Big interview: Julie Hirigoyen

Emma De Vita meets a leader in sustainability who demands a radical rethink of how we construct the built environment. It means viewing every construction project as a co-owned collaboration over its entire life cycle with everyone playing their part in the race to net zero.

Julie Hirigoyen has her work cut out. She is chief executive of the UK Green Building Council (UKGBC), a membership organisation that has an ambitious mission to radically improve the sustainability of the built environment across all its life cycle stages. Its members are drawn from a broad spectrum, from those working in investment, development, construction, products and materials to architects, engineers, project managers and academics, and it’s Hirigoyen’s job to galvanise consensus and collaboration between them. “At UKGBC, we’re concerned with all types of built assets, any kind of scale of scheme – across the whole design, build, operate and decommission process,” she explains. “We’re really there to convene the sector together to find ways of overcoming obstacles and challenges, and find new ways of doing things,” she says.

Hirigoyen has spent most of her career in real estate, fiercely banging on the sustainability drum, most recently as UK head of sustainability at services company JLL. Now she’s in the right place, at the right time to help accelerate the race to net zero carbon emissions for a sector at the heart of the debate. Since she joined the UKGBC in 2015, Hirigoyen has articulated a clear vision of what it should achieve – to have a built environment that enables both people and the planet to thrive, and to do this in a measurable and meaningful way. Her sense of urgency is palpable.

How does the UKGBC make change happen is what Hirigoyen has been focusing on over the past six years, helping to coalesce a clear vision, objectives, as well as creating impact reports that tangibly measure success. For the first time, the membership organisation is also requiring its members to take real action when it comes to reducing carbon emissions. Through collaboration, the sharing of best practice, and advocating for action by government and business on climate change mitigation, resource efficiency and circularity, Hirigoyen hopes to affect real change. UKGBC’s Gold Leaf members (around 10 per cent of its 600 members) are now required to sign up to the UNFCCC Race to Zero campaign, while other standard business members are expected to have an organisation-wide climate commitment of some kind.

We speak via Zoom a fortnight before COP26 happens in Glasgow, in a year identified for taking action globally on climate change. Hirigoyen sits in her running gear, back from her own race around the Oxfordshire countryside where she lives with her husband and two children. She says it’s her nine-year-old and 13-year-old who motivate her work. “I am genuinely worried about their future. I really just find it quite frightening,” she explains. “And I’m also very upset by the number of the generation of my nieces and nephews who are saying they will never have kids because it’s irresponsible. In this vein of work one finds oneself constantly oscillating between hope and despair.”

Hirigoyen has been crunching data from the 2018 National Statistics data, which suggests that the built environment is directly responsible for 27 per cent of UK net carbon emissions, rising to 40 per cent if surface transport is included. “Obviously, it needs to reduce its contribution to emissions, but I think what’s a really exciting possibility that is not being talked enough about is the kind of technological innovation and visions of the future that are more progressive,” she says. Julie Hirigoyen

“We might eventually conceive of buildings and built assets as mini-power stations in their own right, generating renewable energy of their own – and they could also be carbon sinks. There are construction materials now being developed that are sucking back carbon from the atmosphere or they’re locking carbon in… so actually they could be genuinely regenerative rather than just being a bit less bad,” she says.

Constructing net zero new-builds is one thing, but 80 per cent of the buildings that we will have in 2050 in the UK have been built already. “Our biggest challenge is decarbonising our existing stock,” she says. “There’s no excuse though for still not building new buildings to net zero because that’s doable today – truth is we’re still not.” The UKGBC is big on sharing best practice, and Hirigoyen points to the whole list of retrofit projects that it is showcasing in its Build Better Now exhibition as part of the lead-up to COP26, ranging from projects in Nottingham and Bristol to Glasgow where fossil fuel boilers are replaced with heat pumps or buildings clad in airtight insulation.

But what about the use of high-carbon materials like concrete? “That’s a big challenge, but the Global Cement and Concrete Association has just launched its road map to net zero by 2050 with no offsets. Obviously, it will have to use carbon capture and storage, and massively invest in renewable energies – and some of that will come at a cost, but it is exciting to see the industry start to shift its attention to the embodied carbon associated with the manufacture and transportation of materials,” she says.

That shift also requires a seismic move in mindset, which is to ask the fundamental question: do we need to build it in the first place? “Can we reuse what’s already out there? One of our biggest challenges is that we can’t keep using more resource to put something up, then tear it down and put something else up. We just can’t keep doing that. We shouldn’t be demolishing anything unless it’s unsafe and can’t be reused in some capacity. It’s completely crazy,” she argues. “When new buildings are being designed, this should be with the long term in mind, to stand for 100 years and be reused, adapted or taken apart, like a car or a phone to be recycled.”

