Sam Archer

Director of Market Transformation - NZGBC

Sam Archer is a Sustainability Consultant and Mechanical Engineer with over 18 years experience in the Construction Industry. As Director Market Transformation at the New Zealand Green Building Council, he is responsible for running the sustainability and energy assessment tools - Green Star, Homestar and NABERSNZ.

He has a passion for sustainable housing having spent 6 years creating and managing the sustainability framework for a 3000 home development for the University of Cambridge. Sam also has extensive experience in sustainability and energy strategies, including carbon policy work for UK government, sustainable urban design and low energy and passive building design.

Katie Symons

Principal Advisor, Engineering - MBIE Building System Performance Branch

Katie is leading the technical side of the Building for Climate Change programme’s work to reduce whole-of-life embodied carbon emissions.  

Katie is a chartered professional structural engineer in New Zealand and the UK, and has over 15 years’ experience designing building structures in both countries. She has particular expertise in assessing the embodied carbon of buildings and construction materials.  

Working as a consultant engineer, she developed tools and methodologies to integrate carbon assessment into the building design process. She has also undertaken research work at Cambridge University on the application of environmental life cycle assessment in construction, and is the author of a number of academic papers on the subject.  

Marty Verry

Group CEO - Red Stag Timber

Red Stag operates the largest sawmill in the Southern Hemisphere in Rotorua, and owns Red Stag TimberLab. Red Stag TimberLab merged Red Stag’s CLT operation with TimberLab’s 65 year pedigree in mass timber glulam and LVL solutions. With its self-sufficiency in heat and power generation, and local supply, Red Stag has the lowest carbon EPD of all mass timber suppliers in New Zealand. With an in-house frame and truss plant, the group delivers complete structural solutions for many of the main mass timber projects in NZ. Red Stag TimberLab partners on an ECI basis with NZ’s leading build firms specialising in complex, large or critical projects. The company has 500 staff, most in Rotorua where it is the largest private employer and a major supporter of local charities and community initiatives.