Project Leaders Fighting Climate Change

STEVE HENDERSHOT

As the climate crisis intensifies, so does the pressure to do more to heal the planet. It’s an urgent call for project leaders to take action—and to innovate.

KARL CAMPBELL

We only have one environment, and there’s a lot of things that are already negatively impacting it. Where people can be doing things that have a net-positive impact on the environment—whether that’s through design considerations or working closer with communities and other aspects, if you will, of the built environment—I think these are vitally important if we want to have a resilient system that we’re going to be part of for, ideally, the long term.

NARRATOR

The world is changing fast. And every day, project professionals are turning ideas into reality—delivering value to their organizations and society as a whole. On Projectified^®, we’ll help you stay on top of the trends and see what's ahead for The Project Economy—and your career.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

This is Projectified^®. I’m Steve Hendershot.

Forty-three percent. That’s how much the world needs to reduce its collective emissions over the next eight years to hit a key climate-change benchmark, according to a new report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I’ll say it again: A 43 percent emissions reduction—nearly half—is needed this decade to limit global warming to just 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit.

So for all of the great, sustainability-focused work that’s being done around the world, we’re not where we need to be. In fact, we’re not even particularly close. That’s a call to action, as well as a reason why PMI lists the climate crisis among its 2022 Global Megatrends.

Nations and companies alike must step up and take responsibility for their long-term impact on the environment. Project leaders are well-positioned to answer that call, with many building sustainability practices and environmental considerations into their projects.

As we mark Earth Day this week, we’ll hear from a couple of project leaders whose work is helping care for our planet. We begin in the Galápagos Islands in Ecuador with Karl Campbell. He’s the director of Latin American Pacific Islands at Re:wild, a nonprofit organization focused on protecting and restoring wildlands and wildlife around the world. Karl spoke with Projectified^®’s Hannah LaBelle about rewilding islands from Mexico to Chile, including the Galápagos—an effort which made PMI’s 2021 list of Most Influential Projects.

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HANNAH LABELLE

You’re leading a program to rewild 25 islands over the next decade. Tell me about rewilding, what can it entail and how it affects ecosystems.

KARL CAMPBELL

Rewilding is a positive reframing essentially for nature conservation. And it involves working on these holistic solutions to really remove barriers of all the different types that they come in and reestablish vibrant wildlife populations and intact, really resilient ecosystems that effectively integrate people.

The barriers can come in all sorts of different types. They can be ecological barriers. They can be barriers because of species that are present. And then they can be the human barriers to stuff: different groups not working well together, the politics of a situation, funding. These are all sort of barriers that we work to actively overcome, essentially to be able to implement your specific projects.

HANNAH LABELLE

Looking at this rewilding program, what goals are you and the team hoping to achieve? And how did you choose which projects to pursue?

KARL CAMPBELL

The program that we have around rewilding Galápagos and sister archipelagos really looks at achieving sort of a high level of resilience for both ecosystems and human populations and livelihoods on a suite of islands going from Mexico through to southern Chile. It’s a vast expanse and covers sort of a ridge-to-reef program between islands and their interconnected marine environments.

The suite of projects we looked at pursuing was partly around ripeness, if you will. So how ready are some of these projects, feasibility, and also what do they lead on to? So, are these steppingstones? Are these capacity-building for other, larger initiatives that we’re looking to move within the archipelago? So the planning phase and determining which projects were involved was relatively fluid, and this was very much sort of a co-design process. And that co-design process is not just with some of the groups that are implementing these projects, but also with the communities and others that are participating and benefiting from these [projects].

HANNAH LABELLE

And so, speaking of, this has a lot of stakeholders involved. You have partners, you have all these different teams that are leading the projects, and these local communities. How are you approaching collaboration and communication between all of these stakeholders?

KARL CAMPBELL

The communication and collaborations with this is very much a one-on-one type approach. Here what we look to do is build aspects of trust and build strength of relationships. Project managers on this are absolutely key in being able to manage those relationships and then understand deeply what’s actually going on and determine whether things, issues that pop up, might be symptoms or are actually true issues that need to be worked on and actively resolved.

