The University of British Columbia's (UBC) Bioenergy Research and Demonstration Facility (BRDF) has been honoured with an Infrastructure 100 Award from KPMG International. This award identifies outstanding efforts in urban infrastructure in cities around the world.

On March 24, 2010, UBC President Stephen Toope announced aggressive new greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions targets for UBC’s Vancouver campus. Toope made the announcement to delegates at the GLOBE 2010 conference in Vancouver, one of the world’s largest environmental conferences.

UBC has already met international targets established by the Kyoto Protocol for its core academic buildings, which required a six per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels by 2012. The university will now aim to:

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.