Looking back with Joanne Perdue

In this 20th-anniverary interview, we speak with CAGBC founder Joanne Perdue, architect, Canada Clean 50 honoree and LEED Fellow. In this installment of our anniversary interview series, we sat down with architect, Canada Clean 50 honoree and LEED Fellow, Joanne Perdue. Recognized as an innovator in climate action and champion for capacity building for sustainability, Perdue plays an active role in building future. A founding member of CAGBC and former Board member, she was active in our technical advisory groups, LEED Steering Committee, and was instrumental in establishing the Council’s presence in Alberta.

As one of the early founders of CAGBC, can you tell us how you became involved?

That’s a question that takes me back over 20 years. Prior to the founding of the Canada Green Building Council, there were several smaller groups across the country that were actively engaged and advancing green building and green building advocacy. But at regional level, for example in British Columbia, where I was co-chair of the Architectural Institute of the British Columbia Gas Energy and Environment committee in the nineties, we were a group comprising architects and engineers and other allied professionals that were very interested in green buildings. We did a lot of work back then to try to cut a create that case for change.

A lot of this great work occurred around the time CAGBC was founded but equally important was providing a forum to integrate these groups that were working in different regions across Canada to scale up a national green building advocacy network. CAGBC provided that forum.

Your involvement with CAGBC has spanned all phases of the organization’s growth over the last 20 years. What have been the most significant changes that you’ve seen?

I think if I were to home in on one thing, I think it is this idea that we can start bringing people together and increase willingness to work collaboratively on ideas that are bigger than anyone of us individually. I think about all the different ways in which building standards and practices have been adopted across so many jurisdictions in Canada. That could have never been done by an individual or regional group. To me that’s a big transformative idea that has applications going forward. I think about Alex Zimmerman, CAGBC’s first CEO working from his garage due to lack of funding before moving to an office space provided by the RAIC and thinking about where we are now. Thomas Mueller and Alex Zimmerman have been visionary leaders who think about how to take these ideas and really transform them. For me, that’s what really jumps out.

One thing that we’ve noticed is how Canada’s post-secondary institutions seem to consistently be leaders in this industry. Under your guidance, the University of Calgary is among the top in the country. How do you consistently sell green building and build consensus to bring the next level of sustainability?

Not everyone knows that post-secondary education institutions are leaders in sustainability in Canada. The Times Higher Education have a ranking tool called the University Impact Ranking, which evaluates the university’s work in advancing the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDG). Canadian institutions as a cohort are the third highest ranked globally for progress in advancing sustainability as evaluated by the UNSDG. I’m proud that the University of Calgary actually has been ranked among top 5 percent of global institutions for the past three years.

I think post-secondary institutions have elevated responsibilities and sustainability in three key ways. One, supporting students in developing core competencies and knowledge to address what are seemingly intractable, highly complex social ecological problems. We also have research institutions and diverse disciplinary expertise that we can convene around these intractable challenges, because no one discipline on its own can solve this large challenge. The third way that universities can play an important role is the campuses become living learning labs for understanding what sustainability looks like.

Our institutional sustainability strategy is our road map that sets our aspirations and our goals for sustainability. Underneath that, we also have our climate action plan which sets the trajectory of where we’re going. All of our climate action initiatives sit within that and I’m really proud that we are one of the leaders. The McKinney complex is one of the early projects to be certified under CAGBC Zero Carbon Building – Design Standard and I’m super proud that it was the retrofit of an existing building. We also were one of the first universities in Canada to achieve a LEED Platinum certification back in 2007.

We take the time on projects to really think about a compelling vision: what can this project do? It’s not about score cards, but rather holistic health, human health, ecological health. What can this (building) do? How does that tie to the research mission that a particular faculty? What big ideas can we come up with to design a building and get into the practical things of having good governance systems, design standards and guidelines with clear expectations from the project right from the get-go and, importantly, looking at the total cost of ownership that fundamentally changes the financial value of green buildings. The last thing is that it shows great teamwork when all these projects come together. They are the results of innovation and people working together so that’s our secret sauce of how we approach it on our campus.

Do you believe that green building just appeals to leaders, or is this becoming more mainstream? How does CAGBC help that mainstream majority adopt green building?

In Canada, buildings are our third highest source of greenhouse gas emissions, which gives us a tremendous opportunity for improvement, and I think the Council has done a really good job producing reports that really show the possibilities of how the built environment can really help Canada reach its nationally determined contributions, aspirations, and commitments under the Paris Agreement. I think they also have possibilities to help with the new commitment for biodiversity which was just released following up on the COP 15 in Montreal.

Buildings are contributors to climate change as they represent close to 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions globally and are responsible for 40 percent of material extraction. That’s a statistic we don’t talk about enough. Buildings are greatly impacted by climate change so there’s no silver bullet here that we can say if we do this, that will solve the problem. People point to codes and so forth, but codes don’t change fast enough and in the end it’s people that are making those decisions. It is a combination of advocacy, education and working at multiple levels across multiple sectors. Agencies or organizations such as the Council have and continue to do a great job that will eventually help us reach tipping points in different parts of the sector.

I think the Council needs to keep thinking about sectors where those tipping points occur. One thing I’d like to see is the Council pursue is creating a space that supports that new cohort of early innovators and encourages them to think about what’s that next frontier or the trends to advance the transformation of the building environment and what supports could the Council create to help foster that. I really think a lot about regenerative design and resilience thinking and it’s a different approach. Right now we have a lot of technology focus and we’ve got a lot of momentum there but I actually think we need to start thinking about what is that emerging piece and what supports might be needed there and maybe some different models because I think we need different disciplines around the table. We need biologists, climate scientists, and social innovators, to think about different ways that we could approach thinking about the built environment.