Built to Endure: The Future of Climate-Responsive Homes

As climate impacts grow more intense and unpredictable, the built environment must evolve. The Sustainability Symposium 2025 will delve deep into ideas and approaches that enhance resiliency.

Resilience is no longer a buzzword. It has become an essential baseline for how we must design and build structures that can withstand nature’s fury.

Green Builder Media’s 9th Annual Sustainability Symposium 2025: A Force of Nature, a free virtual event on April 30 and May, will spotlight the future of climate-responsive building, with trailblazing sessions that explore next-gen solutions for energy, water, materials, and community design.

If you're a builder, manufacturer, designer, or sustainability leader, this is your opportunity to engage in bold conversations and discover actionable strategies that will shape the homes and communities of tomorrow.

Systems That Work Even When the Grid Doesn’t

With grid instability on the rise, microgrids are becoming essential to keep communities powered. In a session on April 30 at 1:00 ET, titled Power, Water & Survival: The Race to Keep the Lights On & Taps Flowing, Jacob Atalla, VP Sustainability, KB Homes & Will Sarni, Practice Lead, Water and Nature at Earth Finance, will highlight the most significant technical, regulatory, and financial hurdles to scaling microgrids in residential communities. This session will offer real-world case studies, like a KB Homes community in Menifee, Calif., where collaboration between utilities, developers, and tech providers paved the way for a resilient, decentralized infrastructure systems.

The pair will also discuss community-scale water solutions. From atmospheric generators to advanced graywater reuse systems, Will and Jacob will explain how these solutions can be economically viable at scale.

They’ll delve into how water harvesting, recycling and desalination solutions are being reimagined with dramatically improved efficiency, as well as the synergy between power and water, called the water-energy nexus, and how builders and developers can now design for circular systems that optimize both.

Resiliency Redefined

A second session on May 1 at 1:00 ET titled Resiliency Evolution: Building for a World That Won’t Play Nice, with Green Builder Media’s own Matt Power, Editor-in-Chief, along with Marshall Gobuty, CEO Pearl Homes, and Cynthia Adams, Pearl Certification, will underscore how the old way of building is failing. What once meant building to code now means building to survive—and thrive—amid increasingly extreme climate conditions.

Whether it’s wildfires in the West or super storms and flooding in the South, homes need to be safe havens that can withstand prolonged outages and extreme weather events. This includes backup energy storage, water resilience, non-toxic materials, and passive design features that hold temperature even when the grid goes down.

During the session, presenters will examine developments have weathered brutal hurricanes with zero structural damage, thanks to thoughtful siting, resilient materials, elevated design, and off-grid energy capabilities; describe how sheltering in place is the new baseline, and highlight how insurance companies are now leading indicators of risk. The session will spotlight the ROI of resiliency, explaining how investing in resiliency pays dividends with respect to durability, safety, and resale value.

Join us at the Sustainability Symposium 2025: A Force of Nature and learn how to build smarter, safer, and more resiliently in the face of our climate future. The systems we build today will either protect us tomorrow or leave us exposed. Don’t miss the chance to learn from the experts leading the way.

Reserve your spot today.

Believe me, this is an event you don’t want to miss.

A heartfelt thank you to Trane Technologies and Whirlpool Corporation for their continued support of our annual Sustainability Symposium, as well as their commitment to corporate sustainability.