“We need to run towards climate and planet-smart design and construction practices and leave behind the habits and practices which do not contribute to a sustainable future. This needs to happen right now.”

Our Sustainable Performance consulting team is comprised of experts across disciplines, ranging from energy performance to sustainable building consulting.

Recently, we sat down with Associate and Sustainable Performance Stewardship Group Lead Emily King, Senior Sustainable Building Manager Leanne Conrad, Senior Associate and Director of Sustainable Consulting Lindsey Kindrat, and Associate and Building Performance Analysis Lead Tristan Truyens.

We wanted to better understand how this group combines the breadth of their knowledge to offer a one-stop-shop solution to sustainable performance for our clients. We also discussed the future of sustainability and how we can work together as an industry to meet performance targets that could save our planet.

Tell us, what do you consider the biggest challenge for Sustainable Performance in our industry in the next five years?

Emily King (EK): A big challenge is going to be data and data transparency, especially on embodied carbon. We know it’s a huge challenge, and we have a good understanding of what needs to be done. I would encourage other stakeholders in the AEC Industry to consider sharing as much data as possible. It’s our shared responsibility to the planet. And, to implement solutions widespread innovation in the manufacturing sector for building materials is also required. Data and innovation are essential leading up to 2030 to get us to the targets that are laid out. Between now and then, embodied carbon emissions will dwarf the operational emissions of new buildings. This is because most embodied emissions occur up front and take place before a building is operational, while operational emissions add up over the building’s lifespan.

Tristan Truyens (TT): For me, it’s the pace at which deep energy retrofit projects need to progress. For example, the City of Toronto numbers would require completing 1.5 retrofit projects a day between now and 2050 and that was from a presentation six months ago, so we’re even further behind now. The scale of what’s required to upgrade the performance of our existing buildings is a massive challenge. What augments the challenge is a lack of understanding of how ambitious the targets are and a lack of willingness to meet them by many in our industry. So far, the industry has done a lot of “making things a little bit better” but the new targets mean changing entire design paradigms, so the ways in which we support our clients in achieving them have expanded dramatically.

EK: Agreed. We all need to wrap our minds around the fact that we can’t keep building “business as usual.” The process needs to change, starting with the planning stage through design and construction, through to end of life and beyond. Thinking about the circular economy, we need to make sure what we’re designing and building today will contribute to the reuse and repurpose of materials locked up in our buildings and infrastructure to avoid additional emissions at the end of their life. We certainly have a challenge of rapidly reducing the upfront emissions of buildings leading up to 2030 to mitigate the worst impacts of the climate crisis, however we also need to be thinking long-term.

Lindsey Kindrat (LK): A significant challenge we encounter as sustainable building specialists is the lack of consistent and meaningful green development standards that transcend municipal and regional boundaries. This translates to ‘language gaps’ in the vernacular of what defines a sustainable building. In looking at green development standards, the more comprehensive they are, the more productive they are. Clients tend to pick 2-3 areas to focus on in sustainable consulting projects but forego the bigger picture. Talking about an ecosystem, we must be able to solve those challenges because they’re impeding our ability to deliver a comprehensive package of sustainable solutions.

TT: I feel the common thread in all of this is the steepness of the learning curve across the entire breadth of issues we’re discussing. In no way are any of these issues independent of each other and they’re all very important. They all involve a whole lot of learning by a whole lot of people very quickly and in a lot of cases we’re still convincing people that this is required.

How does your team plan to help to solve these challenges?

LK: It seems to me that the best project outcomes often come from a really integrated team. It’s not just having the architect, owner, and design team involved. It’s more about having all the right experts and practitioners at the table.

Our work on the BC Housing Reframed Initiative involves groups like the Pembina Institute and Lighthouse facilitating conversations and hosting integrated sessions. Having entities like that helping, assisting, learning, and prompting each other to think holistically – those are the projects where we get the best outcomes. One of our team’s solutions, therefore, might be to foster strategic partnerships. There are benefits to bringing on other talent and adopting a village approach to project delivery.

TT: I completely agree. The timeline for action is short enough that classic competitive advantage and having everyone create independent solutions isn’t going to work. There’s no one firm that can determine the answer because the scale of action required is so broad. In terms of how we plan to help, then, we need to take a more collaborative and engaging approach to how we’re relating to and problem solving with the industry.

EK: We also have a corporate stewardship group, who is helping by leveling up the skills of all staff to meet the challenge and to provide them with the know-how to guide our clients to the most sustainable solutions on their project. We have created the opportunity for impact on every Entuitive project.

TT: I think that’s a good one especially from an embodied carbon perspective. We are still largely a structural engineering firm and that’s where most Entuitive staff can be enabled to make a difference. The bulk of the Entuitive action will still happen because of the efforts of each one of our engineers.

LK: And architects, technicians, and scientists!

Are there any policies that would be helpful in moving the needle?

Leanne Conrad (LC): Having funding sources for enhanced sustainability measures such as solar PV on public Alberta projects requiring LEED Certification has been helpful. Moving the certification or baseline minimum requirements towards a national standard (within or additional to NECB) would be greatly helpful for moving the needle. Another good initiative might be a federal tax credit over a specified number of years to offset the cost of building the upgraded performance to a BC Step Code 4 type building.

