Chairman of the Supervisory Board (Aufsichtsratsvorsitzender) & Senior Advisor (former CEO), ATP architekten ingenieure (ATP Group)
"Green Deal, Green Finance, Green Building - aber wie?" Keynote von Christoph M. Achammer, ATP
Christoph M. Achammer, ATP architekten ingenieure und Vorstand der der IG LEBENSZYKLUS BAU, zieht am Jahreskongress ein "Resümee für Gegenwart & Zukunft" über Nachhaltigkeit in der Bau- und Immobilienbranche.
Als Universitätsprofessor an der TU Wien, Lehrstuhl für Industriebau und interdisziplinäre Bauplanung, beschäftigt sich Christoph M. Achammer mit der Forschung zu Integraler Planung, Lebenszyklusorientierung, BIM und Digitalisierung. Er ist Vorstandsvorsitzender von ATP architekten ingenieure. Mit mehr als 900 Mitarbeitenden an zehn Standorten in DACH und CEE plant ATP fachübergreifen...
Transcript (48 segments)
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Christoph Achammer0:02
It is my task at the end of this day to provide a summary for you here in the hall and for our guests at home. I can assure you, it will be an enormously optimistic summary.
What my predecessor presented in rather dry banking language, ladies and gentlemen, is nothing less than a revolution. It is exactly what we need to prevent what some speakers, not quite so optimistically, have said — that we have been talking about this for 20 years without making progress.
If the requirements we have for a forward-looking world are to be implemented, they must arrive in the financial world. And what you cited from Larry Fink, one of the largest or the largest investor worldwide — when he speaks in such a tone, then that is the beginning of truly dramatic change.
Perhaps with a small comma in between — a second dramatic change that we have experienced politically, which also passed us by a little. For the first time in Europe, the EU has been placed in a position to take on credit itself, to collect taxes itself, to borrow and distribute across national borders.
I believe these two things will help us. If I want to infect you with my optimism — green finance and green building. And that is a very essential point of this Green Day: green building.
How essential it is — look behind me. We are among the most significant investment industries in the world by a wide margin. In national balance sheets, over 80 percent of fixed assets are real estate and infrastructure.
Broken down to Austria, that means in our industry we have 52 billion in revenue, and interestingly, only 24 billion in value creation. Perhaps you can deduce from that what kinds of production chains we still operate in. But we must be aware that we are one of the most important industries in every national economy, in Austria and worldwide.
Back there you see roughly the magnitude we are talking about globally — the 100 largest companies, which produce 1.5 trillion in value creation per year. Those are only the 100 largest companies. Bau and Strabag from Austria are included in that.
On the other hand, we bear enormous responsibility in our business. I want to highlight just this one again because we dealt with it intensively last year: we are responsible for consuming 100 percent of the land use. And what that means in Austria — as has been said 23 times already — only 37 percent is even habitable. In Tyrol it's only 13 percent, by the way. That's a bit dramatic, but all of eastern Austria has somewhat friendlier terrain, which is why the people there seem friendlier too.
We try to keep pace even though we start with one-third, as you can see. And of that 37 percent, we consume almost 20 percent with building land, 10 percent with traffic areas, and still 6 percent — that is an incredible share — and 3 percent for commercial and recreational areas. We consume every single day, 365 days a year, 140,000 square meters of new land.
I learned today about brownfield sites — 110,000 square meters of that every day we create in brownfield sites each year. You really have to let that sink in. So we need to do something differently.
Given this significance on the one hand and the responsibility on the other — two or three things about the state of our industry, economically. You know this: in our processes we have 30 to 50 percent waste potential. And that despite the fact that nobody really earns enormously in the construction industry, unlike the weapons industry or the drug industry where you can afford waste. With just 2 percent EBIT of our large construction firms, we still tolerate 30 to 50 percent waste potential.
It is the developers, the planners, and those who execute. That is the result. You've seen this many times — red is the normal industry, green is us. And we only look good at just under 100 because the civil engineering industry is included. The building construction sector is significantly further down in terms of productivity.
