Sustainability Rating Systems Research Articles

The Quality Living; A Main Rating Category for Sustainable New Construction in Egypt

This paper is made to describe the Quality Living category which is one of the main categories of the proposed sustainable rating & certification system for new construction in Egypt presented by the accredited Ph.D. research made for the purpose of promoting the sustainable building practices and embracing the potential of green buildings in Egypt. The terms Quality Living, Indoor Environmental Quality, and Health & Wellbeing, as some of these terms are stated in different international sustainable rating systems, are all focusing to encourage the promotion of occupants’ productivity, comfort, and well-being by prioritizing the social and environmental sustainable parameters within the building design to offer a better quality of life rather than keeping the economical concern as the only prevailing priority for new construction in Egypt. The Quality Living category, as described below, is having an assembly of mandatory and scoring credits based on the sustainability three bottom lines; environmental, social, and economical aspects which can promote the quality living issues in new construction including the health comfort, air comfort, thermal comfort, visual comfort, nuisance management, and safety management issues.

COMPARATIVE ASSESSMENT OF TRANSPORTATION SUSTAINABILITY RATING SYSTEMS

The construction industry contributes a significant amount of greenhouse gas emissions to the environment. This highlights the need for this industry to implement sustainable practices to mitigate its negative effects. Sustainability in the construction industry involves considering project development in terms of economic, social, and environmental aspects (triple bottom line). In the transportation sector of the construction industry, several transportation sustainability rating systems (TSRS) have been developed to measure and promote sustainability. However, studies show that these TSRS have not been developed within a consistent “sustainability scope”. This raises the question of the consistency of these TSRS in measuring sustainability of transportation projects. This study assesses three prominent TSRS to determine how each measures sustainability with respect to the triple bottom line. The TSRS that are in the scope of this study are: (i) Envision-a third-party rating system, (ii) INVEST-a self-assessed rating and, (iii) GreenLITES-an in-house developed self-assessed rating system for the New York State DOT. Results show that while these three rating systems provide different levels of credits/points with respect to the triple bottom line, they all place the highest focus on the environmental aspect.

Development and application of a new Resilient, Sustainable, Safe and Inclusive Community Rating System (RESSICOM)

The rising concern about sustainable development led most states worldwide to adopt the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development to achieve 17 new goals before the end of 2030. Due to the prominent role of urbanization, the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) #11 was introduced to make cities and human settlements more resilient, sustainable, safe and inclusive. The frameworks built so far to assess sustainable urban development primarily focus on sustainability, disregarding inclusiveness, safety and resilience. Under the joint consideration of these four facets, this research devised a new tool to evaluate communities and cities by selecting 61 indicators from an extensive literature review, which were weighted subsequently to ensure the balance among the four sustainability dimensions, namely society, economy, environment and governance. Data extracted from international organizations and the targets of the SDGs were used to score the indicators of the system. Mexico City, as one of the most overcrowded cities in the planet, was selected as a case study to apply the proposed tool. The research determined that the minimum thresholds set for the safety, sustainability and inclusiveness domains were not reached. In contrast, the city performed over the resilience limit. Consequently, RESSICOM was revealed as a helpful framework to identify shortcomings in cities related to the achievement of SDG #11.

Creating a Unique Sustainable Rating System for Saudi Arabia to Achieve Environmental Assessment and 2030 Vision

Saudi Arabia Vision 2030 is a planning for 15 years that announced in 2016 to make Saudi Arabia's economy more powerful and has multi income channels not only oil, and developing public services. The planning focuses for better life enhancement with creating new economic regions inside the country with huge investments with hundreds of billions of US dollars. Sustainable development in this case is a mandatory to can achieve the goals of this vision. Sustainability is the process of change, in which the exploitation of resources, the direction of investments, the orientation of technological development and institutional change are all in harmony and enhance both current and future potential to meet human needs and aspirations. A unique sustainable rating system for Saudi Arabia environment should be created and applied under the protection of law umbrella to insure applying sustainable principals on all new developments and constructions. This paper focuses on reviewing applied sustainable rating system in Saudi Arabia against the environmental conditions and people culture in this area of the world and redistribute the weights of each item to be more compatible with the environment, local resources, and human needs. Keywords: Sustainable rating system, Saudi Arabia, 2030 Vision .

