Today, India has 461 million people living in urban centres. A proportionately staggering pace and scale of construction is underway, leaving the country vulnerable to major climatic impacts. A ballooning carbon footprint compounds matters, as globally the buildings and construction sector is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, accounting for 37% of global emissions, according to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Applying the ubiquitous “modern international style” to Indian buildings is only making the situation worse.

More than four decades ago, in an influential essay called “Form Follows Climate,” Charles Correa, a renowned Indian architect and advocate of sustainable design, wrote, “To live in the Third World is to respond to climate. We simply cannot afford to squander the kind of energy required to air condition a glass tower under a tropical sun.”

For the first 40 years of the Indian republic’s existence, its architectural language was noticeably punctuated by “climatic devices” like vertical fins/brise soleil, window overhangs (chajjas) and latticed brickwork (jalis). These broke up the intense sun into shadowed patterns, kept out the rain and ventilated buildings naturally – almost eliminating the need for air conditioning. 

However, this changed with the liberalization of the Indian economy in the early 1990s that saw multinational corporations begin to set up shop in the country. A post-colonial social pressure to be “as good as the West,” coupled with the corporate urge to unify brand image across countries, saw many Indian commercial buildings look identical to their U.S. and U.K. counterparts despite a drastically different local climate. The shift created a sense of “urban placelessness” – and made India’s tropical heat worse. 

The southern Indian city of Bengaluru (also known as Bangalore), dubbed the “garden city” and the “Silicon Valley of India,” saw IT parks mushroom, with “international style” buildings erected in heat-trapping concrete, glass and steel. Soon a sea of high-rises with glass curtain walls (and little ventilation) that could have been in New York, London or Vancouver was built, leading to a greater reliance on air conditioning. Although air conditioning cools interiors, it releases hot air and greenhouse gases into the environment, increasing temperatures both short- and long-term. Rising temperatures leads to more air conditioning use in a vicious cycle. 

Today, Bengaluru, which has a population of 14 million, has morphed from a sylvan garden city with mild temperatures into a dystopian concrete jungle, with untameable traffic, toxic foaming lakes, dire shortages of water and record-breaking heat waves. In April, Bengaluru recorded its second-hottest day in 50 years. As an X user observed, “Never in my twenty years in Bangalore, I ever thought we would need an AC.” Some air conditioning dealers reported an alarming 35% uptick in inquiries, when summer had barely begun. 

LEED buildings still heat-trapping

A second, more climate-conscious wave of corporate offices began with India’s first LEED-certified building in 2004, with a green roof, biological water-treatment ponds and solar panels. LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) is the world’s most widely used rating system for energy-efficient and environmentally safe buildings. In 2023, India ranked third globally for the number of LEED green-certified projects built (with China in first place and Canada coming in a close second). But LEED-certified designs in India mostly use the same Western paradigms of design and heat-trapping materials with large carbon footprints.

A 2023 UNEP study revealed that climate progress in the construction sector has come from reducing operational carbon emissions – those released during the heating, cooling and lighting of buildings – with not enough of a push to address embodied carbon (emissions embedded in the whole life cycle of construction materials such as concrete). While an imminent update to LEED, called v5, promises to address this, so far it has led only to the proliferation of what architect and planner Robert Orr has called “cookie-cutter green projects that can be placed in any climate, instead of creating a green project that reflects the neighbourhood and region in which it is built.”

Local materials, cooler climate

A growing number of Indian architects are reviving indigenous techniques into designs for modern functional comfort. Architectural materials like compressed stabilized earth bricks (CSEB), rammed earth and bamboo are the new alt kids on the block.

Made with the most local of materials – excavated earth – CSEB is a compressed mud brick/adobe with added stabilizer giving it greater strength. Since CSEB is simply sun-dried, its production consumes 3.9 times less energy than kiln-fired brick. Using excavated earth for these alternative bricks is a circular method that can eliminate the production and transport of carbon-intensive fired brick, thereby drastically reducing carbon emissions. 