HANNAH LABELLE

Let’s talk about the Galápagos project in particular. This is the first project in the program, and you’re hoping that this is going to become the template for all of these future initiatives that are coming. What does the Galápagos project include?

KARL CAMPBELL

Some of the projects in the Galápagos—one of them, Floreana Island restoration, is a holistic project that works with the community and government partners, operated essentially by [a] nongovernment organization in conjunction with them. This really sort of looks, if you will, to restore the environmental integrity. And so a suite of that is working on human-wildlife conflict situations and working there to really resolve some of those. And also sort of [to] think forward for when we are doing certain restoration activities, how might we actually be creating human-wildlife conflict situations? And then conduct actions to head those off.

A good example of a human-wildlife conflict situation is if you consider chickens. And on Floreana Island, people have chickens that were free ranging. Small chickens are eaten by short-eared owls. Larger chickens are eaten by Galápagos hawks. Because of this, people protect their chickens, and they kill Galápagos hawks, and they kill short-eared owls. This is just a classic case, and Galápagos is not unique in this fact.

So how then do you work around thinking through the various ways in which you might be able to resolve this conflict and essentially establish a situation where you could have Galápagos hawks thriving populations, short-eared owls thriving populations, and people still have their chickens producing and everything else? So chicken coops, fully covered, is one of the ways, and there’s now 16 of those constructed on Floreana Island.

HANNAH LABELLE

And there are also reintroduction initiatives as well as part of the project, correct? With different species?

KARL CAMPBELL

That’s correct. If we consider that Galápagos hawks actually haven’t been on Floreana Island for probably nearly 200 years. So the earliest settlers wiped them out. Some of this work looks to see—once we work with the community, remove some invasive species and other work—creating the appropriate habitat and the conditions with the community like chicken coops, you can then look to reintroduce species like Galápagos hawks. And there’s actually 12 other species that have gone locally extinct on Floreana because of invasive species that we’re looking to reintroduce as well.

HANNAH LABELLE

So how are you and your team working to build relationships with local community members that you’ll be working with on this and other projects?

KARL CAMPBELL

The relationships with the communities is really the base of this. And that trust base needs to be there before you can have real conversations and establish real agreements essentially that people are going to actually hold by. And so we started off more than 12 years ago working through this, working to understand the values and really just listen to people and what their vision was. What things did they want to see happen on their farm? What things did they want to see happen with their business? What kind of businesses and things do they want to have? And then we pull together a suite of partners and really help facilitate, if you will, the establishment of a shared vision.

That shared vision laid out a suite of things of what people want to see Floreana like in five to 10 years, and that was the anchor around this. And the project reshaped how we go about it and really made this about the community. They’re the decision-makers. They’re the people who are going to ultimately be benefiting from this. They’re the ones that have to live on Floreana Island.

HANNAH LABELLE

How are you and your team measuring success, as well as the project’s impact?

KARL CAMPBELL

We measure success in three different ways. The first of these is: Did you achieve the goals that you set out to? Did you successfully remove the invasive species off the island permanently? Yes or no? Did you plant the number of trees and restore the number of hectares of habitat that you said you would? Yes or no? 

A second one that we then look at is: Are you having the impacts that you expected to have on the endangered species? And that’s also a sort of yes or no. And there’s variances there within that of significantly to not.

And then the third one that we try to look at—which is sort of a catch-all essentially on other things that are very hard to measure, like relationships—is: Do our partners want to work with us again? And that really looks to sort of capture the whole piece of “Was this a successful project from everybody else’s point of view?” And really sort of takes in, if you will, the human dynamic.

HANNAH LABELLE

Looking across rewilding and conservation projects, why do you feel these are critical to the environment?

KARL CAMPBELL

Through rewilding, we know that these are the most effective solutions for both improving human health in the long term as well as treating the biodiversity crisis. And these are the most effective solutions for the climate crisis that we’re currently in.

