Dear friends,

When we were finalizing our 2025-2027 Strategic Plan, I was living through one of the longest heat waves that my state of California had ever experienced. Families and workers struggled to stay cool despite the record-breaking temperatures, hospitalizations increased, and over 70 million people lived under a heat alert. We had also just been informed that the average global temperature has warmed 1.5C above pre-industrial levels for 12 months in a row. Not everybody lived through that devastating heat wave. 

When we ask ourselves how we are doing, we must start with this very real gauge of climate action progress and remind ourselves first and foremost that we are still tragically barrelling into an era of extinction, heartbreaking climate-induced migration, and resource depletion. And as ever, the human impacts of these transitions are borne disproportionately by lower income communities, communities of color, and people living in the Global South, which have historically been damaged most from the destruction of the past. We have transgressed 6 of the 9 planetary boundaries, and we are feeling the effects of these transgressions more and more every day. 

We must act urgently, together, with thoughtful strategy and care like never before.

As an industry, the global building and construction industry is a major contributor to these growing crises. Specifically around greenhouse gas emissions, which remains one of the most measurable and important impacts we can track, according to the Global Buildings Climate Tracker, a tool used by the United Nations’ Global Status Report on Buildings and Construction, our sector essentially remains unchanged in our emissions despite needing to radically reduce them in order to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement and curb the worst effects of climate change by 2050. For many other impacts including health, equity, biodiversity and others, we don’t have many data points to be optimistic about. Rapid structural change is still eluding us, and is more urgently needed than ever before. 

We must act urgently, together, with thoughtful strategy and care like never before. At Living Future, we hold a vision and a commitment to that action, and we see signs that our world and our building industry are turning collective attention to that path and starting down it. As these intersecting crises become more present in our lives, it is strengthening and growing the global community of people dedicated to transforming the building industry. 

This past March, I had the opportunity to travel to Paris for the very first global summit on Buildings and Climate, hosted by the UN. There, roughly 800 global leaders gathered to discuss and strategize the challenges we face: not just greenhouse gas emissions but biodiversity loss, economic justice, resilience and health. The group rallied around the goal of the new Buildings Breakthrough Agenda, which aims to achieve “near-zero emissions and resilient buildings to be the new normal by 2030”. And to my delight, as we sat in the main auditorium for the plenary session, keynote speaker Ciarán Cuffe, a leading member of the European Parliament, declared that a useful goal and framework for hitting this goal is in fact the Living Building Challenge. This is why we continue to show  up for this community: we believe that it is critical to clearly articulate and inspire people towards our ultimate goals. We are proud to have created tools and resources that are actionable, accessible and evolving  to support the growth of our movement as we make these ambitious shifts.

Now, our next step is to harness that growing interest in regeneration along with the high ambitions and commitments of global leaders towards near-zero emissions and resilient buildings as the new normal by 2030.

We are also encouraged to see that the term ‘regeneration’ is on the rise. For us at Living Future, we define this term as follows: Regenerative work creates a positive impact across social, cultural, and ecological systems. This is the path to a common living future. We see the term ‘regeneration’ being used to signify a growing ambition to go beyond “sustainable”: many people and organizations see that we have to take big leaps towards a better future for all, not just small steps, if we want to really see the change we need. But also, regeneration as a goal speaks to a reality of our world that grows every day: we have already lost so much, and we lose more every day. The work of regeneration, which the Living Building Challenge articulates in detail, is different from the work of building sustainably because it involves the critical act of healing, of reconciliation, and of maintenance and care. These actions need more of our time and attention: we will not simply build our way out of the problems we face. We will build, yes, but we will also repair and maintain, we will need to be good stewards of the precious buildings and resources we have. And so it is wonderful to see the growing interest in regeneration, because it gives much needed momentum to the holistic work that we are deeply passionate about in the Living Future community. 

And to be clear, that momentum is deeply and urgently needed. As industry leaders, the community of Living Future practitioners and champions have a key role  to play in the transformation we MUST accomplish.  We are here to support you in this work, but this takes all of us, using our unique voices in our unique communities, to really achieve the transformation we need in the next decade.

Now, our next step is to harness that growing interest in regeneration along with the high ambitions and commitments of global leaders towards near-zero emissions and resilient buildings as the new normal by 2030. We intend to continue our leadership beacon work, while providing more “on ramps” for more of the industry to join us by removing as much friction as possible, without diluting the commitment and action required. We need to see action at scale, and that means structural shifts in how buildings are built, renovated, and operated, how our supply chains work, the levels of transparency and accountability we incorporate into our work, and how our buildings are regulated. At Living Future, we provide inspiration, support, and community to expedite the journey towards a regenerative building sector. We will be there at the table to push for ambitious goals and measure our industry’s progress towards them. We hope you will join us.

In collaboration,
Lindsay Baker
CEO, Living Future

Verification matters as we scale our progress.

I suppose we never really know where our careers will take us, but I have recently realized with considerable surprise that despite my training as an environmentalist and building scientist, I have found myself learning how to become, well, an accountant. Not a normal financial accountant, but rather a carbon accountant. Along with my fearless colleagues at ILFI, we have been wading through the complex and critical details of the carbon impacts of our built environment in such a way that we can provide clear and rigorous accounting guidelines for buildings and companies that have made commitments to reduce their carbon emissions in line with the Paris Agreement and other related climate action regulations. We do this under the auspices of our increasingly popular and well-referenced standard, ILFI’s Zero Carbon certification. 

