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Policies, laws, and regulations around the world are asking the sector to adopt sustainable innovations in terms of products and processes to encourage a more sustainable built environment (Hellstrom, 2007). This attention for the building sector arises from its energy consumption and GHG emissions, which, in developed countries, account for 30% and 40% of the total quantities, respectively (IPCC, 2007). Forecasts of the EIA (2010) show that energy consumption in buildings is increasing at a slightly higher rate than those of the industrial and transportation sectors. However, according to the IPCC (2007), the building sector has the highest energy saving and pollution reduction potential, given the flexibility of its demands. IPCC showed that in countries that are not members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (non-OECD) and in economies in transition, potential CO2 savings in buildings could be 3 and 1 GtCO2-eq every year in 2030. Therefore, a possible reduction of almost 6 GtCO2-eq every year is possible worldwide in the next 20 y if the building sector embraces sustainability. This highlights why sustainable buildings and communities are often considered a priority for a sustainable world (Butera, 2010; Larsson, 2010). Climate change has raised concerns over the rapid depletion of the environment and its resources. International research has confirmed that the built environment is the most promising sector for a rapid transition to sustainability (GhaffarianHoseini et al., 2013). In this scenario, many examples of sustainable urban environments are showing the advantages of sustainability. Meanwhile, an increasing request for tools to assess their sustainability is recorded. The assessment of sustainability of the built environment is an essential step toward its promotion (Crawley and Aho, 1999; Kibert, 2007; EPA, 2008) and recently (du Plessis and Cole, 2011). However, large difficulties exist creating useful and measurable assessment indicators (Mitchell, 1996). Sustainability assessments have been Assessing and Measuring Environmental Impact and Sustainability. © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 497 498 CHAPTER 15 Sustainability assessment in the built environment defined as the processes of identifying, predicting, and evaluating the potential impacts of different initiatives and alternatives (Devuyst, 2000). The possibility to assess both products and processes has often been considered particularly important for a sector as inertial and conflicting as that of the built environment (Winston, 2010; CIB, 2010). The sustainability assessments were addressed with rating tools for buildings more than two decades ago in Europe and North America before diffusing worldwide (Häkkinen, 2007) and more recently (Sev, 2011; Berardi, 2012). In some way, these systems have promoted the commercial image of recent green buildings. Although there is a high demand for and much attention given to green buildings, there is an increasing awareness that these are insufficient to guarantee sustainability of the built environment (Häkkinen, 2007; Cole, 2010). Recent literature has discussed the importance to go beyond the sustainability assessment of single buildings and to enlarge the assessment scale to communities and cities to meet all the different aspects of sustainability (Turcu, 2013). Cole (2011) clarified that a significant achievement in sustainability assessments has been the introduction of rating systems for the urban design. These increase the assessment scale and allow consideration of aspects not accounted for at the building scale. Examples of some aspects are the flows and the synergies between initiatives within the built environment and consequent social and economic effects of sustainability in the built environment (Berardi, 2011). Sustainability assessments on community and city scales are proving to be much more than the summation of individual green elements, because the scaling-up results in complex interactions that significantly alter the results obtained on the building scale (Haapio, 2012). Requests to go beyond the building-centric approach in sustainability assessments have favored the discussion about new possible areas of sustainability assessment within the built environment (Berardi, 2013a,b,c). In fact, systems originally developed for buildings have been criticized for their inability to capture what makes a built environment sustainable for its citizens (Rees and Wackernagel, 1996). The rare consideration of criteria related to social and economic aspects of sustainability has often been underlined at the building scale, but many other limits of current sustainability assessment tools exist (Conte and Monno, 2012). Previous considerations show that different scales are considered necessary to assess sustainability of the built environment. In fact, only cross-scale evaluations allow recognition that the whole urban environment has a prime role in social and economic sustainability and a huge impact on environmental sustainability (Mori and Christodoulou, 2012). More than 50% of the world’s population currently lives in urban areas, and this figure is expected to increase to 70% by 2050 (UN, 2008). In Europe, 75% of the population lives in urban areas, and by 2020 the number is expected to reach 80% (EEA, 2006). The importance of urban areas is also confirmed by the diffusion of megacities of more than 20 million people, which are gaining ground in Asia, Latin America, and Africa (Figure 15.1). As a result, most resources are currently consumed in the urban environment worldwide. This contributes to the Introduction FIGURE 15.1 Views of the Bund of Shanghai in 1990 and 2010. From Berardi (2013b). economic and social importance of the urban areas, and also to their poor environmental sustainability. Their metabolism generally consists of the input of goods and the output of wastes with unavoidable externalities (Turcu, 2013). Urban sustainability has attracted much criticism because urban areas rely on too many external resources. Promoting