- Please tell me a little about what EMSI is doing in China.

- We are headquartered in Washington DC, with offices in Washington, Missouri, Shanghai and Beijing. We came to China in 2001.When I came to China, there were no green buildings. The only building was a small demonstration project that was being implemented at the governmental level, at the Ministry of Science and Technology in Beijing. But that wasn’t a commercial project. So we took a chance and introduced green building concepts to commercial developers, and got our first commission a year later. It took a while to get the first project, the Century Prosper Center, a 150,000 sq meter twin-tower office building in the central business district of Beijing, which is expected to achieve LEED Gold certification this month. Then for the first few years we were getting projects mostly from Chinese developers. In about 2004, the business kind of flipped over, and all of a sudden we became very popular with multinational corporations. Our clients look almost like a Fortune 500 company list, GE, and Dow, Caterpillar, Colgate, a lot of non-US companies as well, Siemens, HSBC, BHP Billiton, and so on.

We’ve worked on a whole variety of projects over the past five or six years. We’ve done LEED for New Construction (LEED ND), LEED Core and Shell (LEED C/S), we’ve done quite a few interior design projects, for commercial customers (LEED Commercial Interiors or CI), like HSBC, who will come in and take 20 floors of a building in Shanghai for their headquarters. We’ve done projects for neighbourhood developments, several very large sustainable communities in the North of China, in the Beijing area, and now we are beginning to do LEED for Existing Buildings (LEED EB), which is another huge market for us, and a huge potential market for China to improve its energy efficiency and practices within the construction industry. I’m very happy that this thing has really taken off in the last few years.