Vancouver is blooming. The city is home for numerous construction businesses, technology companies, start-ups, and it is even dubbed the Hollywood of the North. The city and its 2.5 million inhabitants only have a limited acreage of farming land, but they have established themselves as an amazing clean tech cluster. The Vancouverites really care about the environment: the Climate Emergency Plan with its 6 goals was not aggressive enough, and now they have a new action plan.
“Doing green is good for business,” stated Bryan Buggey from Vancouver Economic Commission on June 3th 2019 in Helsinki, when GBC Finland hosted a meeting for exploring business and cooperation opportunities between Vancouver and Finnish construction sector organizations. Vancouver has published “The Greenest City 2020 Action Plan”, where the city underlines its future actions, says John McPherson. Vancouver city has recently published a green building market research on the economic and business impacts of the new zero-emissions building by-law. It estimates the market beeing worth 3,3 billions US dollars in the urban city in Vancouver and much more when taken the surroundings into account.
Here are few highlights from the meeting:
- Environmental approaches in Business are seen as competitive advantages
- Building code update on year 2000 has encouraged building industry to evolve
- Being
green is seen as great market potential
- Material manufacturers/Building products (fenestration, wood…)
- Technology companies (digitalization, AI)
- Clean tech start-ups
- Construction industry
- Energy
- Increasing employment, green business projects increases labour
- Vancouver offers a safe test environment to organizations interested in green business
- Networking
- Open to collaboration initiative – launching soon with global attendees
- Carbon neutrality achievements and plans
In what ways can Finland benefit from the great opportunities of Vancouver and its Green Business actions? And how does the partnership between the cities encourage the Finnish construction industry to take the steps into a greener future?
More to come. Stay tuned!