Our Zero Carbon certification program, launched in 2018, covers the embodied and operational carbon impacts of buildings. Since that time, we have registered nearly 20 million square feet all over the world. We believe that it is the most well-used certification in the world that exclusively covers the carbon impacts of a building. Although it was before my time with ILFI, we launched this program to help catalyze the rapid decarbonization of our global built environment by providing the best guidance we could find on what a “zero carbon” building was at that time, considering such industry-leading issues as whole building embodied carbon emissions caps, offsite clean energy purchasing, scopes of analysis for whole building life cycle analysis, and more. It was the first of its kind, and it was clearly an effort to build the plane while flying it. Our industry (along with our entire global economy) has to make incredibly difficult transitions in our efforts to drive down emissions, adapt to our warming world, and apply regenerative design principles. We are all doing our best to attempt to create the right standards, market mechanisms, public policies, softwares, and other innovations to make this happen. For us at ILFI, this has meant a continuous evolution for our Zero Carbon program as we seek to provide the clearest and most scientifically sound requirements possible. 

Creating a standard that is documentable, verifiable, clear, concise, and applicable to a wide variety of buildings around the world is not an easy task. But we are building on decades of experience in this work, and I am incredibly impressed with where we are today. And we would not be nearly as far along if we didn’t have friends on this journey. This week, our announcement of our collaboration with four of our largest clients — Amazon, JLL, JPMorgan Chase, and Prologis — is built on years of shared learnings on what is working and what needs evolution around carbon accounting for not just buildings, but more broadly for carbon accounting as a field and scientific landscape. 

When I worked for Google’s Real Estate team over a decade ago, I learned just how different the scale of thinking is when you have a global footprint. In order to achieve our global carbon goals, it is critical that we develop solutions and infrastructure for large companies that work at the global level. Thinking at that scale ensures that the tools that we build can themselves scale at the pace we need. This is the kind of standard-setting that is critical to the success of large-scale public policy, and really any policy that is intended to help the entire global building stock move rapidly towards decarbonization. 

It is this scale and speed that excites me about our new collaboration with these four leading companies and the wonderful individuals working with us in this effort. All four companies have incredibly passionate and knowledgeable in-house experts working on carbon issues for their businesses, and so our collaboration benefits from these teams of professionals who are working with real carbon targets and the complexities of design, construction, and operation of real estate around the world. 

The new version of our Zero Carbon certification will advance our guidance on carbon accounting for buildings in a variety of areas including embodied carbon, refrigerants, the integrity of carbon markets, and more. But the most exciting aspect of this work for me is that we are including explicit guidance for existing buildings seeking certification without major capital investments. As someone who comes from the building operations side of the industry, I believe that some of our greatest unsung climate heroes are the folks who operate and maintain our buildings with decarbonization and efficiency aims. In case you are envisioning that our built environment will be decarbonized by a one-by-one major renovation of every building in operation today, I want to dispel that particular misconception. There are opportunities to gradually decarbonize buildings every day— not during design or construction projects, but just during the day-to-day life of a building. Equipment dies and is replaced, people move in and out, buildings are bought and sold, rented and leased. Building certifications (at ILFI and elsewhere) have historically done a much better job of defining “what good looks like” when we are designing and building, but haven’t always been as effective at defining “good” for buildings over the course of their long lifespans. There are many particularly nerdy but critical questions that we must answer about the carbon accounting of existing buildings, and the next version of our Zero Carbon certification will address  those issues. Having the consultation of these four major companies with vast portfolios is extraordinarily helpful in that piece of the work.

In case you think this work is flying under the radar and only on the minds of a few greenies on the fringe, let me update you: just weeks ago, a group of some of the largest real estate asset investors in the world published a white paper under the auspices of an effort they have been working on for nearly two years. The group, known as Leaders of the Urban Future, issued a call to action for the global real estate industry to align on definitions, metrics and accounting practices for carbon in the real estate sector. The white paper analyzed the current state of certifications that cover carbon emissions for buildings, noting how they line up with a set of rigorous principles for what should be counted in the carbon footprint of a building or portfolio of buildings. We were impressed and delighted with the team that worked on the white paper, led by consultants from the well-respected London-based consultancy, SystemIQ. And we were honored and pleased to see how well our standards line up with the ‘North Star’ that these leading voices put forward. Indeed, aside from the wonderful new UK Net Zero Carbon Buildings Standard that is in development, our Zero Carbon certification is most aligned with the rigorous definition that this group of major investors has put forward based on the most advanced and rigorous carbon accounting schemes in the world (see page 14 of the White Paper to see how others stack up).

And it is not just the largest and most progressive investors in the world that are calling for this critical carbon accounting work to be done. The official ‘Buildings Breakthrough’ Agenda, launched at COP28, is a major piece of the infrastructure for our industry in guiding our contributions to the Paris Agreement target for a 1.5 degree future. In that recently launched Agenda, the very first priority action speaks to the need for clear and rigorous definitions and assessments for near-zero emission and resilient buildings. Doing this well is at the top of our collective to-do list! We at ILFI are trying to do our part by rallying our community to evolve the best possible standard we can, and will be helping to ensure that this work happens around the world.

I will admit that it can feel frustrating at times to feel like we are caught up in the details of ‘what counts’ when it comes to the carbon emissions of a building. Our planet needs us now, and these technical details can feel small in the face of our global challenge. But we are learning rapidly that we simply cannot run this race together if we don’t all play by the same rules and know where the finish line is. We are committed to doing that work as quickly and effectively as possible, and we are deeply grateful to Amazon, JLL, JPMorgan Chase and Prologis for making this work possible through their support and collaboration. We look forward to sharing our progress with our members, partners and clients, and welcome your help and feedback as we make this journey together.

Header photo 6 Pancras Square, Courtesy of Google and Tim Soar.

