This may come as a big surprise: The U.S. commercial construction sector is facing a shortage of skilled workers.

After a period of steep decline in commercial construction stemming from the 2008 financial crisis — forcing mass layoffs throughout the industry — that seems like an absurd notion. But activity is picking back up.

By 2015, non-residential construction is projected to grow 73 percent compared to 2011, increasing demand for skilled workers.

With nearly half of all nonresidential activity by 2015 set to be “green,” workers with experience in energy efficiency, water efficiency, responsible site management, air quality, and green building certification will be the highest in demand. That’s according to a survey of industry companies conducted by McGraw-Hill Construction.

The boom in the green building space is good news. But will there be enough people to fulfill market needs?

The McGraw-Hill survey shows that companies fear a shortage of potential employees with in-demand skills over the coming years. The shortage will be caused by three main factors: A wave of retiring baby boomers; a decline in workers with experience due to mass layoffs after the recession; and a thinning pipeline of students.

More than 85 percent of engineering & design firms, and more than 90 percent of general contractors say it will be difficult to find skilled employees to meet the boom in demand for green projects. In October, McGraw-Hill reported that 35 percent of workers have green jobs in the sector; by 2014, 45 percent will have green jobs.

In order to find employees with new skills, meet demand for greener buildings, and make their businesses more competitive, McGraw-Hill urges companies to start building a plan immediately:

If an organization does not already have a green strategy, it needs to develop one. With green projects and green jobs already accounting for one third of the market and still growing, in order to stay competitive, all involved in the industry need to their approach to green, including finding green skilled workers, capitalizing on existing green enterprise and their internal green experts and emphasizing additional green training.

The companies surveyed agreed. According to McGraw-Hill, 71 percent of firms say having certified/accredited employees help increase competitiveness; 68 percent say having green certified employees will help them expand business.

In January, the Obama Administration came under fire because green jobs training programs supported by the stimulus were not placing workers at expected rates. Those criticisms were based upon a flawed report from the Inspector General that didn’t take into account “incumbent” workers or people currently in training programs.

Those problems aside, many of the worker placement programs didn’t ramp up like many supporters hoped. But this industry survey shows why a commitment to green workforce training is so important.

by Greg Hanscom, reposted from Grist

When people say, “Call the National Guard,” they really mean Craig Fugate. As head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), he’s the guy who swoops in after a tornado or flood to clean up the mess with executive muscle and a pool of cash from the federal treasury. So perhaps it’s no great surprise that he supports efforts to create buildings that are essentially apocalypse-proof: For this guy, every day is another disaster.

Of course, there’s also the fact that he’s actually been working on credit. “I owe you a lot of money from the National Flood Insurance Program — about $18 billion,” Fugate told a group at the National Press Club last week. “Those are payouts from 2005 hurricane season.”

You may remember that season for its unruly offspring: Dennis, Emily, Katrina, Rita, and Wilma. And climate scientists tell us there are many more to come. “We cannot afford to continue to respond to disasters and suffer impacts — particularly looking at large-scale catastrophic disasters — under the current program,” Fugate said. “It will fail.”

The solution? Get smarter about how and where we build.

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With the construction industry still recovering in the U.S., companies offering “green” services may be able to set themselves apart and grow business faster, according to a survey conducted by McGraw-Hill Construction.

In 2011, green builds in the residential sector made up 17% of construction, totaling $17 billion in economic activity. And the value of the residential green building market is expected to grow five-fold by 2016, taking up to 38% of the market and representing $87 billion – $114 billion.

McGraw Hill defines green building as “one built to LEED standards, an equivalent green building certification program, or one that incorporates numerous green building elements across five category areas: energy efficiency, water efficiency, resource efficiency, responsible site management and improved indoor air quality.”

According to figures released by McGraw Hill, 46% of “conventional” homebuilders say that providing green design services makes it easier to find new work. And 71% of firms working exclusively in the green building space say that these services help set themselves apart in a struggling construction market.

Many factors are driving the green homes market, with “higher quality” and “increases in energy costs” topping the list, indicating that today’s green homebuyer is not just a green consumer. Buyers recognize that green homes have lower bills due to higher building performance. The reported costs of building a green home have also gone down significantly. Builders report that the cost to go green is now 7%, as compared to 10% in 2008 and 11% in 2006.

