Sustainability Summit 2025- Challenges & Opportunities for a Changing Built Environment

Deicke Richards architect & Emerging Sustainability Design Award finalist Dominika Richards reports on last month’s Sustainability Summit, staged by Architecture & Design with Good Environmental Choice Australia (GECA).

How might innovations like AI and ConTech advance climate resilience and social equity, delivering solutions to our embodied carbon, housing affordability, and wellbeing crises?

Bringing together architects, developers, engineers, planners, and policy makers, this year’s Sustainability Summit delved into where our industry is heading and how it must evolve to meet the challenges and opportunities of the era.

A finalist for Emerging Sustainable Designer Award, I was proud to travel to Sydney for the Summit with Practice Partner Cameron Davies, and I hope these takeaways inspire sustainable thinking in your own practice.

AI-Sparked Sustainability & the Built Environment

The transformative potential of AI in driving sustainable outcomes is much-touted. It offers new capabilities for modelling and analysing occupancy patterns, optimising façade and structural performance, reviewing design options and more, with the greatest impact early in a project when decisions have the highest sustainability leverage.

Significant challenges with AI, such as high energy consumption, the lack of standardised industry training, unclear data sources and unreliable outputs, were also underscored at the Summit. What remains is that as systems and models progress, policy frameworks and rigorous verification will be vital in shifting best practice from niche to everyday design culture.

Designing for Health & Wellbeing

Wellbeing emerged as a foundational component of sustainability, with ‘safe’ environments supporting more calm and healthy occupants and ‘unsafe’ spaces increasing stress while reducing productivity.

From intuitive way-finding in hospitals to sensory-specific features in community and work precincts, panellists explored how design can enhance security and cultural inclusion, with adaptable lighting, biophilic and inclusive design, low-contrast environments, and playful interventions discussed as key strategies for delivery.

Presenters maintained that building health depends on myriad factors, including physical, mental, social and cultural connection and that real‑time monitoring and early data collection are critical tools for measuring and improving occupant experience.

A Solution to Australia’s Housing Crisis?

The housing crisis is a structural challenge shaped by mismatched supply, rising costs, and a tendency to view housing as a wealth‑building mechanism. The Summit highlighted the urgent need for systemic reform, with a shift to apartment‑led density, build-to-rent models and social & affordable housing pathways.

Case studies like the Burnett Foundation’s innovative approach to low-marketing, cost‑effective apartments displayed alternative models that support long‑term affordability do exist. Speakers noted medium‑density housing (six to eight storeys), incentives for downsizing plus partnerships with church and community groups were necessary to deliver projects at scale, along with three‑storey walk‑ups as a forgotten but highly-fundable typology.

Embracing ConTech Methods & Ideas

Prefab and modular construction were presented as opportunities for fast, smart, and green delivery, with Fleetwood & Modscape showcasing the potential of digitally-enabled manufacturing and streamlined value chains supported by emerging funding models and national research initiatives.

While barriers persist particularly in the housing sector as a result of skills shortages, regulatory complexity, logistics, and early finance requirements, ConTech offers significant value for schools, healthcare, regional projects and developments seeking waste minimisation, standardisation and design‑for‑disassembly.

Demolish, Retrofit, Rebuild?

Deciding whether to demolish, retrofit or rebuild is central to commercial building sustainability. Beyond financial modelling, this requires careful assessment of embodied carbon, cultural value, structural potential and community identity.

Digital twins, circularity frameworks and green financing tools are now supporting better informed decisions. Presenters highlighted that retaining and repurposing existing structures can build social continuity, reduce emissions and maintain the ‘memory’ of place – offering meaningful alternatives to new construction.

What Next?

As built environment professionals, the scale and urgency of the challenges facing our sector are hard to ignore. Bestowing a glimpse into the breadth of innovation underway, the Sustainability Summit underscored the importance of curiosity, collaboration & design leadership in shaping healthy, equitable, and resilient places.

From my personal perspective, it reinforced the need to champion actionable strategies that bring our ecological and social sustainability commitments to life in every project we deliver.

*Get in touch with Dominika about your next project*.