Key Trends and Application of Sustainability Rating Systems in the Hungarian Office Building Segment

Enhancing the sustainability of buildings and construction activities has become a key issue over the last decades. Since in the European Union, the construction industry is responsible for about the 40% of the total final energy consumption, around 36% of total CO2-emission, and 32% of total waste generation it is not surprising, that the ambitious energy and climate protection goals of the EU pose enormous challenges to the sector. Although in the relevant literature there is a lack of common understanding of what sustainable and green buildings are, several quantitative and qualitative methods regarding the assessment of buildings’ sustainability, and approaches suitable for the examination of economic, social and environmental effects of buildings and the built environment have been emerged. The goal of this paper is to highlight the main principles and characters of green and sustainable buildings found in the literature, to summarize the key characteristics of the most important voluntary certification schemes applied in the European Union, and to present the current trends in the Hungarian Office market segment regarding the use of green certifications.

Sustainable Infrastructure Design Framework through Integration of Rating Systems and Building Information Modeling

BIM (building information modeling) can be the basis for carrying out various performance analyses. Sustainable infrastructure rating systems are suitable tools for assessing an infrastructure’s environmental performance. It is necessary to integrate them in the design process. The research adopted a thorough literature review to follow the development trends, interviews with professionals from the academia and industry, and a critical analysis of technical requirements for integrating BIM tools and infrastructure sustainability rating systems in the design process. This study propagates a conceptual framework for integrating sustainability rating systems by introducing BIM with a sustainability metric plug-in. The adoption of the proposed solution allows for what-if scenarios to better support the incorporation of sustainability into design decisions and the assessment of sustainability at the design phase of the infrastructure project. The framework is used to refine designs and ensure that sustainable goals are met and to demonstrate compliance with regulatory requirements. This paper concludes that greater emphasis should be placed on supporting technical requirements to facilitate the integration of BIM and sustainability rating systems. It defines the possibility of BIM adoption to influence the sustainable project performance in the infrastructure. This framework could streamline the sustainable design process and lead to more integrated infrastructure delivery.

Development of sustainability assessment tool for existing buildings

Under climate change impacts, the world is becoming one village. This motivated the application of sustainability rating systems of buildings away from their origins which is hindered by the different attributes and weights. Hence, this study developed a global sustainability rating tool for existing buildings, considering the regional variations through proposing sustainability assessment attributes and determining their weights utilizing fuzzy logic. Data was collected through Canadian and Egyptian experts’ questionnaires to stand for the impact of the regional variations on the weight values. Fuzzy topsis was implemented to overcome the uncertainties inherent when considering opinions of individuals. Consequently, the assessment model and the ranking scheme were developed. In addition to questionnaires, the model was implemented using BIM modeling and energy simulations for two cases in the Canadian and Egyptian environments. The results showed that weights vary from country to another, however, energy criteria deemed to have nearly the same weight in both countries. Also, the results showed the ability of the proposed model to address the regional variations through the developed multi-level weight model. The model was validated by applying sensitivity analysis. The developed sustainability assessment model is a step towards a globally working sustainability rating tool that can address regional variations.

Evaluating the Resilience of Sustainable Neighborhoods by Exposing LEED Neighborhoods to Future Risks

AbstractThis paper examines Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design for Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND), a sustainability rating system for neighborhoods, to determine the extent to which ...

Analysis of Sustainability Assessment Tools (SATs) for Higher Education Institutions (HEIs)

During the last few years, there are many sustainability assessment tools (SATs) were developed and introduced to higher education institutions (HEIs) that functions to guide and assess the commitment of HEIs to implement sustainability. The aim of this study is to review and analysis four existing SATs namely as Sustainability Tracking, Assessment and Rating System (STARS), Campus Sustainability Assessment Framework (CSAF), UI GreenMetric Ranking and Sustainable Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ) which have been embedded and used as their sustainability guidance by many institutions in the world. The analysis is conducted by reviewing the indicators contained within the SATs and then the indicators will be gathered according 1) to the aspect of sustainability; environment, social and economics and 2) between the key elements of each SAT. Result found that there were a significant imbalanced proportion of indicators between the aspect of sustainability and between the key elements of sustainability among the sustainability assessment tools.

