Our teams of planners and designers apply their skills across five key areas and collaboratively integrate the activities of their colleagues and specialist advisers to provide resilient solutions.

Through the receipt of numerous project awards and as a founding member of the Green Building Council of Australia, HASSELL has long demonstrated an understanding and respect for the natural environment and a commitment to sustainable design and building practices.

We have established the Sustainable Futures Unit to increase our own environmental performance, to continually improve our collective skills and knowledge about sustainable design and innovation, and to apply this knowledge in a way that benefits our clients through better performing buildings, and spaces that have lasting value.

We use this growing body of knowledge to provide strategic and policy level advice to businesses and government and to promote change.

In all of our studios we are committed to practicing what we preach, and to that end we are progressively implementing an Environmental Management System certified to ISO14001:2004. All Australian studios were certified in 2008 and all our Asian studios in 2009.

We have conducted an independent audit of our energy use and carbon emissions and have committed to achieving ‘carbon neutral' status by 2010.

We are also in the process of redesigning all our studios to achieve better environmental performance and energy efficiencies, as well as healthier working environments for our people. We are doing this to demonstrate our commitment as well as the workability of our solutions to our clients.

We are convinced that designing for sustainability makes good business sense. It will reduce operating costs for water, energy and facility maintenance, increase the satisfaction level of our people and reduce our exposure to risk from anticipated future regulations designed to enforce lower energy consumption and lower carbon emissions.