The Canada Green Building Council (CaGBC) announced that four new firms have signed on to its Disclosure Challenge. The four new participants are Brookfield Properties, Kingsett Capital, SHAPE Properties and Golden Properties.
The challenge requires participants to publicly share their portfolio-wide energy, water and carbon data through the Energy Star Portfolio Manager platform.
The addition of these new participants brings the total amount of floor space publicly shared in the CaGBC Disclosure Challenge data visualization tool to 14.3 million m2 , a 30 per cent increase from the inaugural year.
“By increasing awareness and transparency, the Disclosure Challenge demonstrates the value of publicly sharing building performance data, which can ultimately help identify buildings that are ripe for zero-carbon retrofits,” said Thomas Mueller, president and CEO of the Canada Green Building Council. “By publicly sharing benchmarking data, building owners are better able to make informed choices about where to invest their retrofit dollars, and policy makers are better able to develop programs that support effective actions. As we move closer to 2030 and the cost of carbon increases, the need for these deep retrofits will only intensify.”
Each participant submits a list of buildings to be included in the program; collects and submits portfolio-wide data for covered buildings to program administrators; identifies outlying buildings and submits additional contextualizing information; and works with the challenge administrators to fill data gaps leading up to the disclosure of information.
The Disclosure Challenge sets an industry-driven example for municipal and provincial jurisdictions that are interested in exploring and developing requirements for building performance data reporting. To date, only Ontario requires public reporting of building energy data, but Nova Scotia, the City of Vancouver and the City of Winnipeg have been actively working on benchmarking programs or plans.
“We believe disclosing information about energy, water and carbon usage benefits owners, managers and tenants, and enables better decision-making leading to greater energy efficiency,” said Jamie Gray-Donald with QuadReal Property Group. “There is also growing demand from tenants for this type of disclosure and access to environmental information.”
