Building sustainability assessment: A comparison between ITACA, DGNB, HQE and SBTool alignment with the European Green Deal

Abstract

The environmental impact of the construction industry is very heavy. Therefore, the global community is further developing green building assessment tools in order to enhance their efficiency in matching sustainability goals and being more environmentally friendly. An analysis approach by means of Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) was carried out to examine the degree of response of different green building tools utilized in Europe, namely (Innovazione e Trasparenza degli Appalti e la Compatibilità Ambientale ITACA, Deutsches Guetsiegel Nachhaltiges Bauen (DGNB), Haute Qualité Environnementale (HQE) and Sustainable Building Tool (SBTool), to the eight criteria of the European Green Deal (EGD), a roadmap elaborated by the European Commission to enhance sustainability deployment in the region. The first phase of the analysis consisted of a Boolean MCDM aiming to define to which criterion of the EGD each indicator in the tools checklists is linked. These data obtained were later examined by means of Fuzzy Logic to obtain comparable results showing how much each tool helps more following the European roadmap towards sustainability. This work intends to compare the efficiency of the most used tools in Europe for building sustainability evaluation while being based on a particular specified reference and not only the sustainable goals in general. This work also shows the efficiency of combining two MCDCM techniques to obtain better analyzing output. The result of this study shows that the DGNB is the most effective method for connecting all EGD criteria in a balanced manner. The HQE tool demonstrated a strong ability to effectively integrate the objectives of the EGD, except for the energy evaluation aspect. For the ITACA tool, it closely aligned DGNB in its response to the EGD, although it had an absent focus on the smart and sustainable shift of mobility. SBTool demonstrated average performance when compared to other protocols. This was expected since SBTool was the basis on which ITACA, DGNB, and HQE were constructed.