USGBC Commits Funds to Research

The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) has announced that it will commit $1 million to green building research.

The funds will be targeted at increasing research in areas such as energy and water security; global climate change prevention; indoor environmental quality and passive survivability in the face of natural man-made disasters.

“Our pledge to invest $1 million in research is a reflection of the USGBC’s commitment to its vision of a sustainable built environment within a generation,” says Rick Fedrizzi, president, CEO and founding chair of the USGBC.

The organization’s financial commitment follows the recent publication of “Green Building Research Funding: An Assessment of Current Activity in the United States,” which found that research related to high-performance green building practices and technologies is woefully under-funded by all sectors. Using this work as a foundation, the USGBC Research Committee will publish a national green building research agenda this fall that identifies key research areas for advancing building performance and market transformation.

“Building operation consumes 40 percent of energy and 71 percent of the electricity in the U.S., and accounts for 39 percent of the country’s carbon dioxide emissions, which is directly influencing global climate change,” says the USGBC’s Vice President of Research and Education Peter Templeton. “Given this impact, it’s critical that the building sector makes exponential performance improvements and research development and deployment activities a top priority.”

More information is available at www.usgbc.org.