Abstract
Since people living in developed nations across Europe, North America, and Australia spend most of their lives indoors, protecting indoor environmental quality is critical for protecting human health. As stressors such as COVID-19 and climate change further complicate living conditions, conflicting system priorities underscore the need for resilience in all building systems. In the engineering and architectural fields, sustainability rating frameworks are used to note, reward, and motivate the use of sustainable practices. As such, it is crucial to ensure that these frameworks genuinely encourage resilience in building systems. This paper conducts a review of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design–Building Design and Construction (LEED BD+C v4.1) framework for New Construction through a credit-level analysis, to determine the extent to which the framework encourages the resilience of building systems beyond the scope of structure. Researchers identified, tabulated, and deconstructed relevant credits according to four key resilience factors: diversity, efficiency, adaptability, and cohesion. Findings indicated that, while efficiency is well supported, diversity, adaptability, and cohesion can be enhanced. The existing rating system provides a strong base upon which improvements can be made, but falls short of adequately encouraging the wide adoption of resilience needed for long-term sustainability. In short, while the LEED credits do reward resilient designs, they do not yet actively inspire them.
Highlights
IntroductionThe vast amount of time we spend inside links the indoor environment inextricably to our wellbeing [1,2]
Intentional partial support (I, P) was encountered seven times in the evaluation, under the adaptability property. This finding indicates that paths to earning credits allow a project to either bypass the Resilient building system practices (RBSPs), scope out building systems, or alter the language describing the practice in a way that diminishes the integrity of the practice in relation to the resilience property
Our evaluation shows that the existing LEED Building Design and Construction (BD+C) credits support some properties of resilient building systems better than others
Summary
The vast amount of time we spend inside links the indoor environment inextricably to our wellbeing [1,2]. As our understanding of these relationships has grown, so has our desire to improve them in tandem with sustainability. Sustainability is a broad concept that, in the context of buildings, is both relatively new to modern discussion and often equated with environmental protection. Among those actively concerned with the subject, “sustainability” cannot be bound to such a narrow scope. Within the field, the concepts of social and financial wellbeing are increasingly included in discussions of sustainability, while the concept of resilience extends these considerations over a longer time frame. Rating systems comprise the leading mechanisms by which these multiple facets of sustainability are incentivized within the industry
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