Building to Net-Zero Community of Practice
Building to Net-Zero (BNZ) Community of Practice (CoP)
The Canada-wide BNZ CoP supports municipalities across the country as they advance building energy performance in their communities. With ongoing growth in the building sector, ensuring that new buildings are sustainable and energy-efficient presents a key opportunity—not only to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but also to enhance long-term community resilience, lower energy costs, and support healthier communities. This CoP provides a space to consider these opportunities through collaborative knowledge exchange, resource sharing, and peer-to-peer learning.
The BNZ CoP hosts monthly virtual sessions that address key challenges municipalities face, including creating internal buy-in, building community and industry support, fostering equitable engagement, exploring best practices for green development standards, and implementing effective measurement and tracking strategies. CoP sessions are open to all local governments and their partners, offering opportunities to engage with subject matter experts, industry leaders, and fellow professionals. Sessions will feature a mix of formal webinars, interactive workshops, and peer-learning clinics, creating space for both structured learning and collaborative problem-solving.
The Business Case for High Performance Housing
Thursday, September 25, 2025 | 2:00 to 3:00 pm ET | Online
How can Canadian municipalities build higher-performance housing, and do so affordably? Join us to explore the financial realities, local market conditions, and practical community benefits of net-zero construction. Join us for a deep dive into financial and market-focused insights from a business case project developed through a collaboration between ICLEI Canada, Urban Equation, and members of the Building to Net-Zero cohort. Fin MacDonald and Andrew MacDonald from Urban Equation will discuss the incremental costs of reaching higher tiers of energy performance in municipal buildings—not just upfront capital costs, but also long-term operating expenses, maintenance, and return on investment.
This CoP session highlights how varying local market conditions—such as labour, materials, and energy pricing—can shape both the feasibility and impact of different design strategies. You will also hear how small, cost-effective design choices can meaningfully improve building performance and resident comfort without significantly increasing costs.
Whether you are a municipal decision-maker, planner, or sustainability lead, this session offers practical, evidence-based guidance to inform capital planning, budgeting, and policy development. Walk away with insights grounded in real municipal experiences from across the country that you can use to advance net-zero building performance in your local context.
This interactive CoP session will be offered in English.
CoP Recordings
Please note that not all CoP sessions are recorded. When recordings are available, these are added to this web page.
Building Resilience: Integrating climate risks into housing design
Recording from Thursday, August 28, 2025
Gain practical insights from National Research Council Canada and explore how municipalities can start incorporating climate risks into housing design while supporting energy and sustainability goals.
Building Better Housing: Making Sense of the National Building Code Tiers
Recording from Thursday, July 31, 2025
The National Building Code’s tiered framework for energy efficiency in new buildings offers a valuable tool to ensure the homes we build today are also affordable, sustainable, and future-ready. Learn how the tiers work, how they relate to local priorities, and what benefits they can bring for residents—like lower energy bills, better indoor comfort, and fewer costly retrofits down the line. You will also touch on how to use Climate Insight to find resources—like the National Building Code—to address the unique climate and housing needs of your community.
Building Support Through Engagement: Making energy initiatives more inclusive and accessible
Recording from Thursday, June 26, 2025
This session explored how local governments can build support through engagement that truly reaches people—especially those who are often left out, such as newcomers, renters, low-income households, and rural residents. Learn how the City of Calgary’s Energy Equity initiative, along with other local efforts, is helping the city build trust, strengthen community capacity, and make energy initiatives more inclusive and accessible.
Unlocking Sustainable Development: Incentives for new buildings in small to mid-sized municipalities
Recording from Thursday, May 29, 2025
In this session, we explored how planning tools like density bonusing, fee rebates, and recognition programs are being used to move the needle on green development. Watch a recording of a presentation by Lisa Mak, Climate Solutions Specialist with the Community Energy Association, to discover how small to mid-sized municipalities are implementing green development incentives, what makes these strategies effective in smaller communities, and key planning tools and approaches that can be adapted elsewhere.
The Case for Municipal Action Toward Building Energy Performance
Recording from Thursday, February 20, 2025
This first CoP session explored why municipal leadership in building energy performance is essential. Participants discovered practical strategies to help articulate co-benefits in order to drive local support and implementation and heard from subject matter experts and practitioners from Efficiency Canada, Community Energy Association, and the Town of Bridgwater, who shared their insights and experiences.
About the BNZ Project
BNZ is a four-year training and capacity-building project designed to support municipalities in the adoption of building energy performance frameworks. Through the BNZ project, municipalities, community partners, and industry experts are working collaboratively to identify and overcome municipalities’ unique adoption challenges, outlining a clear pathway towards net-zero building energy.
This community of practice is part of ICLEI Canada’s BNZ project, which is funded by Natural Resource Canada’s Code Acceleration Fund.
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