Greenbuild's Summits & Workshops
Greenbuild's Summits and Workshops will take place Tuesday, October 20, at the Javits Center in New York City. They will dive into critical topics within the green building space and offer continuing education credits.
2026 Summits
More information including speakers and sessions coming soon.
Resilience
Climate risks are transforming how cities, communities, and businesses plan, invest, and build. This Summit will help you decode the demand signals driving resilience, understand how markets and institutions are responding, and anticipate how standards of care and professional practice are evolving. Attendees will gain practical guidance on responding to the expanding landscape of resilience frameworks and tools, and learn from real-world case studies demonstrating integrated decarbonization and resilience strategies across new construction, retrofits, and post-disaster reconstruction.
Existing Buildings
This full-day summit will immerse attendees in the emerging world of strategic decarbonization. Participants will explore practical pathways to address one of the most significant challenges in the existing buildings sector: decarbonizing buildings over time. The summit will provide insight into current and emerging best practices, tools (including LEED V5), regulatory drivers (including NYC’s Local Law 97), engineering and architectural approaches, and real-world case studies across a range of project complexities.
Designed from the practitioner's perspective, the summit will equip attendees with a foundational understanding of strategic decarbonization planning, including how to navigate uncertainty, evaluate multiple pathways, leverage available market tools, and build a compelling business case for decarbonization. Participants will leave prepared to contribute directly to meaningful, scalable decarbonization solutions that will shape the future of the built environment.
Materials
Accelerate the shift to a low-embodied carbon future at this interactive summit. Explore strategies to scale biobased and circular materials, unlock the carbon potential of existing buildings, and improve whole-life carbon data and measurement. Collaborate with experts to drive regenerative, climate-smart design and construction that delivers measurable impact before 2030.
AI & Green Building Technology
Turn AI promise into measurable green building results. This full-day summit highlights real-world AI use cases across design, construction, and operations, as well as the enabling conditions that determine success—data quality, interoperability, workflow changes, and lifecycle continuity. Learn how to assess investment tradeoffs, verify outcomes, and scale adoption responsibly to support sustained high-performance building delivery and operations.
All-New Workshops in 2026
Greenbuild's Workshops will take place on Tuesday, October 20, 2026, at the Javits Center and will offer half-day education sessions with a hands-on approach to learning.
Build a Sustainable Future with LEED v5 Building Design + Construction
LEED v5 is more than a rating system—it’s a roadmap for cutting carbon, elevating human well-being, and restoring nature. In this hands-on workshop, you’ll turn the LEED v5 Building Design + Construction framework into project-ready strategies that deliver measurable results. We’ll break down how the three impact areas—decarbonization, quality of life, and ecological conservation and restoration—translate into actionable credits and real-world outcomes. We’ll review each credit category to show you what’s new and what’s changed from LEED v4/v4.1, where the big wins are, and how to navigate new or reworked prerequisites and credits.
We’ll walk through the latest resources to build your LEED v5 toolkit, show how to leverage Arc for performance tracking, and share documentation best practices that streamline certification.
Sustaining High Performing Buildings with LEED v5 O+M and PERFORM
This workshop shows how to optimize project data reporting, documentation, data entry, and performance verification tools. You will learn to efficiently use the USGBC platform workspaces, features, and offline tools that support LEED v5 Operations and Maintenance and PERFORM verification.
We’ll align the three impact areas - decarbonization, quality of life, and ecological conservation and restoration with LEED v5 credits to drive real-world change. And we’ll review each credit category to show you what’s new and what’s changed from LEED v4/v4.1, where the big wins are, and how to navigate new or reworked prerequisites and credits.
The workshop will also show how PERFORM complements LEED to demonstrate portfolio-level achievements. Participants will also gain an understanding of the existing building project setup, data flow between credits, reporting, bulk data uploads, and data import from their respective software tools.
The session will also walk through the available tools and resources to build your toolkit for success, how to leverage Arc for performance tracking, and share documentation best practices that streamline certification and verification.