In Auroville, an experimental town in southern India, it is common to see two-storey load-bearing designs using CSEB with no concrete whatsoever. The use of these stabilized earthen bricks is possible in even taller buildings – such as the six-storey Symbiosis University Hospital in Pune, India – when combined with strategic supports in concrete. The best part about using mud bricks is that their high thermal mass and porosity makes internal building temperatures in the summer daytime vastly cooler. 

We simply cannot afford to squander the kind of energy required to air condition a glass tower under a tropical sun.

 

– Charles Correa, Indian architect

Though building with mud today is commonly limited to arid regions, architects like the award-winning Tallulah D’Silva, who builds rammed-earth houses in rainy Goa, argue that it can withstand tropical rainfall, too. “Goa has a history of mud building over 1,000 years, as seen . . . in the local ‘taipa’ and cob houses,” D’Silva says. Taipa is an indigenous mud technique that uses wet soil with bamboo reinforcement. Building on indigenous oral references, D’Silva experiments with various local soils and an array of unlikely, but traditionally vetted, stabilizers like cow dung, carbon-absorbing lime and slag (a by-product of the industrial production of glass). 

Bamboo has long been used in the creation of flood-resistant traditional dwellings in India’s northeast. Its incredible growth rate, low embodied carbon and high tensile strength sees it being used today across the country to design radical projects. The Bamboo Research and Training Institute in the state of Maharashtra may be the largest office building anywhere that uses bamboo as the main structural element. And like mud bricks, bamboo also has thermal properties that may in fact cool the structures it is used to build. 

The cauldron of complexity and contradiction that is India contains both some of the world’s most dire climate impacts and its most innovative solutions, many of the latter drawing from rich indigenous canons. However, even with robust building codes and technical prowess, corruption leaves India with vast unregulated, carbon-intensive construction. Yet climate optimism springs eternal. 

As D’Silva says, “In the sea of unsustainability, every drop of good practice counts. If we expose young construction professionals to the right climate-positive methods, in time they will no doubt be adopted as the first method of choice for all.”

Richa Narvekar is an independent academic and architectural designer based out of Toronto and Goa, India.

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These sites represent the beginning of a concerted drive by the City of Toronto to develop thousands of units of affordable rental apartments on publicly owned land – a program known as Housing Now that grew from a campaign pledge by Mayor John Tory to build 10,000 residential units on 11 swaths of vacant municipal land, including 3,700 that will be designated “deeply affordable.”

In many European cities, large segments of the population live in rental buildings that sit on public land. Indeed, the so-called Vienna model – a system for building affordable rental apartments on public land that goes back to the 1920s and is lauded for its accessibility – offers compelling proof that quality urban housing isn’t just the product of market forces.

Toronto’s plan has echoes of the Vienna model. The city will leverage its own real estate to attract apartment developers, both for-profit firms and non-profits. But they must be willing to sign on to unusual terms: the city will offer builders prime locations, financial incentives (reduced development charges, for instance) and 99-year lease agreements instead of outright land sales, as normally happens when public land is redeveloped. The quid pro quo is that property managers must guarantee affordable rents for a century. The builders that win the right to develop these first four sites will be made public this spring. CreateTO, the city agency responsible for these projects, expects construction to begin by late 2020 and will soon make other sites available.

While city officials are attaching all sorts of planning conditions to these deals, one in particular stands out: they must satisfy a set of demanding environmental performance benchmarks set out in the 2018 version of the “Toronto Green Standard” (TGS), which lays out the sustainable design requirements for new private and city-owned developments. That should translate into features such as better-insulated walls, less exterior window space, improved heating and ventilation systems and other measures meant to reduce a building’s carbon footprint.

“It’s important that if we have an environmental emergency and we have a homelessness and housing crisis, there’s a way to leverage these sites and [address] both,” says Mark Richardson, spokesperson for HousingNowTO, an advocacy group tracking the rollout of the program.

“The upfront costs may be high for creating more sustainable buildings, but in the long term, the operating costs will be lower.”

Forking out for sustainable affordable housing

Like a growing number of cities, Toronto last fall declared a climate emergency and is developing an ambitious plan to slash building-related emissions by 65% (from 1990 levels) over the next decade. But given mounting public concern about escalating real estate, condo and rental costs, it’s also clear that sustainably designed affordable housing projects, such as those envisioned for the Housing Now sites, have become increasingly critical in meeting the city’s climate and social-inclusion goals.

