[00:00:09] Welcome to The Green Urbanist, a podcast for urbanists fighting climate change. I'm Ross.
[00:00:22] Hello everyone, welcome back to the podcast. It's Ross here. I know many of you listening are really near the beginning of your sustainability journey, maybe you're students or you're working in practice, but you haven't got much of a background in sustainability, but you're really motivated to bring it into your work and to start taking climate action through your career, in your jobs.
[00:00:44] Over the next week, I'll be sharing a three-part mini-course to help you kickstart your career in sustainability and to give you some advice and some tools to really just start feeling more confident and feeling like you have a path that you can go down to start to build up your expertise in sustainability and bring that into your work.
[00:01:05] I firmly believe that every job in the built environment, whether you're an architect or a planner or an urban designer or whatever, can and should become a sustainability-focused career.
[00:01:16] Within every job, we need people to be championing sustainability and to be bringing it into their work, even if you don't have the word sustainability in your job title.
[00:01:25] Towards the end of the session today, I'm going to tell you a bit more about a new course that I'm creating, which will be out soon, which is on this topic, but a bit more about that towards the end.
[00:01:35] Before we get into the main part of the training, I just want to tell you a bit about my story for those of you who don't know me.
[00:01:40] Back in 2019, I had been working as an urban design and planning consultant for a couple of years.
[00:01:46] I was living in London and I had this realization that I really needed to be shifting the focus of my career much more towards sustainability, but I just didn't really know where to start.
[00:01:56] It hadn't been a huge part of my education.
[00:01:58] I sort of knew the basics of climate science, but what that meant for my career and what I was supposed to be doing in my projects, I didn't really know.
[00:02:07] And so back then, there wasn't really any resources that I could just go and find out all this stuff.
[00:02:12] So I just started reading reports.
[00:02:14] I started reading books.
[00:02:15] I was watching documentaries, watching lectures online.
[00:02:19] And eventually I started the Green Urbanist podcast and I've now interviewed over 85 experts in sustainability.
[00:02:26] I even went back and did another master's degree in sustainability and ecology.
[00:02:32] Now, I'm not saying all this to sort of brag that I'm so knowledgeable and so qualified, but really just to say that I went on a big journey to really learn all this stuff.
[00:02:41] And I want to save you the hassle and I want to accelerate your learning.
[00:02:45] I don't think people should have to be out there on their own trying to figure this stuff out by just, you know, following, following threads and going off on tangents.
[00:02:53] So that's why I'm doing this mini course is just to give you a little kickstart and give you a bit of a framework to work towards so you can start to develop your knowledge.
[00:03:01] And that's also why I've developed my new course, which I'll talk about at the end of the session.
[00:03:06] So if you're really at the beginning of your looking into sustainability and figuring out what that means for your work, I have three bits of advice for you that I think might be helpful.
[00:03:16] The first thing applies to everyone, no matter what your background is or what your career.
[00:03:20] And that is, I firmly believe everyone should become a sustainability generalist.
[00:03:26] And what that means is knowing a bit about everything and all the topics in sustainability or lots of topics related to sustainability so that you can start to see the connections between things.
[00:03:37] You might think that sustainability is just about carbon emissions or greenhouse gas emissions.
[00:03:41] It's not.
[00:03:42] It's much bigger than that.
[00:03:43] It's also about the materials that we use, the environmental impact of the places we create, the impact on communities and on society and the people who live in our buildings and neighborhoods.
[00:03:54] It's also about biodiversity and creating places that are abundant in nature.
[00:04:00] There's so many aspects of sustainability and that can feel a little bit overwhelming when you're just trying to get your head around it.
[00:04:06] But I really believe it's important to try and understand a bit about lots of different topics within the sustainability umbrella.
[00:04:13] And that will just help you to keep a really big picture perspective and understand where your projects, whether that is a local plan or a neighborhood master plan or even an individual building or street design, how that fits in with the big picture of sustainability.
[00:04:33] I would consider myself a generalist and I really enjoy taking a big systemic perspective on these things.
[00:04:41] And it helps me see the connections and see the dots.
[00:04:43] And it also helps me realize when people are having a bit of tunnel vision and when we need to zoom out a bit and try and connect these things together.
[00:04:52] Once you've built up a bit of a generalist understanding of sustainability, you may want to actually develop more of a specialism.
[00:05:00] Maybe become a bit of a topic expert over time in a particular part of sustainability.
