CIRS’ certification comes through two of the world’s foremost third-party green building certification programs: LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Green Building Rating System™ and The Living Building Challenge (LBC).
The LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Green Building Rating System™ is an internationally recognized benchmark for the design, construction and operation of high performance green buildings.
With four levels of certification (certified, silver, gold and platinum), the LEED rating system promotes a whole-building approach that recognizes performance in five key areas of human and environmental health:
- Sustainable site development
- Water efficiency
- Energy efficiency
- Materials selection
- Indoor environmental quality
CIRS is a regenerative building and goes beyond LEED Platinum building roughly at a cost of 25% more than a LEED Gold-equivalent building. This counters the argument that sustainable buildings cost too much to build. In fact, when considering the lifecycle cost of the building from construction to demolition, it’s expected that CIRS will have a slightly lower cost of ownership after only 25 years.
“Just by virtue of design, LEED Platinum is a given,” says Alberto Cayuela, Associate Director of the UBC Sustainability Initiative. “We think this is easy. What we want to prove is that we can meet the principles of the Living Building Challenge of Cascadia.”
The Living Building Challenge
The Living Building Challenge is quickly becoming one of the most advanced green building rating systems in the world.
Established by the International Living Building Institute (an organization founded in 2009 by the Cascadia Region Green Building Council), LBC certifies buildings based on their performance in seven areas or ‘Petals’: Site, Water, Energy, Health, Materials, Equity and Beauty.
Petals are subdivided into a total of 20 Imperatives, each of which focuses on a specific sphere of influence. Certified buildings are expected to be net-zero energy, net-zero water and nontoxic; to provide for habitat restoration on sister sites; to have an urban agriculture operation; to address social justice and equity issues; and much more.
CIRS aims to be one of Canada’s first buildings to receive certification under The Living Building Challenge. By doing so, UBC is taking a leadership role in ground-testing sustainable urban development and demonstrating that buildings can address not only environmental sustainability, but also economic and social sustainability.
The LBC recognizes buildings that excel at pushing to the next level of sustainability performance—that don’t just reduce their negative environmental impacts, but rather, contribute in multiple positive ways to their surroundings. CIRS will be a regenerative, net-zero building that inherently lines up with LBC’s Imperatives. Striving for LBC certification is a natural fit for CIRS, and a key indicator of success.