While green is growing across the U.S., three regions are seeing higher than average growth. The West Coast has seen the highest green growth; the Midwest’s northern region, west of the Mississippi, is second highest; and New England ranks third.

The green remodeling market performed even better than new construction in 2011, with 62% of firms saying green services helped them increase work last year. Just over one third of remodelers say they’ll be doing mostly green work by 2016.

This mirrors trends in the commercial sector, where LEED-certified retrofits surpassed new builds for the first time ever in 2011.

All this green building activity translates into new jobs and new skills for existing workers. McGraw Hill reported in October that one third of architects, engineers and contractors in the U.S. — around 660,000 people — say they have “green” jobs. That number may climb to more than 900,000 jobs by 2015.

Related Posts:

• Green Jobs Make Up 35% of Design and Construction Industry: “People Will Never Go Back to Building Inefficient Buildings”
• Retrofits Surpass New Builds in LEED-Certified Green Buildings
• Top 10 Residential Green Building Trends to Watch in 2012

The green building market is expected to be worth $135 billion in the next three years, with non-residential activity set to triple. But residential opportunities are growing as well. Here’s a list of some top trends that will help accelerate growth in the residential market, as compiled by the Earth Advantage Institute.

1)      Urban density. Filling in the spaces is the name of the game as homeowners and builders opt to create more living space through the construction of accessory dwelling units (ADUs), laneway homes (bordering the back lane behind the main house), and build on infill lots. All this because the younger crowd and the empty nesters are opting to settle in the city where they can be closer to cultural activity, mass transit, more sustainable lifestyles, and other like-minded people.

2)      Green multifamily homes. As a corollary to the urban density trend, Earth Advantage Institute has seen a large spike in Northwest multifamily building certifications this past year. The increased interest by building owners and operators in energy efficiency savings coupled with 2011’s 17% growth in multifamily homes (McGraw-Hill) means that we can expect to see a rise in certifications in this sector, especially in progressive regions.

3)      Energy upgrades start to drive home remodels. Builders and remodelers who are plugged into changing consumer preferences (smaller homes, reduced energy bills) have been able to capitalize on energy upgrade work. They have moved into the energy audit and residential retrofit market by either expanding their service offerings or, in the case of large West Coast remodeler Neil Kelly, creating entirely new service groups. In the Northwest, demand has increased, leading to significant new energy improvement business for these firms. Remodelers see such work as a driver to help bring in more remodel leads.

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This year saw a major shift in the green building sector. According to figures released earlier this month, the majority of green buildings around the world using the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) criteria are retrofits of existing buildings rather than new builds.

This is a positive shift. While green construction of new buildings is important, it only adds to existing building stock — potentially overshadowing the investment opportunities in existing commercial buildings. Some of the easiest emissions reduction opportunities are in the 60 billion square feet of commercial buildings already built around the U.S. alone.

The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) says the increase in retrofits started picking up in 2008 and have now surpassed new builds into 2011 by about 15 million square feet.

Since 2008, the downturn in new construction has shifted activity away from new buildings. While the green building sector has fared better than its conventional counterpart — growing 50% from 2008-2010 and representing 25% of all construction activity last year — the new build sector has mirrored the broader slowdown.

Also adding to the shift, some very large buildings have gotten make overs under the LEED system. From the Empire State Building to Tapiei 101, the largest building in the world, building owners have invested tens of millions of dollars into efficiency upgrades. (According to the USGBC, The Empire State Building project will save $4.4 million in energy costs and provide a return on investment in three years.)

According to a report from McGraw Hill Construction, green retrofits will grow to a third of the overall commercial retrofit market in the next three years — representing up to $18 billion in economic activity.

Related Post:

• Green Jobs Make Up 35% of Design and Construction Industry: “People Will Never Go Back to Building Inefficient Buildings”

DURBAN – The new solar thermal system perched on the corrugated roof of Deliwe Nobekwa’s small brick home isn’t just a convenience. It’s life changing. For the first time, Nobekwa can take a hot bath with the turn of a faucet.

“I’m living here with three kids. Before I had to boil many kettles of water to have a bath, and it took a lot of electricity,” says Nobekwa, speaking to a small group of visitors huddled in her home.