sustainability in the urban environment has been interpreted as reducing the impact of cities on the environment. However, other interpretations of urban sustainability have often promoted a more anthropocentric approach, according to which urban areas should respond to demand based on people’s needs and focus on the quality of life and other social aspects of sustainability (Turcu, 2013). Large and mega urban areas increase the difficulties in promoting sustainability and their consequent request for tools for sustainability assessments. New assessment systems have been created in the past few years to answer such requests (Sharifi and Murayama, 2013). Tanguay et al. (2010) and Berardi (2013c) have reviewed available indicators for measuring sustainability. They showed that most of the currently used indicators are characterized by a strong environmental approach. This is evident considering indices such as the ecological footprint, the water footprint, the environmental sustainability, and the environmental vulnerability. The preservation of natural resources is a key component in ensuring sustainability and, as a matter of fact, it is also a key dimension of people’s well-being. Furthermore, people directly benefit from environmental assets and services because these allow them to satisfy basic needs and to enjoy leisure time (OECD, 2011a). Thus, it is commonly accepted that environmental sustainability has high effects on the social dimension of well-being (Vallance et al., 2011). This chapter is based on the belief that measures of the different aspects of sustainability, including social and economic aspects, should be explicitly considered in sustainability assessment of the built environment at the different scales. Consequently, systems exclusively related to environmental and ecological assessments are not considered. The attention is focused on sustainability rating systems 499 500 CHAPTER 15 Sustainability assessment in the built environment that adopt a multicriterion approach to consider the different dimensions of sustainability using the triple bottom line approach (Pope et al., 2004). Multicriterion systems are gaining increasing attention because they are easily understood and allow a step implementation for each criterion (Berardi, 2012). In the systems considered, sustainability is generally evaluated by the summation of the results of different performances related to environmental, social, and economic aspects (Scerri and James, 2010). One of the limitations of multicriterion systems is their additional structure based on the sum of different evaluations. This and other limitations are considered here. The chapter is organized in six different sections. The second section describes the framework of sustainability assessment in the built environment. The third, fourth, and the fifth sections review sustainability assessment systems for buildings, communities, and cities, respectively. In each section, the most known systems are presented and compared, and then the outcome of their applications is discussed. The final section presents concluding remarks and research trends. FRAMEWORK OF SUSTAINABILITY ASSESSMENT Before comparing sustainability assessment systems for the built and urban environment, it is helpful to clarify what is meant by sustainability, assessment, community, and city. In fact, lack of consensus on the definitions of these terms prevents the possibility of comparing existing rating systems. This section is largely based on a recently published article (Berardi, 2013a). Sustainability is not a single and well-defined concept. At least 100 definitions have been given to this term, and new definitions are continually added, often clouding its concept (Hopwood et al., 2005). Sustainability has also been accused of being indefinable because every time a definition has been formulated, it has always left out some of the possible meanings (Robinson, 2004). The concept of sustainability dates back to the 1970s. Its theoretical framework evolved after the publication of “The Limits to Growth” and led to the famous definition proposed by the Brundtland Commission (WCED, 1987). In the 1990s, an intensive debate about different definitions and models of sustainability occurred. The multitude of interpretations that the term sustainability has received indicates a resistance in the acceptance of a unique official definition and a preference to adapt this term to the context in which it is considered at any time (Martens, 2006). Paradoxically, the Sustainable Buildings and Climate Initiative (SBCI) of UNEP has declared that sustainability requires all the different interpretations that are often given to the term, because the concept of sustainability represents the synthesis of all of them (UNEP-SBCI, 2009). The wide meaning of sustainability opens several options for the considerable criteria in sustainability assessments. Sustainability is time-dependent and socially Framework of sustainability assessment dependent, and it has different interpretations for different people, with partial dependence on the point of view of the assessment (Martens, 2006) and more recently (Dempsey et al., 2011). These sources of uncertainty have contributed to the belief that several levels of sustainability exist, and that it is more useful to consider sustainability as a relative concept. The introduction of the concepts of strong and weak sustainability increased this belief; strong sustainability states that it is not possible to accept an exchange between environment and economy, whereas weak sustainability accepts their substitutability (Mori and Christodoulou, 2012). The resilience over temporal and spatial cross-scales has recently been used as a measure of relative sustainability (Mayer, 2008) and more recently (Barr and Devine-Wright, 2012). If the definition of sustainability suffers from ambiguity, so does its assessment. A sustainability assessment can be defined as the process of identifying, measuring, and evaluating the potential impacts of alternatives for sustainability (Devuyst, 2000). Several sets of sustainability indicators have been