Resilient USGBC Looks Ahead to 2026
Key Highlights
- U.S. Green Building Council is working to bridge gaps between sustainability and risk management communities, fostering collaboration to amplify impact and share best practices;
- LEED v5 now requires all projects to conduct Climate Resilience Assessments, marking a significant step toward integrating resilience into sustainable building practices;
- Building industry capacity involves developing guidance, tools, and standards to help professionals assess and address climate-related hazards effectively.
- There is a recognized need to create standardized metrics for measuring resilience, which can unlock financial incentives and promote widespread adoption;
- Future efforts include developing resilience measurement approaches, expanding partnerships, and advocating for consistent resilience integration across planning, design, and operations.
By Rebecca Labarenne, Principal of Climate Risk and Resilience, USGBC
There is no doubt that in 2025, resilience emerged as a defining priority for building performance, as chronically occurring, record-breaking disasters continued to strain the health and well-being of societies and economies worldwide.
Through USGBC’s engagement in climate-focused exchanges and discussions with our global membership base, we are seeing this shift occur in real time across the green buildings sector—a shift that has long been recognized as necessary within the risk-reduction community as a vital complement to decarbonization.
At USGBC, 2025 also marked an important milestone in the introduction of risk and resilience considerations in LEED v5. The new requirement that all projects certified under LEED v5 conduct a Climate Resilience Assessment signals a meaningful evolution in practice, accelerating industry-wide awareness of climate risk and helping normalize the integration of proactive risk reduction, resilience and adaptation strategies into project delivery.
LEED v5 also includes credits for measures that reduce risks to buildings, their operations and their occupants, as well as credits that enhance the resilience of surrounding communities.
In the year ahead, we look forward to working with partners to continue to build upon these important resilience measures in LEED and other complementary products. With building regulations evolving more slowly than the changing hazard landscape, and with growing demands on real estate and design professionals to address resilience, there is a need for greater alignment and consistency across planning and design disciplines.
Through its certification products, USGBC is well positioned to respond by serving as a mechanism for integrating and disseminating existing resilience standards and best practices in support of a comprehensive resilience approach. After all, resilience is a natural extension of sustainability. Protecting people and assets, and enabling communities and economies to thrive under uncertain future conditions, must be a core element of sustainable construction.
As we look ahead to 2026 and beyond, we’re excited about the following opportunities:
Strengthening alignment between sustainability and risk reduction communities to amplify collective influence and impact
Within the green building community, resilience is often framed in terms of the co-benefits of sustainable strategies—such as energy and water efficiency, passive design and green infrastructure—resulting in a primary focus on incremental adaptation to chronic hazards like extreme heat, increased rainfall and drought. Meanwhile, risk engineers and those in finance and insurance speak about resilience in terms of value at risk and avoided losses in extreme events—"deaths, dollars and downtime."
Both perspectives are relevant and important, but engagement across these communities to support a comprehensive approach has been limited. USGBC intends to build on engagement fostered this year through our insurance roundtables and resilience working group by broadening our network, leveraging partnerships, and advancing shared understanding and collaboration.
Building industry capacity for assessing risk
With the Climate Resilience Assessment as a prerequisite for all LEED projects moving forward, there is a need to build capacity across the spectrum of real estate and building professionals to engage effectively with hazards, risks and resilience. We can leverage existing guidance and standards to more consistently help users answer the following types of important questions:
- Which types of assessments are appropriate for different purposes?
- How and when should risk assessment be integrated into planning, design and operations?
- Who is best positioned to lead these assessments and take action to address their findings?
- What data and tools are required?
- How should uncertainty be addressed when making decisions?
Contributing to industry alignment on measuring resilience value and reflecting this in our products
Although LEED v5 incorporates resilience measures, it does not yet offer a methodology for measuring resilience comparable to established decarbonization metrics. This reflects a broader industry gap in communicating and valuing risk-reduction strategies in building design that must be addressed to unlock financial incentives and scale resilience implementation. To address this need, we plan to deepen engagement with leading risk and resilience experts to develop resilience measurement approaches that can be practically integrated into USGBC products and piloted across real-world projects.
Even as the impacts of climate change grow more severe, we see real momentum and an expanding ecosystem of expertise and solutions to build upon and amplify. Our role—and our optimism for 2026 and beyond—lies in helping to consolidate and elevate this knowledge, so it can be applied consistently and at scale to strengthen the resilience of the built environment.
if you are interested in learning more or discussing opportunities to partner with USGBC on resilience, please reach out to us.
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