Panel Series Recap: Built to Lead: Lessons in Building Decarbonization and Resilience Fall 2025-Spring 2026
April 21, 2026
From September 2025 through April 2026, A Better City convened a series of five in-person panel events in the Built to Lead: Lessons in Building Decarbonization and Resilience, a series of five in-person panel events to highlight the climate leadership of A Better City member companies and institutions. Over the past four years, A Better City members have focused on helping to shape new and updated climate policies that relate to large buildings. The panel series moved from policy to implementation by showcasing how climate leaders are both decarbonizing and fortifying their building stock, uplifting innovative and replicable strategies, and identifying challenges to implementation and scalability. The first panel focused on decarbonization in existing buildings, the second on decarbonization in new construction, the third on new technologies and opportunities, the fourth on deconstruction and embodied carbon, and the fifth on lessons in building resilience. For each panel, the speakers, slides, and a panel summary is provided below.
Built to Lead: Lessons in Building Decarbonization in Existing Buildings September 24, 2025 (slides)
- Torey Brooks, Senior Manager of Sustainability, Pembroke—Relaxing temperature settings in a back-of-house pilot
- Saagar Patel, Senior Director of Decarbonization, Equity Residential—New window technology pilot
- Al Scaramelli, Managing Director, Beacon Capital Partners—Building equipment optimization pilot
- Neetu Siddarth, Sustainability Director, Energy & Utilities, BXP—Waste heat recovery project
- Kailash Viswanathan, Director of Energy, Arch Energy, A Division of Consigli Construction—Retrofit phasing pilot in a Hines building
Existing buildings are the most difficult to decarbonize. This panel was convened to explore an array of strategies being piloted, each of which can move the needle in small or big ways toward the goal of decarbonization.
As there is a common prevalence of overly conditioned office spaces, the first panelist spoke about their project to relax temperature settings in lobbies, amenity spaces, tenant corridors, and bathrooms with the potential of a 5-10% energy reduction. The second panelist discussed a fenestration project where windows were replaced from the inside, increasing the building’s performance significantly with an estimated 54% reduction in natural gas for heating, a 30% reduction in electricity for cooling, and improved acoustics due to the vacuum of the glazing. The third panelist discussed piloting an energy use optimization software that analyzes real-time and historical energy use in mostly HVAC building equipment to identify potential energy savings to equipment optimization, with $75-150,000 savings per year and per property. The fourth panelist spoke about phasing in a waste heat recovery project to reduce dependence on fossil-fuel driven heating systems by using existing technology in an innovative way that reduced steam use by 30% and annual greenhouse gas emissions by 13%. The fifth and final panelist spoke about a strategy for retrofitting buildings in phases to meet new building performance standards that is estimated to reduce annual emissions by 90%.
Throughout the presentations panelists shared lessons learned and ways to replicate the projects and avoid mistakes made along the way.
Built to Lead: Lessons in Building Decarbonization in New Construction
October 30, 2025 (slides)
- Rustom Cowasjee, Managing Director, Design & Construction, Tishman Speyer—Enterprise Research Center (ERC), net zero residential building, hotel, and lab
- Heather Henriksen, Chief Sustainability Officer, Harvard University—Rubenstein Treehouse Conference Center using Mass Timber and low embodied carbon concrete
- David Gillespie, Senior Vice President of Development, AvalonBay—Salem, MA, passive house development
- Christoph Stump, Vice President of Design and Construction, Trinity Financial—Bronx, NY, passive house development
- Yanni Tsipis, Senior Vice President of Development, WS Development—Seaport, net zero carbon office building using Sublime cement and all-electric systems
- Randy Boles, Senior Director, Global Environmental Health Safety and Sustainability, Vertex—Seaport, 95% electric lab development
The panelists spoke enthusiastically about their new construction projects across many use types that meet compliance with current code requirements, or go beyond them.
Some panelists discussed the use of new technologies like an all-in-one heat pump and energy recovery ventilator, low embodied carbon concrete, and Mass Timber. Others discussed the increased cost to commercial and housing development to comply with the Specialized Stretch Code with one panelist estimating a 2-3% “green premium,” another estimating a 5% premium, and another sharing that renters aren’t willing to pay more for the green attributes of a building (e.g., to live in a LEED Platinum versus a LEED Gold building). Others talked about challenges with Passive House and the new codes, including that the utility modelled energy use and costs were significantly lower than actual, that there aren’t solutions yet for domestic hot water heating and clothes dryers, that the quality control process and inspections are difficult.
Despite some challenges being discussed, all were excited to be on the path to decarbonization and electrification and hoped the discussion would spark further conversations about how to be successful in going “all the way.”
