Land development and building construction majorly contribute the significant impacts experienced on economic, natural, social, and built environments. From an assessment conducted in the United States in 2002, it was reported that buildings accounted for 68% of electricity consumption, 39% of energy consumption, 12% of water used, and 38% of carbon dioxide emitted to the environment. With the increasing rate of building construction and land development experienced, it is estimated that by 2030, more than half of the buildings in the US will have been constructed, which requires about 427 billion square feet ( Li et al., 2017 ). Responsible authorities in the land use, planning, and development did not consider the impacts of the increasing rate of building construction as they did not focus on addressing construction techniques and materials. When some planners realized this issue, they decided to adopt green building programs and policies, which would help in meeting the sustainability and environmental goals. Such policies and programs were implemented based on the green building assessment systems. Green building and assessment systems are the tools, which help in ranking, assessing, and rating development, a group of buildings, buildings, social, economic, and environmental concerns as compared with the ultimate goals or typical practice.
Green building assessment systems focus on establishing specific standards for buildings through the evaluation of performance based on the criteria of these systems. A complete building assessment system has checklist consisting of elements with assigned values weighing their impacts and importance on the sustainability ( Li et al., 2017 ). Some of the elements are optional that the system might not contain them. The determinations of which elements can be included in the system are subjective, but some might be verified like the measurement of energy consumption rate. The owners of the buildings pay a certain amount for them to use the building assessment systems but such buildings are recognized as they meet the required standards.
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The history of building assessment systems is described in four stages. The first stage involves the assessment and comparison of the buildings based on the costs incurred in the process of construction. The second stage involves the expansion of the mandate of the system to include technical solutions and the environmental impacts in the process of determining the operational costs. In the third stage, the focus is shifted from the determination of the green building to the determination of the sustainable building. In the fourth stage, the focus covers a wide range of themes, which includes integrated systems, water, energy, accounting for interdependence, and livability ( Li et al., 2017 ). The current building assessment systems are focusing on the third and fourth stages. The process of changing the goal of building assessment from green to sustainability will involve focusing on the outcomes instead of the inputs of the building and construction. It is challenging to realize sustainability by focusing only on the comparison of buildings with other buildings or benchmarks because the strategy has failed in the previous years. Recently, building assessment system has started focusing on the community and neighborhood challenges instead of concentrating on building design and technology as it was happening previously.
Some of the existing building assessment systems are Earth Graft, enterprise community partners green community criteria, green globes, American Lung Association Health House Program, and leadership in energy and environmental design. Among these building assessment systems, I will discuss leadership briefly in energy and environmental design (LEED). LEED was developed and implemented by US Green Building Council (USGBC). USGBC has improved the building and assessment system to the extent that it has installed LEED rating system in most of the buildings ( Li et al., 2017 ). Considering all the building assessment systems in place, LEED is well known and commonly used in various places. LEED-ND is the only building and assessment system under LEED that does not focus on the five themes. The five themes focused on the LEED assessment systems are indoor environmental quality, material selection, energy efficiency, water savings, and sustainable site development.
Reference
Li, Y., Chen, X., Wang, X., Xu, Y., & Chen, P. H. (2017). A review of studies on green building assessment methods by comparative analysis. Energy and Buildings , 146 , 152-159.