There is a brand-new study, although for Germany — I converted it to Austria. We produce 15.4 percent error costs from our total volume every year. 15.4 percent error costs. Annual construction investment errors in Austria amount to about eight billion, just as a side note.
And of course the ecological state is even more significant. As we said, besides the 100 percent land consumption, we are responsible for the majority of energy, resources, and waste volume. We have almost no recycling compared to, say, the automotive industry. This is also a story that goes back a bit to Mr. Reisinger, who looked at the details.
Ladies and gentlemen, 53 percent of all tons on Austrian roads are construction-related. You have to let that sink in. That is why we have such high burdens in construction. These are just the transport loads driving around on Austrian roads — and the reason is clear.
Regarding the socio-cultural state, I want to mention just two points. We all discuss housing — where is it a human right? In Germany, by the way, it is enshrined in the constitution. In Austria, not yet. I believe we need to talk about these topics even if we are not social romantics. We must create affordable housing, and we are far from it. Today, even in wealthy countries like Austria, Germany, or other European countries, we are far from getting below 40 percent of household income on housing costs.
And where do we want to go? Here and now, I'll say it clearly: in the economic area, we want zero waste. We want to move toward zero waste. Forty years ago, the automotive industry said that was impossible. We are there today. That is why a good mid-range car today is produced at prices less expensive than fitting out a small bathroom in a social housing project. You really have to let that sink in.
A bathroom in social housing today costs, in real terms, more than a mid-range car. So we must operate toward zero waste.
We must — and I say this with conviction — we must also achieve a zero CO2 balance. Thank God, we no longer talk only about energy savings, which certainly contribute. But essentially, we must move toward zero emissions. And we will manage it. It is a technological challenge.
The five demands of Jeremy Rifkin are ten years old, and many of these things we can already achieve technically. If the financial industry helps and forces us to move in a market-economy direction, we will succeed.
And last but not least, we must move toward zero poverty. Excuse this slogan, but we must clearly commit to changing the obscene inequality that we accept today. After 20 years of neoliberalism — this time also coming from Chicago — we must stand against it. We must truly oppose it if we don't aspire to change this obscene inequality. And that also means breaking up large corporations, breaking up monopolies.
If we don't achieve this shift — a shift toward a functioning, sustainable market economy within a capitalist framework — we will not succeed. The United States, before it was dictatorially governed by monetarists, did this once before. I'm almost too young to remember, but AT&T was broken up into five Baby Bells by the monopoly authority of the United States.
It is high time that today's digital companies experience the same. It is a difficult profession, being a monopolist, but it doesn't lead us where we want to go. And how should construction manage this? Let me return to an old structure and an old result — the ICG lifecycle.
We must dramatically and constantly change these first three points in construction. We must change the culture, the organization, and the processes, and then we can use the technology available to us today.
On the culture — as has been said several times by Wolfgang Artist and others — complex processes can only be managed by introducing trust. Not through organizational charts like that one over there, which I believe is the Berlin airport, but through trust. And trust requires transparency; trust requires information for everyone and transparency at the operational level.
Digitization helps us in our industry. We can make cost schedules and facility management not only visible but tangible from a very early phase in the design process all the way through to handover of the building.
We must find a path of cooperation across individual professions. Even within planning, we find this difficult, but we are fighting for it. We must maintain this cooperative culture from the very beginning all the way through to demolition. And we must rethink how all stakeholders together define an order quality at the very start that holds throughout the lifecycle.
Tomorrow we must simplify and change our organizations indirectly. You know this — how long ago was it, five years or so — that it was developed, and everyone who sticks with it runs their organizations well.
And I deliberately chose this image because at the beginning of the ICG lifecycle I struggled a bit, asking what good this would do. Ladies and gentlemen, we will have to unite our processes across departmental boundaries. The general contractor is not the universal remedy, but a model that is oriented toward the end user, toward the customer.
Perhaps also a structure where planners and contractors come together offers advantages and cannot be stopped. We must be clear that technology only functions when we — for example in the planning area — cross boundaries and approach the topic integrally.
We must work with new service profiles. As long as we insist that architects, structural engineers, building services, and building physicists all work parallel side by side, nothing will change. And even in the most open model, this cannot be contractually mapped, because when the structural engineer provides input, you cannot separate honorarium and risk from the architect. It simply doesn't work. We must work together.
