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The building sector is responsible for a high environmental impact, namely during construction, maintenance, demolition, and lifetime. It is then urgent to develop tools for guiding all stockholders to make buildings more sustainable. In order to make the sustainability assessment of a building, it is necessary to make a survey of the most appropriate parameters for this analysis and organize them hierarchically.
green buildings
rating systems
sustainability assessment systems
1. Sustainability Certification Tools for Buildings
Parallel to academic research, government-owned/non-profit organizations onset the development of building certification tools. The first building certification tool was developed in the UK in 1990, and it was called BREEAM (Building Research Establishment’s Environmental Assessment Method) [1]. Some years later, France published a new tool, the HQE (High environmental quality), while in 1998, the USA launched the LEED tool (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design). With the arrival of the new millennium, more certification systems were developed. In Portugal, the LiderA system was disclosed in 2000 and more recently, in 2017, the SBToolPT Urban, a branch of the SBTool, was reported by U. Minho [2][3].
The two best-known rating tools are BREEAM and LEED. BREEAM can be applied to several types of buildings, such as new constructions, infrastructures, in-use or refurbishment, while LEED has different guidelines for building design + construction, residential, operations + maintenance, among others. The present manuscript addresses the International New Construction Documentation by BREEAM and the Building Design and Construction guide by LEED [2][3]. BREEAM International New Construction 2016 has 10 different categories–9 environmental and 1 innovation category–and assessment issues, as shown in Table 1.
Table 1. BREEAM International New Construction 2016 categories and assessment issues (Adapted from [4]).
| Management | Health and Wellbeing |
| Project brief and design | Visual comfort |
| Life cycle cost and service life planning | Indoor air quality |
| Responsible construction practices | Safe containment in laboratories |
| Commissioning and handover | Thermal comfort |
| Aftercare | Acoustic performance |
| Accessibility | |
| Hazards | |
| Private space | |
| Water quality | |
| Energy | Transport |
| Reduction of energy use and carbon emissions | Public transport accessibility |
| Energy monitoring | Proximity to amenities |
| External lighting | Alternative modes of transport |
| Low carbon design | Maximum car parking capacity |
| Energy-efficient cold storage | Travel plan |
| Energy-efficient transport systems | |
| Energy-efficient laboratory systems | |
| Energy-efficient equipment | |
| Drying space | |
| Water | Materials |
| Water consumption | Life cycle impacts |
| Water monitoring | Hard landscaping and boundary protection |
| Water leak detection | Responsible sourcing of materials |
| Water efficient equipment | Insulation |
| Designing for durability and resilience | |
| Material efficiency | |
| Waste | Land use and ecology |
| Construction waste management | Site selection |
| Recycled aggregates | Ecological value of site and protection of ecological features |
| Operational waste | Minimizing impact on existing site ecology |
| Speculative floor and ceiling finishes | Enhancing site ecology |
| Adaptation to climate change | Long-term impact on biodiversity |
| Functional adaptability | |
| Pollution | Innovation |
| Impact of refrigerants | Innovation |
| NOx emissions | |
| Surface water run-off | |
| Reduction of nighttime light pollution | |
| Reduction of noise pollution |
There are minimum BREEAM’s standards for key categories to ensure that the performance of all fundamental environmental is not overlooked; these key categories are namely Energy, Water, Waste, Management, Health, and Wellbeing. Depending on the type of building and location–according to Köppen-Geiger climate classification, different categories will receive different weightings.
Each category has several credits. During the building assessment, the total number of credits achieved is determined. For each category, the fraction of credits obtained (ratio between the number of credits obtained and the maximum number of credits for this category) is multiplied by the category weighting, giving out the category score (in %). Adding the 10 category scores, the final BREEM score is obtained. The final score is then categorized into one of the final six BREEAM ratings, as shown in Table 2.
In order to achieve a given BREEAM rating, the minimum overall score must be met, as well as the minimum standards established for said rating. The LEED certification tool–v4.1 Building Design and Construction–has some similarities to the BREEAM rating tool. Instead of minimum standards, the LEED certification tool has prerequisites and credits for the different categories. The distribution is shown in Table 3, where prerequisites start with an asterisk (*).
Table 3. LEED v4.1 Building Design + Construction Scorecard (prerequisites start with an asterisk *) (Adapted from [5]).
Unlike BREEAM, not all prerequisites and credits are assessed for a given building type. The full scorecard shows which categories need to be assessed, and the maximum number of points for categories of LEED scores goes up to 110 possible points. The building also needs to meet the three LEED Minimum Program Requirements:
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▪ The building must be in a permanent location on existing land.
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▪ The building must use reasonable LEED boundaries.
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▪ The building must comply with project size requirements.
A minimum of 40 points are required to obtain a positive certification. The four levels of certifications are displayed in Table 5.
The developed sustainability assessment tools assigned different names to similar categories. While BREEAM and LEED sustainability assessment tools share common names such as “Energy”, “Water”, and “Materials”, there are some categories that are only found in some of these two tools (for example, LEED has the “Sustainable Sites” category, while BREEAM has the “Management”). Zulkefli et al. [6] compared the indicators of different rating tools and organized them into the primary themes of sustainability (Environment, Social and Economic Indicators). A total of 87 indicators were proposed to assess the sustainability of buildings.
