Green Building Research
Buildings contribute 17% of Canada’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Adding building materials and construction brings that number closer to 30%, making the building sector Canada’s third-highest carbon emitter according to Canada Green Building Council. In order to achieve our net zero emission targets by 2050, Climate Positive Energy has supported various projects from digital twin and building energy management systems to embodied carbon and innovative ways of construction.
A Fine-Grained Dataset of Material Usage in Buildings to Increase Material Efficiency “I'm studying material use in new construction in cities, focusing on low-rise, high-density residential buildings. This work is motivated by simultaneous crises in housing availability and environmental degradation partly due to resource overuse. It forms part of an ongoing project in Professor Shoshanna Saxe’s group to identify existing options for building and city design that reduce material demand while maintaining… Read More
Building More with Less: Pathways to build the infrastructure of the future within allowable embodied GHG budgets Ensuring that the construction associated with much-needed new buildings and infrastructure consumes resources within the carrying capacity of the planet. Read More- Embodied carbon intensity reduction of single-family dwellings in the City of Toronto Aldrick’s research advances housing design and relevant policies to build homes with less embodied carbon. His research will quantify the influence on embodied carbon of built form and material selection and will quantify the power to change carbon emissions through design choices. The research will be Toronto focused but the findings will have broad application, in particular to locations that… Read More
- Exploring Gaps and Requirements to Support More Just Engagement with Energy Modelling for Building Retrofits Investigating how a modelling-based approach to energy transitions can support more equitable participation and just decision making for building retrofits. Read More
- Grid-Interactive Smart Campus Buildings This project aims to develop a novel and scalable building energy modelling and optimal control framework by using modern AI techniques to optimize campus building HVAC operations and transform campus buildings into grid-interactive smart buildings. Read More
- Material Intensity of Building and Embodied GHG Emissions My role includes studying building drawings, completing material take offs, contributing to building the material use database and supporting academic paper writing. I develop detailed models from drawings of real buildings to facilitate material quantification and embodied GHG assessment. This work is done in Masterformat and Uniformat to categorize building elements consistently. Read More
- School of the Environment Photovoice Research “My proposed topic is focused on finding ways that buildings can encourage an active lifestyle for people. My experience as an elite athlete for seven years and as a personal trainer has shown me the importance of a healthy lifestyle. In my research trainee position with Professor Alstan Jakubiec I work on a pilot study to find an effective way… Read More
- Tracking the impacts of climate mitigation and energy transition actions on health in Toronto among vulnerable communities As part of this fellowship, Ian will work with colleagues across U of T to identify and develop the conceptual framework to describe the health impacts of climate change and climate actions across the Greater Toronto Area. The outcome will identify a set of potential indicators that can be used to identify risks and opportunities for health, especially among communities… Read More
