“Everything is interconnected in our world,” says Alice, one of 50 high school students from 12 different Vancouver high schools who visited UBC’s Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS) on April 13th. “Our survival as creatures relies upon every other thing in our world.”

by John Robinson for UBC Reports | Vol. 57 | No. 1 | Dec. 29, 2010

The old paradigm aimed to reduce environmental impact. The future is about buildings that actually improve our environment.

Can we build cities with buildings that reduce a community’s energy consumption and carbon emissions, that improve the quality of water flowing through their sites, that restore their environments… and that make people happy?

Yes we can, and we are, right here at UBC.

It is a claim that makes Dr. John Robinson, the Executive Director of the UBC Sustainability Initiative, cringe just a little. “’Green’ is too narrow a term.”  says Robinson, the man behind the Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability, presently under construction on the University of British Columbia’s Vancouver campus. “And ’greenest’ is a moving target. Every week there is a new green building announced.”

A first-of-its-kind bioenergy project at UBC will generate enough clean electricity to power 1,500 homes, reduce the university’s natural gas consumption by up to12 per cent and eliminate up to 4,500 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per year – the equivalent of taking 1,100 cars off the road.