Fiona Anderson
Sun
Making buildings greener is the easiest, quickest and cheapest way to reduce greenhouse gases, a panel at Globe 2008 told delegates Friday in Vancouver.
Buildings in Canada are responsible for about 35 per cent of greenhouse gases, said Jonathan Westeinde, chairman of an advisory group of the Commission for Environmental Cooperation that released a report on green buildings earlier this week.
If nothing changes, however, those emissions will continue to grow in both the residential and commercial sectors, he said.
But by taking a best-practices approach that uses building techniques and materials that are already available and affordable — with a 10-year pay-back period or less — emissions in commercial buildings could be reduced to 1990 levels by 2030. And emissions in residential buildings would be well below 1990 levels in the same time.
“Buildings represent the single greatest opportunity to protect and enhance the natural environment and basically are the lowest hanging fruit for us to achieve significant reductions in climate change,” Westeinde said.
“And they present probably one of the few sectors where you can get the fastest reduction in those greenhouse gases in a cost-effective and economically viable way.”
But buildings are designed as inexpensively as possible, and the costs of being green are perceived as being too high, Westeinde said. In addition, it’s the occupant — not the builder — who reaps the benefits of a more energy-efficient home.
What’s needed is more information, education and cooperation, and a life-cycle approach to calculating costs, he said.
Rodney McDonald, chairman of the Manitoba chapter of the Canada Green Building Council, believes that most of the roadblocks to greener buildings are in the process associated with building and not in lack of technology.
McDonald is calling for a market transformation so that all parties in the building process — from the municipality to the owner, the architect and the tradespeople — work together to design and build.
For example, municipalities create subdivisions by laying out the roads first, he said. But that eliminates any opportunity to locate the building in a way that maximizes the benefits of the natural elements, such as sun and wind.
“It really requires a new degree of integration and coordination,” McDonald said.
