The year’s highlights

We are pleased to present the 2010-2011 Sustainability Report – our second year of reporting against Landcom’s ‘second generation’ of sustainability indicators.

Our strategic direction

It’s been nearly a decade since we first began reporting our sustainability performance and a lot has changed in that time. In 2001, Landcom was one of the few voices in sustainability reporting in the development industry and our aim at that time was to lead the way for sustainability reporting in our industry.

Most of our partners were exposed first-hand to our sustainable building and development innovations by working with us on our projects. Many of the innovations we introduced or participated in developing, such as BASIX, have now become the industry standard. Over the past  decade, the development industry has developed an enormous capacity to operate more sustainably. Today, our development partners participate alongside us in the sustainability space, including in the area of sustainability reporting. We acknowledge their performance and growth in  this important task, and the impact this will have on our own sustainability activities.

The industry’s capacity has improved because Landcom tends to focus on areas of need where the private sector is either unwilling or unable to participate – we prefer to collaborate and lead rather  than compete. Given this rationale, we recently reset our strategic direction to fill what we believe to be the next ‘space’ in the sustainability continuum. We see two areas of need emerging: high level research and development, and improvements to grass roots delivery of sustainability innovations.

At the top end of sustainability innovation, we are committed to developing strategic partnerships with research and development organisations, universities and ‘think tanks’ across the country. Our aims are to create forums for us to test new ideas and extend our influence, and also to provide a vehicle for these institutions to develop and test their innovations in a ‘real world’ environment. Our initial focus is on innovations in environmental and social sustainability, particularly in the area of health.

We are also committed to delivering incremental improvements in the delivery of sustainability innovations across the development industry. Our larger industry partners have developed sophisticated sustainability initiatives of their own, helping lift the sector’s sustainability credentials overall. However, while consumer preference for more sustainable homes is increasing, what’s missing is their translation into the mass housing market. In the coming years, Landcom will look for ways to effect sustainable design and building at the grass roots level through closer partnerships with the project home industry and small to medium sized builders. Our initial focus will be to promote greater understanding through demonstration projects such as our Eco-Living display homes and 21st Century Terrace initiatives.

This strategic direction is reflected in our revised indicators. The business relationships we develop with builders and others is of growing importance for us as we increasingly rely on third parties to deliver our projects. One of our greatest challenges this year involves aligning our supply chain to deliver more sustainable practices.

Changes to our report this year

We’ve made some changes to the way we report our sustainability performance this year. The changes reflect our continued integration of sustainability performance and other aspects of our business. While our indicators have not changed, we have reorganised them so that they reflect our environmental, social and economic performance more closely. We have combined our internal social sustainability results with our project results, and we have included a selection of case studies this year to illustrate the kinds of individual initiatives we typically undertake to deliver our overall sustainability targets.

Improved performance against our new indicators

This year we consolidated our performance against our second generation of indicator targets. For those new indicators where Landcom was unable to provide data in 2009-2010, we worked hard on our business processes to ensure that reliable data were available this year. We recognise that driving change can sometimes be met with resistance. So we spent time during the year working with both internal and external stakeholders to explain why change is needed and to better understand and respond to their concerns.

Some of the measures we took included:

Review of our environmental management system (EMS)
We have refined the scope of our certification under AS/NZS ISO 14001:2004 so that this more accurately defines our environmental responsibilities and those of our contractors. Since we are not a builder, we removed construction as a Landcom activity under the EMS, and our refined scope now includes the activities we are typically involved in.

Review of our sustainable supply chain business practices
We engaged environmental consultants (Banarra) to help us work with our major landscape and civil contractors to improve practices and environmental reporting along our supply chain. We aim to develop collaborative solutions that will meet Landcom’s needs while also  acknowledging the business constraints and opportunities of our suppliers.

Stakeholder consultation framework
Our current system of stakeholder engagement has grown incrementally over time. This year, we adopted a formal stakeholder consultation framework and put in place a five–year strategy which allows us to clearly demonstrate the thinking behind our engagement. One of our first priorities will be to focus on those stakeholders that are critical to help us deliver our revised sustainability targets.

Internal sustainability survey
In December, we conducted an internal survey of our staff to ask them about their commitment to sustainability both in their work and in their private lives. The staff demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of sustainability across the organisation and strong alignment to Landcom’s core values. However, while they had clearly ‘signed on’ to sustainability, many expressed the need for better systems and processes to simplify its application in their day-to-day work. They also asked for the corporate sustainability data we compile for this report to be broken down to better enable performance to be tracked at a project level. We responded by developing a sustainability ‘dashboard’ prototype and used this to brief our project teams on sustainability trends emerging from their projects over time. This has proven to be a very worthwhile internal communications tool and our staff have requested more initiatives of this nature.

In response, we have commenced development of a web-based tool that will enable user-friendly reporting of sustainability results and tracking of individual projects over time.

Our principal stakeholders and their interests in Landcom