Mexico City, 20/02/2007 – A public workshop featuring many of the architects, planners, policy makers and companies pioneering the development of green buildings in Mexico opened today.
The two-day event is part of an independent study by the Secretariat of the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) to examine the opportunities and challenges facing this emerging industry. Public and stakeholder input from the workshop will help shape the report’s policy recommendations to the governments of Canada, Mexico and the United States.
“It is clear that we humans must react immediately and with urgency to the risks of climate change,” says Dr. Mario Molina, who has been supporting the CEC’s initiative on green building. “The preventive measures that we can adopt today will be, by and large, much cheaper than what will be required to confront the potentially disastrous results that will occur if we continue on our present course as if the problem didn’t exist. There is no single, simple solution to climate change; it is necessary to apply multiple technological and organizational alternatives to reduce greenhouse gases.”
Commercial and residential buildings are a major consumer of electricity, raw materials and freshwater supplies. Buildings that produce their own energy, create less toxic wastes, and are made of recycled and reclaimed materials, can drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with climate change and improve human and environmental health.
Although few statistics are available on the environmental impacts of buildings in Mexico, they are believed to be significant. In the United States, for instance, buildings consume 65 percent of all electricity generated. And for all three North American countries, buildings are estimated to account for about 37 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions.
“Green buildings hold the potential to dramatically improve environmental conditions in Mexico and across North America,” says Adrián Vázquez, executive director of the CEC. “We are pleased with the tremendous interest this emerging topic is beginning to receive in Mexico.”
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For more information, please visit
www.cec.org/greenbuilding
or contact:
Spencer Tripp
Commission for Environmental Cooperation
514-350-4347 |
Rudolfo Lacy Tamayo
Centro Mario Molina
(52 55) 5203-7336 |
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