Another year, another set of choices. Build a greener future, or add to the mounting challenges of our era, with untold expense, inequity and looming ecological disaster. The hard work of USGBC members, partners and LEED users underscores our collective commitment to the better path, and USGBC is proud to count continued progress toward fulfilling our mission of a sustainable and resilient built environment. The challenge, of course, is to do much more.

The USGBC community’s work and resources on resilience are featured in our new education pathway, The Road to Resilience. This curated resource will stay fresh as we add courses and content. For example, we will host a series of guest-authored articles on resilience in 2018.

Even the greenest buildings, that slash their environmental footprints to zero (or beyond), are not shielded from the reality that economic and social disruptions may still happen and that the fury of natural and manmade disasters is increasingly likely. The key is to keep both mitigating and adapting. We continue environmental mitigation efforts at scale by leveraging market forces and public policy to reduce impacts, while also reinforcing that adaptation to our risky world is increasingly essential.

This is the spirit of USGBC’s efforts to dramatically expand the uptake of consistently deeper sustainability practices across buildings, communities and infrastructure, while at the same time engaging in policy action and thought leadership focused on boosting building and community resilience.

Convening experts to tackle sustainability and resilience

Following our early work post-Katrina with the New Orleans Principles and direct staff support, as well as a 2011–2013 national leadership speaker series on resilience, and the wake of the 2011 earthquake, we began building a soon-to-be LEED Platinum orphanage and children’s center in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. USGBC also began co-hosting the Resilient Cities Summit in 2015.

The 2017 Summit was the third convening of mayors, city staff and experts to further unpack resiliency issues and solutions for cities. Route Fifty covered the 2017 event with an article series you won’t want to miss:

In addition to our domestic work to support businesses and governments that are investing in climate mitigation through green building and associated strategies, USGBC traveled to Bonn, Germany, to elevate the role of green buildings and communities as a critical part of mitigating climate change at the U.N. climate talk known as COP23.

A new report shows marked progress by states, cities and businesses across the U.S., even if averting catastrophic climate change will require far more action than efforts to date. Globally, however, the building sector must do much more to bend its current curve of increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

Of course, these future-looking projects often intersect with current events and the need for immediate action. In light of this year’s devastating events in Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, California, Texas, Florida and beyond, USGBC and our local communities have been doing what we can to support communities hit by disasters to build back stronger and better.

USGBC therefore invited a group of lawmakers and resilience program officers from 12 states (including the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico) to a Greenbuild discussion on the role of state governments in resilience planning and sustainable recovery. This group is continuing to meet and will help USGBC develop guidance and collect best practices for states to be more resilient.

A growing family of resilience-focused tools

Our Pathway to Resilience provides an accessible way to find tools and learn about leveraging the core of the resilience-focused rating systems in the USGBC and GBCI family of offerings, including LEED, PEER, and SITES. The resilience components of additional programs, such as STAR Communities, will also be included.

New to these offerings in 2017 is the RELi resilience standard. With RELi, GBCI will help guide the planning, design and management of buildings and communities that offer greater adaptability and resilience to weather and natural disasters. Alex Wilson, former Chair of the LEED Resilience Working Group, offers a helpful overview of the new RELi partnership and what’s next. RELi encourages a robust integrative process and includes guidelines for projects to prepare and adapt to acute hazards and mitigate chronic risks.

USGBC is partnering with the Institute for Market Transformation to Sustainability (MTS) and its Capital Market Partnership to lead the further refinement of the RELi standard to synthesize the LEED Resilient Design pilot credits with the MTS RELi Hazard Mitigation and Adaptation credits. A steering committee has been formed with green building and resilience experts, and we expect their work will take at least a year to complete. USGBC intends to explore how the new standard could be referenced in LEED to further reward green building projects that focus on enhanced resilience.

In the meantime, GBCI will be offering certification on a pilot basis to the current RELi standard, which is expected to open in the spring of 2018. In its present form, it can also be used by project teams and governments seeking guidance on incorporating resilience thinking into planning, policy, design and construction.

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Explore the Pathway to Resilience

Fire, flood and fury: A resilience retrospective for 2017