When I look at the processes, you can already see where I'm heading. I believe that urban planning, in the early phases, has a much more dominant and sovereign task. Planning must plan cities and spaces, not follow project necessities.
And we planners — and even the developers among you — would be grateful for the longer planning horizons and planning certainty that results from that. This also somewhat eliminates the value discussion about which values go to whom through which designations. Urban planning must create framework conditions much earlier and much more clearly, otherwise we will never solve the traffic problem.
On the next level, I believe that planners should already step in at the neighborhood level and contribute even to material selection. This strange process where we develop a so-called neutral building, put it on the market, and then as the only industry leave material selection to the contractor — and then in the 14 days between award and start of work, coordinate whether the so-called neutral building matches the contractor's material selection and becomes a real bridal house.
Think of building services — that is absurd. And that must change. Therefore, we can easily look in a direction of why shouldn't a planner cooperate with a contractor from a very early phase? If I look around — the colleague has already left — everyone who truly does good timber construction talks to a timber builder in the design phase.
Without that, you cannot market it. You cannot write or plan a neutral timber building. You must cooperate with a manufacturer. And finally, technology — we must change.
There is a brand-new study from Baumeister on how our colleagues in Germany assess technology. The large column is not really interesting. We must truly change. But I am glad that the colleagues are so honest: if you don't change the culture, they are completely right that digitization won't interest you.
Because without changing the culture, introducing the digitization topic costs a heap of money, and then after introducing digitization, you produce less standards-compliant and worse plans than before. If that is the goal, just leave it. We know what opportunities this technology offers — namely, to host data in the same system from beginning to demolition.
We know that if we start now, we will be in the jungle. There are no standards, there are no general exchange formats. I encourage you to do it anyway, but only if you have changed the corresponding culture beforehand.
And perhaps — this is what I can say from my own practice — perhaps it succeeds when several in the jungle begin talking to each other. At our level, this is already happening. When Norman Foster and Herzog & de Meuron and a few large firms even talk to us and say let's work on this topic and jointly fight against the software vendors — ladies and gentlemen, that is an incredible ray of hope where collaboration can begin.
And as an outlook, and with that I'll end now — I believe these three cultural changes, with the integration of technology, will put us in a position to achieve the goals I have addressed: zero waste, zero CO2, and zero poverty. They can be achieved with our means in our business.
Think about procurement of components. If today I develop a completely individual door and that door is installed in one and a half years, and I put this door on an international procurement platform, I guarantee you there will be three or four direct suppliers who, because of their improved production planning in one and a half years, can deliver that individual door at half the price compared to ordering it 14 days beforehand through up to three levels of wholesale.
Over 95 percent of all components you see installed here today are still sourced through up to three levels of wholesale. And when I ask why — in Germany, the largest wholesaler has 25 percent market share. He says, you know, we have 600 stores across the republic because we guarantee that within eight hours, every part you need in the sanitary sector will be at your construction site anywhere in the country.
This service is praiseworthy, but not necessarily necessary for a part I know about one and a half years in advance. But please, ladies and gentlemen, with this outlook, I wish you and us full optimism that we can achieve these goals in our industry — through hard work, through much innovation, and through the support of investors who will no longer buy anything else.
I am not a banker, but I'll take one more second from school. I am on the supervisory board of a very large open-end real estate fund — an alternative investment vehicle with a banking license. And an old man like me has to attend a fit-and-proper training twice a year to qualify.
In the last fit-and-proper training, I saw exactly these criteria of the Austrian and European financial market authority for real estate funds. Ladies and gentlemen, they are forced by March 11 of next year — with prospectus liability behind them — to document a sustainability strategy. Not just any way, but in three prescribed levels: I will do it until 2050 like this and like that, and let myself be audited; or I will do it only partially; or I won't do it and must justify why not.
I can tell you, as soon as this enters the prospectus liability of a real estate fund, a pressure will develop very, very quickly. That we can achieve what we aim for. With this optimism, roll up our sleeves and wish us much success. Thank you very much.