At Living Future this year, in my hometown of Atlanta, I kicked off the conference by sharing 10 things that are on my mind. Here’s a recap.

While you all are out there designing products, building buildings, doing innovative research, writing policy, I spend a lot of my time on movement strategy work, along with my colleagues and our co-conspirators. I am observing various tactics we’re using to try to transform our industry, thinking about how we can make things work better or faster or more equitably, how we’re advancing regenerative design, and how we’re engaging at the international scale. That work gives me a perspective that I hope will be a helpful spark. 

Global alignment on carbon accounting

This year at the very first UN Global Forum on Buildings and Climate, we celebrated the unveiling of the official Buildings Breakthrough Agenda for our sector: it is the global plan to achieve the decarbonization goals of the Paris Agreement by 2050. The very first item on our collective to-do list is for standards and certification bodies to align on definitions and assessment methods for near-zero emissions and resilient buildings. This may seem technical, but it is critical: In our work to decarbonize our sector, we can’t get very far without having clear rules of the game that are shared around the world. 

US alignment on carbon & buildings

Many of you know that we have been leaders on this effort here in the US, along with our co-conveners, via the ECHO Project that we began a year ago. We have also been at the table with the White House and other government leaders to help them create a Federal Zero Emissions Building definition that is very much a part of this larger global effort. This is incredible momentum at the US level. When we align on the ways we measure, it enables us to push harder, move faster and reduce confusion in the industry. It allows us to work across borders, which is critical in a deeply globalized world. And of course, it’s a great sign that we have super sharp people in the White House who are directly engaged in this particular piece of the decarbonization landscape — there is a building scientist working for our President right now!

Alignment on materials

Decarbonization is not the only place I’m seeing big efforts around alignment. I want to give a shout-out here to our friends and partners at mindfulMATERIALS for their work on aligning on a common ask for building materials manufacturers around the impacts of our products. This is allowing us to send a stronger market signal, clear up confusion, prevent greenwashing and, critically, to avoid the tendency to focus on only one attribute like carbon emissions, instead showing how all impacts — climate, health, social justice, biodiversity, etc. — matter and need to be accounted for. This has been a big year for alignment on the common ask, and I have confidence that these moves are going to rapidly accelerate change for building product manufacturing.

Understanding wood and forests

I’ve also been spending time this past year thinking about our precious forests and the wood industry. This past year, ILFI joined the Climate Smart Wood Group, where a number of forest-focused nonprofits are sitting with buildings-focused nonprofits and other building industry leaders to ensure that the push for mass timber and wood as a construction material is not contributing to negative ecological impacts but instead contributing to regenerative forestry. BuildingGreen has wonderful coverage on this issue. We are building great momentum here by working collectively.  We are stronger together. And that is worth celebrating.

Inequality & access to housing

Not every sign this year has been a positive sign. It has been a hard year for many who work on building peace, liberation and foundational quality of life for all people. In our vision for a living future, we imagine a socially just world, which is one in which housing is a fundamental human right. However, we are seeing trends that are sending us in the wrong direction. First, economic inequality is growing. Second, buying a home is becoming less and less possible as the price of housing continues to rise while incomes don’t rise at anywhere near the same fast rate. These larger economic trends are then impacting what can be built, such that housing (even rental housing) is becoming more and more out of reach for people in the US and in many countries like ours. 

This is a problem for our community to help solve. We need to find ways to build and maintain affordable housing. We need to help contribute to the creation of housing security in the form of ownership models like Community Land Trusts, cooperative models, and policies and regulations that promote affordability. At ILFI we are working on a new initiative to address equity and justice issues in a deeper way across our work, and that our Affordable Housing program is going strong with a new cohort of members. But these problems will require systemic change, more of us working together, and deeply intersectional approaches.

A shifting landscape for DEI work

The next big thing I’m thinking about in the world of justice and liberation is around Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. We’ve seen a disturbing thing happen this year around DEI work, which can best be described with the word backlash. We can expect more backlash on more of the issues we care about in coming years, and we need to double down on our commitments to increasing diversity, promoting cultures of belonging and inclusion, and real equity work, especially around racial equity here in the US where racial inequalities continue to have tragic and lasting impacts on society and on our lives. As the outrage of racial reckonings of 2020 fades for some, it’s especially important for us to keep up momentum in our DEI work. 

Launching Just 3.0

With that urgency I am very proud to announce the re-launch of our Just program in Just 3.0! For those who don’t know Just, Just is a voluntary disclosure tool and framework for reflection, evaluation, communication, and continuous improvement that helps organizations address social justice and equity throughout all aspects of their policies, practices, and culture. Through Just, organizations publicly commit to an equitable and healthy workplace, examine their existing systems, culture, and practices, and take action.  Many organizations in the building industry are waking up to equity issues or a deepening desire to address them, but need a guiding framework to help them get started and keep moving. That is how we hope to help with Just. Just 3.0 is the result of a rigorous development process that involved extensive research and collaboration.

“A Living Future is one where life wins, where our many global cultures thrive, where we all are treated fairly and where we treat our planet with the same respect and love.“

Working towards a living future amidst destruction

I am also thinking about how much harder our work is to find our Living Future in a world with so much destruction and death. The past six months in particular have felt like heartbreaking times to watch the politics of society play out around the world. There are no words I can find to describe the grief and the disappointment that I feel, that I know many of us feel, watching as people kill each other and destroy each other’s worlds. 

We are not disconnected from this as people working towards a living future. A living future is one where life wins, where our many global cultures thrive, where we all are treated fairly and where we treat our planet with the same respect and love. It’s a future where we don’t bomb each other, we don’t destroy each others’ homes, we don’t cut down our trees as an act of war, we don’t destroy our precious infrastructure. To be a part of this community is to fight for life for everyone, and to find the ways to make that possible. And community finds space to heal together, to grieve together, and to support those in need together. 

