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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While the Wall Street Journal was busy running its relentless campaign to discredit the existence of clean energy jobs, a report featuring some impressive job numbers was released quietly — with zero pick-up from the mainstream press.

According to McGraw Hill, more than one third of architects, engineers and contractors in the U.S. say they have “green” jobs. That’s 661,000 jobs, a number that is expected to climb to more than 900,000 jobs in the next three years.

That’s in line with the $71 billion American green building market, which represented 25% of all new U.S. construction activity in 2010. The value of that activity is on track to reach $145 billion in 2015.

Say what? I thought that green jobs weren’t real?

I went to the Greenbuild conference in Toronto last week to talk to some of the leading experts in green building for this story.  It became apparent very quickly why this story isn’t getting out. So-called “green” building practices are a natural progression of the conventional building industry, with many of the same companies participating in both sectors. As firms in this industry adopt new technologies and techniques, it’s difficult to determine the precise employment impact.

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“Consistently appearing in first place in overall standings throughout the competition, the University of Maryland won the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon 2011. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu announced the competition results Saturday before an excited audience that packed the main tent in the solar village.” The WaterShed house won by combining affordability, consumer appeal, and design excellence with optimal energy production and maximum efficiency. Purdue University took second place in the competition, and New Zealand (Victoria University of Wellington) received the third-place award.

University of Maryland President Wallace Loh offered the winning team his heartfelt congratulations:

The innovation, creativity, skill, vision, cooperation, determination, and, yes, energy displayed by this team is both remarkable and a joy. I couldn’t be more proud of their work and accomplishment. These students, faculty and mentors have dedicated themselves to addressing critical needs of Maryland, the nation, and other countries. They’re the perfect example of what a public research university is all about.

After nearly 100,000 votes were cast, Appalachian State University won the Solar Decathlon People’s Choice Award for its Solar Homestead house. This award gives the public the opportunity to vote for its favorite house. This year, 92,538 votes were cast. Appalachian State also won second place in the Communications Contest and third place in the Architecture Contest. Appalachian State University is located in Boone, North Carolina.

At the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting, ThinkProgress Green interviewed Zack Rosenburg, the CEO and co-founder of St. Bernard Project. His non-profit organization has been rebuilding homes and lives in New Orleans after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. So far, the St. Bernard Project has rebuilt 405 houses with 36,000 volunteers, provided mental health services, and has created local jobs for unemployed residents and returning veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

With climate disasters on the rise, improving disaster preparedness and resilience is a critical need. Rosenburg believes that the existing, bureaucratic structure for disaster relief needs to be revamped drastically to be much more efficient, rapid, and responsive, because “time matters in disaster recovery.” The project still has 130 families on their waiting list for home rebuilding in New Orleans. There are 10,000 American families that are still displaced from that disaster, and 200 families are still living in FEMA trailers. The project has also been asked by the city of Joplin, MO to take over the construction part of their recovery from the devastating tornado.

“Disaster recovery in America is broken,” said Rosenburg.

Watch the interview:

Rosenburg was at CGI as a guest of Toyota. In an interesting partnership, Toyota engineers are teaching the St. Bernard Project to build houses quicker, more efficiently, and cheaper, applying the business practices Toyota uses with its automobile construction. This contribution from the Toyota Foundation compares to the kind of business consulting that companies like McKinsey provide at high cost, usually out of reach to small non-profits.

The St. Bernard Project is not alone in its mission. At the Solar Decathlon now taking place on the National Mall, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign team has built Re_home, designed explicitly to be a permanent residence prefabricated for rapid response to disaster situations. Green construction also fits the philosophy of trying to reduce the risk of disasters before they start, in part by reducing the greenhouse pollution that is making our weather more extreme.

“I’m really proud of the Obama administration in taking a much more aggressive and proactive role in dealing with these inevitable disasters,” Rosenburg said. He is also hopeful for the future, inspired by the outpouring of help from around the country. “America wants America to be whole,” he believes.

Read more coverage of the Clinton Global Initiative from ThinkProgress.
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