Workforce development issues consistently rank as a top concern for employers in the green buildings and energy efficiency industry. The Interstate Renewable Energy Council has recently launched the Green Buildings Career Map, a highly interactive, engaging online tool to help employers with these challenges.

The Map highlights 55 jobs across four major industry sectors and charts possible progression between occupations ensuring users see possible career advancement routes and opportunities in an extremely visual way.

Diversity and inclusion are top priorities for company leaders. However, often times, we make snap judgments of people we interact with, categorizing them according to various characteristics. This may unintentionally lead to microaggressions—which are subtle, covert forms of discrimination that may have detrimental impacts within the workplace. Research shows that when microaggressions are directly addressed, workplace teams enhance performance, cohesion, and outcomes.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion policies can seem daunting to an organization that has not previously made them a priority. As consumers and clients become more socially conscious, it is imperative that organizations set and meet public commitments to creating inclusive work environments. This presentation will help organizations identify where to begin and how to start designing diversity, equity, and inclusion policies on purpose for greater impact.

GBI will discuss how environmental sustainability, social responsibility, and governance transparency are translating into integrated actions throughout the real estate community.

From planning around benchmarking and reporting to determining how to integrate DEI into the workplace and supply chains, participants will take away actionable ideas for their own ESG and DEI efforts.

Whether it is resilience, technology, workforce, healthy spaces, or net-zero future, we come together at conferences like this to explore how lighthouse innovation can be scaled into the mainstream so more people can benefit from it while outmoded, likely harmful practices fade away. This means that as a loose but effective “built environment” community is in the business of systems change. However, while prolific innovators, we have not seen as much systems change as we would have liked, and this session dives into the reasons.

South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province serves as the location for a project to assess the contribution of an innovative sanitation system for the sustainability of a rural community.

The project was developed in an area, where there is a lack of bulk infrastructure. The government relied on innovation to bring this solution that is claimed to be sustainable, and a study was conducted to assess this claim.

This session will present the project research.

Today, most facility and operations systems integrate smart technologies to enhance efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance the human experience. While offering significant advantages, recent headlines reporting the shutdown of critical systems worldwide due to cyberattacks remind facility and infrastructure managers that "smart" must also be safe and secure. Cybercriminals not only can seize or exploit information technology systems, but they can also compromise the operational technologies society relies on every day for essential services as well as defending national security.