materials can be traced back to places that protect biodiversity and support the livelihoods of the local people that harvest them, we might all feel a little more connected to nature.

My new role as CEO of Built by Nature is the natural next step for me. Built by Nature exists to connect, enable and amplify the efforts and progress of many actors and organisations promoting the use of sustainably sourced timber and bio-based materials across Europe and around the world. It has got off to a great start, thanks to the vision and generous support of Laudes Foundation and other donors, and the hard work of a small, committed team led by Amanda Sturgeon, FAIA as its first CEO. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to all of these people, and the Board of Built by Nature, for entrusting in me this opportunity to lead the next stage of our journey. It's an important and urgent one that we need to travel together and gather many more to join us along the way. Let’s get going!