Design the Future

Johanna Partin is Deputy Director of the Building Decarbonization Coalition, which works to help electrify California with clean energy. “We are not going to be able to counteract emissions or have healthy cities without getting off fossil gas,” she says. Johanna studied microfinance abroad but migrated from international development to a hyper local focus, working with San Francisco Mayors Newsom and Lee, and then to the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group; she founded and directed the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance. “Cities tend to be more ambitious than their state or national counterparts,” Johanna says, “because they are on the front lines of climate change, and in cities, the climate issues are clearly about people and their lives.” 

Martha Campbell is a Principal in RMI’s Carbon-Free Buildings Practice, focused on decarbonizing the U.S. building stock using standardized, affordable, attractive building construction methods and innovative business models. Martha has worked in the ski industry and for Goldman Sachs and doing field organizing in Northern New Mexico. A stay at an off-the-grid hostel in Australia prompted her to wonder, “Why don’t we build everything this way?” At RMI now, she is working to decarbonize the  economy using market based approaches. And that early question still drives her. “I want to move to a place where this is just how you build things.” And, she points out, it’s not just about decarbonizing: “It’s about making sure that buildings are healthy and safe places to live. We need to build resilience, too.” Some of the biggest challenges relate to a recalcitrant industry’s stakeholders who are scared of change. Campbell and RMI are trying to prove that a new model can benefit many. 

Landscape architect Pamela Conrad is a principal at CMG Landscape Architecture and founder of Climate Positive Design. She grew up in rural Missouri, has a background in plant science and regenerative design, and today is focused on climate mitigation and resilient design in the public realm. The role of landscape architects in  carbon sequestration is something she explored as a Landscape Architecture Foundation Fellow, which led to Climate Positive Design’s challenge and Pathfinder tool. “I wanted to understand the impacts of my projects, so I built a landscape carbon calculator. But the the real challenge is to reach positive,” she says, “to offset footprint as soon as possible and then shift to taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.” The way she sees it, if landscape architects worldwide shifted to using the targets that the Climate Positive Design defines, “we could sequester more than we emit by 2030 and remove even more by 2050. We can begin to reverse global warming.” 

Architect and structural engineer Kate Simonen is a leader, teacher, researcher, and convener -- and a big believer in the collective impact model. She is also executive director of the Carbon Leadership Forum (a network of 25 regional hubs and thousands of practitioners) and Chair of the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington.She has been a force behind collaborative initiatives such as the Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator and the Structural Engineers 2050 Commitment. After practicing for years, Kate is an educator because she sees the role as ”part of my climate action responsibility.” Kate is thrilled to see all the different ways that embodied carbon is coming into policy -- from codes that call for low-carbon concrete to policy levers that address industrial decarbonization. Under Kate’s leadership, a consortium (CLF at UW, in partnership with Endeavour Center, University of Colorado-Boulder, and Building Transparency) is a finalist for the Lever for Change program with a project that proposes to convert buildings to carbon sinks by storing carbon in buildings using biogenic materials.

Michelle Moore is a social entrepreneur, former White House official, and current CEO of Groundswell, a nonprofit that builds community power by connecting clean energy with economic development, affordability, and quality of life.Reflecting on 25 years in the sustainability space, including a stint at the USGBC, Michelle notes that the focus on metrics and goals has fostered is a very technocratic culture. Yet her drive and purpose is centered on the idea that sustainability is fundamentally about loving people and place. Michelle believes in aligning value with values. This gives her a discerning perspective and inspires her commitment to ensuring that policy is oriented toward lasting change. Michelle has roots in rural Georgia and her work is anchored in her faith and the commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself.”

Chandra Farley is the Just Energy Director at the Partnership for Southern Equity where she leads a team developing local and regional strategies to advance energy equity. “Activism is about trust, respect, and partnership,” she says, “This is personal work.” While some of the activity around utilities and how they are regulated can seem wonky, the influence is significant. PSE focuses on how equity-centered energy and utility policies can improve household economic stability and quality of air, water, and other resources that affect health and well-being. The organization’s theory of change is that people drive it. Chandra points out that this work “is all about strengthening civic engagement -- that’s a muscle. It’s through that that we can get to systems transformation.” 

Jasmin Moore serves as the Sustainability Director for Douglas County, Kansas, and the City of Lawrence, Kansas. This role encompasses everything from energy systems to food policy, and she recently led the integration of sustainability and equity into funding criteria for the Lawrence Capital Improvements Plan, a first in the state. Jasmin is pleased that, as she puts it, “equity has finally come to the sustainability party. Particularly in local government, sustainability and equity are closely tied.” We discussed the language of sustainability and the importance of working with communities to define terms locally. For the Douglas County and Lawrence community, she says, “we talk about sustainability as living today like you believe there will be a tomorrow -- the next day and the next generation. This is about quality of life for all.”

Renée Lertzman is a researcher, educator, and strategist who uses psychological insight to change our approach to the environmental crisis. She works with organizations to harness the creativity needed to solve big problems.  We spoke with Renée about her work, including Project Inside Out, which she created to help people in all sectors explore psychological concepts and expand changemaking potential. “In the built environment sector and others, the baseline is understanding that climate action and sustainability work is fundamentally change management,” she says. “It is also upsetting and charged. Recognizing these qualities of the work can help position us to understand all stakeholders as we try to advance change.” 

Kirsten Ritchie is a Global Resilience Leader and principal at Gensler, where she brings her civil engineering background to big discussions about innovation, wellbeing, and high-performance design. Being a trailblazer throughout her career has given Kirsten a confidence that’s crucial for the persuading that is part of that role. She points out that advancing sustainability in the AEC industry depends on collaboration. “I am really proud of the work we are doing,” she says. “We are making places better for people and better for the planet.” Gensler has recently committed to taking all projects to net zero carbon by 2030, and Kirsten is also proud of that step. “We have shifted the focus to carbon and climate, away from just efficiency,” she says. “I think we will see much faster movement in the coming five to ten years.” 

Daniele Horton is passionate about the role of real estate in tackling climate change. Trained as an architect, she is an influential sustainability leader; her company, Verdani Partners, manages sustainability for portfolios totaling more than 720 million square feet. Daniele grew up in Brazil with an appreciation for the natural world. In the work world, she shifted from architecture to real estate because she saw the possibility to scale sustainability solutions. She is committed to reaching net zero, for new and existing buildings, and warns that commercial real estate firms that do not move toward this will not be ready for the risks ahead. The time for incremental improvements is behind us, she says, “now is the time for for bold, aggressive action.”