Hirigoyen talks enthusiastically about the idea of building products as services that can be leased, such as lifts, where you lease the right to ‘vertical transport’ in a building. “One could conceivably think about leasing a building façade or a steel beam, then giving it back to the manufacturer… We should and could get a lot better with that because it’s basically incentivising the manufacturer to take back, reuse and recycle – upgrade and put it back into a valuable use.” It’s a radical rethink in how we think about constructing our built environment, but it’s already happening in places, says Hirigoyen.

In the meantime, the UK should be designing and constructing for the lowest amount of carbon emissions, measured across the real whole life cycle impact of a building and driving it down wherever possible through the choice of materials and the amount of product that is being used across the project. Once constructed, a building should then be measuring for real-life energy usage every year, which should be actively managed down.

Hirigoyen acknowledges that this vision requires a massive mindset shift for the construction industry, away from a focus on financial cost and short-term return on investment towards a redefinition of value. “The system doesn’t reward a more holistic view of value, and it doesn’t allow us to take in other externalities that actually do have an important economic value, but we should be thinking much more widely… If you’re thinking of cost, then not doing it today means in 10 years’ time or less, you’re going to need to go back to those buildings and retrofit them, and the costs will be far higher than the real costs today. It’s complete lunacy,” she says.

“There’s a big piece there for insurers, the finance community, banks and lenders to get behind, because once the market starts to shift, it can reach a tipping point very quickly, and we might find these financial institutions suddenly say that they are not lending to projects that aren’t generally net zero because they think that in 10 years’ time it won’t be worth anything and that’s going to lead to a whole load of stranded investment assets.”

She may be right. “Non-circular buildings made with concrete and steel today run a higher risk of becoming stranded assets by 2050,” Mathew Vola, project director at Arup, which has designed what will be the world’s largest wood-hybrid office building near Amsterdam, told the Financial Times. Vola believes that “governments will increasingly regulate for circular buildings to meet the Paris Agreement”. Japan has been promoting the use of wood in public buildings for more than a decade and has been joined by France and the Canadian province of British Columbia.

But how do these big ideas filter down to the individual project professional? If you find yourself working with an ‘ostrich’ client with no appreciation of the moral imperative of pushing for net zero, then Hirigoyen recommends going for the economic jugular. “I would say: this project is not going to be viable in the longer term. Use the statistics – that 50 per cent of GDP is in the race to zero and in a couple of years most of business will be. It’s a litmus test for the future marketplace, and clients can’t get away with saying it’s not important.”

The biggest barrier is the mindset of business as usual, Hirigoyen believes. “The question we need to ask is how could we do this completely differently? It means moving away from thinking about making a building slightly less ‘brown’, that’s just a slower way to die. Stop kidding yourself that a little bit better is anywhere good enough, the minimum goal needs to be no adverse impact whatsoever. What would that look like? How do we reimagine a building? Every single project manager should be trying to figure out how to make the project they are working on not contribute to climate change at all.”

Collaboration and the real co-ownership of projects is what would work, she believes, so that everyone has ‘skin in the game’ rather than ticking the right boxes and getting away with greenwashing. “[Clients] should say work with me to achieve the impossible on this together and I will reward you by appointing you on my next project. Neither of us know how to do this, but if we can work it out together, then we will partner again in the future. It’s about incentivising the risk so that if they end up going down difficult rabbit holes, that’s OK, and they’ll be rewarded for that… It’s all about changing the contractual arrangements and incentivising different stakeholder groups so that everyone feels they co-won the project and will get the benefit from it.”

Hirigoyen has a global perspective and a deep commitment to environmental concerns. She grew up just outside of Paris, but moved to the UK with her Irish mother at the age of 12 after her parents separated. She studied law at university but it was her travels to South America that inspired her passion for the environment – witnessing the destruction caused by mining to communities and to the landscape. She pursued a master’s degree in Environmental Protection & Management, and another in Leadership for Sustainable Development in the mid-1990s, before falling into real estate. Her biggest career lesson? “My sense of urgency was curtailed in some of my early years by a sense of needing to fit in and convince people that I was professional. I could have made more of an impact if I’d been a bit bolder and asked difficult questions.” She’s less afraid to ask those difficult questions of all of us now.

CV: Julie Hirigoyen

Born in 1973 in Versailles, Paris

2015 Chief Executive, UK Green Building Council
2013 UK Head of Sustainability, JLL
2007 Head of Energy & Sustainability Services EMEA, JLL
2003 Joint Managing Director, Upstream
1998 Various roles, Upstream
1998 Master’s in Sustainable Development, Middlesex University London
1997 MSc, Environmental Protection & Management, The University of Edinburgh
1994 LLB, Law, University of Bristol