The Potential of Distributed Energy Resources in Building Sustainable Campus: The Case of Sichuan University

Distributed energy resources systems are decentralized, modular and more flexible technologies. These systems can comprise multiple generation and storage components. Sichuan University (SCU) has joined Global Urban Development program, and takes part in Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System, aims at a sustainable campus. So we investigated the potential of distributed energy resources, e.g. solar power, that can be used in SCU. Firstly, we build 4 micro-grids with a total 156 Kw PV capacities to collect the power generation data. The total roof area of SCU Jiangan campus is 165701 m2, and the estimated installed capacity is 8.3MW-11.6MW. Based on this data, 33% ~ 46% power cost can be covered by PV power generation.

Design and application of a Sustainable Urban Surface Rating System (SURSIST)

Urban surfaces reflect the economic, environmental and social idiosyncrasy of cities, playing a crucial role in the sustainable development of modern civilizations. Thus, the planning and efficient management of the skin of urban areas provides an opportunity to facilitate the fulfilment of the needs of present and future generations. However, there is a lack of specific tools to evaluate the contribution of these surfaces to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which is the current framework adopted by the United Nations to measure progress towards sustainability. Consequently, this paper describes the design and application of a Sustainable Urban Surface Rating System (SURSIST) aimed at producing a composite sustainability index to measure the contribution of the land cover of entire cities to meeting the SDGs. SURSIST was based on a series of indicators proposed in accordance to the targets forming the SDGs, which were processed by combining CORINE Land Cover (CLC) maps with the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). The application of SURSIST to the Spanish cities of Santander and Valencia during the time period from 1990 to 2006 demonstrated the progressive decrease in sustainability experienced by their urban surfaces due to the increased presence of impermeable covers. The replacement of a moderate part of the built-up area present in both cities in 2006 by greenspace proved to be a solution for recovering the degree of sustainability lost from 1990.

The Integration and Management: A Main Rating Category for Sustainable New Construction in Egypt

The paper is made for a partial fulfillment of a Ph.D. research made by the above mentioned authors to present a proposed national sustainable rating & certification system for new construction to promote the benefits of sustainable building practices, and embrace the potential of green buildings in Egypt, while the paper is describing one main category of the proposed system which is the and category. Both terms of and are usually listed separately in the main categories of different international sustainable rating and certification systems for new construction, while in this paper both terms are combined together in one category named as Integration and Management category which is mainly focusing to insure that the sustainable accreditation targeted level is given to the project under uniform and consistent Total Quality Assessment (TQA) procedures and project management conditions for the proposed national sustainable rating and certification system for new construction in Egypt. Integration and Category, as described below, is having a new assembly of mandatory and scoring credits complying with the sustainability three bottom lines; ecological/environmental, equity/social, and economical aspects to rectify the lack of integration & management issues in new construction including achievement & appraisal of technical quality from all project disciplines for design documents, construction activities, sustainable planning, project time, modular & standardized design, adaptability & deconstruction, and building re-use.

Global World Wide Rating Systems Development and Implementation Guidelines

As world population continues to expand, implementation of resource-efficient measures in all areas of human activity is imperative. The purpose of this research is to examine the history of Sustainable Building, main factors and categories and to provide a guideline for countries, parties and/or foundation interested in developing a Green Building rating systems. Various Green Building rating systems, their components, scoring system and main categories were discussed. It was found that, factors related to the economic dimension pillar was considered most followed by factors related to social dimension and the environmental dimension had the least intension from developers. The main goal of the study is not to rectify this action in rating system but to encourage rating system developers to choose the convenient to their specific cases and local conditions and to proceed with establishing a sustainable rating system. The research also invites the developers to balance the three sustainability pillars (Environmental, Economic and social) in their proposed systems.

