‘Net Zero’ Green Building certification soon to be launched

The World Green Building Council (WorldGBC) is launching a net-zero building certification and training session soon in an effort to reduce carbon emissions from the building sector. This initiative was followed through last December’s COP21 in Paris, where 74 green building councils, including the WorldGBC, and 27,000 member companies pledge to reduce CO2 emissions by 84 gigatonnes by 2050.

A Net Zero Building is essentially a building intended to generate clean energy and produce no net emissions.

Several green building councils across the world including India, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Netherlands, South Africa and Sweden will be involved in this project aiming the achieve 100 percent of net zero buildings by 2050. In association with Architecture 2030, WorldGBC will work on this initiative to reduce carbon emissions.

According to Terri Wills, CEO of World Green Building Council, the success of the ambition to keep global warming to within 1.5 to 2 degrees will rely on every countries ability to advance the concept of net zero buildings. The net zero buildings will determined the contribution as an efforts to tackle climate change.

Under this ambitious movement, the long term target include all new and retrofit buildings to be net zero starting in 2030. By 2050, one hundred percent of buildings are mandated to be net zero. Another target consists of 75,000 trained net zero building professionals by 2030 to meet 300,000 by 2050 and by 2030 all green building councils across the world will have a net zero tool in place to operate the certification programs.

Moreover, the WorldGBC plans to encourage business and the government to adopt these ambitious targets on net zero buildings even though the focus is on the certification and training.