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Farah Naz And Langdon Morris On Their Book Net Zero Cities, And Their Actionable Roadmap To Fight Climate Change At The City Level | |
| Staff Writer |
Rapid urbanisation has resulted in overburdened infrastructure and services, and unplanned sprawl. By 2050, cities will host another 2.5 billion urban dwellers, making the world’s population 80% urban. It is against this urgent background that ‘Net Zero City’, the region’s first book on the transition to Net Zero, has signalled the urgent wake-up call for swift corrective action. Authored by Farah Naz, a Climate Strategist and Lead of Specialist Services, Sustainable ESG Solutions for AECOM Middle East, KSA and Africa, and Langdon Morris, a globally renowned author, consultant, and speaker on innovation and sustainability, the book provides an action-oriented framework that explains how purposeful change must be achieved in cities worldwide.
Through 113 Global Best practices the authors take readers on a journey of exploration and discovery. This book is about important interventions, integrations, and innovations, about how to conceive, design, and implement an action plan to make them Net Zero cities.”
Naz and Morris propose these detailed action plans and frameworks based on their worldwide experience and renowned thought leadership in architecture, engineering, strategy, and innovation. Their many successful projects have been accomplished across key sectors in the UAE as well as across the entire Gulf Region, the Americas, Europe, and Asia.
In an exclusive Zoom interview T2NZ chats with Farah Naz and Langdon Morris to find out more about their book Net Zero City, how it can help city leaders fight climate changes by the 2030 deadline looming close, and much more.
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Q: How does the book help cities and companies to develop integrated energy strategies towards a Net Zero goal?
A: In the book, we speak about a 10-year transformation plan. We talk about the mindset shift and structural shift that's required for the people and the society to undertake this 10-year transformation plan.
And the idea of the book is to bring together lots of different ideas from stakeholders to financial organizations, to commercial organizations and scientists onto one platform and actually start thinking about it from a mind map perspective. So, the book is very much focused on cities and city leaders, but it's written for generalists.
We refer to certain fundamental principles that could be adopted and a thinking process that could be taken forward by a city or commercial organization. Essentially, we present the key level of thinking that is required to undertake the shift.
Leaders of cities or commercial organisations need to start making a mindset shift and adopt an action plan with actionable insights, benchmarks, & KPIs.
The reason why Langdon and myself focused on cities is that cities consume two or 3% of the landmass globally but cities are responsible for 80% of global greenhouse gas emissions and 70% of waste. So, cities are catalysts of innovation and other things. So, if this Net Zero journey has to start somewhere, this is a great place to start. Cities are an ecosystem that we see within ourselves, whether it's man-made or natural. And essentially, the book connects these ecosystems together in this journey.
Q: When would you say the Middle East region has seen its biggest success in terms of the Net Zero initiative?
A: We see there has been phenomenal growth in the UAE. And I was reading a book on Sheikh Mohammed where he said that a few decades ago when my friends were building sandcastles, I dreamed of building a sandcastle on the sea and everybody laughed. Now when they are in the country, I take them to see the palm.
Similarly, the UAE and Saudi Arabia are very much on the leading edge of the Net Zero initiative, both in terms of their proactive stance on this, and their ability to be first movers. Dubai has articulated the ambition to be essentially a world leader in terms of Sustainability and Net Zero.
They have the leadership, the vision, and the money to make things happen.
The completion and delivery of Expo 2020 shows that Dubai has this way of supporting social entrepreneurship and innovation to actually push and make things happen.
Another example would be the indoor farm, a US$40 million joint venture between Crop One Holdings and Emirates Flight Catering, to produce pesticide-free crops while using a fraction of the water that traditional farming does. The produce will feed passengers of Emirates and other airlines at Dubai’s Al Maktoum International Airport. The farm will be built near the airport, eliminating trucking costs and emissions.
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Q: Where do you see the biggest opportunity for GCC countries to collaborate?
