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Scaling Sustainability from Buildings to Communities with Julio Carrillo

Dec 24, 2025

🎯 The Green Impact Report

Quick take:

From rural Peru to the skyline of Austin, Texas, Julio Carrillo shares how planners can be powerful sustainability changemakers. In this episode, learn how a LEED Fellow is pushing the green building movement beyond buildings — and into data-driven, community-scale transformation.

👷‍♂️ Meet Your Fellow Sustainability Champion

Julio Carrillo is a Peruvian-born architect, urban planner, and newly named LEED Fellow based in Austin, Texas. With a passion for sustainable urbanism, Julio has helped launch the Peru Green Building Council, works at Parkhill as a planner tackling large-scale urban projects, and lectures at UT Austin on AI and planning. His career is defined by actionable ideas, metric-driven innovation, and a relentless drive to move fast on meaningful change.

🌱 Breaking Ground on Better Building

In this episode, Julio Carrillo revolutionizes traditional construction and planning approaches:

🧠 Key Insight #1: Founding the Peru Green Building Council to ignite LEED adoption at a national level

  • The Challenge: Lack of local sustainability infrastructure and LEED awareness in Peru.
  • The Solution: Co-founding the Peru GBC and launching a consulting firm.
  • ROI: Grew from 1 to 100+ LEED projects in just two years; national transformation and market momentum.

🧠 Key Insight #2: Creating the Planning Challenge to scale sustainability across communities

  • The Challenge: Cities lacked tools to track decarbonization and climate goals.
  • The Solution: Built a dashboard platform inspired by Architecture 2030 to track 100+ metrics across 15+ cities.
  • ROI: Expanded nationally and internationally, empowering cities to benchmark and scale climate solutions.

🧠 Key Insight #3: Teaching planners to leverage AI for public good

  • The Challenge: AI is often personalized, not built for community impact.
  • The Solution: Developed and now teaches a UT Austin course on AI & planning.
  • ROI: Equips future planners with tools to use AI for equity, access, and sustainable development.

🗣 Sustainable Soundbite

“Every building is a little piece of the big puzzle. We’ve done great with green buildings — now we need green communities.”

— Julio Carrillo

✅ Your Green Building Action Plan

Transform your next project with these steps:

  1. This Week: Explore the LEED for Cities and Communities framework
  2. This Quarter: Begin tracking key sustainability metrics for your city or district
  3. This Year: Launch or support a data-driven sustainability initiative like the Planning Challenge

🔗 Connect & Learn More

🌿 Access full episode resources: Green Building Matters Podcast

🗒 Read the transcript here

👩🏻‍💻 Connect with Julio Carrillo:

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