As climate change intensifies, the building industry faces a dual challenge: reducing its carbon footprint while increasing resilience to extreme weather. This session explores the transformative potential of plant-based building materials as a solution to these issues, for both new construction and retrofits.

Beyond mitigation, plant-based materials offer adaptive benefits critical to climate resilience. Their natural thermal and moisture-regulating properties enhance indoor comfort, reduce energy demands during heatwaves or cold snaps, and help prevent mold growth in increasingly humid environments. Many of these materials also exhibit impressive fire resistance and can be regrown quickly, potentially enabling rapid and regenerative rebuilding after climate-related disasters.

Attendees will gain an understanding of how natural materials can contribute to both low-carbon construction and climate-adaptive design, supported by case studies and practical implementation strategies. This session will equip you with actionable insights into how plant-based solutions can shape the future of resilient, regenerative building.

Turning dwellings from GHGs sources into c-sink sanctuaries is eminently achievable today. Doing so may require more research than more commonly built homes as new carbon sequestering materials are emerging rapidly. It may also take some concerted effort in persuading local contractors to use unfamiliar materials. One such home was built in the Finger Lakes during Covid with the primary aim of significantly replacing common building materials with high embodied carbon with those that are climate friendly such as strawbales, reclaimed wood, locally harvested wood, Nexcem blocks and biochar. Built with Passive House and Passive Solar principals, this home was built as an age-in-place, non-toxic demonstration that carbon sequestering residences can be built cost-effectively.

You're an eater planning or have completed a natural building project – woo hoo!  Where will your food come from? And what will you plant around your building? According to Project Drawdown, 12 of the top 20 Summary of Solutions by Rank, are categorized as either Land Use or Food. The ethics, principles, and tools collectively sometimes called permaculture, also known as ecological design, provide us with solutions to integrate food production into our landscape management while also contributing to climate change mitigation. Learn nature-based strategies for creating a resilient system.  In this workshop, we'll learn how to utilize regenerative/ecological design methods to feed ourselves while also creating beautiful edible landscapes, including food forest gardens, outdoor living areas, shady pockets, and traditional landscaping forms with an edible twist.  We'll also view and discuss many real life examples of edible creativity!

Alex from Little Foot Yurts will guide participants in setting up a 12ft coppice wood yurt, involving them in hands-on techniques using a draw knife and bill hook. Along the way, Alex will demonstrate how to create a green woodworking space. The workshop will also explore the value of harvesting regrowth from hardwood trees, highlighting the sustainable benefits of this practice.

A new report from the Ecology Action Centre (EAC) shows massive opportunities for job creation in Nova Scotia’s skilled workforce to by making buildings more energy efficient. Building Nova Scotia’s Green Workforce: Addressing Labour Gaps for a Net-Zero Future looks at which jobs will be created by efforts to reach greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions targets in N.S., and how barriers to these jobs can be reduced. To meet our legislated climate targets, Nova Scotia needs energy efficiency upgrades to hundreds of thousands of square metres of commercial buildings and more than 1,600 homes each year. To make that happen we need to train thousands more workers. It’s a huge opportunity for Nova Scotians in the skilled trades: thousands of opportunities for workers entering or already working in the skilled trades. A 2019 EAC-commissioned green jobs report showed that transitioning to a net-zero economy – where we either emit no greenhouse gases or offset all emissions – would create 15,000 jobs per year in Nova Scotia. Building Nova Scotia's Green Workforce delves deeper into building efficiency, which job areas will see the most job growth, barriers for workers entering the skilled trades, and recommendations to improve diversity and education. When it comes to energy efficiency, these jobs are helping to lower greenhouse gas pollution and emissions, but we have an aging workforce. Jobs in carpentry, HVAC, electrical work, and building finishing are in demand, and this demand will only grow. If we do this right, it can be a massive boost to our economy and provide job opportunities right here at home.More than 35 per cent of people working in energy efficient retrofits are over the age of 55 years. According to the report, in five years NS could see 7,010 vacant carpenter positions and 4,292 vacant electrician positions. At the same time, there will be 11.1 per cent more a boost in HVAC sector jobs by 2031, increasing to 1,509.

