From environmental engineering to systems transformation, Arup’s Climate and Sustainability Leader, Joan Ko, is building a more resilient future one framework at a time.
As told to Julia Abbondanza
As I stepped into the Melbourne planning panel room a decade ago, my heart was pounding. We were rolling out an evidence base to embed quantitative sustainability benchmarks into the city’s planning scheme for the first time – no small feat.
Three months ago, my boss shrugged on his backpack and, honeymoon-bound, said to me, “Joan, you are now the expert”.
Now, facing a room full of barristers and panel members, I felt intimidated, but prepared. Thanks to Arup’s support (and a coach), I stood my ground, answered every question and walked out knowing I could both speak the technical language and translate its impact.
That moment crystallised what resilience truly means for me. Resilience isn’t just about enduring adversity; it’s about taking every challenge as a moment for learning so we get better every time. Today, I carry that lesson into every project.
Whether I’m guiding drought-sensitive precinct design, advising on flood-resilient rail projects, or weaving social impact into the energy transition, my mission is the same: build places that don’t just survive, but which evolve through crises.
Chasing water, not titles
I grew up in a suburban corner of Australia, the daughter of immigrants who prized stability, but also encouraged me to find work that mattered.
Engineering made sense. But I’ve always loved storytelling, and I think that combination is what ultimately led me to systems thinking.
From my earliest memories, water fascinated me. Growing up during the Millennium Drought made every drop feel precious. When I first enrolled in environmental engineering at Monash University, I wasn’t sure exactly where it would lead, but I knew I wanted future Australians to have the chance to experience the environment like we did.
But back then, I couldn’t have told you what the job would be. It didn’t exist yet.
After university, I followed my boyfriend, now my husband, to the UK. I told myself I needed something to do in case the relationship didn’t work out, so I signed up for a master’s in sustainable development. It turned out to be a pivotal moment.
In the UK, no one wanted to talk about drought. “Water just falls out of the sky here,” someone told me. Instead, I found myself deep in carbon policy and city design. I returned to Australia in 2010 with a completely new lens.
From local projects to regional strategy
Back home, there was a lot of momentum for sustainability. Suddenly, climate-positive precincts and zero-emission planning were on the agenda.
I drove my first major project at Fishermans Bend, translating grand decarbonisation ambitions into concrete precinct-level requirements. Watching those precinct plans go from paper to policy to pavement taught me that big visions demand rigorous processes and persistent advocacy.
Resilience isn’t just about how strong your bridge is. It’s about how connected your community is when disaster strikes.
Eventually, I stepped into management roles, but when Arup adopted Sustainable Development Goals as part of its mission, I knew it was time to go back to the “why”. I called up senior leaders and said I wanted in. That conversation helped shape the creation of the climate and sustainability services team which I led in its formative three years in Australasia.
I am now stepping into a new leadership position overseeing Arup’s global climate and sustainability team.
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Learning from disruption
I often find that people reduce resilience to hard infrastructure – things like flood defences or backup power systems. That’s part of it.
But to me, resilience is just as much about people as it is about place. I care most about whether we’re learning.
From a professional point of view, there are dozens of frameworks and indicators around resilience. But the perspective I’m particularly passionate about is our capacity to learn from disruption – to adapt, adjust and improve each time.
We’ve had royal commissions into bushfires over and over again. We have the knowledge, but do we actually act on it? Do we share it? During an emergency response, for example, everyone’s got the data they need tucked away in silos.
For example, in April this year, mobile phones stopped working during the Spain-Portugal electricity blackout. If that happened in Australia, I understand that telecommunication providers would not be able to track power status or estimate the time for electricity to be restored. Unless we find ways to trust each other enough to use this information, we’re not maximising what we know.
This is the kind of work I do: helping our clients move from insight to action, from resilience in theory to resilience in practice.
One of the most exciting shifts I’ve seen is that resilience is finally being seen as interdisciplinary. It’s not just about assets and infrastructure; it’s about communities, Country and culture.
I often remind colleagues that change is not linear. You build foundations, deep foundations, and for a long time can’t see evidence of that change. Then, all of a sudden it seems like, overnight, a skyscraper is up.
That analogy applies to climate action: years of stakeholder alignment, de-risking standards and data platform builds. Then one moment, a flood-resilience investment or a net-zero precinct plan launches and everything shifts.
Listening as leadership
A lot of what I do now isn’t just technical, it’s relational. That’s especially true when we talk about integrating First Nations knowledge into engineering and sustainability work.
Our greatest contribution to meaningful engagement is not in the outcome, it’s in the process.
For a long time, engineering treated Indigenous knowledge as something we could extract, or something to slot into a report or bolt onto a project. But that mindset misses the point for me. It’s not about extraction; it’s about respect.
One of the privileges – and responsibilities – of my role is to create enduring structures that help us to consistently and meaningfully deliver on this respect through our work. At Arup, we appointed a dedicated First Nations project leader, Melanie Grills, to help reframe our expectations. It means these questions aren’t just a “nice to have”, but are a core part of our work as leading project engineers.
We also need to be honest about the bias in our systems. As engineers, we’re trained to prioritise written and quantitative information. That excludes a lot of knowledge that’s passed on orally or experientially, which is central to First Nations cultures. Our job isn’t to replace that knowledge with our own. It’s to create space so that Traditional Owners can lead, inform and shape outcomes in ways that honour our shared responsibilities to Country.
I apply the same principle in leadership. I don’t want to be the person with all the answers. I want to be the person who holds the space, someone who makes it safe to ask better questions and helps people see themselves as joint custodians of their organisations, community and place.
This story was originally published in the August 2025 issue of create with the headline, “Designing systems of resilience”.
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