These projects are really looking to build resilience, and that’s around ecological resilience. And if you think of these as integrated systems—on [an] island, you have integrated systems that occur between the national park and the farmland areas, and urban areas, but across the island, you also have these integrations between marine systems and island systems. It doesn’t just cut off at the park boundary. It doesn’t just cut off and these linkages, if you will, stop as you hit the high tide mark. And if you really want to achieve healthy marine systems, you need to be thinking about healthy islands. And if you want to achieve healthy islands, you need to be thinking about achieving healthy marine systems. And it’s likewise, if we want to be thinking about healthy and resilient human systems, we need to be thinking about having healthy and resilient ecosystems around us.

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STEVE HENDERSHOT

Sustainability efforts encompass a range of sectors and projects, from conservation efforts to green architecture. Projectified^®’s Hannah LaBelle spoke to Seattle architect Margaret Sprug, a principal at the Miller Hull Partnership, about her projects that aim to make the built environment more Earth-friendly.

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HANNAH LABELLE

How have you heard the conversation around sustainable design and architecture change, especially over the last several years?

MARGARET SPRUG

I’ve been at Miller Hull here in Seattle since 2000. I think that the firm’s roots have always been based in designing with the local ecology. The founding partners, they were members of the Peace Corps. So those kinds of early forays into how you design kind of frugally with local materials made its way into the DNA of the firm. In the past 10 years, I would say that this has evolved from an ecological, maybe frugal, response to real community needs to a full-blown climate crisis and really acknowledging what it means to be building buildings and hopefully not contributing to the problem. Trying to find solutions that are restoring the planet, rather than harming it. 

HANNAH LABELLE

Let’s kind of walk through your process on a project. Where do you start when it comes to sustainability, and how do you consider it throughout the project life cycle? 

MARGARET SPRUG

We start every project by researching and understanding basically where our client is coming from. Usually, our client has stated goals or a mission statement that we dig into and try to understand what they mean by their stated goals. We always want to be talking to the client in their language and going back to what they are trying to achieve on their building. In terms of sustainable design, sometimes clients have great ideas and big ideas, but they don’t understand the tools that are needed to get them to achieve their goal and their project.

We create a set of strategies for how they can achieve that, and then, hopefully, we get to implement those. The other part is we don’t do this in a vacuum. We’ve got great engineers and contractors that work with us to make sure that we’re all on the same page and all moving toward the same goal.

HANNAH LABELLE

So how do you work with those partners or different stakeholders when it comes to sustainability? 

MARGARET SPRUG

Many of our projects start with a question to the entire team of, “If you could do it, what would you do?” And usually, everybody wants to do the right thing. They want to be a net positive contributor to the world. And I think that from those early charrettes with the entire team, those goals are defined. Being on the same page with the goal definition phase helps build a language with the entire team. It’s like any project that you’re trying to bring a whole bunch of different stakeholders together on—the first step is creating common language and common goals.

I think the other part of our approach to sustainable design [that] has evolved probably over the last 10 or 12 years is using the Living Building Challenge as a framework for how we see the importance of design and the important decision-making that needs to go into design.

HANNAH LABELLE

When it comes to maybe talking with and working with teams or working on one of these projects, is there a specific example that you like to point to?

MARGARET SPRUG

The Bullitt Center. Bullitt Center is an office building in Seattle, and it was the vision of the Bullitt Foundation. And their mission and their goal was to create a living building. To be a living building, it needs to be net-zero energy—at that point, it was net-zero energy, net-zero water. It had to remove all the toxic materials. It had to contribute to the city and the block and the area that it lived in. It had to be beautiful. It had to be resourcing materials locally. All the things that you think about in terms of the most sustainable way to build was baked into the Living Building Challenge.

And that project, which completed in 2013, at the time when we were designing it, we knew it was going to push ourselves into a place that we weren’t comfortable with, that we weren’t sure how it was going to turn out. But we knew we had to take that leap in order to have a proven test case. And I think everyone on the team—again, going back to the contracting partners, all the engineers, even the City of Seattle—were in [it] together, trying to make sure that we could achieve this kind of audacious set of sustainability goals on this relatively small project. 

