Sustainability Award for RWDI’s Building Resilience Approach

RWDI was pleased to receive an award last week from the Ontario chapter of the Canadian Green Building Council, alongside our longstanding client BentallGreenOak. Our work was recognized in the Green Building Pioneer category of the Ontario Green Building Excellence and Leadership Awards.

RWDI has been actively involved with several of BentallGreenOak’s sustainability initiatives. In 2019, BentallGreenOak engaged our sustainability team to help them boost the resiliency of 187 existing buildings. Spread across North America, this portfolio totals 38 million sq.ft. and billions of dollars in value. To help safeguard these assets, we worked to both identify threats and deliver a set of concrete, implementable actions for building operators.

This initiative was led by Mike Williams and Sandra Dedesko out of RWDI’s Toronto office. Our team began by building a database of 423 resiliency practices, drawing from over a dozen leading resiliency standards. We then prepared a climate change vulnerability survey and administered it to operators at each property. We fed the survey responses as well as regionally identified climate threats into the resiliency database, which rapidly generated 187 property-specific climate change adaptation plans. To help operators prioritize, we developed algorithms that weighted input variables to generate a unique top-ten list of actions for each facility.

Developing effective adaptation approaches for large portfolios of existing buildings is vital to continued progress toward a more sustainable and resilient built environment. We’re proud that our work with BentallGreenOak has been recognized as a notable contribution to this effort.  

Congratulations to our fellow shortlisted teams and to the winners in the other award categories.