“It’s been three weeks, and I’ve already saved 90 Rand [$11 USD]. I do not work right now, so this is very important for me,” she says.

Nobekwa lives in Cato Manor, a township just outside the city of Durban, South Africa. She’s also the newest resident of the Cato Manor’s “green street” – a cluster of 30 homes that have received efficiency upgrades, solar water heaters, and rainwater collection systems to help residents of this working-class community reduce energy consumption by up to 50% and prove the value of a small-scale, localized approach to sustainability.

The project, funded by the British High Commission in South Africa and developed by the Green Building Council of South Africa (GBCSA) and the World Green Building Council, was only announced in October. Six weeks later, 30 households have been serviced with solar thermal and efficiency upgrades.

“We didn’t want to do something that would be ready many years from now, or ready in 2050,” says BCSSA Chief Executive Brian Wilkinson, speaking to a crowd of guests gathered for an event in Cato Manor to showcase the project. “ We wanted to do something now.”

Six weeks later, the Green Street is ready to show off to attendees at the COP 17 climate conference in Durban. Proudly greeting the hundred or so guests who’ve come to visit, residents cheer and wave as a delegation of folks from around the world walk into their community to tour the homes.

In celebration of the project, the residents of Cato Manor have named the street “Isimosezulu [climate] COP17 Place.”

But this is not just a one-off gimmick for the climate conference. The partnering organizations have raised additional government funding from the British and Australian governments to support the retrofit of 160,000 new houses in South Africa like the ones in Cato Manor.

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JR:  The University of British Columbia makes its case for North America’s ‘greenest’ building in this video and the following news release. Feel free to link to other buildings that might vie for this title.  South America’s green building of the moment is here.

The University of British Columbia has opened the most sustainable building in North America, a $37-million “living laboratory” that will help to regenerate the environment and advance research and innovation on global sustainability challenges.

The Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS) is one of only a handful of buildings worldwide that will provide “net positive” benefits to the environment. It reduces UBC’s carbon emissions, powers itself and a neighboring building with renewable and waste energy, creates drinking water from rain and treats wastewater onsite.

CIRS will be an international centre for research, partnership and action on sustainability issues, including green building design and operations, environmental policy and community engagement. Researchers will study users’ interactions with the facility to improve building performance, maximize the happiness, health and productivity of its inhabitants and advance best green building practices at UBC and beyond.

“With the world’s urban population projected to jump by two billion people in 20 years, universities have a crucial role to play in accelerating solutions for the sustainability challenges facing society,” said UBC President Stephen Toope. “CIRS is a flagship project in UBC’s ‘living laboratory’ concept, where researchers, students, operational staff and partners develop sustainability innovations on campus to be shared with society.”

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A central component of solving the climate crisis is our built environment — the homes in which we live, the buildings in which we work. Forty percent of energy consumption in the United States is related to buildings, especially heating and cooling. On Thursday and Friday, the T.C. Chan Center is hosting the United Nations Environmental Programme – Sustainable Buildings and Climate Initiative (UNEP-SBCI) Symposia at the University of Pennsylvania.

This conference brings together the different players linked to the built environment from around the world, with the goal of finding solutions that can feed to the international meeting in Rio de Janeiro on climate change and global sustainability next year, twenty years after the seminal conference that set up the international framework for fighting global warming pollution in 1992.

The T.C. Chan Center, founded by Dr. Ali Malkawi, researches and develops technology to “create healthier, productive, energy efficient strategies that will lead to high performance buildings and sustainable environments.” In an interview with ThinkProgress Green, Dr. Malkawi explained why this sustainable building conference is so important, and what are the exciting developments in the world of green architecture.

“The main problem that we have is measuring the performance of buildings,” Malkawi said. “Most of our research is built toward finding solutions that can predict energy consumption of buildings.”

At first glance, the problem of figuring out the energy consumption for buildings doesn’t seem that hard, at least in developed countries like the United States. We have metered electricity and heating use, and clear metrics of energy production. However, when it comes to actually making buildings more sustainable, this aggregate information is insufficent. To design or retrofit an energy-efficient building, Malkawi said, one needs to look at lighting, heating, and cooling systems separately, potentially floor by floor. Most buildings are not submetered. Without sufficiently granular information, it becomes impossible to guarantee clear results:

The rule of thumb is if you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it.

