Award Magazine, December 2019, by Natalie Bruckner
Green building design today is seen as a way to tackle our climate crisis. As a result, leaders in the sector are implementing strategies and standards to help us deal with mitigating the impacts today, and in the future.
“The time has come to address the elephant in the room: climate change and how we will respond to the impending changes that are coming,” says Lindsay Austrom, team lead, sustainability at Williams Engineering. “With buildings this means looking at both mitigation,
in terms of how we can reduce the carbon impact of our buildings, as well as adaptation. Knowing that changes are coming, with more severe storms and temperature extremes, we need to figure out how to respond to it and adjust our approach to buildings accordingly.”
Austrom is seeing change largely driven by municipalities. “They are taking the lead as they look to not only reduce the operating costs of their building portfolio, but, from a holistic perspective, to extend the life of their assets.” The City of Edmonton, for example, has been aggressive in this area and is looking at the energy and water consumption of their building portfolio and undertaking benchmarking so they can identity opportunities for improvements. “They are looking at it from a carbon accounting perspective and seeing what they can do to achieve the municipalities overall carbon goals and how to meet the 2030 target to reduce the carbon impacts of buildings.”
Read the full article Award Magazine – Right-Here-Right-Now
