| Green Travel News |
Vancouver wants to be the greenest city in the world. It’s already well on its way to being North America’s greenest destination. This Canadian Pacific city already requires all rezonings for new buildings to meet Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Silver standard. Now it will soon require all new building rezonings to be LEED Gold certified, the highest green building standard for rezonings in North America. The change takes effect in January, 2011, and is expected to result in 20 to 30 new green buildings being constructed annually.
LEED is a third-party certification program and an internationally accepted benchmark for the design, construction and operation of high-performance green buildings. The LEED program is administered by the Canada Green Building Council.
“By bringing in a LEED Gold standard,” says Mayor Gregor Robertson, “we’ll reduce our green house gases, create new job opportunities for our local green building sector and continue to take a leadership role on urban planning in North America.”
“This bold move by the City of Vancouver supports our goal of achieving 100 thousand LEED buildings in Canada,” says Thomas Mueller, the President-CEO of the Canada Green Building Council.
