President's Message

I was recently asked to write an article on the future of green building and, specifically, how the movement will have changed by 2030—that beacon year of carbon neutrality. While thinking about the piece, I also found myself contemplating what the future might hold for the Green Building Initiative, and how our role has evolved since we first came on the scene in 2004.

As a provider/promoter of rating and assessment tools, we committed ourselves early on to continual improvement. That's what motivated GBI to become the first green building organization to be recognized as an ANSI standards developer, and led to our current process to establish Green Globes™ as an American National Standard. It also led to changes in our residential program, as we shifted our efforts to support the NAHB's new National Green Building Program, while continuing our work with HBAs to develop their own local programs, and expanding the resources available to them.

It is in this last area that I foresee the most significant change for GBI, as we increase our focus on the information and education required to make green building the norm. As I've said before in this forum, we're moving toward an era in which green, sustainable or high performance building is simply standard practice. But it won't come easily.

Even with the threat of global warming and the current price of oil, we need to do a much better job of proving the environmental and economic benefits of green building in quantifiable terms. There is also a tremendous need for education and training, which can only grow.

To this end, we recently kicked off our new research program with a study designed to quantify the economic returns of specific sustainability features, and our July webinar on the liability of building green—the first in a three-part series—attracted hundreds of registrants. Both of these activities are indicative of our belief that mainstream design and building practitioners hold the key to significantly improving our built environment, and our commitment to doing whatever we can to support their transition.

Sincerely,

Ward Hubbell