A Big Week in the Big Easy

Greenbuild is here, and we are excited to bring the green building movement to New Orleans. With so many great things on the agenda, I wanted to highlight a few of the events I’m looking forward to this week.

Monday: We kick off the week focusing on health and wellness.

I will be attending the WELL 2014 Symposium where we will celebrate the release of version 1.0 of the WELL health and wellness rating system. WELL projects will be reviewed by the Green Building Certification Institute (GBCI), and LEED certification is a prerequisite for WELL recognition.

Tuesday: The pace picks up on Tuesday with Greenbuild Summits and special events.

I’ll be attending the BASF-sponsored Materials & Human Health Summit. At 2 PM, I will be joining my colleagues Ashley White, Harvey Bernstein, Charlene Bayer, and Heather Gadonniex to talk about a new materials curriculum for green building professionals. USGBC will release a guidebook based on this curriculum early next year, and we hope to use it as the basis for new kinds of professional recognition.

This will be capped off by a joint closing plenary headlined by the Acting Surgeon General of the United States Boris Lushniak. The Rear Admiral will enlist the audience into his campaign to promote public health through the design, construction, and operation of the built environment.

Wednesday: Things boil over on Wednesday with events literally from dawn to dusk.

We start things off with Frontiers in Research, a wide-ranging session featuring presentations by Dan Winters (Ginsberg Fellow, 2012), Dr. Ashley White (Google Senior Research Fellow), Dr. Matt Trowbridge (Ginsberg Fellow, 2013, and Heather Rosenberg (Ginsberg Fellow, 2014). This session will be a one-stop-shop for cutting edge insights on four of the most pressing issues facing the industry today: health, material transparency, social equity, and business strategy.

This gets us warmed up to Transform Building Materials through Data Collaboration – also known as our materials datapalooza. This two-hour tour de force starts with USGBC and AIA leadership and features 10 powerful lightning talks from individuals working to make information about the health and environmental attributes of building materials more accessible and impactful.

This all leads up to the Big Show – an evening at the New Orleans Superdome. We will dive into the Dollars and Sense of Climate Change with Paul Hawken, Tom Steyer, and Governor Martin O’Malley.

Thursday: There is no rest yet, as we will get started rolling again at 8 AM on Thursday morning.

I’ll be joining Nils Kok and Dan Winters to talk about the investor perspective on sustainability in real estate portfolios. Dr. Kok will give an update on the latest findings from the 2014 GRESB survey, while I introduce new GBIG features. Attendees can learn how to use GBIG to track buildings and places, as well as share their roles and contributions on green building projects. Afterwards attendees can stop by the USGBC booth to get tips and share their feedback.

Friday: There’s no telling what shape we’ll be in when Friday comes along, but the program doesn’t quit.

I’ll be there bright and early to listen to a team from the U.S. General Services Administration talk about groundbreaking research they are doing on healthy workplaces. The session will feature Esther Sternberg, Judi Heerwagen, Kevin Kampschroer, and Mariana Figueiro.

Finally, we will roll into the closing plenary, and I’m looking forward to learning from David Brooks and another star-studded group.

That will wrap it up for Greenbuild in New Orleans. There won’t be much time to rest, as next week we’ll be back in action again at VERGE San Francisco. Hope to see you there too!