Creating a Zero Carbon Solution in Hong Kong – the HKGBC Zero-Carbon-Ready Building Certification Scheme

I have recently taken the opportunity offered by Cundall to join our Hong Kong office on secondment and am so pleased to be meeting this great team of people and getting to know Hong Kong.

As a Cundall partner and Zero Carbon Design 2030 core team member I am passionate about sustainability in our world and was pleased to be invited to the Hong Kong Green Building Council’s Zero-Carbon-Ready Building Certification Scheme Launching Ceremony last week representing Cundall who is also a proud sponsor of this scheme.

The "Zero-Carbon-Ready Building Certification Scheme" is seeking to inspire and support change and here in the Hong Kong development market and advance Hong Kong towards it’s own sustainability goals – a truly noble aim.

At Cundall we seek to be agents of change for a more sustainable world so it was great to hear perspectives from professionals, researchers and officials about the scheme and the opportunity that is presents. When I spoke to various organising committee members as well as industry leaders and experts at the launch event, I was pleased to learn that many have the same passion in driving sustainable changes in Hong Kong and creating a better built environment together. This is so important because the change won’t be possible if we do not do this together.

Creating this tool is a great step, and we feel the next step is to let the market know that this matters to us. Cundall is a responsible business committed to a science-based pathway for ongoing emissions reductions. We value this approach in our procurement and our thinking, and we would encourage you all to consider whether you would wish to do the same. The next step is therefore to tell our suppliers that this matters to us – and we would ask and challenge all of us in the industry to do the same.

As an international business, we regularly have visitors that join us from across the world and we ensure that we evaluate and offset their travel and accommodation carbon as part of our zero-carbon accreditation. We want to encourage those who provide accommodation either in hotel or the residential markets in Hong Kong to move towards a zero-carbon future, and therefore we will be including in all our future enquiries a request for the providers’ position and details on zero-carbon and suggesting that they use the HKGBC Carbon ready framework to assist them in this.

If the suppliers understand that potential tenants and residents value carbon in their decision making, then they will be encouraged to value carbon in their decision making too. This makes good business sense as the demand for zero-carbon living will increase as we get closer to 2050 which the Hong Kong Government is committed to achieve carbon neutrality before then.

We hope you agree that the launch is a positive step and would love to talk to you more about how we help us all move the Hong Kong construction industry towards a more sustainable future.