Chatting with Changemakers is our interview series where we sit down to speak with influential sustainability advocates, uncovering the motivations, insights, and strategies, driving positive change in their respective fields. In this second installment, we speak with GIGA’s Founder and CEO, Raefer Wallis.
The built environment is one of the largest contributors to climate change, with estimates as high as 40% of global emissions. Of this, the vast majority comes from buildings’ energy consumption, with the remainder coming from the manufacturing processes for key building materials such as concrete and steel. However, sustainability in the real estate industry is not only about carbon emissions; increasingly, landlords and tenants are focused on a wide range of sustainability issues, such as air quality, employee wellbeing, waste, and water.
To meet this demand, standards such as LEED, WELL, BREEAM and BEAM Plus have been widely adopted across the industry. These standards assess a wide range of sustainable building features, assigning points for the inclusion of relevant features, and an overall score being given at the end of the assessment. Although the standards have done a lot to improve sustainability in buildings, they are broad in nature and face a limiting drawback; by doing a little bit of everything, the resulting lack of detail and depth makes it difficult to dive meaningfully into any one topic (eg. carbon, water, waste, energy).
Raefer Wallis — an architect and longstanding sustainability proponent — knew things needed to change, and set about making it happen by founding his data standards agency, GIGA (Green Ideas, Green Actions). Driven by the vision of improving building sustainability he created the RESET Standard (Regenerative Ecological, Social and Economic Targets), a performance-based standard focused on diving deep into one sustainability issue at a time (such as carbon, circularity, energy, waste and health). Wallis’ RESET Standard (not to be confused with RESET Carbon!) aims to drive continuous improvements in the built environment by continuously measuring performance.
Championing sustainability from the get-go
From an early age, Wallis was exposed to family values around ‘leaving the world in a better place than you found it’. Coupled with a fascination with the built environment — encouraged by his mother, a doctor and amateur architect — his childhood shaped his perspective. “I was the kid who was responsible for fixing the toilets and the holes in the walls, while hunting for low-VOC paints with my mother”, says Wallis. He developed a keen interest in how the building process could be improved, and what could be done to extend building longevity without the ubiquitous toxic materials. “I was fascinated by questions like: how could we build this differently?” The topic really hit home aged seven, when he watched an Anime film, Miyazaki’s ‘Nausicaa’. “It’s the story of a destroyed world and a young woman who figures out how to use the best of the biosphere to regenerate it. It was the first time I was given a positive vision of what sustainability could look like. I was like: now this is exciting… how can we do more, as long as we’re doing the right thing?”
Green Ideas, Green Actions: The beginnings of GIGA
After studying pure and applied sciences, Wallis embarked on a career in Architecture to get closer to this idea of building regeneration, but was frustrated by the lack of focus in the industry. “It was marketing fluff, where people were checking boxes, but nobody was measuring the outcome — there was zero quantification. I thought: we need to lead.” After receiving widespread media coverage for developing the world’s first carbon-neutral hotel, Wallis founded GIGA in Shanghai in 2008. “There was a demand from our clients for incorporating all these learnings into their projects, which ultimately crystallized into a project standard”.
GIGA comes from the concept of a constant learning process — green ideas are useless without action, and from action comes more ideas. Taking the feedback of further customers on existing green building standards, GIGA released the RESET standard. “Pretty much all the building standards out there are prescriptive… it’s a checklist of things you need to do. If you do certain things, you get a badge, but nobody comes into measure the actual outcome. RESET is a performance-based standard, so we come in and say, let’s set a goal, and we’re going to measure your outcomes, and that’s all that’s going to matter…are you hitting the performance targets or not?”
Going the extra mile: Ambition meets action with the RESET standard
The goal of the RESET standard is to allow clients who want to go the extra mile on sustainability to move beyond the constraints of a traditional green building certification and get very specific on measuring their performance. The GIGA team work with their clients through a network of accredited professionals, who are trained to go onsite and measure their clients’ performance, and suggest improvements based on a large database of previous client projects. “We run benchmarks — it’s about sitting down with a client and looking at their results and discussing their goal. Where do we want to be against this benchmark? Then we put together an action plan”. The crucial element of the equation: that the client is willing and interested to push past the limits of a standard green building certification.
Tenant-landlord engagement: Honing in on mutual high-value impact
Currently, one of the biggest challenges in real estate decarbonization is tenant-landlord engagement. How can a previously combative relationship be turned into a collaborative one to reduce carbon emissions? The GIGA team work directly on this topic by having two linked standards, RESET Core and Shell for Landlords, and RESET Commercial Interiors for Tenants. This allows a linked data set which can be easily exchanged between the two parties, offering an alternative to the standard ‘green lease’ framework which has shown limited success in implementation.
“Typically, these landlord-tenant conversations are too broad, too general. Everyone’s still doing a little bit of everything, and because of that they’re soft on a lot of things. What we say is: pick one or two items that are meaningful to both of you, and just go deep on that. Focus on unlocking high-value pieces for each party, as opposed to doing a little bit of everything without tangible results”. Wallis also focuses on the value of strategic alignment between senior leadership to set clear objectives: “no doubt the one that everyone is watching is the collaboration between LVMH and Hang Lung… I think one of the big successes is the alignment between the two chairmen and the two sustainability directors. Additionally, the biggest hurdle is normally the relationship between the leasing team and sustainability team, but in this case the leasing team actually chases the sustainability team for more because they have seen the positive impact sustainability has in the lease.”
Reflections: Essential learnings from Wallis’ approach
When asked to reflect on the lessons learned from a career of advancing sustainability in his field, Wallis refers to his core philosophy of focusing on the really important things. “Going back to my early days as an architect, every project was treated as a research project. We were delving into one main objective for every project and had a very early performance focus on wanting to achieve one key outcome. For anyone starting their sustainability journey, that’s what I would recommend: think small and think about the one thing that’s going to make a difference and move the needle on this particular project – unless you’re clear on that right from the start, nothing’s ever going to happen.”
To this, we can resoundingly agree. This year RESET Carbon celebrates 15 years in the carbon reduction space, and in our experience Wallis’ words ring true: making a meaningful impact requires identifying your organization’s most carbon-intensive areas, developing a strategy to target those hotspots, and quantifying your progress through robust measurement. Focus is the key.
To continue the conversation with our specialist team and learn more about taking your first step towards sustainability in the built environment, reach out here.