GORD Academy welcomed 2018’s first group of GSAS Certified Green Professionals to a 3-day GSAS Design & Build workshop held in QNCC from 16-18 January 2018.

Capacity building has been a priority of GORD as it is very crucial for success implementation of a system. Since 2009, GORD Academy has trained more than 5,000 professionals in GSAS workshops with more than 2,000 GSAS certified practitioners.

During the introduction to the workshop, the 8 categories of impacts resulting from the built environment were elaborated: Air pollution, land use and contamination, fossil fuels depletion, water depletion, water pollution, materials depletion, human health and the climate change. What was needed to create a sustainable built environment that minimizes the ecological impact, was a sustainability rating system supported by a set of performance based standards that address the specific regional needs.

The workshop was attended by a wide array of professionals working in various disciplines of the construction industry from project managers to mechanical, electrical and civil engineers to architects, interior designers and sustainability as well as environmental and sustainability engineers and energy specialists.

As the workshop progressed over the three days, we discussed with various groups and individuals regarding their take away from the sessions. For Anam Waheed who is an environmental engineer in Alstom working in environmental compliance – the workshop helped her look at the bigger picture and seeing the project as a whole with relation to other sustainability aspects she hadn’t focused on earlier such as urban connectivity and other architectural aspects. Also, Khaled Mahdy, an electrical engineer from FD Consult agreed that though he often heard the term sustainability and sustainability systems, he wasn’t clear how it related to his work or about its various components and their management. After the workshop he got this clarity and said,

It’s much more than just recycling or switching off lights as commonly understood.

A group of professionals from Consolidated Contractors Company included MEP Engineers Adnan El Cheikh Mohamad & Bernard Ghanem who agreed that though they were familiar with GSAS before attending the workshop, its various categories and weightages sounded a bit complex, but the workshop made it quite easy to understand and the examples given during the workshop helped them relate to applying it to their respective area of work and made the evaluation process simple and systematic. It also helped them understand the different sustainability systems, the commonalities and differences among them hence, it was an understanding of sustainability as a totality and not in isolation. Adnan reiterated in the end,

We would like to witness GSAS become a common standard practice in Qatar rather than an optional contractual requirement.