Sustainable social housing: The comparison of the Mexican funding program for housing solutions and building sustainability rating systems

In the last decade, Mexico has been prominent among the Upper-middle-income countries (UMC) due to the application of its Funding Program for Housing Solutions (FPHS) in dealing with social housing.This paper shows the results of the evaluations carried out, through the internationally recognized Building Sustainability Rating Systems (BSRS), on different housing units built under this program. It was necessary to carry out a normalization criteria process (NCP) due to the particular characteristics of each BSRS and the complexity they presented in carrying out a comparative analysis.Case studies indicate that housing developed by the FPHS obtained low qualifications according to internationally focused BSRS, with significant deficiencies concerning materials, energy efficiency, indoor environmental quality, and management. However, this study provides indicators of its possible integration in the social housing of countries with characteristics analogous to those of Mexico. Among all indicators, that those referring to the urban environment are capable of being integrated into the social housing.Among the findings, some aspects of the FPHS evaluation process impede the integration of sustainable characteristics in Mexican social housing. On the other hand, the FPHS evaluation model, which gives priority to urban environment aspects above all else, may represent a new paradigm towards the achievement of the sustainable social housing (SSH).

Evaluation of LEED for Neighbourhood Development and Envision Rating Frameworks for Their Implementation in Poorer Countries

The unstoppable world population growth is increasing the concentration of people in urban settlements and the number of megacities, especially in developing countries where urbanization exacerbates social and economic inequalities. Green rating systems have been launched during the last decades to facilitate the assessment of sustainable development in terms of building and infrastructure, including the evaluation of sustainable urban development through the study of communities. This article assesses two of the most renowned sustainable rating systems through the prism of economy, environment and society and the international actions undertaken toward the promotion of sustainable development worldwide, in order to determine their effectiveness to assess urban development in poorer nations. Hence, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design for Neighbourhood Development (LEED ND) and Envision, both from the United States, were chosen as representatives of building and infrastructure fields, respectively, so that the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the New Urban Agenda (Habitat III) were the benchmarks selected to define the sustainability aspects required to evaluate their potential application in less developed countries. The absence of metrics in the New Urban Agenda led to relate its commitments to the SDGs, which revealed that the prerequisites and credits included in LEED ND and Envision mainly focused on managerial and environmental aspects and disregarded the economic and social dimensions. Consequently, the premises under which LEED ND and Envision were developed must be updated and complemented with the two latest guidelines recently adopted by the United Nations in the field of urban and sustainable development.

An aggregated and dynamic analysis of innovations in campus sustainability

PurposeThis paper aims to compose a systematic understanding of campus sustainability innovations and unpack the complex drivers behind the elaboration of specific innovations. More precisely, the authors ask two fundamental questions: What are the topics and modes of implementation of campus sustainability innovations? What are the external and internal factors that drive the development of specific innovations?Design/methodology/approachThe authors code and analyze 454 innovations reported within the Sustainability Tracking Assessment and Rating System (STARS), the campus sustainability assessment tool of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. Using descriptive statistics and illustrations, the paper assesses the state of environmental innovations (EIs) within STARS. Then, to evaluate the role of internal and external drivers in shaping EIs, the authors have produced classification and regression tree models.FindingsThe authors’ analysis shows that external and internal factors provide incentives and a favorable context for the implementation of given EIs. External drivers such as climatic zones, local income and poverty rate drive the development of several EIs. Internal drivers beyond the role of the agent of change, often primarily emphasized by past literature, significantly impact the implementation of given EIs. The authors’ work also reveals that EIs often move beyond traditional mitigation approaches and the boundaries of campus. EIs create new dynamics of innovation that echo and reinforce the culture of a higher education institution.Originality/valueThis work provides the first aggregated picture of EIs in the USA and Canada. It produces a new and integrated understanding of the dynamics of campus sustainability that complexifies narratives and contextualizes the role of change agents.

Building sustainability rating systems in the Middle East

Countries share common concerns, namely global warming, pollution, limited resources and greenhouse gas emissions, which are major elements affecting the future of people on this planet. Buildings play a considerable role in these environmental problems and the challenge of maintaining their well-being could be resolved through a unique solution called ‘sustainability’, which could be considered a method of life. Sustainability is a way of planning and managing the lives of the present and future generations. This study explores the definition of this widely used term and highlights the most used rating systems and practices that could be adopted to achieve sustainable developments. Green building rating systems became a mandatory requirement for each city in order to provide guidelines for green design and practice to reduce negative environmental impact on the one hand, and to evaluate buildings’ sustainability on the other. This study conducts a comparison between international and Middle Eastern green building rating systems and concludes that the implementation of a regulatory framework and mandatory regulations for sustainable design will serve most effectively in developing performance towards sustainability. Furthermore, locally designed systems would serve much better for achieving targets than employing internationally leading systems.

