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Look for Portland State University students climbing on the Walmart roof, the green roof, that is. Under a two-year research partnership between the Oregon school and the retail giant, PSU is building a green roof research site on Walmart's new North Portland store.

The Portland, Oregon, city council yesterday passed a law banning the demolition of homes build on or before 1916. The law requires old homes to instead be deconstructed, allowing builders to salvage and reuse lumber and other materials. The city expects the new deconstruction policy will divert 8 million pounds (4,000 tons) of materials for reuse annually.

A company that manufactures green-roof materials in Portland, Ore., has earned recognition for exporting. The award came from the federal Small Business Administration.

At the COP23 conference in Bonn, Germany, mayors of 25 major cities from around the globe have signed a commitment to make their cities carbon-neutral by 2050. The list includes US cities Boston; Los Angeles; New York City; Philadelphia; Austin, Texas; and Portland, Ore.

Renewable energy projects surpassed all other sources of new electricity added to the global supply last year, says a new report released this week by the International Energy Agency. In 2015, renewables made up more than half of all new installed capacity, with the greatest gains seen in onshore wind and solar. It's a development that speaks to a "transformation of global power markets,"