Posted in Sustainability Conference

Next Level Sustainability Training: GRI Standards for Sustainability Reporting

Last chance to enrol in Pre Conference Training: GRI Standards for Sustainability Reporting

Next Level Sustainability is offering the Global Reporting Initiative’s Standards for Sustainability Reporting training course on Friday 29 and Saturday 30 March.

This 2-day GRI Certified Training Course will cover corporate sustainability reporting know-how, and how to run a smooth and effective reporting process.

Registration fees start at $1,265.

GRI Certified Training on Sustainability Reporting

This course is provided by GeoTrends Sustainability, a GRI Certified Training Partner with training materials certified by GRI under the GRI Certified Training Program. The course explains how companies/organisations obtain value through GRI Standards based Sustainability Reporting because it is a proactive, structured, and methodical approach to disclosures about organisational performance, particularly non-financial disclosures. Companies which cannot identify material issues, choose to ignore them, or fail to disclose them, may damage their reputation and brand loyalty and increase the risk of further regulation.

In this training you will learn to:

  • Assess an organization’s significant impacts along the value chain
  • Conduct stakeholder engagement as a function of sustainability reporting
  • Decide what belongs in the sustainability report through a materiality assessment
  • Produce performance measures
  • Align your report with other reporting frameworks (e.g., CDP; Integrated Reporting)
  • Develop top-quality sustainability reports

For further information and to make a reservation, visit the Next Level Sustainability website or contact Dr Robert Gale. 

E: r.gale@nextlevelsustainability 
M: 0434 216 136

Join us at the 2018 National Sustainability in Business Conference!

The 2018 National Sustainability in Business Conference will be held on Thursday 8 and Friday 9 March at the Hotel Grand Chancellor, Brisbane. 

The 2nd annual conference will explore sustainability best practice within organisations, creating resilience in business and ways to implement change. The conference speakers and partners will provide insight into how they are interweaving sustainability practices within their organisations, navigating change and the differences they are making within national and multinational companies and small business.

2018 Topics Include:

  • Integration
  • Politics
  • Technology automation
  • Future of renewables
  • Procurement
  • Food security
  • Sustainable construction
  • Waste as a resource

Click here to download the conference program.

Visit the 2018 National Sustainability in Business Conference website for further information and to register today!

Community Energy Opportunities in Regional Australia

In 2016 the ACT government committed to a target of 100% renewable energy by 2020, moving the target forward and reflecting a growing commitment by sub-national and local governments, and city administrations to changing their energy dependencies and the energy mix, and decentralising the energy production process (reference – Paris Council of the Parties on Climate Change in 2015).

Governments are recognising the growing interest in renewable energy in their constituencies, and in fact the public is arguably leading the political agenda.

Dr Kate Auty

The regional Victorian experience in relation to community energy is instructive.

Daylesford began a conversation about two community owned wind turbines a decade ago.  That community is now held up as an example of change. They engaged in a massive amount of community discussion, forged a new way of funding the proposal, built constructive relationships with government, and then built two turbines which now produce the energy for the township. Recently they celebrated their success.  Soren Hermansen, the Danish community energy advocate from the island of Samso, a world energy transition leader embraced their work. Regional small towns Newstead and Yackandandah are working towards a 100% commitment.

Seymour and Euroa have formed a community alliance and been afforded a small grant to conduct a pre-feasibility study for pumped hydro energy storage in respect of three dams in the Strathbogie Ranges and the Trawool reservoir above the Goulburn River.  Recent scholarship recognises this as a significant component of any energy future. Changing conditions in the energy market, networks with experts and community determination made this submission possible.

Beyond the engineering, academic expertise and commitment to changing infrastructure, however, there are compelling social and cultural reasons why a submission such as this comes together.

Communities which start where they are, in the places they know and care about, will always be capable of and interested in driving change. Baseline knowledge – social, economic, cultural and political – is already available. Communities want to see the co-benefits. In regional settings communities also understand the need to organise, share and take responsibility to attain outcomes.

The final attribute in a regional theory of change should always be a desire to show what has been done. It is important to provide demonstration sites for innovation, illustrating successes and reflecting on mistakes.

Author: Dr Kate Auty, Commissioner for Sustainability and the Environment

Design Competitions and the “Design Dividend” in Central Sydney

Good design delivers a variety of public benefits. The so-called “design dividend” links these benefits to positive financial uplift for property interests resulting from superior design. But what happens when competitive design processes enter the picture?

An Australian Research Council-funded project led by researchers from UNSW Sydney and the University of Canberra is examining the City of Sydney Council’s Competitive Design Policy. This policy uniquely requires major private projects in Sydney’s CBD to undergo a design procurement process based on jury-based evaluation of alternative designs. A discretionary floor-space bonus becomes available for achieving “Design Excellence” via this route.

With this policy now in operation for 15 years, roughly 40 major completed or approved projects in Sydney’s CBD have successfully come through a competitive design process. This provides a unique opportunity to examine the potential of good design – and, particularly, competitive design – to lift the bar for both public and private interests. To arrive at an overall assessment of the value-add from these arrangements, the team’s research draws from Council records, interviews with built environment professionals including developers, architects and planners, fieldwork, and examination of industry judgements of the outcomes.

Although the team echoes previously identified difficulties in defining and quantifying the benefits of design excellence, there is evidence to largely substantiate a consensus in perception that Sydney’s competitive design policy has generated significant public and private benefits in aesthetic, functional, design and sustainability terms. Notably, the policy has diversified and elevated the field of architectural firms participating in designing Central Sydney, and has established common ground for Council staff, design experts and developers to work collaboratively towards better outcomes.

Securing design excellence through competition emerges as an innovative regulatory approach to help ‘bridge the gap’ between public and private interests in the design and development of the city.

For more information on this ongoing research project, visit the team’s UNSW Built Environment research page here.

Authors: Professor Robert Freestone (UNSW), Ms Sarah Baker (UNSW), Dr Gethin Davison (UNSW), and Dr Richard Hu (UC)

 

Clever Regions, Clever Australia – Enhancing the Role of Regional Universities

Dr Caroline Perkins, Executive Director, Regional Universities Network

The Australian economy is moving from a heavy reliance on mining and manufacturing to a new era in which skills, knowledge and ideas will become our most precious commodities. The jobs and industries of the future will need highly skilled university graduates who can connect regional Australia with the global, innovative economy.

Caroline Perkins

The six regionally headquartered universities of the Regional Universities Network (RUN), CQUniversity, Federation University Australia, Southern Cross University, University of New England, University of Southern Queensland, and the University of the Sunshine Coast, make a fundamental contribution to their regions. They improve opportunities for regional Australians to access higher education. People who study in the regions largely stay the regions to work.

The teaching and learning activities, research and innovation and service functions of regional universities contribute to: human capital development; regional governance and planning; community development; health and ageing; arts, culture and sport; environmental sustainability; and industry and business development in regional Australia. Staff and students play active and visible roles in their communities and contribute to regional capacity building, including internationally. Regional universities are major employers across a wide range of occupations, and purchasers of local goods and services.

In Europe and the United Kingdom universities are seen as important players in Smart City Specialisations and City Deals.

The Australian Government is now adopting a more strategic approach to regional development. This includes establishing a Regional Australia Ministerial taskforce, chaired by the Prime Minister, with representation from a range of portfolios including regional development, education, industry, employment and agriculture. Two city deals announced in 2016, Launceston and Townsville, have universities as key players. A Precincts Advisory Committee has been established to advise on a possible university innovation precincts strategy.

Dr. Caroline Perkins attended our 2016 National Sustainability in Business Conference.