TT: As Leanne mentioned, moving baseline requirements to a national standard is essential. For instance, lack of cohesive national energy code that is targeting net-zero operations is needed. You have the few communities in BC that have adopted high step code requirements and Vancouver and Toronto with their municipal standards. But everyone else falls back on the NECB which is built into the National Building Code of Canada, and that does make sense as something that people would look toward. Having that code be updated in a way that fits with federal ambitions for building performance would be great. Right now, there’s a disconnect. The question I always get asked by clients is “do I have to do this?” and I must respond that “no, they don’t.” We need teeth to meet the performance requirements we’re targeting.

EK: It’s a bit of a balance between having codes and legislation in place to push those who are currently not motivated or willing to take the necessary action to meet recommended carbon, energy, waste, and water targets, and incentivizing the industry and the private sector to do the right thing. There needs to be a better way to leverage the private sector and our economic systems to move quickly to solve the innovation challenges that we’re currently bumping up against. There needs to be more awareness of the financial opportunities of being the ones who can solve these huge innovation challenges. We need government to put a more concerted effort on their plan of action to address the climate crisis which would create more incentive for the private sector to develop more innovative solutions.

Emily, you mentioned our stewardship group earlier. As a company, what are we doing internally to improve our environmental footprint?

EK: We audit our corporate greenhouse gas (GHG) footprint every year, benchmarked against 2018, and take that information to inform our plan of action for reducing our emissions. We purchase high quality carbon offsets from reputable sources in amounts equal to the emissions that we cannot yet eliminate. Those offsets support external projects that are developing solutions to remove carbon out of the atmosphere, provide renewable energy, or provide low carbon solutions for existing processes. With those audits we get to see where we have the biggest impact.

What’s interesting is our annual corporate GHG emissions are less than those of a typical project, highlighting the importance of getting zero carbon design thinking embedded in our existing services and reducing emissions associated with our services and projects. We are providing educational opportunities to staff and actively working with our design teams to implement low embodied carbon solutions on our projects.

Internally, another big focus has been on developing corporate policies to help guide the actions we need to take to reduce corporate emissions. These policies include occupying high-performance spaces when leases are up for our current corporate offices. We can also reduce flights, which has a huge impact on our corporate footprint. We’re working towards getting our B Corp certification which addresses environmental and social sustainability as well as corporate governance and demonstrates we’re committed to being a part of building a sustainable future.

What’s keeping you up at night when you think about the future of our environment?

LC: Finding people who still care and are passionate about passing the environment onto future generations. We need to break the notion of “me first” in society.

TT: What’s keeping me up at night is how effective the early marketing around energy efficiency was. People were convinced that there’s an immediate and available economic payback to this work. There’s not really that same level of convincing anymore. Easy to adopt technologies and solutions that make economic sense are now commonplace. Now, the scale of the problem and the speed of implementation required to solve it dwarf the potential energy cost savings. We need to understand how to reconcile this in a way that is economically viable.

LK: For me, it’s the ongoing annexation and development of fringe lands around urban municipalities. There’s no performance-based planning. The idea that there is an endless surplus of available land available for development and that sustainable standards don’t matter when designing these developments is upsetting. There are things like light pollution, holistic transit planning, climate resilience measures, etc. that are so hard to convince the development community to implement. The growing trend toward urban and suburban sprawl and the feeling of being unable to influence developments with positive sustainable solutions is what keeps me up at night.

EK: What’s keeping me up most nights is fear of what will happen if we aren’t successful at keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees. While watching “A Life on Our Planet” with David Attenborough, it made me emotional to think about how much our planet has changed, how much biodiversity has been lost, how many communities that haven’t contributed to climate change are so severely impacted by it, and how much we need the pace of climate-smart policy and innovation to accelerate to solve this challenge. It drives home that the decisions we need to make need to be made with the entire planet in mind.

Is there anything else you’d like us to know?

TT: We need to aim high when it comes to zero emissions design. In less than a decade every new building that is designed and constructed will need to achieve these lofty goals. The design of buildings is a “practice”, in that it has been developed over centuries of looking at past precedent and finding ways to improve incrementally. But we don’t have a wealth of past precedents that inform a zero-emissions built environment. So, we need to be figuring out today how to achieve this goal as there are only a few project cycles left before net-zero will be the necessary norm.

LC: We need to remain vocal about the benefits of building sustainably and apply pressure to governments and municipalities to embrace and adopt minimum green building standards in addition to energy and carbon targets.

EK: We have a shared responsibility to do better for all present and future generations of life on this planet. It is going to take collaborative, cohesive, far-reaching, and meaningful action from all of us both personally and professionally to stop the climate crisis. We need to run towards climate and planet-smart design and construction practices and leave behind the habits and practices which do not contribute to a sustainable future. This needs to happen right now.

LK: The dominant species on Earth is living wildly beyond our planetary capital. From buildings to food to lifestyle to waste, we use 4-7 times the ecosystem capacity that Earth has available. Why?

Thanks for sitting down with us today Emily, Leanne, Lindsey, and Tristan. It’s been eye opening and inspiring to hear you share your thoughts on the future of our built environment.

If you’d like to discuss sustainability and sustainable solutions with our team, you can reach out to them here.