Bio-based materials resurgence

One of the most exciting parts of the past year is the building momentum for natural and biobased materials. Obviously, we’ve been seeing a rise in interest in Mass Timber for a few years now, and we’ve been seeing a lot of new biobased products grow in the market like Hempcrete and panelized straw technologies, but this year was a particularly great year for biobased materials and I really hope that trend continues. 

One big boost this year was the UN Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction Report released in collaboration with the Yale Center for Ecosystems & Architecture on Building Materials and Climate. I love how it places this shift in its rightful place in a set of three cascading priorities for our industry. The first priority is to avoid the use of new materials in the first place through building and materials reuse. The second priority is to shift to biobased materials wherever possible. The third priority is to improve the carbon footprint of conventional extracted materials. I love this framing. It shows the growing momentum and importance of bio-based materials especially in the Global South where so much of the new construction is occurring in the world today. 

Decarbonization and decolonization 

The last thing on my mind stems from a moving experience I had — visiting the 2023 Architecture Biennale in Venice, Italy. For the first time in history, the exhibition focused on the work of the African diaspora with the themes of decarbonization and decolonization. Many in the exhibition highlighted connections between global extractive and polluting industry and the history of colonization and war. At the same time, there were many depictions of a better world that is possible (such as contributions from Francis Kéré and MASS Design Group). A core characteristic of many visions for that better future is indigeneity — indigenous labor, craft, and materials that are biobased and regenerative. 

Many might think that this vision for the future sounds impractical. We are not those people. We know that it is deeply possible to build buildings that celebrate place, that create good jobs, that are built out of the materials of the ecosystem in which they are constructed. It is time to link arms and support these visions, to find inspiration from them ourselves. I certainly did.

Do you remember the first time you entered a building and it changed you? Perhaps it was a building that brought on a sense of awe. Perhaps it was intimidating. Perhaps it looked and felt and smelled like something you’d never experienced before. 

I have come to understand that buildings change us in many ways. Buildings teach us things, both tacitly and actively. When I was 18 years old, I became one of the first students of a trailblazing building on my campus. I went to Oberlin College in Ohio; I went to study this building. The Adam Joseph Lewis Center opened the year I started college, and it was an unprecedented experiment at that time. Built to produce more clean energy than it needs, to clean all of its own wastewater through an elaborate constructed wetland called a Living Machine, and to touch the earth lightly. Indeed, it was built to give back more than it took. It was the brainchild of my mentor and advisor, Dr. David Orr, an environmental educator and writer who was determined to prove that the act of design and construction could serve as its own pedagogy. He wrote an essay describing his intentions for the project in 1993, Architecture as Pedagogy: 

The process of design and construction is an opportunity for a community to deliberate about the ideas and ideals it wishes to express and how these are rendered into architectural form. What do we want our buildings to say about us? What will they say about our ecological prospects? To what large issues and causes do they direct our attention? What problems do they resolve? What kind of human relationships do they encourage? These are not technical details, but first and foremost issues of common concern that should be decided by the entire campus community. When they are so decided, the design of buildings fosters civic competence and extends the idea of citizenship. …. 

These questions cannot be answered without engaging issues of ethics. How are building materials extracted, processed, manufactured, and transported? What ecological and human costs to various materials impose where and on whom? What in our ethical theories justifies the use of materials that degrade ecosystems, jeopardize other species, or risk human lives and health? Where those costs are deemed unavoidable to accomplish a larger good, how can we balance ethical accounts?

These questions were raised at Oberlin for the building that would rise on campus in the years to come, as Orr worked with the design team from William McDonough + Partners on the design and realization of the project.

The Lewis Center is now a profound learning experience for thousands of people and generations of students who learn and engage with the building. It is a lesson in what we are capable of, how we can live in balance with our communities, our ecological resources, and how that has incredibly positive impacts on our health, our learning, and our relationships with each other. It is a teacher who will never retire, it is a book in the physical “public library” of a campus landscape. Just walking into the building and learning how it works shows the visitor that a regenerative future is possible, and indeed, it is here in this small space in this particular community, because they made it so. Today, the Lewis Center is a grandmother of a family tree of buildings that have emerged all over the world that are teaching similar lessons. 

The Lewis Center was completed before the Living Building Challenge was launched. At its heart, the Living Building Challenge and all the programs in its orbit are driven by the idea that every building has the potential to be a dynamic hub of learning — for its users, owner, stakeholders, community, design and construction team, and others. Each building can teach us how to use less energy to heat and cool our buildings, how to use non-toxic materials to build, and how to landscape without potable water. But it can also teach us about how to live in balance with the world around us, it can teach us about native plants and animals, and ecosystems. It can teach us how to care for each other just through the act of buying and making things. It can teach us that our opinions matter, that our values matter, and that we have a hand and a responsibility in the infrastructure around us.

To learn more about the Living Village project, join our next Living Future Member webinar on April 2nd.

This piece was adapted from a talk that Lindsay Baker delivered at Yale University’s Divinity School in 2023. The School is engaged in a Living Village project. 

Cover photo: © Barney Taxel, courtesy William McDonough + Partners.

I have a small confession to make. I am a chronic sufferer of a very common but pernicious syndrome: FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). As a youngest child and part of the first generation to experience the internet in our youth, I have had a life-long anxiety that I’m being left out of something very important and very fun. It has its downsides, and I’ve learned to tame it considerably over the years. But more recently, I’ve actually found that FOMO is one side of a two-sided coin for me. The other side is that I am an enthusiastic advocate for convening and coordination, and I often think about who else should be invited to whatever I am doing.