Healing by Design: A Sustainable Healing Indoor Environment for Healthcare Facilities

In the past two decades, healthcare administrators and medical professionals are becoming aware of the need to create 'Healing Environments' that support the needs of patients, family and staff. The key factor motivating this awareness has been the growing scientific evidence linking a range of aspects of the built environment to patients' clinical outcomes and staff's effectiveness. Based on Evidence-Based Design, it was necessary to examine the incorporation of these aspects in sustainable design and to discover those aspects that need to be more addressed to promote healing environments and health in all its complexity for all the users of healthcare facilities, that‘s why a comparison between the physical characteristics of the indoor environment and the environmental interventions of healing environments in three Sustainable Rating Systems for Healthcare have been implemented. As a result, a checklist for Environmental Interventions to promote Psychological Comfort is developed to create a Healing Psychologically Supportive Environment that supports users' wellbeing and helps patients cope with stress that accompanies illness which can cause a person's immune system to be suppressed and can dampen a person's emotional and spiritual resources impeding recovery and healing, and aiming to encourage the incorporation of these physical features into future building initiatives.

A sustainability performance assessment framework for palm oil mills

The palm oil industry has had to undergo rapid development in order to cope with the increasing demand from consumers year by year. The palm oil industry is receiving criticism from various parties on the issue of sustainability. This paper presents the development of a Palm Oil Mill Sustainability Index that enables millers to assess the sustainability performance of palm oil mills against benchmarks, and to differentiate between the performance of each mill. The assessment was performed via the adoption of a Proximity-to-Target approach that measures the current sustainability performance of the industry relative to policy targets. The industry's comparable performance was observed in terms of sustainability and indicators through a graphical method. The resulting Palm Oil Mill Sustainability Index scores were translated into a five-point rating system to describe the sustainability performance levels for different mills i.e. excellent, good, fair, poor, and very poor. Based on the Palm Oil Mill Sustainability Index scores and rating system, weak performance indicators were identified, for example, excessive use of water consumption due to inappropriate operation of hydrocyclones. By identifying the weak performance indicators, practical recommendations and measures for improvement can be proposed and the Palm Oil Mill Sustainability Index scores recalculated to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed sustainability performance strategy. Selected palm oil mills in Malaysia were used as a case study to demonstrate the applicability of the framework. The results provide empirical evidence to support a decision-support-system for enhancing palm oil mill sustainability performance, so as to achieve a balance between environmental, economic, and social aspects in the palm oil mill sector.

Rating the sustainable city: ‘Measurementality’, transparency, and unexpected outcomes at the knowledge-policy interface

Ratings are an increasingly popular part of urban sustainability governance and are widely understood as tools to guide policy and ensure transparency. This understanding is part of a more general shift in governance towards “New Public Management” that emphasizes public accountability and the accuracy of quantitative metrics and technical knowledge in policy evaluation. But critics have assessed ratings as broader mechanisms of governmentality, through which authorities shape, instrumentalize, and control conduct, and promote particular urban trajectories, in politicized ways. This paper examines STAR Communities, a recently developed urban sustainability rating system in the USA, to understand how such ratings behave at the interface of knowledge and policy, and how seeking transparency through ratings can produce unexpected outcomes that evade sustainability. This paper is not a critique of a specific rating system or set of indicators, but does yield a critique of the kinds of unexpected outcomes that are possible when we privilege quantitative measures of achievement. The study finds: 1) ratings are often used as labels rather than as policy inputs; 2) ratings can exacerbate existing inequalities and create new inequalities within and between municipalities because, while ratings can bring financial benefits, certification demands significant financial and political resources; and, 3) ratings can incentivize the realignment of governance priorities, as cities ‘grab’ points by pursuing quickly implemented, uncontroversial, and politically ‘safe’ policies and programs. The study also finds that sustainability managers continue to pursue quantitative sustainability measurement because of dominant assumptions that ‘counting is what counts’.