developed so far, but none has emerged as a universal measure (Pope et al., 2004). Multicriterion rating systems focusing on environmental indicators have been proposed in different fields in the past 20 y. However, as increasing attention on sustainability is recorded among sociologists, economists, and politicians, new assessment indicators have been promoted. Sustainability indicators have raised the debate about the way in which they were developed and used: from the top, initiated primarily by governments and based on expert input (expert-led), or from the bottom (citizen-led), drawing on local networks and involving citizens. The tensions between expert-led versus citizen-led systems of sustainability assessment recently seemed to be solved through the integration of the two approaches (Reed et al., 2006). Meanwhile, doubts about the objectivity of the assessment are still often raised. In fact, previous research has shown that the assessor, the point of view of the assessor, and time of assessment often play a prime role in the assessment results because they influence the considered criteria (Martens, 2006). Consequently, a transparent, objective, and plural (or promoted in a multiagent contest) assessment has recently been considered necessary. The difficulties in performing sustainability assessments in the urban environment are greater because the object of the assessment is often an unbounded entity. Most of the systems presented here were originally proposed for the assessment of buildings. They answered the request of sustainable and green buildings and were intended as tools to give objectivity to their performance. At the same time, the increasing awareness of the limits of the assessment of buildings has led to developing systems for urban communities and cities. These systems are considered useful to assess the built environment in a more integrated way, and they have been proposed as tools for marketing as well as for planning issues. Nevertheless, these systems suffer from a lack of data and of exact definition of the boundaries of their assessed entities. An urban area can be identified in different ways in terms of land use, infrastructure, or people density (UN-Habitat, 2006); these criteria raise ambiguity about urban boundaries. 501 502 CHAPTER 15 Sustainability assessment in the built environment For example, the evaluation of transportation generally covers several communities, whereas population density may consider residents or workers. Different criteria have been used to define the boundaries of communities and cities, among which administrative criterion, population density, and economic characteristics are the most common (UN-Habitat, 2006). Urban sprawl is also increasing the confusion in establishing exact boundaries. Consequently, during sustainability assessment, attention must be given to external impacts (leakage effects) on areas beyond the assessed boundaries (Bithas and Christofakis, 2006). Considering the scale of urban communities, high uncertainty exists regarding their dimensions. In the Haussmannian fabric, approximately 200 3 200 m2 represented the dimensions of a neighborhood; in South America, the grid is generally larger and it often reaches the dimensions of 400 3 400 m2, whereas in cities such as New York it is generally rectangular (100 3 200 m2). Apart from geometrically planned cities, the boundaries of a community are generally difficult to establish. As a consequence, during sustainability assessments, they are often established only considering the area object of assessment. This criterion is often meaningless for sustainability. The importance of the interactions between different parts of the built environment has been recognized as an unavoidable aspect of sustainability and has increased the request for assessments at scales larger than buildings (Berardi, 2011). However, it is widely recognized that evaluations of countries and regions are often far from capturing, influencing, and assessing sustainability of the daily practices of people (Mori and Christodoulou, 2012). Communities and cities are therefore considered the institutional and geographical levels closer to citizens where sustainability can efficiently be promoted and assessed. As a matter of fact, they represent the nearest natural environment, social network, and economic market around a citizen. Urban areas are the lowest level where problems can be meaningfully resolved in an integrated, holistic, and sustainable way (Aalborg Charter, 1994). International policies have started focusing on sustainability assessments in urban areas and, therefore, the number of communities and cities experimenting sustainability assessments is increasing. This trend shows that sustainability assessments are recognized as tools for monitoring urban dynamics and land promotion. Many communities have developed their own sustainability assessment systems (Atkisson, 1996) and later (Corbiére-Nicollier et al., 2003). Several frameworks of sustainability assessment indicators have been proposed (Bentivegna et al., 2002; Xing et al., 2009) and more recently (Mori and Christodoulou, 2012). Figure 15.2 is one of these and it covers the most important indicators, although it should be considered as a reference that allows the opportunity to contextualize different visions of sustainability by assigning different importance to each criterion. In particular, Figure 15.2 adopts the recent interpretation of the concept of sustainability as composed of four dimensions (instead of the classic three): environmental; economic; social; and institutional sustainability. Framework of sustainability assessment INSTITUTIONAL sustainability Local authority services Community activity Local partnerships ENVIRONMENTAL sustainability a. Resources (natural) Energy use Water use SOCIAL sustainability The core of sustainable communities Waste recycling Sense of community Moving in and out of an area b. Housing and built environment Crime and safety (man-made) Housing / area conditions Mix (income, tenure, ethnic) Housing state of repair Satisfaction with home Green open space