Progress on Existing Buildings

Existing buildings represent a huge opportunity for reducing GHG emissions, and a threat to hitting national emission reduction targets if changes aren’t made. To make progress on existing buildings, we first need to understand how they perform today. The CaGBC’s Disclosure Challenge is helping to advance benchmarking and public disclosure. The recently announced first-round results of CaGBC’s new voluntary Disclosure Challenge initiative included benchmarking and disclosure by over 700 buildings representing over 10% of commercial real estate in Canada – a newsworthy outcome for an initiative launched only eight months ago!

LEED continues to evolve to help accelerate change as well. LEED v4.1 O+M dramatically reduces certification challenges for buildings that have never pursued LEED, and LEED Recertification provides a straightforward path for new construction, commercial interior and other LEED projects to recertify by simply providing basic performance data. The result is that property owners are moving ahead with certification on properties that would not have previously sought certification.

Underpinning LEED is the Arc platform, which is now free to use for any building, whether LEED certified or not! Arc provides a strong platform for managing portfolios around the world and is already used by nearly 7,500 buildings. The Greenbuild conference saw the release of several important updates that will further enrich the experience and transformative power of the Arc platform.

• Improved User Interface: New charts, graphs and other tools– all designed to make it easier and simpler to collect and report data! These new tools allow you to aggregate all your project’s big data in one place while receiving small, actionable data that you can leverage to improve your performance.
• New Integration Partners: Arc has expanded its partnerships with leading technology organizations to offer users new tools that make Arc faster, easier and more scalable than ever before.
• Category Level Performance Certificates: Arc now recognizes incremental improvement by allowing project teams to complete each category one at a time (energy, water, waste, transportation and human experience) to earn Category Level Performance Certificates. Projects can work toward higher levels of sustainability over time, and once you have achieved all five categories, you’re ready for LEED.
• The Arc Improvement Score: Arc has always had a Performance Score to benchmark your project against other projects around the world. The new Improvement Score allows you to track your performance against your own internal plan and measure the progress you are making year-over-year.