“Climate change and housing affordability are the two most difficult challenges facing communities and the country,” says Jake Stacey, vice-president of impact banking at Vancity Community Investment Bank (VCIB), which is launching a “green commercial mortgage” this spring to finance projects that combine both objectives.

Older buildings will also have to pull their weight. Hundreds of slab apartment towers constructed in the 1960s and ’70s will require deep energy retrofits (new windows, insulation, LED lights, airtight building envelopes, high-efficiency mechanical systems, etc.) to meet council’s carbon reduction targets. But in the past, financing for such undertakings was elusive. Some of the capital costs can be recouped by reductions in operating costs related to energy efficiency retrofits, but property owners need other sources of financing if they hope to make these fixes without hiking rents.

At various times, public funding programs have helped make the math work, but mostly on the margins. Case in point: since 2000, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities’ Green Municipal Fund has provided $5.1 million in grants and $31.3 million in loans to a handful of social housing complexes looking to cut emissions.

The Atmospheric Fund (TAF) has provided $10 million in financing for 22 energy-efficiency retrofit projects around the Greater Toronto Area, mostly older apartments, using a profit-sharing formula that sees TAF finance the capital expenditures and keep about 90% of the energy savings. The organization invests from an endowment established by the City of Toronto in the 1990s.

There are also a few sources of private sector financing. VCIB’s lending program has underwritten more than 1,200 rooftop solar and geothermal energy projects for residential buildings. The bank also recently acquired CoPower, which sells green bonds that have financed about 400 energy-efficiency retrofits. VCIB’s commercial green mortgages, says Stacey, will allow property owners to borrow against long-term value growth created in their buildings by energy-efficiency capital upgrades, such as tighter building envelopes, new mechanical systems and LED lighting conversion projects.

Yet new public dollars will likely deliver most of the needed investment. This spring, Ottawa will begin flowing about $300 million from a 2019 federal budget commitment for a sustainable affordable housing program. Toronto Community Housing will receive $1.3 billion from the $55 billion National Housing Strategy for overdue repairs to its portfolio, with a portion of those funds earmarked for energy retrofits. A further $300 million from the federal government will help municipalities offer retrofit financing for low-rise homes, and it seems likely that governments will add even more to these pots of funding to counter the recessionary impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

The Housing Now philosophy offers a variation on the theme. The city is aiming to entice developers by leasing prime land and providing breaks on development charges and property taxes in exchange for more sustainably designed projects.
This latest version of the TGS, according to one city estimate, will add about 3.5% to overall construction costs. Yet advocates say that such buildings in the long run are financially attractive because they slash energy expen-ses over decades. They also tend to be better constructed, meaning they require less age-related maintenance.

As it turns out, the implicit formula – additional upfront investment in sustainable design in anticipation of lower long-term operating and maintenance costs – is exceptionally well suited to companies and non-profits that own multi-unit residential buildings and don’t intend to sell them any time soon. Yet it remains to be seen how hard Toronto officials will push the Housing Now developers to maximize the sustainability features of their plans. Richardson says CreateTO’s evaluation rubric doesn’t assign enough weight to the green design aspects of the proposals submitted by the development groups vying to build on these four pieces of land. In late February, CreateTO spokesperson Susan O’Neill said it was too soon to comment.

Greening building codes

For many years, sustainable-design activists, especially in North America, complained that building codes were far too lenient and set minimum standards that allowed developers to erect structures that leaked energy in the form of heat. Many of the condo towers that have sprung up in Toronto in recent years fit the critique. Their perfunctory concrete balconies jettison heat, while the wall-sized windows are so cheaply made and shoddily installed that they either radiate cold or transform small apartments into convection ovens, depending on the season and time of day.

Voluntary green building certifications such as the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) system have historically been taken up by only a small percentage of builders. (Since 2004, only 4,350 buildings have been LEED certified in Canada, according to the Canada Green Building Council, which oversees the certification process. To put that figure in context, the country erected nearly 20,000 new buildings in December 2019 alone.) In the meantime, other, less demanding, voluntary standards have come on the market, such as Energy Star, which rates residential dwellings for energy efficiency.

