The U.S. Green Building Council announced updates to the primary version of the LEED green building certification program, LEED v4, to more directly address carbon emissions and climate change. With the change, building design and construction and Interior design and construction projects will be able to demonstrate improvement in energy performance with LEED v4.1’s metric of energy cost or greenhouse gas emissions in addition to LEED v4’s original source energy metric. For the last nine years, LEED v4 has been the primary and balloted version of LEED green building certification. However, its guidelines on reducing energy demand focused first on … Read more
USGBC Releases Top 10 States for LEED, Recognizes Leaders Committed to More Sustainable + Resilient Buildings, Cities and Communities
The U.S. Green Building Council announced the ranking of its annual Top 10 States for LEED, with Illinois once again topping the list and demonstrating leadership in green building. Illinois certified 3.16 square feet of building space per person under LEED in 2021. LEED is the world’s most widely used green building program and was created by USGBC as a leadership standard defining best practices for healthy, high-performing green buildings. “Amidst the challenges of 2021, governments, companies and other organizations committed to taking bold actions to protect the climate, their employees and their communities,” said Peter Templeton, president and CEO, … Read more
NIBS President & CEO Lakisha A. Woods Elected to Vice Chair of USGBC
President and CEO Lakisha A. Woods, CAE, has been re-elected to a three-year term with the U.S. Green Building Council board of directors. Woods will serve as vice chair. Dr. Aaron Bernstein, interim director with the Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment at the Harvard T.H. School of Public Health also was re-elected. Bernstein will serve as chair. Newly elected board members include Anyeley Hallová, founder of Adre; Dr. Ruth Thomas-Squance, director of field building at the Build Healthy Places Network and Dr. Marwa Zaatari, partner with Dzine Partners and co-chair of the enVerid Systems advisory board. These … Read more
Opening of William J. Hybl Sports Medicine and Performance Center Begins New Era for Sports Research, More
A first-of-its-kind facility, designed with intentional “collision spaces” for collaboration between medical doctors, faculty researchers and students, celebrates a vision six years in the making with the recent opening of the William J. Hybl Sports Medicine and Performance Center in Colorado. The start of the fall semester at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs brings together students and faculty for education and research with the medical providers and clinical experts at Centura Penrose-St. Francis Health Services. Led by co-directors Bill Lueck from Centura and Steve Johnson from UCCS, the facility uses a liberal amount of glass and open space to … Read more
New ‘Insight’ Feature to Help Green Building Projects Prioritize Sustainability Strategies, Improve Performance
The U.S. Green Building Council recently launched Insight, a new data-driven tool that highlights building project design features that can lead to better performance. Insight is available as a feature of the Arc platform and provides information on the design attributes of LEED-certified buildings within a specified geographic region. Project teams can then compare and rank potential sustainability strategies to see how they stack up against the performance of other buildings. Insight leverages the depth of the existing LEED data to aid designers and builders in adopting smart, practical and achievable sustainability strategies. Insight can be leveraged by LEED and … Read more