The Coalition

The Living Communities Coalition is an emerging group of leading green municipalities, counties, regional districts and other agencies from BC, WA and OR  that are coming together to accelerate the transition towards Living Communities – communities that are carbon neutral, free from persistent toxic materials, habitat neutral, and equitable. One initial target for coalition signatories is to meet the 2030 Challenge, and the below proposed Green Building Performance Targets are developed to reach that target.  However, once the inaugural members are on board and the working group is established, these targets will be refined and formalized with the help of an expert advisory group, and targets in support of the other principles (persistent toxic chemicals, habitat neutrality, social equity) will be developed. In addition to focusing on green buildings, other critical strategies such as land and transportation planning, social and economic planning will be pursued. Cascadia Region Green Building Council (Cascadia) will, for their part, dedicate staff time to facilitate and support the coalition in these efforts. Cascadia Region Green Building Council (Cascadia) will, for their part, dedicate staff time to facilitate and support the information sharing, web portal development, fundraising, publicity, policy development and campaign development critical to allowing the coalition to meet its goals and targets.

The Living Communities Coalition (LCC) offers opportunities for collaboration among municipal, regional and county staff including sharing new tools for achieving mutually held sustainability goals.  Cascadia, once funded to do so, will provide the following support to the Coalition:

• Support municipalities in working towards Living Communities – communities that are:
• Carbon neutral;
• Free from persistent toxic materials;
• Neutral (no net increase) in habitat loss and species extinction;
• Supportive of an equitable community.
• Influence Provincial, State and National policies to promote Living Community goals.
  
• Facilitate information sharing and capacity building through conference calls, webinars, and twice-yearly in-person meetings. This will build capacity in an area in which municipal staff are currently severely stretched and allow staff to work with others in other jurisdictions towards the Living Communities goals.
• Create an interactive web portal for sharing of resources among jurisdictions.
• Fund-raise for joint initiatives as such as the development of research, incentives, and tools to support the coalitions' efforts.
• Organize campaigns focused on issues to be decided by the group, but which may include the adoption of a variety of actions, including the following green building performance targets.
• Publicize and profile the achievements of the coalition and individual members.

The below images are from British Columbia:

History

Living Communities is a coalition that has emerged from a set of dialogues called the Green Building Collaboration Summits which have been put together to accelerate market transformation towards green and sustainable building in the Cascadia bioregion through action-oriented dialogue and collaboration among key government and NGO stakeholders. A key focus is to look for ways in which municipalities can work together on carbon neutral operations, green building, transportation and energy policy, research, strategic partnerships and public outreach. 

To access the Powerpoints that were presented during the Collaboration Summit on September 3, 2008 please click here.

The model of the Green Cities California is being examined for future coordination of Cascadia's leading green communities. Green Cities California represents the cities of Berkeley, Los Angeles, Pasadena, Sacramento, San  Diego, San Francisco, San José, Santa Barbara, Santa Monica, Marin County - collectively it represents more than 8 million California residents. As proposed, the Living Communities Coalition (LCC) would act as a coordinating body to facilitate communities within Cascadia (largely local governments) to share green building and sustainable community policies, tools, building codes, trainings, case studies, best practices and incentives. This would be done through a website and dedicated LCCC staff person.

The below images are from Washington State:

Vision

The vision for Living Communities Coalition is to build communities that are thriving ecologically, economically, and socially. They should provide healthy environments for the human and other communities that live within them. Living Communities are:

• carbon neutral
• free from persistent toxic materials
• neutral (no net increase in) habitat loss
• supportive of an equitable community
  

To this end, the initial project focuses on facilitating easier, greater and faster information sharing to enable the adoption of the best policies, practices, codes and regulations by Cascadia's communities. This includes sharing green building and sustainability policies, tools, building codes, trainings, case studies, best practices and incentives through an interactive municipal website and through ongoing communication with the LCCC staff.

By connecting cities and creating a platform for collaboration, barriers to sustainable development can be minimized. For example, building code barriers to green buildings can be addressed and, eventually, overcome. This GCCC website will catalyze change in the built environment by helping to removing obstacles to sustainable development.

For example, in 2008 the City of Vancouver, WA is currently identifying regulatory and building code barriers to the Living Building Challenge (a level of performance beyond LEED Platinum which has been developed by Cascadia and endorsed by the USGBC and CaGBC). In addition, not so far away, the City of Vancouver, BC, is using VanDusen's new $20 million upgrade (it is being renovated to Living Building standards) as a case study to train staff and document practical code issues. Through the proposed LCC website and facilitated dialogues, this work could be shared with participating cities so that the wheel does not need to be reinvented each time.

Background

Currently there is leadership emerging from municipalities throughout the Cascadia bioregion to address the critical sustainability challenges of our time: problems of climate change, habitat loss leading to species extinction, persistent toxic chemicals and equity issues. However, despite this emerging leadership, there is not a mechanism for leading green municipalities to easily and quickly communicate to do such things as compare and adopt each others recently developed policies, tools, building codes, trainings, case studies, best practices and incentives. In addition, while there is plenty of information available for the municipalities just beginning to learn about the first steps they can take with respect to greening their built environment, there has been, until now, no group or network to support the leading green municipalities in rapid adoption of best practices to meet targets, including the 2030 Challenge. Existing organizations such as ICLEI (Local Governments for Sustainability), the British Columbia Ministry of Community Services (MCS), the Suburban Cities Association, the Association of Washington Cities, the League of Oregon Cities, the Union of British Columbia Municipalities (UBCM) among others, provide a wide variety of valuable services. However, there is currently no organization with a focus on helping high-performing communities in the Casadia region to move quickly to accelerate market transformation towards green buildings and carbon-neutral communities. Therefore this coalition proposes to fill that gap.

Membership in the Coalition

Full membership

Associate membership