A: I recently completed a trend analysis for GCC, and we found three big trends where collaboration is possible.
The first one is a clean energy transition. It has already started happening in Egypt, Jordan. UAE and Saudi Arabia are on their way. But now we have started setting other countries like Bahrain and Qatar coming into place. So, I think the biggest opportunity for collaboration is the renewable transition.
The Food-Energy-Water Nexus (FEW Nexus) is the second biggest trend for collaboration. The gulf countries could come deeply together in this relationship. We touch on this subject in our book quite deeply, because I think that is a sector that really needs a lot of collaboration. The UAE Food Security Ministry is already working on this.
And the third aspect is the Environmental Social Governance (ESG). The Middle East is slowly waking up to ESG and there is a big drive toward environmental and social governance. This is another area the countries in this region can closely collaborate on.
Q: As a pioneer in the Net Zero industry what do you think about the UK’s Net Zero strategy?
A: I think the UK is very good at setting up good regulations but what becomes a little bit challenging is the speed at which they are implemented. With Net Zero, the clock speed needs to be very fast. What we really need is to test different ideas quickly, fail fast (if that’s what happens) and move on until we find the idea that works. And we really need to find a way to optimize the learnings.
The UK is quite good at setting up policies, but its clock speed doesn't always match up with the ‘clock’ speed of climate change. And I think this is not just the problem with the UK. It's happening to many countries.
Investment is a big thing. Langdon just wrote a brilliant piece about 2022 predictions, and one of the things he talks about is that the biggest change we will be seeing is from the financial sector. The financial sector is moving so fast in this Net Zero investment. It will be interesting to see how the leadership of each country takes all these lessons learned and how fast they adopt a plan to proceed. And in the book, we talk about a journey. But we also talk about how to test pilot case studies, fail fast learn and optimise. There's a lot to be done by the UK and any other country that seeks to become climate forward.
Q: The book started with Langdon's thesis. Could you tell us more about your collaboration and how many countries and case studies does the book span?
A: We started working together on this in the fall of 2020. We have examples from every continent at least 20 or 30 countries across 113 case studies. But it's actually the experience and the energy of the people who actually we interviewed as well as Langdon’s career of four decades that is steeped in innovation mastery and strategy and my own expertise in Architecture that came together beautifully. It has just been a fabulous time working together.
Q: How did you put together a book without ever meeting?
A-LM: I really enjoy writing and the intellectual work of taking a very complex subject and trying to understand it, and then conveying that understanding. So, it's sort of a natural thing for me. Farah was a tremendous partner because she has so much knowledge and so much insight, and so many specific examples that were outside of my expertise area. So it really flowed together in a very beautiful way. We hope it shows up in the book.
Q: Where did you see yourselves in the next decade or two?
A - LM: As I've always been interested in urban design, but my career took me onto a path of strategic consulting and innovation. I wanted to reconnect with the urban issue. The way cities are evolving, and what cities are becoming in terms of the global society and global economy are important. And frankly, we are making a lot of stupid mistakes in how we design and build and live in our cities. And so I wanted to leverage the opportunity to study at the LSE to really sort of return to that as a field of interest for me personally. So, what I foresee that I'll be doing for the next 10 or 15 years is really driving the message of the book into action as much as possible. And then obviously learning that book, I would say we would call it version one. And, as we do more in-depth study in this area, we will have the opportunity to learn more, and maybe we'll write more books, or maybe we'll just do consulting projects. But I personally really want to be intimately involved in accelerating this progress to net zero as fast as possible.
A - FN: Over the next 30 years I hope to work very closely with leadership in various countries and cities using the roadmap to develop and implement actionable insights. Secondly, I hope to inspire not only built environment professionals but also the future generation, which might be the young children. Thirdly, in our book, we talk about an AI-based digital city-like ecosystem in a digital world that mirrors a real city, and how we can test different ideas between this digital city and bring it to the real world. This is another concept I hope to personally develop further.