I’m telling you all of this about me, dear reader, because I’ve come to believe that these kinds of things — personality, anxieties, motives, extroversion and introversion, etc. — all matter significantly in our work to transform the building industry.

We already know that this daunting goal requires a collective effort, and we are great at that. We bring our technical contributions, our successes and failures, our persuasion tactics, our facts and data to help the greater good. But all too often, those activities don’t involve a critical act that I believe we need more of, and that is the act of thoughtful and rigorous coordination. Our sense of urgency, our passion and, oftentimes, our desire to help our individual businesses propel us to share what we are doing and add to the collective knowledge base, but it doesn’t require that we agree with each other on critical tactics, on definitions and “what good looks like.” And without this harmonization of tactics and goals, I believe it will be impossible for us to rapidly transform our industry in the ways that our planet and our communities need.

And so I am delighted to share the small example of what we have begun with the Embodied Carbon Harmonization and Optimization (ECHO) project over the past year. It was just one year ago that it all got started, and Andrew Himes asked me to share a bit about the story. As a fellow believer in collective impact, Andrew is a kindred spirit with me on this topic, and I think we both hope that lessons can be learned from the full story of how ECHO came into being. I will say upfront that it has not been a perfect or linear path, nor is the story complete.

Five organizations took on the responsibility of hosting and leading the conversation: Architecture 2030, Carbon Leadership Forum, Building Transparency, ILFI (us!), and USGBC. The group included representatives from all of the major organizations in the US that were presently collecting embodied carbon data at a whole building (and project!) scale, either as a part of a certification or voluntary commitment program, and a few who were just embarking on the task.

FOMO was a big factor for me in showing up in the conversation that became ECHO. I was introduced to a woman named Kate Ascher and told that she was putting together an event about embodied carbon in New York in April of 2023. In January, she would be out in Seattle to meet with a few embodied carbon experts to discuss how best to set up the agenda, and she invited me to join. Double FOMO! Two in-person events (after the pandemic years, this alone was exciting), one a lovely small group of experts and the other a larger and powerful group of industry leaders. I cleared my schedule and eagerly showed up in January.

The meeting in January was intended to just be a planning meeting, to help Kate come up with a useful agenda for the May meeting. But as the conversation progressed, folks around the table suggested that there was one potential outcome for the April meeting that would be a shame, and we all wanted to avoid it. It was something we had learned from the past: if we held an event to talk about embodied carbon in the built environment and ask developers, architects, owners and others to take action to reduce embodied carbon emissions, we would get a familiar and understandable response, that was something along the lines of:

“There are too many conflicting standards and definitions, too many acronyms, too many certifications asking for slightly different things. It’s all just too confusing and we don’t know what we are being asked to do. We need clear and universal (and achievable) targets to hit before we can really address the problem.”

At that point, I piped in to say that I thought we had a decent shot at getting ahead of that problem. For many reasons, 2022 and 2023 were years where the spirit of communication and collaboration really picked up between green building certification programs and related NGOs. The communication lines were open. We might be able to get a group together to agree to make the paperwork and definitions and other infrastructures as streamlined and harmonized as possible, so that embodied carbon achievement could be evaluated consistently. Especially because the field is so much younger than that of operational carbon accounting, we had a chance to address inconsistencies before they got out of control.

At the same time, it turned out that Architecture2030 and Building Transparency had been talking to a set of large firms about aligning carbon data reporting for the various professional commitment programs (AIA 2030, SE2050, MEP2040, etc.). This idea was clearly aligned and quite similar, so it was woven into the conversation.

Through the grace and tenacity of Kate Ascher, the financial support of the Holcim Foundation, and the efforts of a small group of people, we managed to get a group in a room together just 2 months later. The group was convened by another group- five organizations who took on the responsibility of hosting and leading the conversation: Architecture2030, Carbon Leadership Forum, Building Transparency, ILFI (us!), and USGBC. The group included representatives from all of the major organizations in the US that were presently collecting embodied carbon data at a whole building (and project!) scale, either as a part of a certification or voluntary commitment program, and a few who were just embarking on the task. We spent a day getting to know each other’s organizations, and then discussing the question: how might we work together, how might we harmonize our efforts?

If this piece has left you feeling FOMO about ECHO, I feel you. We are working hard to make sure that all of our peer organizations are in the room, and that others will have opportunities to weigh in to what we are doing in the right ways. But ECHO is just one way that we can come together and align on our shared goals.

There is much to be found now on ECHO’s website to see what has transpired since. We are working on two specific deliverables, a common project data reporting schema and something we are calling the North American Minimum Project Embodied Carbon Reporting Framework V1.0. I will leave those to speak for themselves, because admittedly I am NOT the expert on the technical details of what we have agreed to align on. But I do want to clarify and share what I think we have accomplished so far, and what this can teach us for the future.

First, the ECHO project is not a new standard or definition. It is a collective project to align ourselves. The activity that we are engaged in is coming to agreement across a variety of programs and organizations so that all of our definitions and embodied carbon data requests are asking for the same things.

Second, coming to agreement is not as easy as it sounds. There is a lot that we can all agree on about embodied carbon reporting in terms of what is in scope and what is not. But sometimes there are very real reasons why our standards and programs might ask for different data. Some programs focus on a theory of change that focuses on only decisions that a particular stakeholder has control over, while others (like our Living Building Challenge) are founded on a different theory of change that means that we look at the holistic impacts of the building, regardless of the stakeholder in control. That’s good! We need a variety of approaches to addressing our industry’s problems. My hope for our community is that we talk more with each other about these theories of change, these definitions of what we care about, and act more like a community of different programs working together toward a common goal.

