This Week's News for LA’s Best Buildings
Capital Flows: Five Takeaways from COP26 for Commercial Real Estate
The 26th meeting of the “Conference of the Parties” (COP26) in Glasgow last November reinforced commercial real estate (CRE) as a major mechanism to achieve the global goal of net-zero emissions by 2050. Pledges of $130 trillion among financial institutions to support the initiatives delivered serious scale to the efforts.
Climate Action Report Card: Grading Biden's Environmental Record So Far
As President Joe Biden completes his first year in office, many people across the United States are anxious about the resurgent COVID-19 pandemic, concerned about supply chain bottlenecks and related inflation, worried about climate change and frustrated that elected leaders don’t seem to be able to make progress in addressing these challenges.
Adding Solar to California Apartments Could Get Easier—If Regulators Go Along
The vast majority of California’s rooftop solar has been installed on single-family, owner-occupied homes. But Dover Janis, CEO of San Diego, California–based startup Ivy Energy, sees apartment buildings as the state’s rooftop-solar future — if the right combination of technology, policy and business models can align to make it happen. The prospects depend in part on how California utility regulators decide to reform the state’s net-metering system for rooftop solar.
Leaky Toilets and Inefficient Cooling Towers Are a Waste of Water and Money
When we talk about the building sector’s impacts on climate change, most refer to energy usage and carbon emissions. But another factor sometimes overlooked is the increased need for water conservation. The UN Security General describes climate change as a “crisis amplifier,” and nowhere is that more evident in water supply in certain parts of the world. The UN Environmental Program has named water crises as one of the top global risks in the coming decade, as the number and duration of droughts globally have increased by 29 percent since 2000. This is not just a third-world problem, either. The U.S. Southwest, the hottest and most arid region in the nation, has been abnormally dry since 2012, according to the EPA, and drought periods are expected to become longer, more frequent, and more intense.
Regenerative Architecture Pushes Building Industry to be More Climate Conscious
Regenerative architecture is a way of engineering alongside nature that produces a net-positive impact on the environment. It’s part of a new climate push in the building industry — an industry that was responsible for 38% of the world’s energy-related greenhouse gases in 2019 and 39.9% by 2021.
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