Green Building Festival in Toronto, September 19-20, 2016 – hosted by SBC and iiSBE

This year’s green building fest is going to be an exciting one. The International Initiative for the Sustainable Built Environment will be co-hosting it with Sustainable Buildings Canada. This is a great event for anyone working in or interested in getting into the green building world. It’s going to be held on September 19-20, 2016, at the Eaton’s Centre Marriott.

I’ve been attending this conference on and off since 2007 when it was held up at the International Centre on Airport Road. The festival was a pretty small affair back then, and the instructors were still introducing LEED and associated factors such as LED lighting and VOCs (volatile organic compounds). We’ve come a long way since those days, and the topics are more sophisticated than ever. It’s great that facets of green building are going mainstream (such as the use of recycled materials, looking at VOC content, and an eye on energy efficiency), but there is so much more to learn, and policies that need to be developed/implemented for the built environment to help tackle climate change.

This year’s theme is Regenerative and Resilient Urban Environments — a topic that is absolutely essential to get planners and architects to start thinking of not only how we mitigate climate change, but how cities adapt to it. Adapting to it will vary depending on a city’s location and state of infrastructure. Forward thinking and acting cities will be more prepared for sudden rainstorms, ice storms, heat waves, and droughts than those which have not given it much thought and end up reacting to such weather-related events.

The idea of regenerative cities evokes images of buildings and roads that can self-repair, absorb more CO2 than they produce, and conserve water and are net positive in electricity generation. These are interesting concepts to think about and even more exciting to realize that some parts of the concept are beginning to be realized in practice.

Here is a link to the two-day schedule:

To register, visit this link:

http://sbcanada.org/conferences/sbe16-toronto/register-for-sbe16toronto/