I first heard about Antonios Voulodis when he was appointed as NYU Abu Dhabi’s inaugural Director of Sustainability and Environmental Stewardship. His talk touched on a broad swath of topics and he discussed it very well by going across the timeline of his career. There were tangential discussions around his experience navigating the working climate in Abu Dhabi – he shared how he had to navigate being young in an old people environment, file claims when developers requested added scope, etc. He noted how everyone hopes projects were ‘complete yesterday.’ It makes me hope this sense of urgency is translated over to the initiatives he begins at NYUAD.
Given that he began his career in sustainability working for the Abu Dhabi government, I found his insight on the inner functioning of government sustainability quite informative. I haven’t heard about the Ghadan 21 program, program before his talk. It was great to hear that the UAE leadership gave a broad 50 Billion AED grant with the broad goal of ‘improving the public realm.’ As Antonios pointed out, such a project could have any scope but the focus on interventions around sustainability goes to show the close relationship general well-being and sustainable living have. Going through the projects by the Department of Municipalities and Transport it seems my first engagement with one of Ghandan 21’s interventions is the mangrove park. The Mangrove park was inaugurated recently and had a lot of visitors since it provided access to natural sites that were usually constrained by fees or lack of access. Hearing Antonios’ experience as he sought to create pocket parks to bring out people during high temperatures by leading a team of international consultants and going through modeling iterations was informative.
At NYUAD he spoke about how he was tasked with envisioning a robust climate action plan. Most of the sustainability discussions I was exposed to on the NYUAD community came from students and student interest groups so it was great the new leadership was emphasizing a climate action plan – which Antonios spearheads. Before coming to NYUAD, and even before Ghadan 21, Antonios spoke about the work with a green building rating system. He shared that NYUAD received a rating of 2, which he called quite impressive and is the minimum government-funded buildings must achieve. NYUAD suffers from major pain points in its sustainability ranging from energy consumption to behavioral action of its community members. I wish Antonios success in improving our sustainability and hope we as a community are as supportive as possible.
Leave a Reply