Going beyond zero emissions to net positive sustainability

Excerpt from the Fifth Estate: According to Birkeland sustainability has been corralled by everything that created the problem in the first place: payback periods, costs, a paradigm focused on negatives, and that the best we can do is to minimise these by concepts such as zero carbon.

“You can’t fix the thing by using the system that broke it in the first place”, Birkeland says.

Speaking to an audience at Customs House in Sydney last Thursday morning, Birkeland, who is professor of Architecture at Queensland University of Technology and professor of sustainable architecture at University of Auckland, had teamed with Caroline Pidcock, interim chair of the Living Futures Institute Australia, presenting on the theme of the positive development at an event organised by Mark Thomson for the Australian Green Development Forum.

In Birkeland’s view the topic is spot on. We need to rethink the sustainability agenda. The paradigm of sustainability is an impediment to sustainability. Full story by Tina Perinotto in the Fifth Estate here.