Finally, we are still iterating on the structure of our project. We all feel very fortunate that Architecture 2030 provided the logistical backbone of the group for the first year, and we are grateful that Carbon Leadership Forum is now serving in that role. Many participants in ECHO are volunteers with full-time jobs. Others work for non-profits like ILFI and USGBC, but without funding to support our work on this project. The act of establishing formal governance structures is a big one, and we haven’t gotten too far down that road. So it requires living in a bit of ambiguity, building trust, good communication, and a fair amount of overcommunication to keep things moving and make sure we stay on the same page. I’ve gotten to know a handful of people more deeply than I would have, had we not embarked on this project, and that is perhaps the greatest accomplishment in my eyes. We need to build these relationships with each other, so that we can build a movement strong enough to catalyze the transformation our industry needs.

And if this piece has left you feeling FOMO about ECHO, I feel you. We are working hard to make sure that all of our peer organizations are in the room, and that others will have opportunities to weigh in to what we are doing in the right ways. But ECHO is just one way that we can come together and align on our shared goals. We all can and should find ways to do this work in the communities that we are a part of. So perhaps the next time you meet with your CLF Hub or other group, you can ask yourselves the same question we started with in March: how might we come together and make something bigger than the sum of its parts? In my experience, the act of trying will bring you into a community in a deeper way, and help to build our little movement to the strength and size that we need for the work to come.

This blog post was originally published on Carbon Leadership Forum.

A Path to a Better Future

Recently I wrapped my first Ecotone project with my ILFI colleagues Michael Berrisford and Juliet Grable and their editorial team, and I am delighted to introduce the new book, The Regenerative Materials Movement (Ecotone, 2023). These dispatches about regenerative materials are a primer on the issues at play in our work. 

Using the three pillars of our work—climate, health, and justice—we sought to represent a variety of intersecting issues that all relate to the impacts that building materials have on our world. We acknowledge that there are more subjects and voices than we’ve assembled, but it is a powerful introduction to these topics and a instructive guide for practitioners and supporters that entices and encourages deeper examination.

The viewpoints are those of people who are in the very thick of it, including ILFI’s own Hannah Ray and Susan Puri as well as Robin Bass & Lauren Sparandara (Google), Dana Bourland (JPB Foundation), William Browning (Terrapin Green), Gina Ciganik (Healthy Building Network), T. Campbell, R. Temple, P. Vanderford, T. Seager (Sustainable Northwest Wood)  Don Davies (carbon expert), Kelly Alvarez Doran & James Kitchin (MASS Design Group), Heather Henriksen (Harvard University), Kathleen Hetrick (Buro Happold), Jeff Hurley (Blue Green Alliance), Carol Kwiatkowski (Green Science Policy Institute), Malisa Maynard (Mohawk), Alison Mears & Jonsara Ruth (Healthy Materials Lab) Alex Muller (Mindful Materials), Sharon Prince (Grace Farms), Christina Rabb (Ph.D. in materials chemistry), Veena Singla (National Resources Defense Council), Rebecca Stamm (Healthy Building Network), Charley Stevenson (Integrated Eco Strategy), and Wendy Vittori (Health Product Declaration Collaborative).

No matter the scale of a project, decisions about materials that design teams and owners make occur in a vast, complex, unwieldy, and fraught landscape. For many years, teams have slogged along, sifting through unaligned and incomplete information, making the best decisions they could at each step of a project. Through the emergence of the transparency movement that the ILFI has helped to lead, we are seeing a huge influx of data and reporting activity: increasingly, product manufacturers are showing building professionals what is in their products. This is great progress. We are beginning to know what we are building with enough to understand and make better decisions about the impacts we want them to have.

Many organizations are working hard to make materials vetting as easy and simple as possible. ILFI is proud to be doing part of that work through our Declare Label program, our Living Product Challenge program, and through the facets of our work in the Living Building Challenge and elsewhere that promote awareness, best practices and advocacy around regenerative building materials. And we are also so happy to be doing this work in coalition with so many wonderful people and organizations around the world who are pushing for change alongside us.

As you will read in my own foreword to the book, there are three themes that emerge in these pages. The first that stood out to me is the deep, passionate agreement that this movement can only be successful through collaboration and interconnection. The second theme that struck me relates to the rapid emergence of voices, expertise, and power in the Global South. A final theme speaks to deep considerations of justice. Many of the contributors are keenly aware that historically, the modern environmental movement has not focused enough on the impacts of environmental and health injustices. Indeed, the authors illustrate how justice is fundamental and intersectional to the work.

Together, we are working to usher in a new era of building where the materials we use are regenerative. When we say “regenerative,” we mean materials that are safe for our bodies and ecosystems, and which sequester carbon emissions from our atmosphere, create jobs that sustain families and communities, and enable local economies and communities to thrive. We hope this book supports you and your team on the path ahead. 

How do you think about your work each day, and the work you are doing as part of this movement? As I consider the purpose of ILFI, I am conscious of a need for and a blossoming of innovation and advocacy. For many of us, I see that innovation comes more naturally and is a part of our work, but advocacy is just as necessary. We are creating a new era for the building industry. As we shift our industry, we are also inspiring other industries in our economy to shift toward regenerative and equitable practices that bring our economy into balance with our planet and each other. 

If that sounds lofty, consider this. There are Living Buildings in every climate zone of the USA. We are working with the largest companies in the world, because they see the climate threats, the health threats, and the threats from income inequality. They are making ambitious climate commitments. This is market transformation. And yet amid the curves of market transformation, there is a chasm, as Geoffrey Moore described it in Crossing the Chasm. The goal was never to create a niche industry. We are all connected to something much bigger: transforming how everyone builds and rebuilds, until every building on this planet benefits from regenerative design. As we cross the chasm, we ask: What kind of innovation and advocacy will advance us to this goal? 

