World Green Building Council Helps Accelerate Growth of Green

By Jessica Boehland

The World Green Building Council (WGBC), a federation of national green building councils with a mission to accelerate the international growth of green building, is reinventing itself.

In May 2007, WGBC announced that the organization’s secretariat would be located in Toronto, Ontario, and that Kevin Hydes, P.Eng., P.E., who lives in Montréal, Québec, would succeed Ché Wall as chair of the organization. Hydes continues the dominance of engineers leading the organization, since Wall is an environmental engineer with Australia-based Lincolne Scott. In August, the organization appointed Andrew Bowerbank, a Toronto-based designer, as executive director. A new logo and website design round out the transformation.

Hydes knows what he’s getting into: he’s former president and CEO of Keen Engineering; current vice president of buildings engineering and sector leader of sustainable design at Stantec, which acquired Keen in 2005; founder and director of the Canada Green Building Council; and outgoing chair of the U.S. Green Building Council. Keeping up with the growth of green building around the world, though, could challenge even Hydes.

Since it formed in 1999, WGBC has welcomed 11 full member councils—from Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States. An additional 17 emerging member councils round out WGBC—these are from Argentina, Chile, China, Egypt, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Israel, Korea, Nigeria, Panama, the Philippines, South Africa, Switzerland, Turkey, and Vietnam.

“We are really seeing an explosion of green building councils globally,” says Hydes, noting that WGBC anticipates 100 full members by 2010. “As the demand for councils increases dramatically, we will continue to help communities around the globe with the tools and techniques that can assist them in transforming local markets to provide a sustainable built environment for our children,” he says. To speed this transformation, Hydes envisions the Council moving “from a networking to an implementation organization”—giving notice that WGBC will increasingly play a hand in advancing the green building agenda.

Joel Ann Todd, vice chair of the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED steering committee and secretary of the International Initiative for a Sustainable Built Environment (iiSBE), welcomes WGBC’s growing presence on the international green building scene and anticipates iiSBE and WGBC collaborating on various initiatives.

As green building gains prominence around the world, Todd says, we need to explore both what the developed world can teach the developing world and vice versa. She also notes that the national council model might need some tweaking to work in different contexts. “I think this is one of WGBC’s primary purposes—not to force the model created in the U.S. on other countries but to learn from that model and help other countries create something that is appropriate and effective and responsible to their specific conditions.”

WGBC wrapped up its seventh International Congress in July 2007. More than 100 delegates from 23 countries gathered in Toronto for the event, which Hydes describes as “the beginning of the next generation of WGBC.”

This article was produced by BuildingGreen, Inc.- www.buildinggreen.com

For more information on the World Green Building Council:

www.worldgbc.org/

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