[00:05:05] This will likely be related to your career.
[00:05:08] So if you're an architect, you might be interested in the carbon emissions related to the operation of buildings and the embodied carbon materials, that kind of thing.
[00:05:18] If you're working at the neighborhood scale, maybe you're doing master plans or you're doing bigger planning projects.
[00:05:23] You might be interested as well in things like biodiversity, things like resilience and climate adaptation, which are also really important at those scales.
[00:05:34] So if you're looking to develop a bit of a specialism, I would say just follow your passion.
[00:05:38] Once you've been reading a bit more widely about sustainability, there'll be a few topics that really jump out at you as being really fascinating, really in tune with what you want to do and what impact you want to have in the world.
[00:05:51] And I'd invite you to follow, you know, go down that rabbit hole, go down those tangents and just try and learn as much about these specific topics as you can.
[00:06:02] For me, although I am very much a generalist, I'm starting to develop my particular expertise and specialism in urban rewilding, which is something I'm going to be diving into a lot more over the next year.
[00:06:16] Now, the final thing, the final bit of advice, the final path you might choose to go down is something that I think anyone working in built environment can do and should do, which is to become a sustainability champion or a climate champion.
[00:06:30] What this means is you basically just take it upon yourself and you decide to champion this cause within your organization or your community.
[00:06:39] We all have a sphere of influence, whether it's big or small.
[00:06:41] And actually, even if you're a small part of a bigger team, you have the potential to have a huge amount of influence by training up your colleagues, sharing resources with your colleagues, having conversations with your clients or your collaborators about how you can start to make your projects more sustainable.
[00:07:00] Introducing new ideas that maybe your practice hasn't considered before and starting to bring that sort of best practice that you've been learning about into the real world and into your projects.
[00:07:11] You know, these things don't happen without people just taking the initiative and going for it.
[00:07:17] So you have to be tenacious.
[00:07:18] But I think being a champion for these things and agreeing with your colleagues and with your manager, if necessary, that you're going to take on this role can be hugely powerful.
[00:07:27] And you can start to influence the processes and the design processes within your practice.
[00:07:33] And eventually, over time, start to get people into the new status quo of just designing things more sustainably, planning more sustainable places.
[00:07:45] So there's my key bit of advice for this introductory training session.
[00:07:49] But I don't want to just leave you there.
[00:07:51] I want to actually get into teaching you some more about the topics related to sustainability.
[00:07:56] And so in part two of this mini course, I'm going to be tackling one of the really tricky topics that I think people sometimes struggle to get their head around, which is net zero carbon.
[00:08:06] Net zero carbon can be quite technical.
[00:08:08] There can be a lot of new language around it that you need to learn.
[00:08:11] So what I'm going to do is just explain it in really simple and relatable terms.
[00:08:15] And I'm going to explain what the big concept means.
[00:08:18] And I'm going to show you what it might mean for your projects and for your work.
[00:08:23] Now, I mentioned earlier about my upcoming course.
[00:08:26] I'll tell you just a little bit more about this now while we have a few minutes left in the session.
[00:08:31] This course is called Sustainability Essentials for Built Environment Professionals.
[00:08:36] It's going to be available to book on to on the 18th of November.
[00:08:40] So very soon.
[00:08:42] And what it is, is it's an online course.
[00:08:45] It's self-guided and it's made up of pre-recorded lessons that are these bite-sized lessons covering a range of key topics, including net zero carbon.
[00:08:54] And in the next part of this mini course, you're going to actually get to see a sneak peek of the course.
[00:09:01] I'm just going to show you part of one of the lessons about net zero carbon.
[00:09:05] But it also covers other topics like regenerative design, circular economy, climate adaptation and biodiversity.
[00:09:13] It's really the course I wish I had when I was starting off learning about this stuff.
[00:09:17] And I'm really excited to share it with you.
[00:09:21] Now, for more information on the course, there is a link to the course page in the episode description.
[00:09:28] It's the first link that you see when you open the description so you can't miss it.
[00:09:31] And importantly, if you want to know when the course is available and get notified when there's more of these free mini course sessions coming out later this week, get on the mailing list.
[00:09:42] That is the best way to stay on top of all of this information.
[00:09:47] So if you follow that link, you'll see on the page there is a place you can put in your email address and register your interest.
[00:09:54] And then you'll start getting some emails from me about the course.
[00:09:58] Cool. Thanks. I'll see you at the next one.