Describe the critical need your solution addresses.

Every natural system on the planet is in decline, but there is no shared understanding of what can and must be achieved now to reverse this decline. A new bar must be set for sustainability in the built environment to support the rapid adoption of integrated, cutting-edge techniques and practices.

Explain your initiative in more depth and its stage of development.

Launched in November 2006, the Living Building Challenge has already proven to be a transformative program, with over sixty projects in various stages of development around North America and beyond. The Challenge inspires green building teams to leap forward and innovate new techniques – to demonstrate that ecological balance in the built environment is possible using current technology. To be “Living” the building(s) must achieve each of the Challenge’s environmentally critical imperatives (no exceptions). It must generate all of its own energy onsite using renewable sources; capture and treat all of its own water; be constructed of nontoxic, sustainably sourced materials; use only previously developed sites (ending sprawl); and be beautiful and inspiring to its inhabitants.

Challenge certification is based on 12 months of actual, not predicted, performance, ensuring that environmental claims reflect reality – not hype. Thus, to be “Living” a building must both inspire and educate the people who interact with it, transforming end users and visitors into agents of change. This single unifying standard catalyzes comprehensive change within the built environment, while giving end-users and policy makers a clear path toward true sustainability. The Challenge is now poised to make a bigger leap into countries around the world.

How does your strategy and approach respond creatively and comprehensively to key issues?

We are entering a peak oil, peak water world that is globally interconnected, yet ecologically impoverished. Human behavior is warming the planet at an unprecedented (potentially cataclysmic) rate. Habitat loss and toxic pollution are wearing away the resiliency of planetary ecosystems. We have scant time left to make the transformative changes needed to bring the planet back into equilibrium.

Despite this urgency, the green building movement has embraced an incremental, bottom up approach that even if hugely successful can not come close to achieving the needed impact and reductions. Without a clear end-goal, the movement is adrift.

The Challenge tackles the built environment’s complex role in these interconnected issues. Equal parts manifesto, metaphor and performance standard, the Challenge inspires all who encounter it to become change agents – transforming an industry and themselves.

The Challenge reminds us that:

• Transformative performance levels are possible now. We have everything we need to create buildings that use 70-80% less energy and water and that meet their remaining needs through clean, renewable energy and ecologically sound water gathering techniques. Each imperative has been achieved on its own in multiple buildings. The Challenge provides the vision to bring them together.

• The greatest barriers to change stem from attitudes and perceptions – our fears and values, what we allow, what we incentivize.

• The future of design and construction is integration – more collaboration, more synergies across disciplines.

The Challenge’s deepest impact transcends the number of projects currently underway. It lies instead in the transformation of expectations effected in the people who encounter it. As one Challenge project leader told us: “We are gaining valuable knowledge at the very edge of what is possible in the built environment today, and that is informing everything else that we do on all our other projects.”