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With Green Building Standards Spreading Around the World, Coordination Among Them Is Just Starting
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April 19, 2010
By William DeVan
Howrey LLP
The growing trend toward green building has resulted in a number of competing and overlapping certification systems, with only faint hope in sight of better standardization. U.S. builders are most familiar with the LEED system sponsored by the United States Green Building Council (USGBC). Through USGBC’s association with the World Green Building Council, LEED now is available in almost 60 countries, spanning the globe from Malaysia to Morocco.
Starting in 1996, Canada’s Building Research Establishment developed its Environmental Assessment Method. This evolved into an online assessment and rating tool owned by BOMA Canada (Building Owners and Managers Association Canada) known as Green Globes. BOMA Canada then licensed Green Globes to the Green Building Initiative (GBI) in the United States to compete with LEED. To raise its market share, GBI has applied to have Green Globes accredited by the American National Standards Institute.
Outside the Americas, the BREEAM standard promulgated by BRE (formerly the Building Research Establishment) in the United Kingdom has become widely used and adopted in Europe and the Gulf Region, with approximately 110,000 buildings BREEAM-certified.
There also are a number of national and local standards. France has the HQE system, and about 70 percent of the commercial buildings built in Australia since 2002 have been rated under the Green Star system. In Italy, a regional standard known as Protocollo Itaca was developed for particular regions but now has been divided into two separate and more streamlined standards.
Most of these standards are privately owned and promoted, but on December 11, 2009 at the Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen, the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) unveiled the “Common Carbon Metric” for measuring energy use and reporting greenhouse gas emissions from building operations. UNEP proposes establishment of the Common Carbon Metric to measure the weight of carbon dioxide equivalent (kgCO2e) emitted per square meter per year by different building types and climate regions. While the Common Carbon Metric has yet to be adopted by any governing body, entities such as BRE and the USGBC may well incorporate the metric in their rating systems.
The diversity in rating systems means that parties wishing to build green projects in diverse locations need to be familiar with different standards for use in different countries or even regions within a country. The different rating system requirements also need to be compared to local building codes and regulations to ensure that there are no conflicts between them.
This diversity undermines one of the principal business reasons for green building. A recent study sponsored by the World Green Building Council determined that the top business reason for green building is because it is the “right thing to do.” Positive publicity is the most obvious commercial benefit from “doing the right thing,” and a common standard for assessing a project’s “greenness” makes getting that positive publicity much easier.
The Sustainable Building Alliance (SBA) is working to solve this problem by developing common minimum standards for adoption by the different rating systems. SBA’s goal is to ensure consistency among the systems and to promote “dual certification.” But because each rating organizations has its own commercial interest in promoting its system, SBA has a difficult task ahead of it. Uniformity is in the interest of engineers, architects, builders and owner/developers, and there are early signs of progress, with the organizations developing the BREEAM and HQE standards working together on single joint rating tool for the European Union. Click here for details on that.
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For more information about the issues covered in this report, please contact William DeVan in our Washington, D.C. office at 202-383-6859 or at devanw@howrey.com or contact your Howrey attorney. For more information about Howrey's Construction Practice Group, click here.
©2010 Howrey LLP
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