As climate change intensifies, coastal communities face risks from sea level rise, erosion, and extreme weather. How can we make better decisions about where and how we build on the coast? One powerful answer lies in citizen science.This presentation introduces the Eastern Shore Citizen Science Coastal Monitoring Network (ESCOM), a community-driven initiative that equips local residents of Nova Scotia's Eastern Shore to collect and analyze coastal and climate data. With support from Dalhousie University, ESCOM empowers community members to monitor beach profiles, vegetation, precipitation, wave activity, and pollution—creating a growing dataset that supports more informed, locally grounded decisions.By linking community monitoring with risk governance and coastal management, this initiative represents a promising adaptation strategy. ESCOM is not only generating baseline data for understanding climate impacts, but also strengthening the collective capacity to respond to change. Local organizations, builders, and planners could access real-time, site-specific information to reduce vulnerability and make choices aligned with natural systems.This presentation will explore how citizen science data can guide sustainable design and development along dynamic shorelines. It will also offer insights into how similar community-based models can be replicated in other regions facing climate uncertainty.

This presentation will take participants through a leaning journey, of developing expertise through doing. Providing a high level overview of skills acquired on self-lead major projects that included 2 deep energy retrofits of single family homes and the design/build of a tiny home on wheels. 

The presentation will then shift towards how community organizations, such as the Halifax Tool Library, support people in sharing skills and resources to empower people in their DIY learning journeys.

Will review and demonstrate the use and functions of the rocket mass heater at the Deanery Project.

This presentation shows how a consortium of Nova Scotia businesses is building a
wood supply chain for the information era. The group includes a systems specialist a
land-owner, a harvester, a sawmill, an architect and a manufacturer—but we’ll soon
need to grow. This province, with its mixed Acadian Forest and its patchwork of
woodland ownership, has had trouble competing in scale-based forest products, but it’s
an ideal incubator for a system grounded in differentiation. Data-driven, mass-
customized, just-in-time. The presentation also explains why Māori geologist Dan
Hikuroa sees our low-impact, eco-generative approach as a case of hauora, and why
Chris Googoo of Ulnooweg has called it netukulimk in action.

The components of a timber-frame barn vary in size, shape, and species, each
optimized to its purpose, and together arrayed in a rich network of relationships. Both
the informational richness and the complex organization reflect the naturally grown
forest from which the wood was drawn. By contrast, the industrialized light-frame
equivalent is built of four or at most five widths of a single thickness of purely rectilinear
“S-P-F”, a category of types that deliberately ignores the difference between several
softwood species. And the light frame is ordered mostly through serial repetition, with
only a thin and shallow hierarchy. Again, this matches closely to the single-age
plantation monocultures that supply low-information carpentry. Light-frame construction
as we know it is highly evolved, beautiful common sense, but it is primed for disruption.
The entire supply chain from homogenized forest to generic lumber to commodified
commerce to standardized design solutions is in contemporary terms inefficient. But
we’re looking at a powerful system firmly rooted in our minds and methods so we can’t
really change it tweak by tweak.

This talk will describe a project that was part of an artist residency and a PhD dissertation in which knotweed was explored as a potential collaborator in building liveable post-Anthropocene futures. Knotweed, a plant capable of breaking through pavement and so invasive that it resists most attempts at its eradication, is insistently abundant and inevitably present in the landscapes in which we live and work and seek to establish sustainable lives and communities. Rather than understanding knotweed as an adversary, this project sought to find the ways in which knotweed might provide “gifts” (Kimmerer, 2013) or be a resource. 

Knotweed was used in attempts to make cordage and paper, to limited success using only handmade processes. While this project did not reach conclusive results about how to best make use of knotweed, it did lead to other discoveries about learning from plants—even invasive ones.