HANNAH LABELLE

So you said this was completed in 2013. And obviously, you’ve now had almost 10 years to continue with these lessons that you’ve learned. How have you seen that evolve from this very early, very intense, it sounds like, effort to the kinds of buildings and projects that you’re executing now?

MARGARET SPRUG

It’s definitely an evolution. And I think that maybe there was a lot of fear, maybe on my part, during the design and implementation of the Bullitt Center because we just knew we couldn’t fail. The big takeaway I had from that project was we’re just obeying the laws of physics. It’s not rocket science to get your energy model going and understanding where the water’s coming from. The barrier is not design and technology. We have the technology to achieve all these regenerative design solutions. I think that a lot of times the agencies having jurisdiction are a bigger obstacle than the laws of physics.

HANNAH LABELLE

In talking about sustainable design in the built environment and kind of running and executing these projects, obviously there’s going to be some impacts that teams have to measure. How do you or your team measure and track a project’s specific environmental impacts? And how do you consider ways to mitigate those? 

MARGARET SPRUG

Yeah. That’s also a really good question. I’m not going to say everyone at our firm does this the same way, but on the projects that I’ve worked on, you always start with the premise that less is more in the fact that each component of the building has to be essential to its goal, mission, function, performance. When you have that kind of a mindset—that you’re not like adding extra stuff, you’re just trying to get down to the essence of what that building is—if you do that, you’re already starting from a place where you’re not adding more volume to the built environment.

An example of that is the use of heavy timber as a structural material rather than steel or concrete. Timber is, obviously, a much more environmentally positive way to build things because of the carbon impact of them. The biggest decision you make is the way you design the structural system of a building, and if you can do that out of wood, you’ve moved the bar quite a bit. Many buildings you can’t build out of wood, so then the next step is, can you get lower embodied carbon concrete? Can you use steel in really strategic ways? So you’re kind of embedding all this philosophy, I guess, as you’re designing the project so that you’re not sweating the small stuff. You want to get those big decisions right. 

The other part of the equation is we use modeling software to quickly generate what the carbon calculation is for all the different options of the building, curtain wall or, like I said, the superstructure of the building comes into play. We do that from day one. We input all that information into a model that we are continually tracking and updating as we move through the design of the project.

HANNAH LABELLE

So how does sustainable design and architecture benefit not only the planet and the environment but also these organizations themselves? What are maybe some of the cost benefits when it comes to focusing on sustainability in your design, in your architecture, in the built environment, for whatever that project is?

MARGARET SPRUG

Depending on what type of project it is, I think that there’s a competitive advantage that we’re seeing. A lot of different owners of a lot of different types of projects understand that sustainability is something that their tenants want, that their students want, that the occupants of the building are going to want. So sustainable design is something that results in leasing rates that are higher and faster and in healthy places for people to live and work and study. So there’s that aspect of it for sure.

HANNAH LABELLE

What other aspects of sustainable design should teams or organizations consider?

MARGARET SPRUG

The role equity plays in sustainability—it’s obviously a big topic of conversation in the last few years—and understanding that we need to reach out to all different types of communities to make sure that they’re included in this conversation. I think the other part is that, as we know, the areas of cities in the country and the world, the poor are the most impacted by climate change. And so we need to reach out, embrace all different people in all of our communities to bring them into this conversation because that’s a group that is also affected the most dramatically and usually doesn’t have a voice at the table.

What excites me about sustainability in architecture is really the next generation of architects and engineers, and even anybody who needs to enter a building and work in a building. Because I think this generation that’s moving into the world right now, who are becoming future leaders in all kinds of industries, they are the ones impacted by climate change. Their kids are going to be impacted by climate change dramatically. What I’m hopeful for is the time of speaking about action is over, and we are getting to the place where action is required and demanded by people who are in the position of creating these new buildings in the future.

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STEVE HENDERSHOT

Even as climate change poses an urgent threat, many project leaders are making a difference—executing projects that deliver real value by healing our planet and reducing the toll we take on our environment.

NARRATOR

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