Green Buildings Are Our Choice
The Russian Green Building Council (RuGBC) founded in 2009 defines ambitious goals, notably, to drastically change the building ideology in our country adapting it to green standards. Starting almost without any basis, the Council has results not only in popularization of these ideas, but in their realization as well. The General Director of the Council Guy Eames is speaking about the present and future of the Council.
Guy, please, tell us about a creation process of the Russian Green Building Council. Who was among initiators?
I remember that day very well. In spring of 2009 30 people met in a small office in the Baumanskaya Street for realizing a dream about Green Building Council. The ambiance was rather tense, a reaction of participants was unpredictable, but, luckily, everything turned out well.
We had a support of international companies which are represented in Russia: AIG/Lincoln and Hines (development and real estate activities), Denton Wilde Sapte (legal services), representatives of the World Bank, investment, construction and consulting companies Prosperity Project Management, Turner, Arup and nonprofit organizations Forest Stewardship council (FSC), Greenpeace, WWF, etc. Certainly, we understood that the situation could change from a moment when we voted for the creation of the Council and till a critical moment when membership dues were to be paid. But we did it and signed all the founding documents.
I was lucky to meet Yuri Tabunschikov being a president of the nonprofit partnership AVOK uniting engineers on heating, ventilation, air conditioning, heat supply and building thermal physics, who was an adviser of Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov on issues of energy efficiency. He, our staunch ally – General Director of “Prosperity Project Management” Alexey Poliakov - and I received a confirmation from the Ministry of Justice that the Council was officially registered. There were other key persons, including our first workers Xeniya Agapova and Galina Sergeeva. There wasn’t much done without their enthusiasm and zeal.
All who helped us and supported were kind of seers and believed that green buildings could be a reality in Russia. In many world countries people recognized that there is more sense in “good” buildings than in the “bad” (very often at the same price!). For example, the company AIG/Lincoln built a lot of qualitative buildings in Europe and USA which are certified by the LEED and BREEAM. Hines realizes a global green policy in the construction field when all projects are ecological from the beginning. World institution investments being pension funds, insurance companies also prefer green investments due to their quick payback and low risk level.
What is the situation today?
I would like to note that the Russian Council is a nonprofit organization which exists thanks to dues of the members. We had a long way from 2009: today we are supported by 200 companies and individual members, we published basic documents, realized conferences on the highest level, our delegations visited a lot of countries. We are closely working with projects “Sochi-2014” and “Skolkovo”. Now we are on the next stage and before we had a battle for survival, when we were working on the website, procedures of membership in the Council, organization of events and first marketing investigations.
Today, having a strong leadership and correctly organized processes both inside the company and in interaction with the external world, we have a stable state. Highly qualified lawyers (K&L Gates) and financial adviser (Valeriy Gorohov) support us. We are proud of our database CRM – “electron cloud”. I should point that we support green IT, i.e. apply energy efficient netbooks, our website is based on a green hosting, without a corporative server. Last year we published impressive annual report and carried out a Webinar where we could talk about our achievements.
Now we are going to the third stage of our development, to the consolidation of the state structures, nonprofit organizations and leading market players. Several scores of projects in Russia are pretending to international certification and it means that the green building market is growing. Maybe it grows not as quickly as we wish, but we are looking forward a considerable growth and expanding a number of members of the Council. It will favour a perfection of our procedures, consolidate cooperation between members, help to form new committees and working groups, interactive processes and contribute a green technology development.
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Text By Irina Alpatova