A blog post from Zerochamp this morning alerted me to an agreement that's been signed by the world's three leading environmental rating tools. For several years the building councils that develop these tools have been leapfrogging each other with their updates, each building on the ones that went before. Hence the uncanny similarities, right down to the phrasing of some text in the manuals.
This agreement is to form a working group "to develop common metrics to measure emissions of CO2 equivalents from new homes and buildings". So instead of just learning from each other with successive updates, they will begin to align themselves with a global standard for what is the key concern of the rating tools: carbon emissions.
I had thought that the next major change in these tools would be the incorporation of social impacts, building on the existing environmental emphasis by shifting the building industry towards a recognition of the need to improve broader sustainability performance. There have been calls for such a shift, particularly in developing countries where there is a much more obvious polarity in social wellbeing and quality of life. There can be no doubt that buildings, neighbourhoods and districts have a huge impact on the shape of cities, on the ability to provide effective and affordable transport systems, and ultimately on the ability of vulnerable individuals and communities to gain access to what cities have to offer.
But perhaps the current global concentration of minds on the challenge of limiting carbon emissions has put social issues on the back burner. If so, that is a pity. I completely agree with the urgency of developing a universal approach to assessing carbon impacts from buildings. Without a common language, it will be difficult to achieve transparency in the process of auditing national emissions (if that is where we are heading with these tools). But emissions are about climate change mitigation; and as I wrote last week, concerns about adaptation are equally worrisome, and adaptation strategies need to be closely tied to social issues.
These tools have been shown to transform the building industry in a number of countries. It's a tricky balancing act they are performing, because if performance requirements are too stringent, developers will avoid certain credits (or avoid a rating altogether), and if they are too lax then there will be no transformation. From my involvement in the development of the Green Star tool for the Green Building Council of South Africa, I can say that the objective is to push the boundaries by targeting the top 10% of the industry - those that already have strong "green intentions" rather than those that just meet building codes. One of South Africa's first "green" buildings is the BP regional head office in Cape Town, which boasts solar panels, grey water recycling, and waste management systems. It was built around 2003, but today it would not achieve a Green Star rating.
The issue of meeting code is an interesting one, because in some cases it is possible that some Green Star credits can encourage standards that actually go against local regulations. For example, Green Star offers credit for reduced levels of parking; but some municipalities work the other way around, specifying a minimum parking ratio, with anything above the minimum being considered acceptable. This can force dialogue between a developer and the local government authorities, and (hopefully) gradually transform thinking not only in the building industry but also in the formulation of municipal guidelines and standards.
However, the rating tool can also generate an unintended government response, with some municipalities trying to hang their hats on the rating tool as a de facto set of building standards - which is not the intention of the Green Building Councils. In fact, as soon as Green Star becomes the new minimum standard, it needs to be updated so that it continues to target the top end - but generally, the tool addresses performance issues, not how a building and its mechanical systems achieve a certain level of performance.
It will be interesting to see how this new partnership plays itself out, and how its outcome relates to interpretations of building performance under local conditions. I suspect that the working group will stop at setting a standard for how to quantify emissions, and not set universal emissions targets. Targets would need to relate to local environmental conditions and could eventually bear some relationship to national emissions obligations that will be agreed under the UNFCCC negotiations leading up to December's Copenhagen meeting.
If it is indeed these climate change negotiations that are the impetus for the new partnership among the three building councils, then we could be seeing the first stages of a transformation in the role of the councils and their rating tools. At present, they are voluntary, but some municipalities are slowly rumbling towards a system of mandatory requirements; and when national emissions targets are set, there will be further pressure on local government agencies to set local targets and show how they will contribute towards the national targets. The methodologies used by these rating systems may well form the basis for developing more comprehensive strategies to limit emissions.
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