Sustainable construction key indicators
Abstract
The buildings environmental impact has been a growing concern across the last decades. The relation between the planet environmental problems and the building sector is proven and accepted. Thus, there is an increasing demand for environmental friendly construction practices in order to minimize the building sector negative impacts (Cole 1999). Due to these concerns, the necessity to develop a set of metrics in order to evaluate the buildings environmental impacts has emerged. Consequently, it was also necessary to establish benchmarks to these metrics. Thus, several entities have developed several sustainable building assessment methodologies. These methodologies have defined reference practices and have contributed to the implementation of sustainable development in the building sector (Ding 2008). These systems also allow to assess and monitor the buildings performance and to disseminate the importance of adopting sustainable practices. In their beginning, these methodologies focused only on environmental indicators. However, with time, it was possible to understand the importance of the social and economic issues, regarding the buildings sustainability. Therefore, social and economic indicators began to be considered in these methodologies. Generally, building sustainability assessment (BSA) tools evaluate the buildings sustainability level through the aggregation of the building performance in a group of sustainability indicators.
References (16)
- Alwaer, H. and D. J. Clements-Croome (2010). "Key performance indicators (KPIs) and priority setting in using the multi-attribute approach for assessing sustainable intelligent buildings." Building and Environment 45(4): 799-807.
- Alyami, S. H. and Y. Rezgui (2012). "Sustainable building assessment tool development approach." Sus- tainable Cities and Society 5(0): 52-62.
- Bragança, L., et al. (2010). "Building Sustainability Assessment." Sustainability 2(7): 2010-2023.
- BREEAM (2012). "BREEAM -Building Research and Consultancy's Environmental Assessment Meth- od." Retrieved 27-12-2012, 2012, from http://www.breeam.org.
- CASBEE (2012). "CASBEE -Comprehensive Assessment System for Building Environmental Efficien- cy." Retrieved 27-12-2012, 2012, from http://www.ibec.or.jp/CASBEE/english/overviewE.htm.
- Chen, Y., et al. (2010). "Sustainable performance criteria for construction method selection in concrete buildings." Automation in Construction 19(2): 235-244.
- Cole, R. J. (1999). "Building environmental assessment methods: clarifying intentions." Building Re- search & Information 27(4-5): 230-246.
- Ding, G. K. C. (2008). "Sustainable construction -"The role of environmental assessment tools." Jour- nal of Environmental Management 86(3): 451-464.
- Freyd, A.-C. (2012). Annual Report 2012 -Sustainable Building Alliance, Sustainable Building Alli- ance.
- Huovila, P. (2012). Sustainability and performance assessment and benchmarking of buildings -Final report. Finland, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. iiSBE (2012). "SBTool 2012." Retrieved 21-01-2013, 2012, from http://iisbe.org/sbtool-2012 LEED (2013). "LEED -in Energy & Environmental Design." Retrieved 27-12-2012, 2012, from http://www.leedonline.com.
- Mateus, R. and L. Bragança (2011). "Sustainability assessment and rating of buildings: Developing the methodology SBToolPT-H." Building and Environment 46(10): 1962-1971.
- OPEN HOUSE (2010). "OPEN HOUSE -Seven Framework Programme Home Page." Retrieved 06/06/2013, 2013, from http://www.openhouse-fp7.eu/.
- SB Conferences (2013). "Sustainable Building 2013-2014 Conferences Series -SB Challenge." Re- trieved 06/06/2013, 2013, from http://sbconferences.org/concursos/.
- SBChallenge11 (2011). "Sustainable Building Chalenge 2011." Retrieved 06/06/2013, 2013, from http://sbchallenge.iisbe.org/.
- SuPerBuildings (2012). "SuPerBuildings -Sustainability and Performance Assessment and Benchmark- ing of Buildings." Retrieved 08/06/2013, 2013, from http://cic.vtt.fi/superbuildings/.
- Zavrl, M. Š., et al. (2010). D1.3. Definition of indicators, sustainability performance levels and proce- dures to evaluate them. OPEN HOUSE.