“Sustainable building upgrades are never an emergency,” says Sara Neff, head of sustainability for Lendlease Americas, explaining why some laggardly real estate companies don’t budget adequately for green building. “You can always put off a lighting retrofit.”

Maybe not anymore. With the gradual... Read more

New York City and Ithaca, New York, recently passed legislation meant to decarbonize the built environment, and now similar efforts may be spreading throughout the state, thanks to moves proposed by Governor Kathy Hochul. The governor also recently signed a bill paving the way for procurement of low-embodied-carbon concrete... Read more

Green building is rapidly becoming more prevalent globally, though the importance of certifications has slightly declined. Use of green products is expected to grow. And reduced energy consumption and operating costs are two of the biggest drivers of these trends.

That’s all according to the Dodge... Read more

Climate change is complicated, to say the least, so the terminology relating to climate change can also be hard to decipher. Here we’ve put together a simplified glossary of just a few terms that can be helpful to know as you navigate information about global warming. We’ll start with the very basics and move on to some of the... Read more

The construction sector’s take-make-waste approach to materials needs an overhaul. Materials and construction account for an estimated 11% of global greenhouse gas emissions annually. At the other end of the life cycle, demolition in the United States annually generates 90% of some 600 million tons of construction-sector debris. Getting... Read more

Building electrification and embodied carbon standards for new construction are all well and good, but they leave the U.S.’s massive stock of existing buildings behind. That’s where building performance standards come in. Jurisdictions like New York City and Washington, D.C. have already adopted such standards, which require existing buildings... Read more

The construction sector’s take-make-waste approach to materials needs an overhaul. Materials and construction account for an estimated 11 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions annually, according to the World Green Building Council. At the other end of the life cycle, demolition in the United States annually generates 90% of... Read more

The climate is changing, and the weather along with it. Why, then, are we still using “typical meteorological years” from decades ago to guide our energy models?

The simple answer is that the industry hasn’t reached consensus on a way to do things differently. Yet as the world heats up, so do the... Read more

Angela Brooks, FAIA, and Lawrence Scarpa, FAIA, principals at Brooks+Scarpa and a married couple, have jointly received the Gold Medal from the American Institute of Architects (AIA) for 2022.

With five Top Ten awards from the AIA Committee on the Environment (COTE)—four of which were affordable... Read more

BuildingGreen’s editorial team has been vetting green building products for more than 30 years. This research has informed our articles, GreenSpec product directory, product guides, and our annual Top 10 green building products award, where we select products that significantly improve upon standard “business-as-usual” practices. This is the... Read more

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) recently allocated $61 million to pilot grid-interactive technologies in ten communities—many of which consist of affordable housing or serve vulnerable populations.

The program, called Connected Communities, is intended to expand the number of grid-interactive... Read more

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) concerns are exploding at companies around the globe—but how these concerns apply to building portfolios may not be obvious. In a new handbook, Devon Bertram of engineering and green building consulting firm Stok promotes “the adoption of sustainable and equitable real estate... Read more

The non-profit architecture firm MASS Design Group has won the American Institute of Architects’ (AIA) 2022 Architecture Firm Award for Architecture. According AIA, the award was given to MASS because the firm “has worked tirelessly to ignite systemic change in the built environment through its mission-driven process” that... Read more

2021 was a year in a string of years of unprecedented weather-related events: mega tornados, record-shattering heat domes, and ever-expanding forest fires. But even in a year like this, the Marshall Fire stands out as something new: a grass fire that turned into an urban firestorm--destroying entire suburban communities on Colorado’s... Read more

Resilient design is getting a makeover at the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). The organization, which acquired the RELi resilience rating system in 2017, will cede ownership as of January 1, 2022. RELi (pronounced “rely”) will return to its developer, The Institute for Market Transformation to Sustainability (MTS), while USGBC works to... Read more

U.S. federal government operations could approach carbon neutrality by 2050, thanks to a sweeping sustainability plan and associated executive order announced by President Biden on December 8, 2021.

The plan includes requirements regarding building operations, embodied carbon, electric vehicle procurement, purchasing of less toxic... Read more

Although disparities between predominantly white and predominantly non-white neighborhoods go back hundreds of years, 20th-century government-sponsored discrimination was a key turning point in segregating our cities, creating the maps we have today. In fact, it all began with maps—maps released during the New Deal era by the Federal Housing... Read more

We may be inching toward net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

More than 3,000 businesses and 700 cities had signed onto the United Nations’ Race to Zero commitment ahead of COP26 (the 26th Conference of the Parties), held in November 2021. But is 2050 soon enough? And how does this commitment... Read more

Baton Rouge is breaking. Since 2003, four different districts of this city in Louisiana have seceded in order to create their own school systems. The latest, St. George, is in transition and simultaneously facing a legal battle challenging the election results that led to its secession. The proposed new city, whose citizens argue that the Baton... Read more

U.S. households with low median incomes (LMI) spend 14.5% of their paychecks on energy for heating, cooling, and appliances—almost double the percentage spent by non-LMI families—according to a Groundswell study conducted by data scientist Elvis Moleka, Ph.D. This higher energy burden exists despite programs designed to... Read more