Pierre Blanchet, researcher at Laval University, receives a $2.4 million grant from NSERC for an ambitious project to reduce GHG emissions in the building sector!
We are pleased to announce that Pierre Blanchet is the recipient of a new $2.4 million Alliance Société grant from NSERC, which will run from 2024 to 2029. This funding will support an ambitious project entitled “Building as a tool for reducing GHG emissions”.
This project, a flagship initiative of the Canada Research Chair on Sustainable Building headed by Professor Pierre Blanchet, aims to accelerate the adoption of public policies, codes and standards, as well as the development of action plans to reduce the carbon footprint of the building sector in Canada. It will be carried out in collaboration with renowned partners, including Natural Resources Canada, the Canadian Forest Service, Énergère, Provencher Roy + Associés Architectes, Vertima, and the Ministère de l’Environnement, de la Lutte contre les changements climatiques, de la Faune et des Parcs (MELCCFP). The project is also supported by a team of prestigious co-awardees: professors Robert Beauregard, Louis Gosselin and Yan Cimon ( Laval University), and Ben Amor (Sherbrooke University).
Congratulations to the entire team on this outstanding achievement!
Project summary:
This Alliance Society project is presented as a key activity of the principal applicant’s Canada Research Chair on Sustainable Building (DP) and will have as its main objective to contribute to the adoption of new public policies, codes and standards as well as to the development of action plans aimed at reducing the carbon footprint of the building sector in Canada. It will also contribute to the achievement of Canada’s greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction targets, and by the same token to Canada’s sustainable development goals (e.g. Goal 13 of the SDGs). A central component of this project will be the development of a Canadian model (Parc2050), in close collaboration with all the partners, representing the current and future building stock, to which various transformations can be made in order to determine the optimal trajectories to be put in place to reduce as much as possible the GHGs associated with operating energy and the embodied energy associated with materials and equipment in a context of new construction and renovation. In the short term, this model can be used at regional, provincial and national levels to accelerate the building sector’s energy transition. In the longer term, the expected spin-offs are the transformation of a building stock that is resilient to climate change (CC) and contributes to the fight against CC. The model will also demonstrate that investments made now will reduce the expenditure that Canadian society will have to make in the future in the absence of a profound transformation of the sector.