Details coming soon

Be sure to watch this fantastic film before the event! You will get the chance to ask the director & producer questions during an organized Q&A period. Watch it here.

What Really Counts, directed by Kent Martin, is a thought-provoking documentary that challenges the dominant economic narrative centred around the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a statistic often deemed the most important in human history. The film argues that our global reliance on GDP and its demand for perpetual economic growth is driving humanity toward devastating outcomes, including war, poverty, extreme climate change, and mass extinctions—potentially even our own.

The presentation will include discussion on CarbonCure's journey to operating internationally suppling a solution that includes software, hardware, IP licensing, and decision support.  It will take about organizational change and process management, both its own and its customers.  It will talk about some of the challenges behind it and still to go.  The impact and complexities of carbon credits and investment financing will be discussed.

Co-presenters, Zabrina Whitman, Project Manager, and Joshua Stromberg, Project Architect will discuss the collaborative design and construction of the NSNWA Administration Office and Resiliency Centre—an innovative, culturally rooted facility guided by the “Two-Eyed Seeing” approach. This methodology brings together Indigenous and Western knowledge systems to create a space that reflects Mi’kmaq values while advancing sustainable architectural practices. Community engagement was central to the process, with elders, cultural leaders, and artists informing everything from the building’s layout to its symbolic design features, including a façade inspired by the Mi’kmaq ribbon skirt and the eight-pointed star.

Key sustainable design strategies will be discussed, including the building’s achievement of Net-Zero Operational Energy. The project features passive solar orientation, a super-insulated double-stud wall system, rooftop photovoltaic panels, and high-performance mechanical systems. Attention will also be given to water conservation strategies, stormwater management, and the preservation of site ecology, including forested land used for ceremonial spaces and healing trails. These approaches reflect the Mi’kmaq principle of Netukulimk—a balance between environmental stewardship and human well-being.

The presentation will also highlight wellness-driven programming and material choices, as well as lessons learned throughout the process. The centre incorporates smudging-ceremony support, biophilic design elements, natural materials like cedar, and culturally relevant amenities such as a teaching kitchen and children’s space. It offers a model for how community-led, culturally respectful architecture can support reconciliation, empowerment, and sustainability.

Over the past decade, homes and communities have been destroyed by storms, wildfires, and floods. These events are part of a natural disturbance pattern that has moved into the realm of disaster. These disastrous events are rooted in climate change and ecosystem destruction. However, they are also rooted in poor planning, bad design, and outdated regulations. We can do better. We must do better. Join Charles Williams as we look at our current situation and where we go from here.

For this Natural Building gathering, Nanci is coming to listen, learn and connect. She has been invited to be a rap-poet-teur and capture, in poetry, some of the heart and spirit of the time together.

 In response to the climate crisis, architecture must transition from extractive to regenerative, low-carbon material systems. This session investigates the role of bio-based composites—such as biochar concrete, flaxcrete, and mycelium—in shaping sustainable and environmentally responsive design. Through project-based case studies, it examines material performance, fabrication methods, and the broader architectural implications of building with living or biodegradable components. The session challenges conventional paradigms by posing a provocative question: what if buildings could be grown, sequester carbon, and ultimately return to the earth?

Co-housing is housing developed together by groups of 50 to 150 people who want to live near each other in private homes and share common resources. The land base, architectural form and building materials are determined by the community. The shared resources centre around a Common House where people can choose to eat meals together, and often include shared amenities such as garden spaces, a workshop, co-working office, playroom, etc. Treehouse Village, Atlantic Canada's first co-housing community, is now live after six years of development, design and construction. What can we learn so far from this effort? What worked well, what didn't work so well, and how does this model of living contribute to sustainability and resiliency?

In this session, Andy will lead a discussion about the strategic role that economic (re)localization can play in creating resilient, flourishing communities, as Canada comes to terms with its newly unfolding relationship with the USA, and the myriad other global challenges. He'll highlight examples of proven initiatives and enterprises that could and should be scaled up and/or out, and invite those on the call to share their own examples and insigh