Latest Thought Leadership

Landscape Architecture 2040, MEP2040 Whole Life Carbon Pilot, CARE 2.0, and more

Join Architecture 2030 at New York City Climate Week for a day of events on September 25th from 11:00 am - 4:00 pm at the Center for Architecture followed by an evening panel discussion with Architecture 2030 CEO Vincent Martinez.

Architecture 2030's latest article dismantles the misleading narrative that an AI-driven energy crisis requires fossil fuels—a fiction that creates "sacrifice zones" across America's heartland. In its place, the article uses hard evidence to reveal a quiet revolution in our field: we have managed massive growth while significantly reducing our energy and carbon footprint.

With BEACON, our mission is to light the way to a better future. We spotlight the leaders who are designing built environments that support healthy, vibrant and equitable living, highlighting pockets of the future alive and thriving in the present.

The Mass Timber Tipping Point was a two-year project led by Pilot Projects and Architecture 2030 that involved a collaboration with 43 small, medium and large architecture and engineering firms in North America representing 409 offices and studios.

A message from Vincent Martinez, Architecture 2030’s new CEO

As Architecture 2030 has continued to evolve in response to meet the changing needs of our global community, we are pleased to announce that Vincent Martinez, who has been with the organization since its inception, has stepped into the role of CEO.

Discover how the SE 2050 Commitment is revolutionizing sustainable design and what it demands from architects.

Uncovering false narratives and institutionalized deceptions is critical to building a responsible and informed future for energy and the built environment. And the reality is, there is no “national energy emergency.”

An exclusive interview with LMN Architects' Kjell Anderson unveils the challenges and evolving strategies in achieving zero carbon emissions in architecture.

The transformation of our built environment currently underway stands as one of the most remarkable yet understated stories in the fight against climate change and despair.

Architecture 2030 delegates — in person and virtual — are engaged with COP29 in Baku, advancing building decarbonization strategies.

After a two-year collaboration between Architecture 2030 and Climate Positive Design, we are pleased to announce the publication of a series of new and updated resources to support policymakers, planners, and designers in full built environment decarbonization.

Projected population growth and urbanization worldwide will drive significant development, making the shift toward low-carbon infrastructure more crucial than ever.

Ghaith Tibi is an urban planner and sustainable development advisor with extensive experience in city planning and sustainability advisory projects in the Middle East. He was a featured speaker for Architecture 2030’s Official UNFCCC side event titled “Planning, Design, and Development in the Global South: The “How to” for People & Planet” at COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.

It’s me again, MEP Engineering, your overly analytical cousin (that you love being sat next to at the Thanksgiving table.) I know I’ve made things complicated in the past regarding my doggedness on the climate change movement, but I’m changing my ways -- I promise.

Architecture 2030’s Lisa Richmond caught up with Ariana Karamallis, Build Change’s Global Advocacy and Development Associate, to talk about what they do and what’s ahead in the work towards community resilience in the context of climate change.

The relentless drumbeat of climate disasters in the headlines—scorching heat waves, raging wildfires, historic floods, and crippling droughts—are no longer a series of anomalies. As a grim new reality across much of the globe, these extreme weather events, driven by human-induced climate change, are becoming more frequent and severe. In short, they are clearly symptomatic of a broader and more pervasive environmental crisis.

Discover why bio-based materials have become niche and expensive, and learn about efforts to reintroduce them into the construction industry.

Dr. Yasmeen Lari is Pakistan’s first female architect and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation of Pakistan. After a career as a leading commercial architect, she shifted her focus to humanitarian architecture. She pioneered what she calls Barefoot Social Architecture, a model for self-built, resilient, low-carbon housing using local materials and craft. This approach has resulted in the construction of some 40,000 refugee homes.

In a remarkable moment for the building decarbonization movement, 70 countries signed the Declaration de Chaillot in Paris on March 8, promising to center buildings in their national climate policies. The agreement commits its signatories to systemic, sufficiency-first strategies and endorses a raft of regulatory, financial, and private-sector tools to achieve them.

I am Landscape Architecture – your outdoorsy cousin who missed the last few family gatherings. I know this publication is more for your crowd – so I thought posting here might grab your attention.

In this era of climate crisis, it is imperative that we harness our resources and knowledge to create transformative changes in the built environment.

It’s a lengthy journey from Dubai’s original city center to the Expo City Dubai grounds, which hosted the UN Climate Change Conference known as COP28. One can either hire a car and fight Dubai traffic for 40 minutes, or take the elevated train for an hour and half.

Exhausted but determined, COP28 negotiators worked through the night, sleeping on sofas and shuttling between meeting rooms and the warm Dubai night. But by early morning, high-fives in the hall signaled an achievement that was unthinkable just 24 hours earlier...

Last month, Architecture 2030 sent a robust delegation to COP28 and tapped a talented crew as virtual delegates. Altogether, the NGO was represented by 21 people representing multiple disciplines and perspectives. I asked several of them to share their impressions after the event closed.

The UN climate talks held earlier this month in Dubai ended with a deal that seemed unlikely only a day before: Representatives from nearly 200 nations at the 28th Conference of Parties (COP28) signed an agreement that calls for “transitioning away” from fossil fuels in a “just, orderly, and equitable manner.”

