Green house

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How environmental regulation may change the face of warehouse construction.

With the biggest developments in the world, the tallest buildings and the most luxurious hotels, competition seems to underpin all aspects of the construction industry in Dubai. Now developers have something else to squabble about - which company has the greenest building.

At the beginning of the year, Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum announced that any new buildings throughout the country would need to be environmentally friendly.

For the logistics industry, this naturally suggests that ‘green warehouses' will begin to appear in the country. So what will this mean for supply chain practitioners looking to build a new facility? The answer is that the specific form the regulations take will likely vary from emirate to emirate.

While Dubai's own set of regulations are still being drawn up by the municipality and won't be expected until the end of the year, other emirates - not least Abu Dhabi - have forged ahead with their own code of certification.

Abu Dhabi's Estidama regulations, announced at the beginning of July, are adopted from the US-created Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification schemes and are perhaps more stringent than anywhere else in the world.

Town planners in the emirate say they want to leave a clean, sustainable city to future generations.

Whether Dubai decides to transplant the Estidama regulations or whether it will adopt the US LEED pedigree, it is clear that warehouse developers in the emirate are in limbo for now.

Whatever form the rules take when they are adopted at the end of the year, there will inevitably be a skills shortage. Firms that have been able to take out multiple projects at a time will suddenly have to put new contracts on ice until they train up engineers in the new rules or find the right consultants to ensure that the buildings are built to specification.

There are currently only 11 engineers in the UAE who are trained to LEED certification, and bosses at industrial construction firm Amana recently announced that they will train 10 of their staff in the US building code.

"We see that the markets locally and the markets globally are moving toward sustainable development and a lot of it is coalescing around the LEED certification of the US Green Buildings Council (USGBC)," says Amana chief operating officer Riad Bsaibes. "Dubai looks like it is moving that way - by using LEED as a standardisation of requirements.

"Abu Dhabi has taken it to another level, perhaps to a higher level in creating its own requirements. The reason why it is important for us to move in that direction is because that is the route the market is taking.

"But the first thing that we need to do is to raise the wareness within the company of the requirements for sustainable construction with respect to LEED certification," he adds.

In order to train the 10 engineers, the company is looking to bring in LEED consultants from the US.

"We don't believe the market here has the right means to train our staff. Right now it is still coming together and is thus in an early stage," says Bsaibes.

"We needed to bring expertise from a developed market like the US to train our people. The aim is to have 10 LEED certified staff by the end of the year."

Bsaibes himself admits that should the new code be a LEED pedigree they may struggle to retain their engineers after the regulation comes out and the skills shortage hits the market.

Other companies, however, are playing the waiting game to see what the final system will be before training up in-house experts. For instance, ProLogis, which has led the field around the world in developing sustainable warehouses, has not trained up any of its engineers in the Middle East region.

"We are seeing that consultants are already preparing to take on this type of document management," says Joseph Ghazal, ProLogis' senior vice president in the Middle East.

Ghazal adds that he is not convinced that Dubai Municipality will simply adopt an identical LEED system to that utilised in the US.

"We believe certification will be closer to the standards in Abu Dhabi or Europe - a modified version of LEED or BREEAM like in the UK," he says.

LEED certification is split up into six categories - sustainable sites, water efficiency, energy and atmosphere, materials and resources, indoor environmental quality, and innovation and design process.

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