Abstract
Green building design is becoming broadly adopted, with one green building standard reporting over 3.5 billion square feet certified to date. By definition, green buildings focus on minimizing impacts to the environment through reductions in energy usage, water usage, and minimizing environmental disturbances from the building site. Also by definition, but perhaps less widely recognized, green buildings aim to improve human health through design of healthy indoor environments. The benefits related to reduced energy and water consumption are well-documented, but the potential human health benefits of green buildings are only recently being investigated. The objective of our review was to examine the state of evidence on green building design as it specifically relates to indoor environmental quality and human health. Overall, the initial scientific evidence indicates better indoor environmental quality in green buildings versus non-green buildings, with direct benefits to human health for occupants of those buildings. A limitation of much of the research to date is the reliance on indirect, lagging and subjective measures of health. To address this, we propose a framework for identifying direct, objective and leading “Health Performance Indicators” for use in future studies of buildings and health.
Highlights
BackgroundIt is well-known and oft-repeated in environmental health circles that we spend 90 % of time indoors [1,2,3]
Over 40 years of research on the indoor environment has yielded many insights into building-related factors that influence health, well-being, and productivity [4, 5]. This manuscript is not intended to include a review of these factors in detail, but we cite a few important aspects here to highlight the breadth of the issue: environmental hazards [6], building design, [6, 7], social factors [8], behavioral factors [9], adjacent land use [10, 11], architectural design [12, 13], and operations and maintenance (preventative maintenance, Curr Envir Health Rpt (2015) 2:250–258 upkeep, cleaning, integrated pest management) [14, 15, 16]
Due to the widespread adoption of LEED and the fact that it was started 15 years ago, most of the studies of green buildings we identified were focused on LEED buildings
Summary
It is well-known and oft-repeated in environmental health circles that we spend 90 % of time indoors [1,2,3]. Over 40 years of research on the indoor environment has yielded many insights into building-related factors that influence health, well-being, and productivity [4, 5]. Discussed less frequently is the corollary—the fact that the indoor environment can provide health benefits when we optimize building environments for human health [21]
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