2024 Sustainability Report

The Australian Institute for Infectious Disease (AIID) will drive faster and more effective pandemic and infectious disease detection, prevention, and response. The AIID Project Team has embedded sustainability and social procurement as key priorities from the outset.

To construct the world-class AIID building in the Melbourne Biomedical Precinct, several existing buildings needed to be stripped and demolished to prepare the development site. Acknowledging that demolition can produce high amounts of CO₂, waste, dust, and noise, the project team identified an opportunity to minimise this impact through sustainable construction and business practices, including sustainable and social targets within the contractor's scope.

Prior to contracting with the market, the team proactively identified 80 tonnes of equipment that could be repurposed in other University properties, including a chiller and student accommodation items like beds, air conditioners, and other furnishings. This proactive approach saved the Dookie student accommodation project from purchasing new items, demonstrating the benefits of sustainable practices.

For the remaining furniture, fittings, and equipment, the team leveraged the procurement process and sustainability requirements within the scope to maximise sustainability and social outcomes. During contractor selection, tenderers were assessed on their adoption of sustainable construction practices, including waste management, dust suppression measures, response to sustainability and social targets, and project-specific requirements to minimise and capture greenhouse gas emissions.

Through a competitive process, preferred contractor Kane Constructions committed to exceeding the social procurement targets of 2-4% and agreed to a stretch target of 5%. This commitment demonstrated the contractor's dedication to delivering positive social outcomes.

The social procurement targets led Kane Constructions to seek alternative suppliers and innovative ways to strip out the existing furniture and equipment. This search resulted in the engagement of Project Net Zero, a 100% Indigenous-owned business with a workforce comprising more than 80% Indigenous employees.

Working with Project Net Zero resulted in a further 30 tonnes of furniture and equipment being diverted from landfill and donated to the community. Repurposing these items helped reduce the production of new items and their associated emissions, as well as the energy, water, and mineral resources required for manufacturing.

By applying sustainable and social principles to the project, the majority of furniture, fittings and equipment was diverted from landfill, and an Indigenous-owned business was engaged, delivering social, environmental, and economic benefits for the University and the community.

Melbourne Law School’s Sustainability Business Clinic marked a decade of operation in 2024, with its thirtieth client passing through the clinic. Among the three clients supported in 2024, groups of students worked on behalf of National Trust (Victoria). The students completed research on the operation of statutory regimes to protect non-native urban tree canopies, which are essential to mitigate urban heat and provide streetscape amenity. They also explored reform options to achieve better protection, including equipping local councils with model regimes which they can develop using their existing powers to make local laws.

The Sustainability Business Clinic exists within the Melbourne Law Clinics Program, which in 2024 conducted Australian-first research into clinical legal education models for climate law in two different ways.

First, the clinical program oversaw research into the Sustainability Business Clinic. Three distinct strands of impact were identified, constituting a model of for-purpose environmental clinical education evaluation:

• Student sustainability skills development and awareness. The research analysed student reflections and found that the real-life exposure to the environmental goals and legal barriers of their clients built their self-confidence and belief in their capacity to contribute to future a legal system changed by and responsive to environmental and climatic change.
• Direct financial impact on clients by measuring cost savings and value provided.
• Amplifying the environmental mission of enterprise and community groups. The research highlighted the power of legal support from a legal team like a student-led clinic that has a shared environmental purpose with their client (as opposed to the lawyers having a profit purpose). This was evidenced by the different manner of lawyering, including having an openness to providing more-than-legal supports to clients, on sharing these supports with groups working for the same environmental purpose as their client, and advocating to governments and for legal change on topics of interest to their clients.

The second research project examined the Sustainability Business Clinic as one of a number of models for legal education for climate conscious lawyering, alongside outreach legal education clinics, including Melbourne Law School’s Street Law program. This program provided the community legal sector with climate legal education modules that were distributed to communities in the outer eastern suburbs of Melbourne deemed vulnerable to climate risk. The models assessed were litigation-based clinics, enterprise clinics, and policy and community support clinics. They were all shown to be effective running in partnership with existing legal actors.

The research project led to Melbourne Law School's approval of a new Climate Resilience Clinic, which will be offered for the first time in 2025. The Climate Resilience Clinic will be run in partnership with Victoria’s community legal sector and build legal capacity across Victoria within the community legal sector so that locally based lawyers can better respond through the law to extreme weather events, and support Victorians experiencing the effects of climate change.