The Living Building Challenge is a philosophy, certification, and advocacy tool for projects to move beyond merely being less bad and to become truly regenerative.

The Living Building Challenge consists of seven performance categories, or 'petals':

• Place
  
• Water
• Energy
• Health
• Happiness
• Equity
• Beauty
  

Each Petal is subdivided into Imperatives, for a total of twenty Imperatives in the Challenge. The Imperatives can be applied to almost every conceivable building project, of any scale and any location — be it a new building or an existing structure.

Two Principals of the Living Building Challenge:

1. Living Building Challenge compliance is based on actual, rather than modeled or anticipated, performance. Projects must be operational for at least a year prior to audit to verify Imperative compliance.
2. All Living Building Challenge projects must be holistic — addressing aspects of all seven Petals through the Core Imperatives.

The past decade has seen relatively small progress toward addressing global climate change. We are reaching a point where the next decade will see change to our ecosystem health, fresh water supplies and climates at unprecedented levels. Every single major ecological system is in decline, and the rate of that decline is increasing. Global temperature increases mean shifting rainfall distributions, acidified oceans and potentially catastrophic sea-level rise. Nothing less than a sea change in building, infrastructure and community design is required. Indeed, this focus needs to be the great work of our generation. We must remake our cities, towns, neighborhoods, homes and offices, and all the spaces and infrastructure in between. This is part of the necessary process of reinventing our relationship with the natural world and each other - reestablishing ourselves as not separate from, but part of nature, because the living environment is what really sustains us.