The rewards of data-driving green building design are huge. According to Malkawi, you can save 50 to 60 percent of energy consumption during the design phase. A good example is the Monterrey International Airport, where a new terminal was designed with the idea to lower energy consumption even before systems were put in. Major improvements can also come from ensuring efficient operation of existing systems, the equivalent of making sure that a car’s tires are properly inflated and its sensors calibrated. At the T.C. Chan Center’s home, the University of Pennsylvania, they’ve worked with facilities managers to find problems that exist in systems and optimize systems behavior, using computational models that allowed them to pinpoint individual problem buildings. They’ve achieved 15 to 25 percent reduction in energy use just by getting the best use from existing systems.

The challenge of sustainable buildings is greater than just one of designing good structures. “There’s work that’s underway that looks at the behavior of urban environments and the interaction with individual buildings,” Malkawi said. If buildings are placed away from urban infrastructures, that will require more energy consumption by its users, including the costs of increased transportation. A good rating system for green buildings takes into account the “neighboodscape,” as Malkawi described it.

The UN symposium deals with the technology, policy, and financial issues of sustainable building. There needs to be meaningful, performance-based policy to encourage green buildings, as well as a way to finance these measures. “There’s a need for both top-down and bottom-up policy,” Malkawi said. Without mandatory policies that set objective standards and technology to measure results, the financial sector won’t be able to ensure that efforts to decrease energy consumption have guaranteed value. Policies that set clear thresholds, Malkawi believes, “would drive the financial sectors and technologies.”

Unfortunately, the United States is lagging behind, Malkawi said, although our strong university system is keeping us in the game:

At the moment, research and development is in good shape. We’re much further than other countries because we still have the best universities in the world — but not in deployment and practice, which is best in best in northern Europe and Japan. It’s being hindered here by lack of enforced standards that would require developers to erect energy efficient buildings. Pretty soon, if you don’t put these issues up front, even the areas of research are going to be lagging behind.

Rebuilding our living and working spaces to be sustainable is both one of the world’s greatest challenges but also an incredible opportunity. The housing crisis, jobs crisis, and climate crisis are linked by our built environment. Whichever nation leads the way will reap the greatest rewards.

The 27-story Bosco Verticale in Milan, designed by Stefano Boeri as the world’s first ‘vertical forest’.  Click to enlarge.

If you can’t plant a forest horizontally in a dense urban setting, how about vertically?  The architect explains his design on his website here:

Bosco Verticale (Vertical Forest) is a project for metropolitan reforestation that contributes to the regeneration of the environment and urban biodiversity without the implication of expanding the city upon the territory. Bosco Verticale is a model of vertical densification of nature within the city….

The first example of a Bosco Verticale composed of two residential towers of 110 and 76 meters height, will be realized in the centre of Milan, on the edge of the Isola neighbourhood, and will host 900 trees (each measuring 3, 6 or 9 m tall) apart from a wide range of shrubs and floral plants.

On flat land, each Bosco Verticale equals, in amount of trees, an area equal to 10,000 sqm of forest. In terms of urban densification the equivalent of an area of single family dwellings of nearly 50,000 sqm.

The Bosco Verticale is a system that optimizes, recuperates and produces energy. The Bosco Verticale aids in the creation of a microclimate and in filtering the dust particles contained in the urban environment. The diversity of the plants and their characteristics produce humidity, absorb CO2 and dust particles, producing oxygen and protect from radiation and acoustic pollution, improving the quality of living spaces and saving energy. Plant irrigation will be produced to great extent through the filtering and reuse of the grey waters produced by the building. Additionally Aeolian and photovoltaic energy systems will contribute, together with the aforementioned microclimate to increase the degree of energetic self sufficiency of the two towers….

Christopher Woodward, director of London’s Garden Museum, has the story on “Living Architecture” with lots of images in the Financial Times.  He reports that in this case, the green design “adds only 5% to construction costs.”

Woodward has a great figure on Harmonia 57, an office block in São Paolo, which he calls “the cult ‘green building’ of the moment”:

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