Sustainability Priorities

GWLRA has partnered with MicroHabitat to establish gardens on 13 of our office rooftops in Toronto and Mississauga. Founded in 2016, MicroHabitat is a Montreal-based organization that specializes in creating, implementing, operating and teaching urban agriculture.

Microhabitats bring change by transforming the cities’ unused or under-utilized spaces into urban farms. These initiatives contribute to the greening of spaces, create local, ecological and resilient food systems, help support local communities, and encourage biodiversity in urban areas.

The gardens at our GWLRA-managed properties feature a variety of vegetable plants that are currently thriving on our rooftops. Food is continually harvested throughout the growing season and donated to local food banks. In 2021, our gardens produced over 5,550 lbs (or 2.5 metric tonnes) of produce for local communities, and almost 500 meals were donated to the Breakfast Club of Canada through our partnership with MicroHabitat.

Building on this foundation, an additional five of our managed office properties in Calgary, Montreal, Winnipeg and Vancouver have established rooftop gardens of their own.

The rooftop gardens are near beehives that also live atop some of our buildings, providing a complementary relationship between our pollinators and our produce. Last year, our gardens offered over 8,000 plants to local insect populations for shelter and pollination and, thanks to our ongoing partnership with Alvéole, 52 beehives supporting 2.5 million honeybees across the country call a GWLRA rooftop home.

In early 2022, GWLRA announced that we would be doing our part to help build a carbon neutral economy by moving towards net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2050. However, for the world to effectively meet this ambitious goal, action is needed now to make substantive GHG emission reductions before 2030.

At 840 Howe in Vancouver, our property and asset management teams seized a one-in-twenty year opportunity to make these reductions in support of our clients: the Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan (HOOPP) and the Canadian Real Estate Investment Fund No. 1 (CREIF).

With 840 Howe’s conventional gas-fired boilers reaching end-of-life, GWLRA’s property management team engaged a consultant to investigate the electrification of the heating plant and make-up air (MUA) unit at the building. Since electricity generated in British Columbia emits much fewer GHG emissions than the combustion of natural gas, this conversion can substantially reduce emissions at the property.

To work around some of the logistical challenges of the electrification, the team took advantage of 840 Howe’s need for simultaneous heating and cooling throughout the winter to retrofit the building with a heat recovery chiller and replace two of the three natural gas-fired boilers with electric boilers.

The combination of upgrades involved in this retrofit is expected to reduce natural gas consumption by almost 60% and cooling tower water use by about 25%, while increasing baseline electricity use by only 3%. This will result in a reduction in GHG emissions of 110 tonnes CO₂e/yr, with estimated lifetime savings of 5,277 tonnes CO₂e. This is the equivalent of removing 1,148 passenger cars from the road for one year.

While there is an incremental cost to these changes compared with a like-for-like boiler replacement, it helps future-proof the building against carbon taxes, variability in natural gas pricing, and possible regulatory requirements. Work is now underway to complete these retrofits over the next five years.

While this measure is intended to be a behind-the-scenes upgrade that is imperceivable by occupants, it nonetheless makes a meaningful contribution to GWLRA’s net-zero commitment.

Vancouver Centre is a BOMA BEST^® Silver certified, class-A highrise tower in downtown Vancouver. In 2020, to help reduce its water consumption, the property team installed a new high-efficiency condensing water cooling system with advanced programming capabilities. While the technology isn’t new, the equipment and programming are the latest generation and highest efficiency available, ensuring that the operational response to the cooling load is managed to an optimal level.

The system, consisting of an air-cooled fluid cooler, replaces 10 ‘once-through’ cooling systems previously in place throughout the building, which used significant amounts of water. Over the course of a year, the new system will save an estimated 31 million litres of water, or enough to fill almost 13 Olympic-sized swimming pools. The project has been well received by existing tenants and translates into annual water savings of approximately $35,500. In recognition of these efforts, the property earned HOOPP’s “Sustainability Innovator: Technology” LEAP Award in 2020.