Through the Living Building Challenge, teams face legal or regulatory barriers and , a lack of products and materials, among other challenges. We ask that you write letters and state your desire for rule changes, products, and other things that could help realize these projects. You are doing that not for your projects, but for the future, and for your community. And Open House Day is part of the Living Building Challenge because we know that buildings can be beacons and catalysts for community change. This is the ILFI theory of change: We are here to show that it is possible to build regenerative buildings and use them as proof to leverage change at scale. We are here to use our buildings, our products, and our companies as examples to push for system changes. 

We are not nearly as far along as we need to be in this transformation. We see dramatic disparities between who has access to safe and healthy buildings and who does not. Our use of toxic chemicals is still on the rise. And despite progress, our global industry’s carbon emissions are going up. 

As I look back on the arc of our movement over the past 20 years, I see a resemblance to trickle-down economics. We hoped that after some learned to create these buildings, it would speak to more firms and contractors and homeowners until all of our buildings were transformed. But there are problems with that thinking: One person, firm, and building at a time is way too slow. It also relies on the idea that we can all make choices. Those with resources and connections can, but for many, those choices are not theirs to make at all. And in the case of existing buildings, which we know to be crucial, the choices are even more sparse. 

For these reasons, we need policy change. We need building performance laws like Local Law 97 in New York and embodied carbon policies like California’s AB2446. We need to be banning PFAS. We need incentives and structures to hasten the creation of regenerative buildings and communities. At ILFI, we are building relationships to help envision what these might be. We proved that these buildings were possible, and now we need policies to ensure that all projects can be built and rebuilt this way.

I’m excited about a new coalition we are forming with other non-profits in our space—including Architecture 2030, Building Transparency, Carbon Leadership Forum, and USGBC—to align our industry around whole-building embodied carbon accounting, so that we can accelerate that part of the market transformation. There is a tremendous amount of work under way: we are gathering more proof points, developing the Living Building Challenge Version 5.0, and creating a toolkit to help people use those projects as beacons. We look forward to sharing that work and we hope that you will join the effort, through our new Technical Advisory Groups and other engagement opportunities.

Our theory of change is bold. It reaches far beyond the built environment community. We create buildings, products, and practices and invite people to join us on this positive path. We know these places and processes can change people. We need every lawmaker, teacher, business leader, and community member to walk these buildings with us to see what it feels like to live in a better world. The chasm leap and the broad invitation require us to know our power and act like a movement. We have incredible opportunity and responsibility. It is inspiring work. It is beautiful work. 

Follow Lindsay on LinkedIn

We recently lost an incredible voice for change, the brilliant ibrahim abdul-matin. ibrahim served on the International Living Future Institute Board of Directors from 2015 through 2021, at which time he joined the Institute’s Advisory Committee, continuing to offer his wisdom and support to our mission. His perspective was a valued addition to any conversation and his kindness, generosity, and passion for the movement will be greatly missed. 

The Institute’s community has many memories to share:

“ibrahim was on the International Living Future Institute Board of Directors when I joined, and we had a chance to spend a few memorable days together. He was generous, passionate, deeply principled, and an inspiration to so many through his book, writings, and broader work. ibrahim, we will miss you deeply, my friend. Thank you for everything you gave to our movement and our world. Rest in peace and power.”

– Lindsay Baker, CEO of ILFI

“I first brought ibrahim into the ILFI universe as a keynote speaker at a Living Future in Portland. He had just published his book – “Green Deen: What Islam Teaches about Protecting the Planet” in 2010, and I thought it was important for our community to hear a different voice and perspective—from a scholar and practitioner, a person of color, and a Muslim. His speech was powerful, and he resonated clearly with our community that values inclusivity and openness to new ideas. 

“What was immediately clear to me, however, was that he wasn’t just an outside voice or perspective—he was one of us. His values and attitudes around the environment and community aligned perfectly with the values embedded within the Living Building Challenge and ILFI’s mission to be socially just, culturally rich, and ecologically restorative. Shortly thereafter, I asked him to serve on our board of directors, and he agreed immediately. For a decade after his first speech, ibrahim was an integral part of our organization—as advisor, mentor and friend. He was a solid, bright, and insightful presence in meetings, conferences, and events that we held year in and year out. 

It is hard to grasp that ibrahim is now gone from us. He was a wonderful friend and a kind contributor to the world. He and I would always hug and ask each other how we were doing whenever we’d see each other. I truly miss that and his wonderful presence. ILFI has lost a true green warrior.

You are missed, my friend!”

– Jason F. McLennan, Founder of ILFI

“ibrahim was a kind and compassionate man and a brilliant champion for living in harmony with nature.”

– Richard Piacentini, Advisor and former Board Chair of ILFI

“During the last part of my tenure as Board Member, I was privileged to be at the same table with ibrahim. I am so sorry for the loss and broken by this news.

He was a charismatic figure to me—knowledgeable to the point of erudition—and with a profound and passionate commitment to the well-being of all living souls. He seemed to bear the suffering of others in an effort to empathize with them. He was always interested in other people’s personal stories, an excellent listener with a healthy sense of humor. A couple of times, he accompanied me on my walk towards my hotel after our sessions at the Board, and would graciously let me take his arm while crossing streets. I will never forget his generosity and kindness.”

