Sustainability Street: Live From Greenbuild

November 14, 2025

Rhiannon Jacobsen of the U.S. Green Building Council sat down with CPE's Therese Fitzgerald at the global sustainability conference.

Welcome back to Sustainability Street, our podcast on the intersection of commercial real estate and the world we live in.

Last week, I attended the Greenbuild conference in Los Angeles where I got to sit down with Rhiannon Jacobsen, managing director of market transformation & development for the U.S. Green Building Council, which hosts the global sustainability event.

If you don’t know, Greenbuild is an annual conference that draws thousands of executives from around the globe to talk about making buildings and communities more sustainable. Building resilience was a big focus for this year’s program, but so was decarbonization, energy efficiency, the circular economy, wellbeing in buildings, the increased role of data and so much more.

“You can’t have a conversation about building and community development without talking about resilience,” Jacobsen said. “And if you are, you’re having the wrong conversation.”

Jacobsen and I talked about the overall theme of the conference “Better Buildings, Better Futures,” about the new LEED v5 and about how U.S. sustainability is faring now that the federal government is no longer championing green efforts.

”We see incredible work happening at the city, at the state, at the county level,” she told me. “We’re going to continue to encourage that, and, of course, we’re going to be available to speak with and support federal initiatives.”

You can find other highlights from our conversation here: