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DECEMBER 2019 | 17 Green Building Design PHOTOGRAPHY BY LINDSAY REID/COURTESY PRAIRIE ARCHITECTS INC. Exciting developments are happening in the green building design sector by NATALIE BRUCKNER G reen building design today is seen as a way to tackle our climate crisis. As a result, leaders in the sector are implementing strategies and stan- dards to help us deal with mitigating the impacts today, and in the future. "The time has come to address the elephant in the room: climate change and how we will respond to the impending changes that are coming," says Lindsay Austrom, team lead, sustainability at Williams Engineering. "With buildings this means looking at both mitigation, in terms of how we can reduce the carbon impact of our buildings, as well as adaptation. Knowing that changes are coming, with more severe storms and temperature extremes, we need to figure out how to respond to it and adjust our approach to buildings accordingly." Austrom is seeing change largely driven by municipalities. "They are taking the lead as they look to not only reduce the operating costs of their building portfolio, but, from a holistic perspective, to extend the life of their assets." The City of Edmonton, for example, has been aggressive in this area and is looking at the energy and water consumption of their building portfolio and undertaking benchmarking so they can identity opportunities for improvements. "They are looking at it from a carbon accounting perspective and seeing what they can do to achieve the municipalities overall carbon goals and how to meet the 2030 target to reduce the carbon impacts of buildings." Mike Williams, VP buildings at RWDI, agrees that the most recent change of late is a refocus on the idea of building resiliency. "We've reached a point where we know climate change is happening and while we still need to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions [GHG], we also have to deal with the consequences of our actions. This means considering how we can make existing and new buildings resilient to these new climate change realities," explains Williams. Understanding what the current climate is and having a better handle on the future climate is of course essential. Two years ago RWDI conducted a study to create a future weather file for the City of Toronto that can be plugged into build- ing energy simulation models to provide a quantified summary of a building's ability to perform in a future climate scenario. RWDI has made the file and report explaining their work available for free to download on its website. RWDI has been working on an extremely impressive project of late with BentallGreenOak, as Williams explains: "BentallGreenOak was aware that climate change was creating new risks to their building assets and came to us to ask what they should do. We worked together to develop a methodology to assess the resil- iency across their North American wide portfolio, which consists of 187 buildings. We assessed each building and created a database of resiliency best practices and came up with adaptation plans for each of the buildings," explains Williams. One challenge ahead of us will be quantifying the value of resiliency. "To do this successfully will require us in the engineering space to collaborate with different circles, in particular those who quantify risk, such as insurance providers. This will result in more integrated conversations early on." One company that is taking the leadership reigns when it comes to green build- ing design is WSP, which now ranks 16th in the Engineering News-Record (ENR) rankings of the Top 200 Environmental Firms and Top Firms by Market Segment for 2019. As part of WSP's Future Ready initiative and commitment to sustainability, WSP helps to ensure its clients can reduce environmental impacts over the life- cycle of their assets. One example of this is WSP's very own Calgary office, which was Alberta's first project to certify under the LEED v4 rating system, receiving ID+C Silver certification in April 2018. WSP's Calgary office fit-out showcases the company's commitment to supporting the growth of a healthier and more sustainable society. Through green building design, WSP was able to offset 100 percent of antici- pated energy use, divert 87 percent of construction waste from the landfill, and save 31 percent calculated water versus the LEED baseline. "At WSP, our Future Ready approach to sustainability is understanding how changing climate, access to resources, emerging technologies, and urbanization of society all intersect. This allows us to design and think differently," says Greg Northcott, chief operat- ing officer, at WSP in Canada. RJC Engineers is also busy working on a number of impressive green building projects across the country. Terry Bergen, managing principal at RJC Engineers, says a reason for the recent uptick in activity is as a direct result of performance- based energy codes and standards such as the implementation of the BC Energy Step Code. "Energy modelling went from being a somewhat niche service primar- ily provided on institutional and select commercial projects to now almost every building in B.C. requiring energy modelling at both design and completion stages." Energy modelling as a design assist tool is now recognized as one of the most powerful methods to cost-effectively develop the design of higher performing buildings. It provides a clearer understanding of how various design approaches affect energy use intensity (EUI) requirements for a project and is now legislated through the Step Code in B.C., as well as in other regional jurisdictions including the City of Vancouver and the City of Toronto. Bergen is enthusiastic about the Step Code and its methodical approach, and says it, and other performance-based codes, are essential in helping take Canada where it needs to go in terms of meeting its GHG reduction target under the Paris Agreement. He adds that while there will always be talk about the "latest and greatest" technologies on the market, it simply comes down to efficient design with selec- tive, as opposed to wholesale, assembly improvements and "taking a little more time during construction to assure, with testing and commissioning, that critical elements like continuity of the air barrier and thermal insulation are achieved to meet target requirements." Right Here, Right Now Offices of Prairie Architects Inc., Winnipeg, MB.

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