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2030 is not a distant milestone, it is already colliding with the reality of long design and construction timelines. We sit down with Ewan Brown, Director at Tenant Brown Architects, to unpack what NZIA’s Kaitiakitanga 2030 strategy is really asking of architects, and why “we’ll get to it later” quietly locks in decades of carbon, water use, and overheating risk across Aotearoa New Zealand.

We dig into the practical heart of the strategy: moving beyond one-off “green” projects and making building performance measurement standard across every job. That includes operational energy targets (EUI), switching to all-electric buildings, lowering embodied carbon through lifecycle assessment, improving potable water efficiency, and designing for comfort by limiting overheating over a full year. Ewan also shares what he has learned from Living Building Challenge projects, where the process forces education and buy-in from the whole site team, including subcontractors, and creates a ripple effect beyond a single build.

We also talk honestly about what makes this hard: small practice capacity, tool costs, messy data, and fee structures that rarely support post-occupancy evaluation. The upside is just as real: shared, anonymised carbon data can build New Zealand-specific benchmarks by building type, and external drivers like green finance and future regulation will shift “nice to have” into business as usual.

If you care about sustainable architecture, regenerative design, and low-carbon buildings in New Zealand, hit play, share this with your team, and leave a review so more architects can find it. What would you start measuring first?

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