Built to Lead: Lessons in Building Decarbonization—New Technologies and Opportunities December 17, 2025 (slides)
- John Fernández, Professor, Department of Architecture, MIT, and Co-founder of Lamaar.AI—AI building envelope evaluation
- Zeyneb Magavi, Executive Director, HEET—Thermal energy potential of water sources
- Colin Schless, Director, Client Decarbonization Services, Turner Construction—Hybrid electrification
- John Kastrinos, Lead Hydrologist, Haley & Aldrich and Jacob Knowles, Principal and Chief Sustainability Officer, BR+A—Right sizing of geothermal energy
In this panel, a wide variety of new technologies and opportunities were explored by an array of building energy experts with overlapping and intersecting potential.
The first panelist introduced a new technology known as AI building envelope evaluation that detects thermal anomalies like thermal bridges (missing insulation) or infil/exfil (leaks in the envelope) through detecting, diagnosing, and auditing data collected from a specific building to guide upgrades. The second panelist shared an innovative thermal energy network opportunity currently being explored that uses water—like lakes rivers, and harbors—as a thermal resource that could provide a flexible energy supply for heat production and consumption. The third panelist discussed hybrid electrification as a solution for some large building types, as the cost to electrify these buildings 90% is a staggering 64% cheaper than to electrify 100%, and air source heat pumps are most effective at 20 degrees Fahrenheit or higher. The final two speakers discussed the right sizing of geothermal boreholes for maximum fossil fuel reduction and recommended a hybrid approach for certain building use types with ground source heat pumps covering 80-90% of the annual heating and cooling load and supplemental equipment covering short-term peak loads, as there are diminishing returns in thermal exchange with an increase in borehole count.
As building energy technologies will continue to advance, we anticipate this topic will continue to be revisited in the near future.
Built to Lead: Lessons in Building Deconstruction & Embodied Carbon
February 3, 2026 (slides)
- Irmak Turan, Associate, Climate and Sustainability, Arup—Circularity and embodied carbon at airports
- Dennis Carlberg, Chief Sustainability Officer & Associate Vice President for Climate Action, Boston University—Retrofit of BU’s Warren Towers
- Caroline Murray, Regional Sustainability Manager, Turner Construction Company—Deconstruction and reuse of office space
- Andrew Thompson, Interim Executive Director, Boston Building Resources—Material donation and reuse
This panel explored a wide variety of projects for deconstruction and reuse, and the embodied carbon implications of these, ranging from large airports to college dorms, to the fit out of office spaces, and to the services available to residents for deconstruction and material reuse.
The first panelist discussed how large portfolio owners, like airports, higher-ed campuses, and multi-facility organizations are uniquely positioned to benefit from circularity because they manage continuous and overlapping construction cycles with examples from San Francisco and Portland International Airports showing significant cost savings and waste reduction along with the identification of material types best suited for reuse, recycle, and disposal. The second panelist discussed the decision-making process for updating college dorms on campus, resulting in a renovation plan that avoids 20,000 metric tons of CO2e or a noteworthy 840% reduction in embodied carbon relative to new construction. The third panelist shared examples of tenant fit outs in office spaces and provided a matrix of material reuse feasibility. The final panelist discussed a reuse center and the deconstruction services offered for residential spaces, the desirable materials for reuse, and the challenges and opportunities to scaling this work.
A common theme across speakers was to start early in the planning process when considering deconstruction, as reuse is best considered at the outset of a project. What equipment and materials can and can’t be easily reused also seems to be a developing field of expertise across different building use types.
Built to Lead: Lessons in Building Resilience
April 8, 2026 (slides)
- Andy Dankwerth, Senior Vice President of Design & Development, Pembroke—Commonwealth Pier
- David Burson, Senior Project Manager, Mass General Brigham—Mass General Brigham
- Doug Manz, Partner & Chief Investment Officer, The HYM Investment Group—Suffolk Downs
- Andrew Wang, Vice President, Design, Related Beal—Channelside
This panel looked at how building and asset owners and developers are responding to current and future climate challenges. All panelists were asked to include the work underway to mitigate sea level rise and storm surge, increased precipitation and stormwater, extreme heat, and wind.
The panel moved from the retrofit of an historic and existing building and structure to a campus planning for climate challenges with both existing and new buildings, to a phased approach for land use and resiliency planning on a large parcel, to the design of a mixed-use development on the water’s edge. All panelists have major sea level rise and storm surge challenges and were asked why they proceeded with the retrofit, building or design of these projects knowing the challenges with each project. A memorable response was, “The day we’re afraid to build because of climate change, is the day we should go home.”
Points raised by panelists included not being able to pencil out all resilience components they had planned, regulatory challenges and the need to allow for coastal fill for protection and development, and the role of government because private owners can’t solve all the issues. The panelists were then asked questions relating to responsiveness to heat, flooding, and social vulnerability, challenges associated with pumping water, whether Boston is at the leading edge of this work, and whether challenges with district wide solutions kept the panelists up at night.
For any questions, please contact Yve Torrie.
