Reducing Emissions from Buildings by Supporting Building and Real Estate Professionals

Supporting Building and Real Estate Professionals

In partnership with the Town of Banff, the Biosphere Institute is worked collaboratively with the development community to identify local barriers to adopting higher tiers of the National Building Code of Canada 2020. As part of this project, we will develop and deliver targeted educational opportunities to increase awareness of the benefits of high-performance buildings. This project has been funded by Natural Resources Canada via the Town of Banff.

Concurrently, we also engaged real estate professionals to leverage their influence and expertise to help drive demand for high-performance buildings. Our aim here is to ensure new home buyers are able to access quality information about the economic incentives, pay-back periods, and other benefits to owning a high-performance home. This portion of the project has been funded by the Alberta Real Estate Foundation.

In engaging these industry stakeholders, we are using our learnings to build, partner, and execute a customized education program for Bow Valley and Albertan professionals via the Building for Sustainability platform, which will improve energy efficiency and dramatically reduce the carbon footprint of new and existing homes as sustainable building technologies are increasingly implemented.

During the summer months of 2024, we surveyed and interviewed builders, developers, contractors, trades people, real estate agents, property managers, mortgage brokers, commercial lenders, real estate lawyers, and inspectors.

Why is this important?

Our Bow Valley buildings contribute a significant portion of our total greenhouse gas emissions, a third in fact. This represents a great opportunity to reduce emissions through a holistic, industry wide approach, improving knowledge, skills, and capacity to build high-performance buildings. This is complicated because there’s a delicate balance between regulation, market demand, and industry capacity that has molded the building industry into what it is. Incentive and finance programs are available to current and prospective homeowners to help reduce the barriers for building for higher performance and it’s important our building and real estate professionals have the knowledge and skills to do as well.

What did we learn?

We shared our findings at the Building for Sustainability Symposium in October 2024 – where we also launched the first of our courses, workshops, and seminars to help raise awareness, build capacity, and develop skills with industry professionals.

thank you to our Project Partners