– Carolyn Aguilar Dubose, Advisor and former Board Secretary of ILFI

“ibrahim was an empathetic leader who genuinely cared for people and the environment. When I joined the Board, he welcomed me with open arms and took the time to listen and understand. I admired his courage and conviction and will definitely miss his presence.”

– Paolo Bevilacqua, Vice Chair of ILFI

“I have fond memories from working with ibrahim during the CEO search when he was an amazing collaborator and sounding board. He often gave me more patience to continue. He and I met in Prospect Park a few times to walk and talk about the environmental movement.”

– Anthony Guerrero, Board Member and former Board Chair of ILFI

“ibrahim—who had the most beautiful color-arranged library on his zoom calls—was always a delightful presence on the Board—whether in conversation over dinners, contributing new and fresh perspectives to a meeting topic, or simply one-on-one. His enthusiasm, passion for his faith, his stewardship, and his smile will be greatly missed.”

– Margaret Montgomery, Board Secretary of ILFI

“One thing that I always remember about ibrahim was that he was extremely committed to his family and faith. He would occasionally realize that he needed to go pray, and he would do so. I’m glad that this space was sacred to him. 

When in a group setting, he would always take time to focus on the conversation at hand. He’s not looking around to see what else is happening. He’s looking at you, in your eyes, and absorbing everything you have to say. Not only was he a good listener, he also had great perspective and insights, and that was very valuable to me—not just during my time on the board, but also in life.  

When he entered a room, regardless of whatever else was going on, he showed up with passion and energy. An infectious energy.  

I’m saddened that he’s no longer with us. His legacy is certain, as he did great things in this world.  

A sad day indeed”

– Ted van der Linden, Former Board Member of ILFI

You can read more about ibrahim’s work on his website here.

Greetings Friends,

I wanted to take a moment at the end of this eventful year to reflect on life at Living Future, and to share some of my excitement for the work to come in 2022. My first 5 months as CEO have been packed with meeting brilliant people, engaging in thoughtful strategic conversations, poring over spreadsheets (I happen to love a good spreadsheet), and engaging in the deep work of setting up a culture with the ILFI staff that will lead us into the next era of the organization. I remain humbled and delighted to be in this role and in this amazing community of world-changers and visionaries. And I am thrilled with the work that we’ve been able to accomplish in the second half of this year. 

ILFI had a transformative and landmark 2021 in many respects: 

• We registered more new projects than any previous year since our founding, which you can read about more in my fabulous colleague Richard’s blog here. We have seen major strides in projects pursuing Living Building Challenge, Zero Carbon, or Zero Energy certifications, including our first sports arena–the Climate Pledge Arena, in our hometown of Seattle. I’ve been particularly impressed by the Harvard Science and Engineering Complex and the new headquarters of PAE, the cutting-edge engineering firm that will open its living building to tenants and the Portland workforce in coming months. 

• We launched a new Corporate Membership option to enable teams to be a part of our work at a firm level, and we are already so delighted by the firms that have joined us in that community. In the new year, we will begin stakeholder engagement around a new concept for our network that will allow us to scale our work globally, balancing the ever-challenging dynamic of centralized organization and grassroots, decentralized momentum that nonprofits like ours have to navigate.

The challenges of the global pandemic continue to be a part of our daily life at ILFI. It affects our work in concrete ways, especially as conveners of this community. We were hopeful that we could reconvene Living Future 2022 in person, but the constant news of variants and travel restrictions compelled us to apply an abundance of caution in our event plans. We really look forward to seeing you all virtually in May for LF22! It will be my first Living Future as ILFI’s CEO, so I am particularly excited about the speakers we are lining up, and for the opportunity to speak with you all about the work and the challenges ahead. If you register here for LF22 before Dec 31st, 2021, as a bonus you’ll get free access to our LF21 conference session videos on demand!

The pandemic has also impacted us personally: we have lost loved ones, it has changed our rituals and our wanderings, it has affected our communities. As people who think daily about the ways in which climate change is impacting our lives, we spend time mourning these losses and considering what enormous losses are still to come as we face more severe impacts of climate change. For me personally, this is a motivating force to get me focused on the work. But all of us have hard moments when we just need to mourn and take space for ourselves, and that has been the case for many folks at ILFI this year. If you are experiencing moments like this, please know that we are with you. Sharing grief with your community can connect us and create space for the type of action and change that the world needs today.

I am so thankful for the community that surrounds us every day at ILFI. I’m thankful for the passionate and wonderful staff of the Institute who show up every day with such enthusiasm and open hearts to do this transformative work. I’m thankful for our Board and Advisory Board, our passionate advocates and members, the teams engaging with our programs, and all of you who support our work in every way. And a special thank you to our donors and funders, who help to allow our work to grow and deepen. In particular, I’m so proud of the work we’ve been able to do with our Affordable Housing program this year- our current cohort is the biggest yet, and huge thanks is due to our funding partner, JPB Foundation. We had our most successful Giving Tuesday campaign ever this year, and we are so profoundly grateful for that.

I want to close by asking for your continued support. I’ve been a part of the professional community of people working to transform the building industry for many years, and I know the passion that this community has for the work that we do. We need a robust community of nonprofit organizations fueling this work for change. We are here to make sure that the momentum grows, to hold the industry accountable for change, to educate and mobilize and do whatever it takes to secure a better future built environment for everyone. That is the role we play in society, and we do it with your support. Without the non-profit community, the building industry would not be capable of rising to the challenges ahead. We are currently working on our 3-year Strategic Plan for 2022-2024 to continue charting an impactful path, which I’m so excited to share with our community in early 2022. So if you can, please consider donating to us, or to one of the other wonderful organizations doing work to transform how we build and operate our buildings and cities. 

Yours in pursuit of a living future for all,

Lindsay