If you’re not in the habit of tracking addenda updates, now would be a good time to start.

USGBC surprised a lot of people with its November 9 addenda drop, making profound changes to several credits in the BD+C v4.1 beta. Some of these changes have LEED users breathing a sigh of relief, while others might seem a bit more mysterious. We spoke with USGBC’s Corey Enck, vice president for LEED technical development, about some of the biggest updates.

LEED v4.1 is still in beta. LEED v4 isn’t going anywhere soon. The sunset date for LEED 2009 even got delayed because of the pandemic. For those mired in the details of one of these currently used rating systems, it might seem premature to start thinking about what’s next.

Forget net zero by 2030: it’s not enough, or soon enough, to stop catastrophic climate change.

That’s the message Mahesh Ramanujam, president and CEO of the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), had for attendees of Greenbuild 2020. Ramanujam instead set a more ambitious requirement: all new construction will have to achieve net-positive carbon and energy performance by 2025 in order to achieve LEED certification. Existing buildings will have to achieve these same goals by 2050.

Protesters are rising up around the nation in response to our racist legal system. And although the Black Lives Matter movement focuses on police brutality, these protests are helping bring attention to social equity more generally. White people who had never thought about privilege before are soul searching and confronting the ways they themselves are contributing to injustice and violence—and they’re trying to figure out what they can do about it.