Road to a regenerative world explored at QF’s Education City Speaker Series

Experts from Qatar and around the world discuss how regenerative development can point the way toward a safe and prosperous planet in the latest edition of QF’s Education City Speaker Series.

In a virtual discussion titled Beyond Sustainability: Imagining A Regenerative Future, the international platform for dialogue turned its focus onto a concept that aims to build, rather than simply maintain, the support systems needed for long-term growth and a resilient world, and reverse damage to the natural environment instead of simply minimizing it.

The event looked at regenerative development’s roots in indigenous culture, where and how it is already being embraced, and what it can make possible, as well as how it can be applied in different cultural contexts. Among the speakers giving their perspectives on the topic was Ibrahim Mohamed Jaidah, Group CEO and Chief Architect, Arab Engineering Bureau, who spoke about how Qatar is working to build a better future.

“The amount of construction that has been done in the last 20 to 25 years is more than the last 100 years – there has been tremendous growth. But we are fortunate as we have recognized in the last decade or so that we have overconsumed our part of the earth.

“With the steps we have taken, in the last 10 to 15 years, we have started to recover, to regenerate. For example, in the last three years, Qatar has managed to increase food security by 400 percent. If we continue this way, we’ll be self-sufficient in just a handful of years.”

Jaidah went on to speak about the upcoming FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022™ - the infrastructure, sustainability, and the legacy of the stadiums. “How are we going to continue living with these buildings, to rehabilitate them, for people to make use of them? Here, for every design – and as part of the competition – we had to show how we planned to rehabilitate the buildings after the event. And we had to look at the bigger picture, because the stadiums are going to form part of our society – they’ll become parks, medical facilities, education institutes.”

During the discussion – moderated by Jason Twill, Director of the World Cup Master Program at Qatar Foundation – Bill Reed, a planning consultant and sustainability and regeneration expert who is the Principal of US-based Regenesis Group, Inc., explained the concept of regenerative development. “We can’t really save the world,” he said.

“The world is too abstract, it’s too big. There’s no chief or CEO of the planet. So what we can do is save the world place by place. And each place is different, which requires us to engage in a unique way. So regenerative development is about developing capabilities to participate in the process of evolution.”

And speaking about the Middle East specifically, he said: “It doesn’t matter where you are, it matters how you address where you are. What is the nature of a healthy ecosystem around the Gulf? That is the first question that needs to be asked, and then how do we serve that in our projects.”

The Education City Speaker Series event also heard from indigenous community leader Dr. Anne Poelina, Chair of the Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council in Western Australia, whose work is focused around issues of environmental and cultural protection.

Speaking about the future, she said: “I think we need to be quite clever, we need to be innovative, we need bring a wide range of collective wisdom into how do we start to look at how we learn and unlearn, and how do we look at what is happening globally and bring that locally. All of these things are really important.”