1. You have been closely involved in shaping sustainability strategies and advancing low-carbon urban development in India. What are some of the most significant changes you have seen in the built environment sector over the past few years?

The biggest change has been the shift from sustainability as an aspirational agenda to a focus on risk mitigation, long-term value creation and measurable outcomes.

There is a greater recognition that sustainability requires systems thinking, and that many aspects are interconnected. Embodied carbon, for example, is influenced not only by materials, but also by design, specifications, data availability and procurement. Similarly, cooling is influenced by urban form, heat, building design and equipment efficiency.

The next challenge is to mainstream this systems thinking through enabling policy and markets, and make it repeatable at scale. At Lodha Foundation, we are focused on generating insights through real-world interventions and openly sharing what we learn, so that these learnings can help enable the wider ecosystem transition.

2. If attendees leave ISC2026 remembering one key message from your keynote, what would you like that message to be?

The transition will not be delivered by working in silos. It will come from connecting the dots and changing the way we make decisions, by enabling the ecosystem with systems-level insights.

We need to look beyond individual interventions and understand how design, materials, energy, climate, procurement, policy and markets interact. The opportunity is to take what we learn from pilots and individual projects and translate those learnings into better design decisions, enabling policies and market mechanisms that can be repeated at scale.