| Abstract | In collaboration with the Standards Council of Canada (SCC), the National Research Council (NRC) has conducted a series of three consultation workshops (during June 2023) to gather initial comments and feedback from experts, practitioners, industry representatives and regulators across Canada. The objective of these initial consultation workshops was to collect input and suggestions from various stakeholders to refine the NRC’s research and development agenda on a transition towards performance-based codes and standards within the NRC Platform to Decarbonize the Construction Sector at Scale, supporting new solutions to increase innovation potential and productivity. The current compliance path in the National Model Codes (NMCs) for innovative solutions that do not comply with the literal wording of the acceptable solutions, is via an alternative solution pathway. Innovative low carbon solutions must comply with all applicable regulation, while also achieving additional project-specific decarbonization goals. Therefore, with a high-level perspective considering the areas of the NMCs with material-specific and other types of provisions that generally lead to the development of potential alternative solutions and may relate to innovative lower carbon solutions, first steps were selected to focus on the National Building Code (NBC) 2020 Parts 3, 4, 5 and 9. These four parts of the NBC are prioritized at this stage as low-carbon solutions would either be part of, or would interact with, the structural system, fire protection system, building envelope system or acoustic system. Three major topics of the NBC were discussed during the workshops:
• Structural design requirements, covered in Parts 4 and 9.
• Use, fire safety and egress design requirements, covered in Parts 3 and 9.
• Building envelope, energy efficiency and acoustic design requirements, covered in Parts 5 and 9.
Stakeholders from academia, government, industry and code development were engaged through virtual workshops to provide their comments on current code provisions for the NBC to highlight requirements where the performance targets and/or assessment methods are lacking clarity. The following topics were raised for participants to share their experiences, insights and opinions:
• Gaps and challenges encountered in development and review of alternative solutions;
• Current requirements with a lack of, or unclear, performance targets;
• Current requirements with a lack of, or unclear, performance assessment methods; and
• Which topics and areas should be prioritized for development of performance-based approach when considering application of low-carbon solutions.
These initial three workshops were the first in a series of ongoing engagement.
A simple presentation of comments received is reported without further analysis. This is intended to provide an objective summary of what was heard from the participants. The list of comments reported is not reflective of the authors’, SCC’s nor NRC’s opinions.
While the primary objective of the workshops was to invite input that would inform and refine the research agenda on a transition towards performance-based codes within the NRC Platform to Decarbonize the Construction Sector at Scale, the scope of inputs went beyond the scope of the research initiative. Within this report, all inputs are captured and shared, so that other future efforts may also benefit from the comments shared by participants. In all instances, next steps would be recommended to use comments raised to assist with brainstorming before collecting more background information for deeper investigations on selected topics. |
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