But in the past decade or so, provincial governments in Ontario and BC have revised their building codes to make them more demanding in terms of energy efficiency and performance. Vancouver and Toronto have gone even further with their own municipal codes, joining a growing cohort of cities pushing to achieve or surpass 80% reductions in carbon emissions by 2050.

The TGS aspires to ensure that all new buildings will attain “near zero” emissions by 2030. The code offers builders more stringent voluntary features and then sets out an aggressive timetable for making those optional elements mandatory – a system known as a “step code.” One such change in Toronto’s green building standard: much tougher rules for the so-called wall-to-window ratio, a shift that will effectively end the practice of building towers clad almost entirely in glass.

According to Lisa King, the senior policy planner who oversees the TGS, the 2018 rules have attracted all sorts of builders interested in developing projects that satisfy the code’s tougher voluntary requirements. “What’s exciting, under [the newest version], which is difficult [to satisfy] because it has absolute targets, is that we’re seeing a quick adjustment in the market.” She says numerous proposals have come in from firms developing smaller commercial or office buildings as well as rental buildings.

Passive houses pass on cost savings

One public agency has decided to aim even higher. Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC) has embarked on an ambitious plan to build 21 townhouses in Alexandra Park, a downtown affordable-housing complex, that meet the most demanding voluntary targets in the TGS – a set of benchmarks that are virtually the same as “passive house,” a German certification method associated with draft-free structures that have, among other things, thickly insulated walls, state-of-the-art windows and extremely low energy bills.

After an unusual competitive bidding process was completed last year, a consortium led by Tridel and Diamond Schmitt Architects won the contract, estimated to be worth about $10 million. The tender process was out of the ordinary because the two finalists had to present their plans to community members, who voted on the one they wanted.
TCHC architect Michael Lam, who will be the senior construction manager, says the project will be the first of its kind in Greater Toronto.

While residential passive-house developments, both for-profit and non-profit, have gone up in Vancouver, Ottawa and Hamilton, none have been completed in Toronto. “We don’t have a lot of experience with this,” Lam says.

Officials with TCHC, which is in the process of redeveloping and intensifying a number of its housing complexes, looked ahead five or six years and realized that more demanding green building codes, especially for city-owned projects, were inevitable as the TGS evolves. So Lam and his team decided to get ahead of the curve. “We thought, ‘We’ve got an incredible opportunity in our own revitalization projects,’ and this [the townhouses] was a fairly well-delineated project.”

Because certified passive-house projects feature extremely airtight designs, smart heating/cooling and humidity-control systems, natural interior materials that don’t cast off chemical smells, and all sorts of devices tasked with capturing and recycling waste energy (from hot water going down drains or from bathroom ventilation fans, for instance), the design process is far from conventional, Lam explains. The team’s architects, engineers, energy consultants and constructors must all work together to figure out how they’ll create structures that satisfy a demanding set of performance standards. “The objective of the building is so different that it requires a different design process and a different way of thinking about how architect, engineering and energy modelling work together,” says Lam. Detailed designs will be unveiled later this spring, and construction is expected to begin in about a year

An Ottawa non-profit supportive-housing provider, Salus, went down this road a few years ago, with a 40-unit apartment complex for people with mental health issues. The project consists of 300-square-foot apartments with small kitchenettes, about a fifth of which are barrier-free. “At the time, [passive house] was not something that was on the landscape,” says Salus executive director Lisa Ker.

In 2013, Salus was trying to figure out what to do with a piece of donated land when a manager with a national affordable-housing umbrella group suggested they try developing a passive house project. Ker’s advisors predicted that the costs would be 6 to 9% above a more typical building. But, as she points out, Salus was the first in the market, so they had no real basis to evaluate. “We were very much an experiment.”

However, Salus’s donors were very interested, and not just because of the environmental features. As Ker points out, Salus’s clients live on the fringes of society and are generally seen to be contributing little. Living in a cutting-edge project, she says, “was a great opportunity to show they could bring something to the equation.”

Salus’s architect, CSV principal Anthony Leaning, adds that passive house projects are notably comfortable to be in, and so the design could improve clients’ health and well-being. And, he says, the durability of the building materials means such projects “will last a long time.”