COP28 ended in Dubai last week, with significant implications for buildings, cities and the planet. While the eyes of the world were on the wording around fossil fuels, COP’s impacts can’t be boiled down to a few lines of text.

Imagine a world in which we consciously care for and improve the buildings we already have as a lever for climate action. Architecture 2030’s CARE Tool, which allows stakeholders to estimate the embodied, operating, and avoided carbon impacts of reusing and upgrading existing buildings compared to replacing them with new construction, aims to realize that world.

Architecture 2030 at COP28: Decarbonizing the Built Environment, Deeper and Wider

Architecture 2030 delegates are gearing up to attend COP28 in Dubai this November, planning messaging for the world stage focused on Decarbonizing the Built Environment, Deeper and Wider.

Architecture 2030’s collaboration with Climate Positive Design (first publicly discussed in ARCHITECT's July/August 2022 issue) is part of an important shift toward more holistic thinking about the built environment (buildings, landscapes, and infrastructure) through the lens of materials and carbon.

This month marks the 20th anniversary of the Metropolis cover story that launched Edward Mazria’s career as a climate and environmental activist. The blunt and glaring cover—designed by Pentagram’s D.J. Stout and commissioned by Criswell Lappin—showed a rolled-up set of architecture plans shaped like a smokestack and billowing black smoke, with the accompanying headline “Architects Pollute”.

The AEC industry has made significant progress toward reducing the energy that buildings use and the carbon they emit. In a 2023 article for ARCHITECT, Architecture 2030 founder Ed Mazria, FAIA, examined a 2022 U.S. Energy Information Administration study and highlighted promising decarbonization trends in the built environment, including the decoupling of emissions and building sector growth.

Architecture 2030 releases new aggregations of International Energy Agency (IEA) data indicating that the exterior built environment’s infrastructure and sitework impact has been underrepresented.

The office of Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill has long studied issues of density, asking questions about how we might — and if we should — build at various scales, including the carbon impact of these choices.

According to U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) statistics, U.S. building sector operating emissions fell in the first half of 2023 by about 8.4 percent percent, or 78.8 million metric tons CO2, compared to the same time last year.

Too often, we talk about carbon as if buildings exist in a vacuum. Buildings are part of built and human systems, and emissions are associated with all aspects of those contexts—people and jobs, open space, vehicle miles traveled, adjacency of uses, and infrastructure and utilities.

In the building sector, the mismatch between accepted Global North solutions and the needs of the Global South is pronounced. For a century, the Global North has exported its energy-consuming glass towers and concrete roadways regardless of climate zone or social structure.

Call it a confluence of thinking, multiple discovery, or group consciousness, but a growing focus on accelerating climate-responsive design and building is gripping the built environment community.

Climate Bright Spot: Building Sector Success Story & IPCC 1.5°C: What Are the Odds?

We are witnessing the remarkable transformation of the U.S. building sector with record emissions reductions that began in 2005.

The latest reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are in, and the findings are clear: reusing and retrofitting our existing building stock is critical climate action.

Architecture 2030 recently co-authored a series of articles on the value of existing building reuse.

The offical COP27 Side Event Planning, Design, & Development in the Global South: The How To for People + Planet, presented by Architecture 2030, the International Network of Women Engineers + Scientists, and ASHRAE, took place at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheik this November. Click below to check out highlights and stream the event.

Pamela Conrad, an Architecture 2030 senior fellow and principal with CMG Landscape Architecture in San Francisco, explains why architects must focus sustainability efforts on the outdoor realm and exterior build environment.

Architecture 2030 in the news: "The Renewables Gambit" & "Evolving the Embodied Carbon Landscape"

Building Industry Leaders to World Governments:
It’s time to Lead on Climate

Architecture 2030 is calling on all architects, engineers, planners, and individuals involved in the building sector worldwide to design all new projects, renovations, landscapes, cityscapes, and infrastructure to be zero carbon starting now.

According to the IPCC’s sixth assessment report, as of January 1, 2020, the remaining global carbon budget for a good probability (67% chance or better) of avoiding more than 1.5°C warming is 340-400 Gt CO2 (AR6 budget).

Architecture 2030's namesake target year to achieve carbon-neutral buildings is now deemed too late by CEO and founder Edward Mazria and COO Vincent Martinez.

The U.S. building sector has not increased its energy consumption since 2005 even though we have added over 50 billion square feet (4.7 billion square metres) to our building stock, and today CO2 emissions in the entire sector continue to decline and are down 30% from 2005 levels.

As the leader of the international entity tasked with supporting the global response to the threat of climate change, Architecture 2030 calls on the UNFCCC Secretariat to provide updated accurate targets on its websites and in its communications of the emissions reductions and timelines necessary to achieve the 1.5˚C global warming threshold.

In the U.S., economic growth and building construction have decoupled from building sector energy use and CO2 emissions – an unprecedented achievement in modern U.S. history. This decoupling appears to be actualizing globally as well. 

Introducing Achieving Zero: a "how-to" framework and a set of tools to enable cities and sub-national governments (state, provincial, and regional) to achieve crucial emissions reduction targets in the building sector.