DATE: September 22, 2026
Registration closes on September 21 at 12:00pm Eastern Standard Time.
DURATION: 4 hours
TIME: Atlantic: 1:00pm – 5:00pm; Eastern 12:00pm – 4:00pm; Central 11:00am – 3:00pm; Mountain 10:00am – 2:00pm; Pacific 9:00am – 1:00pm
LANGUAGE: English
LOCATION: Online

Event Highlights

This workshop is intended for professionals who are ready to apply carbon transition planning concepts to the design and implementation of deep carbon retrofits for existing buildings. It is part of CAGBC's Zero Carbon Building (ZCB) Practitioner Micro-Credential.

Once a transition plan is in place and a business case is established, transition planning shifts to project design and implementation.

The Decarbonizing Existing Buildings: Retrofit Design and Implementation Workshop is structured around practical applications, guiding practitioners through the steps of preparing and implementing deep carbon retrofits at the building level. It focuses on the process and considerations key to optimizing retrofit strategies to achieve targeted carbon, resilience, and performance outcomes. During this workshop, participants work through example scenarios and group discussions to identify retrofit project questions, cross-disciplinary impacts, system interactions, and challenge elimination. Activities further help practitioners think critically about how implementation choices influence whole-life carbon objectives and key steps to achieve performance verification and ongoing monitoring in alignment with Zero Carbon Building Standards requirements. The CAGBC Business Case for Retrofits Workbook, a practical workbook for building the business case, aligning stakeholders, and sequencing retrofit investments, is a complementary resource that will be provided and used during the course.

Learning Objectives

• Translate transition plans into detailed scopes aligned with design, engineering, and asset management.
• Guide upgrades to the building enclosure, electrification, and controls while addressing constructability and operational constraints.
• Align trades, designers, engineers, and facility staff to resolve issues and maintain design intent during implementation
• Support monitoring, reporting, and verification to confirm that outcomes meet ZCB Performance requirements.
• Integrate carbon, cost, schedule, risk, and resilience to support informed stakeholder decisions.

Is this workshop right for you?

This workshop is highly interactive and builds directly on the knowledge gained in the prerequisite on-demand courses. Before enrolling, you should have completed the following courses:

• Embodied Carbon in Practice: From wbLCA to Procurement Decisions
• Operational Carbon, Energy Efficiency, and Peak Demand
• Strategic Carbon Transition Planning for Existing Buildings
• Building the Business Case for Decarbonization Retrofits

By the start of this workshop, you should be comfortable with most of the following concepts:

• Developing and interpreting carbon transition plans for existing buildings
• Evaluating operational carbon reduction strategies, electrification and peak demand considerations
• Understanding whole building life cycle assessment (wbLCA) results and how they inform embodied carbon reduction strategies and retrofit decisions.
• Prioritizing retrofit investments using business case principles, including carbon, cost, risk, and resilience considerations
• Understanding the intent and requirements of the Zero Carbon Building Standards™
• Recognizing how design decisions, procurement, operations, and stakeholder collaboration influence retrofit outcomes

If you have not completed these prerequisite courses, we recommend doing so before attending this workshop. Together, they provide the technical and strategic foundation needed to fully participate in the workshop activities, discussions, and implementation exercises.

Instructors

Steve Kemp | M.A.SC., P.Eng., LEED ® Fellow Principal, Senior Energy & Climate Specialist - RDH	Christy Love | P. Eng. Principal, Senior Energy & Climate Specialist - RDH	Bailey Brown | MS, PE (WA), CPTM  Principal, Building Science Specialist  Training & Publications Service Area Leader - RDH