The United States Green Building Council (USGBC) has released a Measuring Resilience Guide. The publication was created to help community leaders and planners use LEED v4.1 to measure and improve existing community resiliency, which includes building in a way that is cognizant of and adaptive to changing environmental conditions. It also aims for construction that can recover quickly after a crisis or natural disaster and “increases sustainability and quality of life for all residents.”

Resilience is a hot topic, according to the USGBC as more people recognize environmental issues such as flooding and fires needs to be taken into consideration when developing cities and communities.

“USGBC has a vision that buildings and communities will regenerate and sustain the health and vitality of all life within a generation,” the guide states. “LEED is evolving beyond buildings to the city and community scale to meet this need.”

In other Green news, next week (September 23-29) is World Green Building Week (WGBW), an annual international campaign by the World Green Building Council (WGBC) to raise awareness of green buildings and their impact. This year, WGBC is “calling on all of the building and construction industry supply chain to decarbonize.”

The construction industry has focused its green efforts on a building’s operational emissions and performance in-use. But, according to the WGBC, buildings and construction are responsible for 39 percent of global energy-related carbon emissions and 28 percent of these emissions come from the operational “in-use” phase (heating and cooling of the building), while 11 percent of these emissions are attributed to carbon released during the construction process and material manufacturing.

Follow the conversation on social media through the hashtags #BuildingLife and #WGBW2019.