Willow CEO Bert Van Hoof Helps Shape Global Framework for Action on Healthy Indoor Air
More than 200 Commissioners from 40+ countries contributed to the new Global Framework for Action on Healthy Indoor Air, including Willow CEO Bert Van Hoof.
The Global Commission on Healthy Indoor Air today released the Global Framework for Action, a roadmap developed over the past year by more than 200 Commissioners across more than 40 countries. Willow CEO Bert Van Hoof served among them.
Stewarded by the International WELL Building Institute, the Framework outlines nine levers of market transformation, 40 strategic priority areas and 179 recommendations spanning public awareness, research, policy advocacy, finance, building codes and continuous monitoring. It is intended to serve as the foundation for country-level Blueprints for Action.
Van Hoof contributed the following to the launch release:
For decades, healthy indoor air has been an aspiration we design for and periodically measure. Operational AI gives us the ability to make it a continuously managed outcome — creating a unified understanding of buildings and their systems, interpreting changing conditions, and orchestrating action in real time across facilities and entire portfolios, while balancing health, comfort, energy and sustainability.
Why Indoor air remains difficult to manage
People spend between 60 and 90 percent of their lives indoors. EPA research has found common volatile organic compounds at concentrations two to five times higher inside buildings than outside them. Household air pollution contributes to nearly three million premature deaths worldwide each year, and EPA estimates more than $100 billion in avoidable annual costs in the United States from healthcare, lost productivity and reduced quality of life.
Buildings are also producing more air-quality data than they once did. The harder problem is turning that data into consistent operational decisions.
Air quality, energy and cost are often managed by different teams against different objectives, even though they depend on the same building systems. Increasing ventilation may improve indoor air quality while increasing energy consumption. Measures taken to improve efficiency can create a different set of tradeoffs. Those decisions become much harder when each team sees only part of what is happening in the building.
What continuous improvement looks like in practice
The Framework calls for indoor air to be expected, measured, valued, financed, governed and continuously improved across the places people live, learn, work and heal.
Doing that requires more than periodic testing or commissioning.
Occupancy changes throughout the day. Filters load. Dampers stick. Outdoor air conditions shift. Wildfire smoke, pollen and extreme heat can change what a building needs from one hour to the next.
Managing those conditions means understanding the state of the building as a whole: what is happening in each space, how the systems serving it are performing, and what changes can be made without creating problems elsewhere.
That is where Willow’s platform fits. Willow creates a digital representation of assets, spaces and systems, connects that context with live operational data, and gives operators a way to understand conditions and act across individual facilities or an entire portfolio.
Healthy indoor air becomes less of a point-in-time measurement and more of something building teams can actively manage.
That idea is closely connected to Willow’s broader vision: a world where every building responds to the people, purpose and environment it serves.