What should the next-gen building environment look, feel, and sound like? What are the biggest barriers preventing us from getting there? Today’s existing technology can drastically reduce the climate impact of buildings, improve occupant health and well-being, and better prepare for an unpredictable climate. However, the benefits of sustainable buildings have been inequitably distributed and are not being adopted quickly enough. Learn about the innovations that will define tomorrow’s buildings and retrofits, and what it will take to accelerate the scale, scope and speed of change.

Corporate campuses are leading the charge in sustainable, healthy buildings. However, as more companies are shifting to hybrid work, they face the added challenges of enticing employees to return to the office, fostering new ways of working, and achieving carbon and waste-free growth across its operations through energy efficiency and renewable energy.

In this session, Adobe will share its journey in building its North Tower headquarters – Silicon Valley’s first all-electric building of its scale powered by 100% renewable energy (scheduled to open in early 2023 in downtown San Jose).

Speakers will discuss design and workplace experience considerations, how the team navigated decisions, and how this initiative fits into Adobe's operational sustainability goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and slow the negative impacts of climate change.

Attendees will learn best practices from this groundbreaking project on how to design and build more sustainable, innovative and healthy workspaces for employees, while reducing operational costs and increasing productivity through sustainability initiatives.

Building construction has historically been a slow and dirty process. What innovations will allow us to leapfrog the entrenched processes and technologies we currently use to construct buildings? Speakers in this session will showcase promising new construction materials and processes that offer novel ways to reduce waste, embodied carbon emissions and construction timelines.

Attendees will leave with an understanding of the applications, strengths and weaknesses of different building materials. Practitioners will leave better equipped to see around corners when communicating the value of these materials to decision-makers in their organizations.

As the world heats up, cooling isn’t a luxury — it’s a needed form of climate adaptation. Moreover, as we decarbonize and electrify heat, the primary technology solution is heat pumps which are scaling rapidly and globally. More cooling, and more heat pumps, mean more refrigerants in use.  The irony is that these heating/cooling technologies are, in turn, driving climate change, with global AC stock expected to triple by 2050. To meet this demand we will need to rethink the refrigerants, appliances, and design norms to meet our climate and comfort demands. Suffering from undeserved neglect, refrigerants are shifting from obscurity to significance, as a GHG emission. 

This session will look at the growing challenge of cooling, heat pumps and refrigerants, the innovators crafting the future, and how our buildings can adapt without cooking the planet.

Driven by regulatory and stakeholder pressures, the commercial real estate sector is increasingly devoting resources to ESG reporting. Unfortunately, making sense of the jargon, myriad reporting frameworks, and hype surrounding the topic can make it challenging for practitioners to understand how to make sense of ESG and go beyond “checking the box.”

This session will help real estate professionals manage all of the steps of ESG reporting including collection, managing implementation, and reporting of data. Gain a deeper understanding of each component of “ESG,” as well as how regulations are impacting the real estate investment market. Attendees will gain a better understanding of how their current sustainability efforts fit into ESG reporting and where they may need to turn their attention next.