CSV is now working on numerous other passive house affordable-housing projects, and Leaning points out that Ottawa’s public housing agency has also begun to promote aggressive environmental standards in its newest projects. Some of the federal government’s $55 billion 10-year National Housing Strategy funding will pay for large-scale energy-efficiency retrofits of older affordable-housing projects that need everything from new boilers to proper windows (in addition to funding 125,000 new housing units). “There’s a shift happening,” Leaning says of the affordable-housing sector’s growing embrace of energy-efficiency design.

Building on lessons learned

This story, of course, isn’t just about the performance of individual buildings. HousingNowTO’s Mark Richardson points out that the best strategy for reducing the emissions associated with any apartment building is to situate it close to a transit stop. Such locational decisions also bring financial dividends because the developer may not need to build a giant, expensive underground parking lot in such projects, provided municipal planning officials waive those requirements.

TCHC’s Michael Lam hopes that as for-profit builders like Tridel gain experience with more environmentally ambitious projects, such as the townhouses in Alexandra Park, they’ll begin to incorporate those energy- and cost-saving features in more market-oriented apartment building projects. “They’re seeing the writing on the wall: ‘Sooner or later, we’ll be asked to do this.’”

Anthony Leaning says municipal governments should be promoting the case for green affordable housing by offering to fast-track the approvals of such projects and waiving development fees.

The Housing Now program that is attracting so much attention certainly has deployed all available carrots and sticks – more demanding minimum-energy and ecological-performance standards, but also breaks on a range of charges, including property taxes. And as with TCHC’s Alexandra Park venture, the eventual winning Housing Now bidders will include both for-profit and non-profit developers, meaning there’s an opportunity for the design lessons to find their way into the private development sector.

VCIB’s Jake Stacey adds that as recently as two years ago, few builders or agencies would have had the chops or the courage to attempt a net-zero or near-zero building, of any sort. But as more organizations gain experience in building or rebuilding affordable housing that meets the ambitious emission-reduction standards we’ll need in the near future, other agencies, developers and financing sources will fall into line.

“There’s a way to do it,” she says. “I want to be out in front of this.”

Toronto journalist John Lorinc writes about cities, sustainability and business.

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“People comment about the air,” says James McKellar, a professor of real estate and infrastructure who serves as associate dean and oversaw the development of the $50 million project, known as the Rob and Cheryl McEwen Graduate Study and Research Building. “In a normal building, the air is constantly being re-circulated. In our building, the air is very fresh and people notice.”

Visitors also observe that the windows open (a rare feature in some newer institutional or commercial buildings), and attribute the fresh air to this seemingly cosmetic feature. In fact, the explanation for the McEwen building’s air quality tells the story of a much more involved and – for Canada, unprecedented – “bioclimatic” design concept that introduces some salient ideas about dramatically improving energy efficiency in built form. McKellar, an architect by training, says the McEwen building will use 74% less energy than a comparable campus structure.

Designed by Toronto-based Baird Sampson Neuert Architects, the project draws heavily on German technology, as well as age-old insights about the way buildings can naturally absorb and expel excess heat and cold. The focal point is a so-called solar chimney – a five-storey-high concrete slab surrounded by glazing and oriented, like the rest of the building, to maximize solar exposure. In the winter, it absorbs the sun’s heat and draws in fresh air. In the summer, the chimney functions as a convection oven, drawing hot air up and out of the building, thus expelling air-borne chemicals that cause indoor air to become stale and oppressive.

Instead of forced-air based heating and air conditioning systems, the McEwen building uses an extensive network of water-filled tubes that regulate temperature using thermal exchange systems linked to air moving through the chimney. This radiant system, in turn, is linked to a network of 150 computer-operated windows and shades that are automatically adjusted according to ambient temperature and weather – a design developed by Transsolar, a German environmental engineering firm.

Shorn of the technical elements, McKellar notes that the core design principles trace back to historic architectural techniques that recognize how to use materials, shade, and orientation to mitigate the impact of hot and cold weather.

Looking ahead to a warming future and the imperative to reduce energy consumption, McKellar says Schulich sought to adopt a radical approach instead of more conventional techniques, such as LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification more common to office buildings, out of a recognition that the climate crisis demands game-changing solutions, not incremental alterations.

“We have to be prepared to make that quantum shift,” he says, noting that the cost-per-square foot didn’t exceed the capital costs for comparable campus structures but will generate energy savings in the order of $80,000 to $100,000 annually. However, the project did require expertise that’s not (yet) available here.   There has been one other important financial learning: the innovative project galvanized Schulich’s donors, including the federal government, which provided a $15 million grant. “It had a huge impact on our ability to raise money.”

Toronto journalist John Lorinc writes about cities, sustainability and business.

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“Ohio’s LEED schools have outperformed baseline energy performance by 34 per cent, almost 200,000 tons of construction waste has been diverted from landfills and occupants report improved educational outcomes,” says Tyler Steele from the Ohio chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC).

So why is the state set to pass a non-binding resolution demanding that LEED no longer be used by government agencies?

The first iteration of LEED was unveiled in 1998, but it took several years for it to pick up steam. The standard has since grown so popular that it is often viewed by the general public as synonymous with the concept of green buildings. Hundreds of jurisdictions across North America provide tax and other incentives to encourage LEED construction, while over 30 states and provinces encourage or require it for all new public buildings. The standard has proved popular overseas as well, including a recent burst of certification in the Middle East. Yet despite these successes, the USGBC has managed to antagonize a number of powerful interests: the timber, chemical and plastics industries.

One of the criteria considered by the LEED standard concerns the sourcing of wood. It has only ever recognized Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) wood as qualifying for its “environmentally responsible forest management” credit, despite a four-year campaign by the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) to be considered as well. The American Forest and Paper Association launched SFI in 1994 as an industry-friendly antidote to FSC, arguing that failing to include SFI would hurt U.S. forestry jobs.

Seventy-nine members of Congress, along with 12 governors, threw their support behind the SFI’s lobbying effort, which was defeated by USGBC members in 2010. Upon defeat, SFI chief executive Kathy Abusow called for companies to ignore the point deducted for using SFI-certified products in LEED buildings to “demonstrate their pride and support for North American forests, communities, and jobs.”

As the timber industry began to encounter resistance from the USGBC, it cast around for an alternative ratings system. Based on a British green buildings rating system called BREEAM, the Green Globes was launched in Canada and licensed for use in the United States in 2004. Founded by former Louisiana Pacific lumber executive Ward Hubbell, the Green Building Initiative (GBI) – the licensed operator of Green Globes in the U.S. – quickly drew substantial support from the chemical and forestry industries.

For the past several years the anti-LEED coalition has assembled a series of significant victories, starting in 2011 with an executive order from the Tea Party-friendly governor of Maine, Paul LePage. While not explicitly banning LEED, it only allowed for green building standards that recognized SFI, the American Tree Farm System and FSC equally. The “wood wars” quickly spread to Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina and several other states.

Discounting the fact that LEED does award points for locally sourced materials, which can include non-FSC wood, the anti-American messaging proved very successful at the state level. During the debate in North Carolina, Weyerhaeuser spokesperson Nancy Thompson condemned the LEED program as “an inherent discrimination of North Carolina lumber.”

State and federal lobbying efforts expanded to include the plastics and chemical industries as well. The big catalyst for this was the long debate – and eventual adoption – of a material transparency credit in LEED version 4. “Before that there were already people saying GBI was going to close down,” says Scot Horst, senior vice-president of the LEED program. But the prospect of mandatory disclosure of material components was viewed as unacceptable by organizations such as the Vinyl Institute, which engendered new interest in promoting Green Globes.

Testifying before the Ohio state house in January, Allen Blakey, vice-president of industry and government affairs at the Vinyl Institute, belittled the transparency credit as a prime example of “discriminatory and disparaging treatment of vinyl in LEED credits.”

