USGBC Announces $1 Million Commitment to Support Green Building Research

The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) announced on June 19 that it will commit $1 million to green building research. These funds will be targeted at increasing research in areas such as energy and water security, global climate change prevention, indoor environmental quality, and passive survivability in the face of natural and man-made disasters.

USGBC’s commitment comes on the heels of its recently published “Green Building Research Funding: An Assessment of Current Activity in the United States,” which found that research related to high-performance green building practices and technologies is woefully underfunded by all sectors. Using this work as its basis, the USGBC Research Committee will publish a national green building research agenda this fall that identifies key research areas.

“Research will help us advance the practice of building science,” said USGBC Board Member Vivian Loftness, FAIA, professor of architecture at Carnegie Mellon University and former AIA COTE chair. “It should also track and validate as quickly as possible the profound connection between green buildings and human health and productivity. We sense this connection intuitively, and we’re beginning to have some astonishing data about fewer absences in schools, greater productivity and fewer injuries in business, even higher sales in retail environments. The kind of research we need is that which proves the business case so profoundly that an organization’s commitment to building green becomes the easiest and best operational decision they can make.”

USGBC says that further details about the structure of the fund and application for grant dollars are being developed and will be announced later this summer.