“When I describe sustainability to people, I talk about it being like an extra lens in your glasses that you can apply to your decision making. You introduce a long-term lens and ask, where are we going to be in 10 or 20 years’ time, what about 50 years? What if you apply a different time horizon when building, say you design for 200 years instead of for 50 years?”
There’s another way of looking at this. Cutler says we are going to be living with the projects that are being built today for 50 to 100 years. “How we place buildings into the environment, where you place them in relation to things like transport has a massive impact on the wider built environment and how well it all functions.
“It is important that we introduce these pieces of intelligence into the conversation so that we can influence clients to think about such matters as well as, for instance, the number of car parks they are putting in”.
RDT also develops social and cultural sustainability. “A great example of social sustainability is the work by our team to integrate te ao Māori in the built environment.”
The Mānawa Bay outlet mall being developed at Auckland International Airport illustrates the wider view of sustainability. RDT is working to develop and implement a sustainability framework for the project which aims to be New Zealand’s most environmentally sustainable retail building.
“Auckland Airport was already a client. It had an existing sustainability strategy for the whole organisation and we were asked to create a sustainability framework for the development.
“There are standard things you do at the start of a piece of work. One of them involves mapping all the different stakeholder groups and assessing the engagement channels you have with these groups.”
Cutler says stakeholder engagement is a critical piece of social sustainability.
Another aspect of starting a project is materiality. This is understanding the impacts the development will have. Cutler says this work means developing a framework for addressing the impacts during the build and the building’s operating life.
Mānawa Bay is going to be a five Green Star building. The Green Star system is an independent certification system for measuring a building’s environmental performance. A five Green Star building is excellent, six Green Star buildings are world-class.
Earning the highest ratings means influencing how tenants operate inside the completed building and including features that help them achieve sustainability. This includes dealing with matters such as waste.
One aspect of social sustainability involves responsibilities around human rights. Cutler says the building and construction sector can play a role. “At the moment some of the best practices are in Australia. It might, for example, be a requirement in some projects there to include a statement about modern slavery.”
This may sound distant from the sector here in New Zealand, but she says some institutional investment funds operating in Australia are “extremely aware of their responsibilities when it comes to modern slavery in the supply chain. This is starting to impact some of the work we do. It means investigating where in the world a product is made and what are the labour or human rights issues in those countries.”
RDT Pacific is best known as the project manager behind large construction projects. It has worked on office buildings, hospitals and warehouses. It is also a quantity surveyor. In the past five years, the business has expanded its scope to include advising companies on making large asset decisions.
Cutler says project managers usually get involved quite late in a process when some of the decisions have already been made. That makes it hard to get the best outcomes. “We’ve realigned what we do strategically to influence the earlier part of the process. We’ve found that if you ask a different set of questions early in the piece you can end up with a different outcome to, say, a new building.”
This requires a strong, long-term relationship with customers. Cutler says RDT has worked for many years for a large proportion of its clients.
Getting involved in the pre-planning of a project makes it easier for RDT to help a client create a new building with a high Green Star rating.
It’s possible to do this later, but that comes at a higher price and can involve compromises.
At times this can mean not constructing a new building. She gives the example of a tertiary education institute that has a piece of land in its portfolio and believing it may need a new building to perform a specific role. “We tell them, we’ll look at all the space, the whole portfolio and we may be able to offer a space rationalisation instead. Sometimes we do ourselves out of a job.”
Integrating te ao Māori in the built environment
A te ao Māori programme at RDT Pacific in 2021 inspired Miko Brouwer, who heads the company’s Hamilton team, to approach a group restoring a local river. Pūniu River Care is an established marae-based river care group in Te Awamutu. The group invited local whānau and rangatahi to take part in the clean-up.
Cutler says the relationship Brouwer had with the group led to RDT being asked to help with strategy. “Normally we just influence the building, but in this case we helped develop a strategic approach to the whole organisation, how it could grow and become more commercial.
“It was about the investment in the long-term relationship. We have internal project management training sessions that we run. Some of their people joined training sessions. And we had an intern who was a young engineering student who joined our Hamilton office for a holiday period. This was creating a long-term partnership approach to our client.
“It wasn’t just transactional, with us giving some advice it became a way of building our company into the fabric of the local community.”
She says the experience means the business has a better cultural understanding of the hapū and the local iwi. “We know our place, where we can contribute, local protocols, and the right way to approach the situation.”
· RDT Pacific is an advertising sponsor of the Herald’s Sustainable Business and Finance report.