The American High-Performance Buildings Coalition (AHPBC), led by the American Chemistry Council and backed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, was created to push for federal anti-LEED legislation. “Our mission is to support and promote green building codes, standards, rating systems, and credits and we believe the best systems will be developed in conformance with ANSI or ISO-type processes,” Steve Russell, vice-president of plastics for the American Chemistry Council, stated in a conference call announcing the coalition in 2012. It worked hard to weaken the proposed transparency credit in the draft LEED v4 standards, an effort that failed last fall. At the same time it was lobbying hard for legislative change to accept Green Globes alongside LEED at the federal and state levels.

ANSI, the American National Standards Institute, has proven key to their strategy. Green Globes is certified by ANSI, while LEED is not. The AHPBC and others have used this to denounce LEED as not being sufficiently consensus-driven, despite the long consultation process and open vote by its 13,000 members in the adoption of each LEED standard. The legislation pending in Ohio, for example, specifically bans any green building certification programs that have not been ANSI-approved. Corporate Knights contributor and architect Lloyd Alter pointed out last year that numerous other well-regarded rankings are not ANSI-approved either, like the popular Energy Star ratings.

With green federal government buildings serving as a key pillar in President Obama’s executive-driven push on sustainability, the AHPBC turned its attention to influencing the U.S. General Services Administration’s review of its building policies that favour LEED use. In a significant victory for AHPBC, the Green Globes certification was approved as equivalent to LEED in October 2013. Several months later, the U.S. Department of Defense also opened its doors to Green Globes.

Not all companies were pleased with the efforts of the AHPBC, including Skanska USA. The American arm of the Swedish construction conglomerate made a high-profile exit from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over its support of AHPBC in July. Penning an op-ed in the Washington Post, Skanska USA CEO Mike McNally denounced the organization’s efforts to influence the LEED v4 process. “What they want is a standard they can manipulate and weaken,” he wrote. “They are putting their bottom lines first and sustainability second.”

For LEED’s Horst, the issue is not with the Green Globes ranking itself. “While not as rigorous as LEED, it’s a good green building tool,” he says. The problem, for Horst, lies with the GBI’s close ties to industry. Its board still consists of representatives from Weyerhauser, Plum Creek Timber, the Vinyl Institute and other corporate interests, with a similarly composed list of members and supporters. “They support Green Globes because it doesn’t require them to change their practices,” he adds. He points out that by accepting SFI and avoiding the implementation of any similar material transparency, the GBI can’t claim the same stringency as LEED.

In an attempt to reboot their image, LEED fellow and respected green buildings advocate Jerry Yudelson was hired in January to head up the GBI and its Green Globes certification. All ties to founder Ward Hubbell have been cut, he declared in a telephone interview from his office in Portland, Oregon. “I can’t speak to what the organization has done in the past, but I will say that a year from now the board is going to look a lot different,” he states. Yudelson’s plans for the next year involve spreading the message that Green Globes is faster and cheaper, while assuring people that it remains an effective green building standard.

There are plenty of critiques to level at LEED, from the onerous compliance costs to the points allocated for simple steps taken. A green buildings landscape dominated by LEED is not a realistic scenario. “In the end, we want as many green buildings built as possible,” says Elizabeth Heider, chief sustainability officer at Skanska USA. “At the same time, insistence by GBI that there is an equivalency between Green Globes and LEED is just not true,” she says.

A look north over the border provides a blueprint for a less acrimonious relationship between green building ratings systems. The BOMA BESt system, run by the Building Owners and Managers Association of Canada, is loosely based on the original Green Globes methodology. The lower costs, compared to LEED, allow for more buy-in from property managers, including those with existing building stock that weren’t built with green standards in mind.

While not as focused on the holistic approach to green buildings as LEED, BOMA Canada president and CEO Benjamin Shinewald views BOMA BESt as somewhat complementary to LEED. “Our ratings systems are both working towards the same goal of greater efficiency in building management, with ours more focused on existing buildings,” he says. Horst disputes the idea that LEED is mainly interested in new buildings – pointing out that LEED has certified more existing buildings than new ones – but he agrees that there is no antipathy between the two organizations.

In the U.S., meanwhile, Green Globes-certified projects currently only constitute about 2 to 4 per cent of green buildings. Yudelson is confident that will expand in the coming year. “The more choices the better,” he says, citing that less than 1 per cent of commercial buildings in the U.S. have been certified green.

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