Health and wellness in commercial buildings: Systematic review of sustainable building rating systems and alignment with contemporary research

Abstract

While sustainability rating systems for buildings have been established for nearly 20 years, systems to specifically recognize healthy buildings are much more recent arrivals to the global scene. Building upon the health-related credits in sustainability rating systems, these new systems leverage academic research to prescribe interventions designed to create workspaces that enable wellness and productivity of their occupants. This paper presents a systematic review of these requirements in the global systems currently available in today's market– WELL, FITWEL, Living Building Challenge – and leading green building rating tools (BEAM Plus, BREEAM, DGNB, Green Globes, Green Mark, Green Star, HQE, and LEED) and aligns them with eight key topics related to health and productivity and recurrent in the academic literature: indoor air quality, thermal comfort, visual comfort, acoustic comfort, ergonomics & movement, diet & clean water, social well-being, and psychological well-being. In the discussion, this research presents regional trends, points of commonality, and discrepancies, both within this set of standards as well as with the broader academic literature and industry guidance on developing healthy workplaces. The purpose and contribution of this paper is to situate the system approaches within the context of contemporaneous academic literature, thus providing new system developers and their users with insight from current research and to identify and address gaps in existing systems from a health and wellness perspective.