Mandate

Informing and tracking progress towards climate mitigation and adaptation efforts relating to City of Hamilton's community building decarbonization and resiliency efforts, decisions and outcomes. Advancing an equitable lens on building decarbonization efforts to identify opportunities to advance carbon and energy poverty reductions.

Objective: Achieve decarbonization and resiliency improvements in Hamilton's building stock.

New Buildings

• Advise on future iterations of the green development standards, focus on value of retrofits vs new builds.
• Assess the effectiveness and evaluation system of the City's green development standards; include exploration of potential platforms for information gathering and migration.
• Explore potential additional KPIs that can be gathered through the required reporting to meet standards to further decarbonization.
• Ways the City can promote and incentivize the development of low carbon buildings

Existing Buildings

• Identify and/or propose retrofit programs and support, beyond the Better Homes Hamilton pilot program.
  
• Explore the potential of building labelling (e.g. disclose energy star score)
  Extend green development standard to retrofits
• Identify potential roadblocks to green development by assessing the costs and needs to develop in urban vs rural.
• Research Hamilton's retrofit ecosystem (contractors, mechanical systems, energy customer supports).
  

Commercial Buildings

• Develop potential strategies to expedite and intensify actions businesses must take for building decarbonization.

Municipal Buildings

• Evaluate City of Hamilton's annual reports for their building portfolio to identify any potential further actions that can be taken towards decarbonization.
• Research and develop potential new or additional frameworks for measuring, evaluating, and reporting the City's action plans.

Collaboration and Engagement

• Assess the current framework for collaborative working sessions between policymakers, staff, and frontline workers to obtain first-hand feedback, input, and ideas for creating standards, policies, and legislation. Propose new recommendations as needed to create a more effective system.
• Development of a networking platform for connecting building owners with technical experts for education and engagement.
• Collaborate with the other working groups in the Climate Change
  Advisory Committee to ensure that all appropriate parties are partaking in the work
  for a well rounded solution and perspective.
• Determine which working groups are appropriate for the project; working
  groups may reach out to participate based on interest and stakes in the topic.
• Determine the appropriate timeline to engage and work with the other working
  groups.
• Participate in other projects and research for other working groups as needed

Buildings Working Group Terms of Reference