As Australia moves towards a price on carbon, robust carbon accounting within the built environment will become increasingly critical.
Buildings have long been identified as ‘low hanging fruit’. The United Nations Environment Program, for instance, has found that proven and commercially available technologies could reduce energy consumption in old and new buildings by 30-50 per cent, without significantly increasing investment costs.
Building rating systems are one of the best ways to capitalise on this low hanging fruit. Globally, building rating systems are improving environmental attributes and increasing the environmental performance of buildings, while also raising industry, government and consumer expectations.
In some countries, such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, rating tools have been extremely successful and their widespread uptake has generated the critical mass required to create new sustainable benchmarks.
But now, with the World Green Building Council’s membership growing to 85 councils and counting, the global green building industry is faced with a great challenge: how to make direct comparisons between buildings across international borders.
Currently, we have no international agreement about how to measure and report carbon, much less other environmental and socio-economic benchmarks such as indoor environment quality or liveability.
The WorldGBC believes that each country should be able to develop an individual rating tool that reflects its unique environment, climatic conditions and types of housing stock. However, while nations may require individual sustainability rating tools, the downside to this is that there is little consistency between rating tools. This in turn has created complications for stakeholders, such as property investors who may have portfolios in a range of countries and no way to compare apples with apples, or buildings with buildings.
Earlier this year, the WorldGBC Board approved the establishment of a WorldGBC Rating Tools Committee. This committee, which I chair, is tasked with developing criteria and guidance for the development and quality assurance of rating tools; developing a socio- economic category that WorldGBC members can use to integrate or overlay into existing tools; and collaborating on the development of a common carbon metric for buildings.
We are currently working on an ambitious project list, which includes research and consultation with a range of countries to determine how we can harmonise rating tools.
Harmonisation between international rating tools is already beginning to occur in mature markets. While this does not mean we will see one international rating tool emerge, representatives of the USGBC’s LEED and the Green Building Council of Australia’s Green Star, along with the German and UK GBCs and the Sustainable Building Alliance, agreed to work together to develop a common method of measuring and reporting the environmental impact of buildings. The alliance, established in 2009, is overseeing the ‘Common Carbon Metric project’, which will enable the development common metrics to measure emissions of carbon equivalents from residential and commercial buildings.
Without a common language and an agreed accounting method for measuring and reporting environmental impacts such as greenhouse gas emissions, we cannot effectively participate in the global carbon market. Without a common voice, we cannot share the sector’s progress or its contribution to achieving emissions reductions targets.
For example, at the moment the construction industry’s participation in the United Nations’ Clean Development Mechanism projects is restricted, because we cannot demonstrate carbon reductions in a cost-effective way that complies with the UN’s requirements. A common metric for measuring carbon emissions from buildings will enable the global construction sector to participate in carbon markets and attract investment that may not otherwise have been available, in turn delivering tangible carbon reductions.
So, while we won’t see a universal rating tool for the world’s buildings, we are certainly getting closer to a common language for buildings which will enable us to pick that low hanging fruit.
