This year’s Greenbuild is all about what’s NEXT — from a sneak peak at what’s NEXT in product and service innovations, to what’s NEXT in business and sustainability in our nation’s cities. For those with a finger on the pulse of the LEED green building rating system, Greenbuild is the place to learn firsthand about what’s NEXT in LEED from the experts as well as earn continuing education credits for a variety of professional credentials like the LEED AP.

Continuous improvement of LEED is in its DNA, and with the increased prevalence of green codes and the increased uptake of LEED certification, evolution is necessary in order to maintain its position as a leadership tool. The next update to the rating system, coined LEED 2012, just completed its second public comment and builds on the foundation of LEED 2009, including the alignment and weighting of credits and further advancing the “bookshelf” framework where credits are applied to specific building types. The draft also places increased emphasis on integrative process and building performance.

Updates and guidance to LEED 2012 are woven throughout the Greenbuild programming and include a handful of standalone sessions focusing entirely on the update. The Greenbuild Master Series will feature well-known speakers and leaders in the green building world along with USGBC’s own staff.

NEXT Events

Wednesday, Oct. 5: The first of Greenbuild’s Master Series sessions, LEED Performance and Recertification (RD15), will pair Garvin Gardi of The Christman Company and Lauren Yarmuth from YRG Sustainability for a dialogue about building performance tracking and improvement. Attendees will also learn about the new LEED Recertification Program, which uses the Building Performance Partnership (BPP) framework and updates to LEED for Existing Buildings: Operations & Maintenance, to allow projects to easily maintain, improve and verify their operational performance.

The session will take place at 8:30 a.m. in Theatre 102, North Building, and qualifies for 1.5 CE hours for GBCI’s Credential Maintenance Program and LEED-specific for BD+C, ID+C and O+M.

Thursday, Oct. 6: As a market transformation instrument, LEED engages building project teams in a way that connects strategies to a defined set of goals through the point allocation, or weightings, process. LEED’s impact categories were developed to answer the question: What do we want LEED projects to accomplish? USGBC’s own staff will team up with CTG Energetics for a discussion on weighing in LEED 2012 in the session Point Allocation (Weightings) Process and Outcomes for LEED 2012 (SU13). The session will discuss the theory behind the weightings process, how the impact categories and their components were developed and how these differ in the update to LEED.

The session will take place at 2:30 p.m. in Room 701B, South Building and qualifies for 1 CE hour for GBCI’s CMP program and LEED-specific for BD+C, ID+C, O+M, HOMES, ND.

Friday, Oct. 7: The aptly named session LEED 2012: The Next Version of LEED (SL15), taking place at 9 a.m., will bring together chairs of the LEED Committees for a look into the decisions behind the changes in LEED and discuss some of the more complex issues that have arisen during the development process. The session will take place in Theatre 102, North Building, and qualifies for 1.5 CE hours for GBCI’s Credential Maintenance Program and LEED-specific for BD+C, ID+C, O+M, Homes and ND.

Packed schedule? Don’t worry! If you can’t make it to all of the specialty updates and Master Series Sessions, USGBC’s NEXT Team will bring you up to speed during the Closing Plenary session on Friday, Oct. 7 in Constitution Hall, North Building. USGBC’s Scot Horst, senior vice president of LEED; Mahesh Ramanujam, chief information officer; Rachel Gutter, director of USGBC’s Center for Green Schools; and Chris Pyke, vice president of research, will tell the story of what’s NEXT for green building and USGBC’s future plans and budding
technologies.

For late-breaking announcements and information onsite, follow @USGBC on Twitter using hashtag #greenbuild.