by Shane Henson — December 3, 2012—The World Green Building Council (WorldGBC), the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) , and the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, a global network of the world’s mega-cities dedicated to action on climate change, have announced an expanded partnership focused on creating a suite of innovative green building solutions that can be readily implemented in C40 Cities around the world. According to the organizations, the announcement broadens the scope of their longstanding collaboration and brings it to a global scale.
According to the entities, the partnership will make accessible to C40 Cities the full range of USGBC and WorldGBC’s green building expertise in project best practices, policy development and implementation, education and training, and powerful data-driven tools and resources. By linking city experts with the largest network of green building professionals in the world, cities will be able to quickly develop comprehensive and customized plans for ramping up green building.
This collaboration to make cities greener is certainly needed. As USGBC notes, buildings consume approximately 40 percent of the world’s energy and account for more than one-third of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. In cities, buildings represent the majority of global greenhouse gas emissions and can account for as much as 80 percent of these harmful heat-trapping gases. For many of the world’s cities, greater efficiency in the building sector is not only the largest opportunity to save energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but also the most cost effective.
