Brenda Martens is a leading sustainability advocate and early adopter of green building practices who helped transform how buildings are designed and constructed in B.C..

She was one of the reviewers of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Canada guides, the standard that the province requires building projects to meet to qualify to receive provincial funding. She is one of the founders of Recollective Consulting, the first B.C. company dedicated to providing green building consulting, and continues to provide these services through her company, ædify consulting.  She is co-founder of the Open Green Building Society, the originators of a worldwide Wiki database of green buildings.

As a green building practitioner, Martens has helped to make over 2,000,000 square feet (185,000 square meters) of built space in B.C. greener, saving water and energy and providing better places for British Columbians to live, work and play. She has worked on some of the most environmentally-progressive and largest projects in B.C., such as the Athletes’ Villages; and some of the most modest, including BC Housing projects across the province and hundreds of units of social housing —helping to make them healthier, more durable, and more affordable (through energy and water efficiency) for the non-profit agencies that operate them.

She has worked countless volunteer hours to support non-profit environmental organizations such as the Canada and US Green Building Councils, and to create educational content to further the knowledge of sustainable design and environmental building practices. And she has selflessly open sourced and given away processes and resources to competitors in the industry in order to further the green building movement.

Martens’ contributions have been peer recognized by her election to the board of the Cascadia Green Building Council in 2006, her appointment to the board of the Light House Green Building Centre in 2015, and her invitation to sit on the City of Vancouver’s green building advisory committee.  Nationally, she has been recognized by her appointment to the technical advisory groups, one of which she chaired, and LEED steering committee which are the highest green building technical positions in Canada.

Martens goes to extraordinary lengths to reduce her personal environmental footprint as evidenced from her 2013 participation in the World Masters Games in Torino Italy. It took her six days to cross North America from Vancouver to Wilmington, South Carolina by train; 11 days to cross the Atlantic as the only passenger on a freighter with a crew of 24 men; and further seven days (with stops) to travel by train from Antwerp, Belgium to the games in Torino.

Her awards include the Volunteer Leadership Award by the Canada Green Building Council (CaGBC) and she has been named a LEED Fellow, one of only 10 Canadians and 226 individuals in the world.