Sustainability Scholars Program

The City of Vancouver currently has 24,950 non-market housing units spread over 484 housing projects operated by 208 different organizations, and is actively pursuing the addition of 5,000 new housing units to their stock. The majority of these units were built between 1950 and 2000 and considering the advancements of mechanical equipment to cool and heat buildings built since then, these buildings have potential for energy savings and reduction of GHG emissions. This report includes a non-market multi-family housing energy retrofit analysis, and includes information on the state of the housing sector, current programs, energy efficiency retrofit program case examples, and recommendations. 

Partner: City of Vancouver
Keywords: climate and renewables, green buildings

The Healthy Workplace Initiatives Program (HWIP) is a health promotion program implemented by Human Resources at UBC. It is designed to address the university’s goal of being an employee-centered, socially sustainable community, of which health and wellbeing is an important component. The purpose of this project was to provide insight into best practices in order to enhance the programming capacity and increase the rate of success of the HWIP. Research included a best practices review of over 120 peer-review articles and development of an improved evidenced-based version of a stress model for the Workplace Experiences Survey.

Partner: UBC
Keywords: social sustainability

The report analyses key elements of sustainable design challenges and lessons learned on four LEED Gold Certified projects within four lower mainland health organizations. It also includes a post occupancy study of the facilities.

Partner: Fraser Health
Keywords: green buildings

As part of a broad strategy to reduce energy and greenhouse gas emissions, the City of Victoria is developing an online decision support tool to inform its residents of the potential benefits of investing in solar hot water and photovoltaics  systems for their homes and businesses. This report outlines the details of a solar benefit calculator that will help decision-making and ultimatley reduce energy use, utility costs and carbon footprints.

Partner: City of Victoria
Keywords: green buildings

This project evaluated a number of standards, technologies and methods for new home construction in the remote communities of the Great Bear Initiative Coastal First Nations in British Columbia. Current home construction in these communities does not address a number of technical, social, economic and cultural needs. Key issues to be addressed in new home construction, and recommended solutions are included in this report.

Partners: Pinna Sustainability, BC Hydro, Coastal First Nations
Keywords: green buildings, social sustainability

This report reviews and analyses commercially available biomass technology for the Bioenergy Research & Demonstration Facility (BRDF) at UBC to understand potential plant expansion capacity to meet UBC’s 2020 GHG emission reduction target of 67% below 2007 levels. 

Partner: UBC
Keywords: sustainable development & green economy, green buildings

The City of Vancouver is interested in reducing or minimizing chemical exposure in City operations. This project is aimed at developing an inventory of toxins associated with materials used in internal City operations.This report contributes to larger project that will seek to reduce and minimize chemical exposure across the City of Vancouver.

Partner: City of Vancouver
Keywords: lighter footprint, ecological systems, social sustainability

This report is a brief summary of the results obtained after benchmarking 22 of City of New Westminster’s corporate buildings using Energy Star Portfolio Manager. The list of buildings includes community centres, swimming pools, a firehall, a public library, a convention centre, and offices (among others). The building performance data includes energy consumption from December 2010 to Dec 2014.

Partner: City of New Westminster
Keywords: green buildings, sustainable development & green economy

This report is a resource for individuals at Musqueam and UBC who recognize the value of effective, meaningful collaboration, and seek to strengthen the relationship between our communities. The insights in this report were drawn from interviews with individuals from the Musqueam Indian Band and the University of British Columbia with success working collaboratively between the two communities.

Partner: Musqueam & UBC
Keywords: social sustainability, sustainability in education