Making cities better: voluntary programs aren’t enough

Originally posted on: https://theconversation.com/making-cities-better-voluntary-programs-arent-enough-35535 Voluntary programs are all the rage. From ratcheting up cybersecurity to fighting obesity, firms in the United States and elsewhere voluntarily make pledges to do better than governmental regulation. Firms are rewarded for doing so. Governments may stall the introduction of mandatory regulation, clients may be more inclined to buy their goods, and investors...

Benchmarking building environmental performance: What can we learn from LEED?

    In my last post I questioned whether Green Star has caused the green building revolution the GBCA claims it has. I conclude that the ‘revolution’ is very much contained to the high-end of the office market in Australia’s central business districts. In this contribution I will look at Green Star’s big sister in the...

The Green (Star) building revolution? Not so fast!

In 2003, the Green Building Council of Australia (GBCA) introduced Green Star, a tool that rates the environmental performance of buildings. Green Star is highly comparable with LEED in the United States (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), and BREEAM in the United Kingdom (Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Methodology). The GBCA boasts about the...

Trends in governance for urban sustainability and resilience

Oops! More than a month without blog entries. But some good new since the last entry: based on a book-outline and two sample chapters Cambridge University Press has expressed their initial and conditional (etc, etc) interest in the manuscript. I will send them the full manuscript for review once done, which is hopefully by June...