The Net Zero Conference Walks the Talk

Networking at the “Women in Net Zero Mixer.” Net Zero Conference photos courtesy Ling Luo.

When Drew Shula, founder and CEO of the green building consultancy, the Verdical Group, convened the first version of the gathering that would become the Net Zero Conference 13 years ago, it wasn’t meant to be an annual event, Kimmy Ngo, Verdical’s marketing and events director, told Convene.

Kimmy Ngo

Shula — an environmentally minded architect who founded Verdical in 2012 to advise the construction industry on building practices that reduce carbon emissions — was just looking for a way to bring clients and experts together at a dinner to talk about how to make buildings more sustainable and the emerging net zero movement, “which wasn’t well-known at the time,” Ngo said. (The United Nations has defined net zero as “cutting greenhouse gas emissions to as close to zero as possible, with any remaining emissions reabsorbed from the atmosphere by oceans and forests.”)

To the surprise of Verdical’s then-miniscule event team — Shula and one other person — more than 100 people registered, Ngo said. It demonstrated that there was an audience eager to learn about mitigating the negative environmental impact of building construction and operations and that events “are an amazing platform for bringing people together to share their knowledge of how to make the building industry more sustainable,” she added.

Bigger Reach

From there, Verdical Group assembled a “proper events team,” Ngo said, and began to develop the annual event now known as the Net Zero Conference, which in September 2025 brought more than 900 event participants from 27 U.S. states and 10 countries to the Los Angeles Convention Center for three days. The educational scope of the event has expanded along with its size: Last year’s keynote speakers ranged from the environmental activist Nalleli Cobo, who, while still a teenager, led a grassroots movement that shut down a toxic oil-drilling site in her South Los Angeles neighborhood, to Joel Cesare, an executive at Cambio, an AI-powered real estate investment platform dedicated to decarbonizing commercial real estate. Other sessions focused on construction, energy, materials, water, waste, and technology, as well as biomimicry (using nature as inspiration for problem solving), and a City of Los Angeles partnership with UCLA to create the LA City Biodiversity Index.

To avoid potential bias on the part of Verdical, an outside board of experts drawn from multiple fields is asked to score speaker submissions and determine the educational content, Ngo said. Verdical is a certified B Corp organization, which means it measures the social as well as the environmental footprint of its business and has strong diversity goals for its entire program, she said. The conference aims to create a speaker lineup made up of at least 50 percent people of color and 50 percent women — this year, 55 percent of presenters were women. A “Women in Net Zero” mixer was held in the conference’s Expo Hall, not exclusive to women but meant to celebrate them working in what traditionally has been a male-dominated industry, Ngo said.

And the Net Zero Conference also offered participants a way to get out from under the fluorescent lights of meeting rooms and into nature, Ngo said. “Especially with our conference being so focused on the environment, we want people to actually be out in the environment that we’re working so hard to protect.”(See “Not Just for the Birds,” below.)

Getting to Near-Zero

As would be expected at an event focused on net zero, “we take a lot of actions to have as minimal waste at our event as possible,” Ngo said. That long list includes foregoing plastic badge holders, printing badges on recyclable paper and reusing lanyards, asking attendees to bring their own water bottles, encouraging the use of public transportation, using real dishware and utensils whenever possible, and providing guidelines to exhibitors on how they can generate as little waste as possible. Verdical sets an example at its own booth, where visitors are given pencils made from wood harvested from sustainably managed forests and embedded with seeds, so that they can be planted when they are down to a nub, Ngo said.

Since 2020, Verdical has published a Net Zero Conference Transparency Report to record how it is meeting its internal goals, which includes generating “near-zero” waste. The Los Angeles Convention Center already has a clear waste-sorting system for participants to sort waste on site. Verdical also works in partnership with local Waste Not Consulting (WNC), which measures the event’s waste stream over the course of a day and calculates initial waste-diversion rates in a dozen categories, including wood, paper, glass, plastic, organic material, and single-use disposables. WNC then makes sure that anything that can be donated or is recyclable or compostable “ends up in the right place” and calculates a final diversion rate, she said. In 2025, the initial diversion rate was 49 percent and the final diversion rate was 91 percent. “We’re very proud of that score,” Ngo said. “We’re always looking for ways to make our event as low waste as possible.”

In recent years, Verdical’s event planning team has offered sustainable planning services for external events, Ngo said, including the Green Sports Alliance Summit, a global gathering dedicated to advancing sustainability in sports, and the 1% for the Planet Global Summit — the nonprofit organization’s 11,500-plus members are businesses that give 1 percent of their annual sales revenue to environmental organizations (Verdical is a member).

Not all of Verdical’s external clients are environmental organizations, Ngo said. It’s important to share their expertise in planning low-waste events widely, “because events typically are very wasteful,” she said. “We love being able to share [sustainable actions] with clients who may not have known of these initiatives to begin with.”

Some Net Zero Conference attendees took a birdwatching field trip through restored wetlands in West LA. 

Not Just for the Birds

Some participants at the Net Zero Conference in Los Angeles last September took a break from walking the exhibition floor to hike a 1.3-mile loop at the Ballona Freshwater Marsh, part of a 600-acre ecological reserve in West L.A. The reserve, previously the site of invasive weeds, oil fields, and a concrete channel, is now a birdwatching hotspot, a refuge for more than 250 species of birds, some of which now return every year to nest after a 70-year absence, according to the Friends of Ballona Wetlands website, a nonprofit organization that led the rehabilitation of the wetlands.

The hikers saw a pair of white-tailed kites hunting, “and lots of snowy egrets, great egrets, and great blue herons,” said Olivia Jenkins, the manager of scientific programs for the Friends of Ballona Wetlands, who guided the hike. They also heard the calls of rarer species that are vulnerable to climate change, including least bitterns, Virginia rails, and marsh wrens, birds that often hide in the dense reeds of marshes, Jenkins told Convene.

Founded in 1978, the Friends of Ballona Wetlands’ decades-long work to restore and rehabilitate the reserve benefits far more than the birds it shelters. “A healthy wetland doesn’t just benefit wildlife, it also improves life for people,” Jenkins said, “by reducing flooding, cleaning and processing runoff and groundwater from surrounding communities, and creating green space in the city where folks can de-stress in nature.”

Barbara Palmer is Convene’s deputy editor.

Download the Verdical Group’s “2025 Net Zero Conference Transparency Report” (NZ25) here.