In 2015, the European Commission started the development of a common European approach to assessing the environmental performance of buildings. The proposed tool, which is still under development, is known as Level(s), which is a framework that has core indicators of sustainability for buildings [5]. The tool has been developed with six macro-objectives in mind, as depicted in Table 5.
Out of the 16 core indicators presented in Table 6, 3 of them are composite indicators (Life cycle Global Warming Potential, Construction and demolition waste and materials and Indoor air quality), five of them are qualitative (Lighting and visual comfort, Acoustics and protection against noise, Increased risk of extreme weather events, Increased risk of flood events and Value creation and risk exposure) and one (Bill of quantities, materials and lifespans) is reported as information reporting.
Table 6. Level(s) macro-objectives and their corresponding indicators (Adapted from [7]).
| Greenhouse gas and air pollutant emissions along a building’s life cycle | Use stage energy performance |
| Lifecycle Global Warming Potential | |
| Resource-efficient and circular material life cycles | Bill of quantities, materials and lifespans |
| Construction & demolition waste and materials | |
| Design for adaptability and renovation | |
| Design for deconstruction, reuse and recycling | |
| Efficient use of water resources | Use stage water consumption |
| Healthy and comfortable spaces | Indoor air quality |
| Time outside of thermal comfort range | |
| Lighting and visual comfort | |
| Acoustics and protection against noise | |
| Adaptation and resilience to climate change | Protection of occupier health and thermal comfort |
| Increased risk of extreme weather events | |
| Increased risk of flood events | |
| Optimized life cycle cost and value | Life cycle costs |
| Value creation and risk exposure |
The Level (s) framework is divided into three levels. The first level regards the conceptual design for the building project. It is the simplest level, in which early-stage qualitative assessments are applied to the conceptual design or concepts of the building. The second level covers the detailed design and construction performance of the building. This intermediate level entails quantitative assessments of the designed performance and monitoring of the building. The third and final level encompasses the as-built and in-use performance of the building after completion. It is the most advanced level, and it entails the monitoring and surveying of activity on the construction site and the building, as well as its occupants. The higher the level, the more accurate and reliable the report will be, but the framework is built so that one can choose which level/combination of levels to work at [8].
Finally, Level(s) has four briefings on the key concepts of the framework, as follows:
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▪ Whole life cycle and circular thinking;
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▪ Closing the gap between design and actual building performance;
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▪ Achieving a sustainable renovation;
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▪ Sustainability has a positive influence on the market value of a property.
2. Compilation of Sustainability Indicators
Sustainability indicators proposed by the present work were compiled into a single list. They were divided into five levels of weighting, where a higher weight was assigned to the indicators shared by an increased number of reviewed rating systems of sustainability. The indicators with higher weights are shown in Table 7, and the others with the lowest weights are shown in Table 8.
As shown in Table 7, the most prevalent indicators in the Environment pillar are “Renewable energy”, “Thermal comfort”, and “Site selection”. In the Social Pillar, the most used indicators are “Design considerations towards safety” and “Acoustic and noise control”. Finally, in the Economic Pillar, the most mentioned indicator is “Innovation management/new product development”.
A total of 153 indicators were identified. The Social Pillar has the highest number of indicators at 56. It is followed by the Environmental Pillar with 54 indicators, and lastly, by the Economic Pillar with 43 indicators.
References
- Reed, R.; Bilos, A.; Wilkinson, S.; Schulte, K.-W. International comparison of sustainable rating tools. J. Sustain. Real Estate 2009, 1, 1–22.
- LiderA. LiderA—Sistema de avaliação da sustentabilidade. Available online: http://www.lidera.info/?p=faqs&;RegionId=6 (accessed on 27 September 2022).
- Bragança, L. SBTOOL Urban: Instrumento para a Promoção da Sustentabilidade Urbana. In Proceedings of the Simpósio Nacional de Gestão e Engenharia Urbana—SINGEURB 2017, Universidade Federal de São Carlos, São Carlos, Brazil, 25–27 October 2017.
- BREEAM International New Construction 2016, Document reference: SD233, Version: 2016, Issue: 2.0; BRE Global, Ltd.: Watford, UK. 2016. Available online: https://files.bregroup.com/breeam/technicalmanuals/BREEAM_INC-Manual-English.pdf (accessed on 27 September 2022).
- U.S. Green Building Council. LEED v4.1—Building Design and Construction. 2021. Available online: https://www.usgbc.org/leed/v41 (accessed on 27 September 2022).
- Zulkefli, N.S.; Mohd-Rahim, F.A.; Zainon, N. Preliminary Review Of Sustainability Indicators To Greening Existing Building Based On LCSA Components. Malays. Constr. Res. J. 2020, 9, 81–93.
- Dodd, N.; Donatello, S.; Cordella, M. Level(s)—A Common EU Framework of Core Sustainability Indicators for Office and Residential Buildings, User Manual 1: Introduction to the Level(s) Common Framework, Publication version 1.1; European Commission: Seville, Spain, 2021.
- Dodd, N.; Donatello, S.; Cordella, M. Level(s)—A common EU Framework of Core Sustainability Indicators for Office and Residential Buildings, User Manual 2: Setting up a Project to use the Level(s) Common Framework, Publication version 1.1; European Commission: Seville, Spain, 2021.
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