It’s no stretch to call Canada’s Yuill Herbert a climate adaptation guru. The principal of Sustainability Solutions Group (SSG) has worked on climate action plans for 40 communities, including some of Canada’s largest cities, Toronto and Vancouver among them.

His latest venture — a decarbonization strategy for all federal buildings in the National Capital Region — is a roadmap for a doozy of a project that could lead to Canada’s largest ever mass building retrofit scheme. Think home renovations times 2,200, except the scale of each job is thousands of times larger because these are buildings with a combined floor space of about 6 million square feet.

Herbert’s team started with a lot of meetings.

“We met with 30 government departments, from the secret service to public works and everyone in between,” said Herbert who spoke about the plan in Glasgow at a COP26 side event.

SSG examined each of the 2,200 federal buildings in the region, which range from the Gothic Revival-style Parliament buildings built in the mid 1800s to brand new LEED standard office buildings which are already energy efficient. It found it was possible to convert the region’s government buildings to net-zero emissions.

Herbert said the cost of the renovations could run upward of $25 billion between 2020 and 2050. It’s a massive public expenditure, to be sure.

“But it will generate a ton of jobs in the process,” said Herbert, and provide a much needed boost to the sluggish post-pandemic economy. SSG’s report found the retrofit project would create 46,000 person-years of direct employment and another 22,000 person-years of indirect employment.

The government doesn’t have much of a choice, Herbert said. “They have to spend that anyway, because their building stock is falling down.”

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