Last
November, Greenbuild, easily the largest green building conference in the
world, not only brought together the most important politicians, proponents,
and luminaries in green construction, but also brought to the fore pressing
issues in sustainability. The conference is an enlightening exposition that
will let you know more or less where the industry is heading.
1.
Health
and education are two important principles that go hand in hand.
The
agenda of the conference showed the regard for both education and health, with
several sessions dedicated to health education. USGBC and the UL Environment
partnership also announced in the expo that they will be putting up a Center
for Green Building and Human Health. LEED v4 stepped by introducing the
Materials and Resources (MR) section, while manufacturers have also started
labelling their products in conformity with the upcoming MR requirements. The
private sector, in full recognition of the connection between health and green
construction, has given a $3 million grant to USGBC for research on healthy
building materials.
2.
What
matters are the outcomes.
Strategies
are important, but outcomes are ultimately what matter. In the previous LEED
standards, certified projects put a premium on strategies and energy models.
There is more focus on outcomes in LEED v4, especially with the new LEED
Dynamic Plaque, a web-based performance dashboard that continually monitors the
waste, transportation, energy, and “human experience” of the LEED building
real-time. This means that the rating of a building will be constantly
re-scored depending on its daily performance.
3.
Scalability
and going local are important.
Scalability
is also a pressing concern in the summit, as the challenge to handle a system
with a growing number of global design problems became clear. One of the
discoveries of the summit was the 2030
Palette,
which helps in building an increasing number of sustainable and low-carbon
environments worldwide by giving design professionals the tools they need to take
action in an accessible manner.