Halifax reaches for net zero
Lorrie Rand, co-founder, president and lead designer at Habit Studio, in front of a building being planned for a retrofit in Halifax on Wednesday, April 21, 2021. Photo by Darren Calabrese
By Lindsay Jones
The guilt hit Lorrie Rand in her 20th year of designing upscale renovations and sprawling oceanfront homes. The Halifax architectural designer thought about every concrete foundation, every steel beam, that each of these materials was finite, and she was taking, taking, taking. “That started to feel icky for me,” said Rand. “I love my job and making houses and beautiful things for people, but I don’t want to be doing bad things for the world because we have very little time.”
Halifax declared a climate emergency in 2019, joining countries and major cities around the world, including more than 500 other jurisdictions in Canada. The capital city of Nova Scotia has since pledged to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. But in order to get close to that ambitious if not lofty target, the city of just under half a million people will need to deal with the single biggest energy waster facing all cities in North America: old, leaky buildings.
“We have this massive cleanup act to do between now and 2050. If we don’t figure it out quickly, how to lower emissions in these buildings, we’re not going to succeed. We’ll never meet them,” said Rand, co-founder of Habit Studio, which specializes in building sustainable houses and low-carbon retrofits.
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