BUILDING LASTING CHANGE PUTS SPOTLIGHT ON DECARBONIZATION

Building Lasting Change brought Canada’s green building community to Vancouver. From real estate professionals, financiers, and policy advisors, to designers, contractors, owners, and tenants, the Canada Green Building Council’s annual conference highlights how the building sector can be a champion for impactful climate change solutions.

CCAGBC, along with presenting partner Mitsubishi Electric Heating & Cooling, put together a program focused on the opportunities zero-carbon building and retrofits present. Over the course of two days, experts shared their knowledge and participants got to explore practical solutions and discuss the policies, standards, and strategies necessary for decarbonizing large buildings at scale.

Highlights from the program included the sold-out building tours, featuring The Stack, Canada’s first commercial high-rise office tower to be awarded CAGBC’s Zero Carbon Building –Design Standard certification, and last year’s winner of the CAGBC Award for Existing Buildings, the Bentall Centre.

The always-popular Gala event featured a moving keynote from Craig Losos, the executive director of Nature Conservancy Canada’s Nature and Climate Project Accelerator. Sponsored by Lafarge, the gala entertained while the presentation gave attendees insight into the ways the built environment can better interact with natural systems.

Also at the Gala, CAGBC unveiled the 2023 winners of the CAGBC Awards in green building leadership and excellence. The list of winners is available on cagbc.org/awards.

The closing plenary panel, entitled “ESG & Commercial Real Estate in Canada - State of the Industry,” touched on climate risk, social impact, and ESG reporting, and featured insights from REALPAC’s first-ever ESG State of the Industry Report, which they unveiled at Building Lasting Change.

Other highlights included these popular sessions:

• “Factoring resilience and climate risk into decarbonization strategies,” where participants learned how to maximize the benefits of building climate risk factors into transition plans.

• “Securing stakeholder buy-in for low-carbon transition” saw industry leaders share successful strategies for getting buy-in and engagement from the boardroom to tenants for zero-carbon projects.

• “Carbon as a metric in future codes and standards” featured an international panel of experts helping attendees understand how metrics in codes and standards are evolving to better capture the true impact of carbon.

Building Lasting Change will return to Toronto in 2024.