LEED for Communities: Frameworks for Sustainability in New Community Design and Exiting Community Performance
The LEED for Communities has provided a framework for over 265 projects to improve their holistic sustainability by addressing energy, water, waste, transportation, public health, and quality of life — and retooling the way communities are planned, developed, and operated.
The LEED for Communities framework encompasses social, economic, and environmental performance indicators and outcomes-oriented strategies with a clear, data-driven means of benchmarking and communicating progress.LEED for Communities are places such as new or redeveloping mixed-use communities, master-planned developments, business improvement districts (BIDs), economic development zones, neighborhoods, corporate and university campuses, and military installations.
Certification is typically initiated by private-sector planners or developers, corporate entities, quasi-governmental authorities, universities, or non-governmental organizations.
This workshop will address both LEED for Communications systems.
Beyond Comfort: Bridging the Occupant Experience Gap
The 1:5:200 rule says it all: for every dollar spent on construction, five are spent on operations, and $200 on the people who work there. Personnel costs dwarf bricks, beams, and utilities. So how can we design spaces for people beyond mere sufficiency and basic comforts, spaces where people are healthy, productive, and able to truly thrive? And how can we ensure that the design strategies we know are good for people actually make it into the final built product?
Many designers understand the importance of biophilic design and experiential delight. Yet these strategies are often the first to get “value engineered” out. And despite its name, value engineering is seldom about creating value and rarely has much to do with engineering. Too often, it becomes synonymous with cost-cutting. During this process, little attention is paid to the lived experiences of the people who will ultimately inhabit the building.
This workshop explores the critical connection between intent and impact. It will focus on how to clearly articulate experiential intentions, followed by practical ways, including using LEED v5, to advocate for and integrate human-centered design so deeply into a project’s DNA that it withstands budget pressures and competing priorities, ensuring that the final product is dynamic, inclusive, and memorable. Finally, we will discuss mechanisms for evaluating impact - how do we measure success from the occupants’ experience? How do we know what’s working and what’s not? Because ultimately, it’s about more than design, and more than comfort. It’s about creating inhabited spaces that actively contribute to occupant wellbeing, inspire care, and connection. It is these spaces that people love, and that consistently provide a return on investment.
The EDGE Auditor’s Playbook: Insider Best Practices to Faster & More Affordable EDGE Certifications
Getting your EDGE certificate shouldn't feel like a high-stakes guessing game. Created by IFC, a member of the World Bank Group, EDGE (Excellence in Design for Greater Efficiencies) was designed to make resource-efficient building in emerging markets fast, simple, and affordable. The secret to a seamless experience? Understanding the process through the eyes of the pros who audit and review your projects.
You will learn about the latest EDGE Buildings updates and tools, gain practical strategies to prepare quality submissions, and discover expert tips to save time and reduce costs.
Join this high-impact, interactive workshop designed to pull back the curtain on the GBCI EDGE certification process. We aren't just reading from a manual—we're bringing in experienced EDGE Auditors to share the "view from the other side."
Whether you are scaling resource-efficient buildings in emerging markets or setting a new benchmark for resource-efficient development, this session provides the essential roadmap for your success.
Expanding Zero Waste
This workshop will show how TRUE and its community are working together to expand the adoption and impact of zero waste. In this interactive workshop, presenters will demonstrate the varied ways TRUE helps scale zero waste adoption: through presentations from professionals who have implemented TRUE across their portfolio of sites; case studies of some of the trailblazers in their sector and region; and an interactive deep dive on the key themes of TRUE v2.
Attendees will see and discuss first-hand the scale of impact zero waste can have: through business transformation, cost savings, decarbonization, and beyond.
We will share information on the soon-to-be-released TRUE v2 Rating System to give attendees an early look at what's next and how this update will expand the impact and benefits of the certification.
Summit & Workshop Sponsorships Available
Guarantee that the green building industry identifies you as a partner by sponsoring one of Greenbuild's Summits or Workshops.
Eric Peterson
Sponsorship Opportunities
202.256.0939
eric.peterson@informa.com
Looking for a particular topic or speaker?
Let us know! Contact us at program@greenbuildexpo.com to share your feedback or specific requests.