c. Services and facilities (infrastructure) Provision and quality School GP / health services Public transport ECONOMIC sustainability Local jobs Access to jobs Business activity Local training and skills House prices Housing affordability FIGURE 15.2 Framework for the sustainability assessment in the built environment (Turcu, 2013). Indicators in Figure 15.2 are common to many sustainability assessment systems, although specific urban settings may require alterations in the frameworks. In this sense, using an adaptive approach to sustainability assessment indicators for specific local situations has generated a multitude of different systems (Reed et al., 2006). This trend is also briefly described here, especially because the request for comparability among the systems is a challenging topic in sustainability assessments. In some way, the goal of this chapter is to compare the most diffused multicriteria systems for sustainability assessment of the built environment. 503 504 CHAPTER 15 Sustainability assessment in the built environment SYSTEMS FOR SUSTAINABILITY ASSESSMENT OF BUILDINGS According to many studies, the sustainability assessment is considered necessary to increase the diffusion of sustainable buildings (Cheng et al., 2008). Unfortunately, the construction sector is unfamiliar with performance measurements and, although many assessment systems already exist worldwide (Figure 15.3), their diffusion is still low in absolute terms. Sustainability building certification programs and rating systems are used worldwide, with the only exceptions being Africa (except South Africa) and Latin America (except Brazil). Sustainability measurements, in the building sector, are capturing much attention worldwide, rapidly moving from fashionable certifications to current practices. In 2010, 650 m2 obtained a sustainability certification throughout the world, with projections for 1,100 m2 in 2012 and for more than 4,600 m2 in 2020 (Bloomc and Wheelock, 2010). Sustainability assessment has reached early adopters and is increasing, and the subject is becoming common in specialized press and journals (Bloomc and Wheelock, 2010), but, even in active countries it is not yet a common practice (McGraw-Hill Construction, 2008). According to innovation diffusion theories, communication is generally the most important element for the introduction of a new paradigm. In this sense, sustainability assessments represent the framework and communication labels for sustainable constructions. FIGURE 15.3 Sustainability assessment systems around the world (in gray, countries with adopted systems). Systems for sustainability assessment of buildings The increasing number of certified buildings shows that awareness for sustainability is increasing. Moreover, the assessment scale allowed by many rating systems, which permit defining several sustainability grades, has shown a trend toward higher sustainability levels in the past few years (Berardi, 2012). For example, few buildings among first assessed projects were rated as LEED platinum (best rating) buildings from 1999 to 2002. Then, in 2003, some buildings were rated platinum; currently, this rating is often common among sustainable buildings (Bloomc and Wheelock, 2010). It is often unclear how to categorize and recognize sustainable buildings and how to measure their sustainability (Steurer and Hametner, 2013). After the energy crisis in the 1970s, regulations promoted energy consumption limits for buildings around the world. As a result, energy consumption evaluation became the first ante litteram measure of sustainability for buildings. Meanwhile, sustainability consciousness evolved to the point at which the energy consumption is considered just one among many other parameters. The complexity of a building suggests a multidisciplinary approach in sustainability assessment (Langston and Ding, 2001). This is also because buildings cannot be considered assemblies of raw materials, but they are generally high-order products that incorporate different technologies assembled according to unique processes on-site (Ding, 2008). The sustainability of a building therefore should be evaluated for every subcomponent, for integration among them in functional units and assembled systems (e.g., the air conditioning system, the envelope), and for the building in its entirety. A first, but partial, approach to sustainability assessments is through the sustainability evaluation of building products. A similar approach for environmental evaluations is internationally established for many kinds of products. For example, ISO 14020 (2000) defines three environmental labels: the eco-certification of environmental labels (type I); the self-declared environmental claims (type II); and the environmental declarations (type III). Among these, type III is the most common label for building products. However, environmental declarations of products are rarely performed by manufacturers, and environmental product declarations (EPD) in the building sector are slowly diffusing (McGraw-Hill Construction, 2008). Product eco-certification assessment systems have been developed in different countries with labels such as the American Green Seal, the European Eco-Label, the French NF Environment Mark, the German Blue Angel, and the Japanese Eco Mark. Moreover, specific evaluations for building products exist, especially for timber and concrete-based ones. The aforementioned labels have a binary evaluation and indicate a sustainable product without the ability of measuring its greenness. Since 2011, the new European Construction Products Directive states that a sustainable resource use evaluation is part of the assessment for the CE mark (305/2011, CPR). This implies a larger diffusion of environmental assessments for construction products, at least in Europe. Energy labels of equipment (e.g., heat pumps) represent another way of assessing building sustainability. However, the adoption of certified sustainable materials is not sufficient to obtain a 505 506 CHAPTER 15 Sustainability assessment in the built environment sustainable building because the complexity of this requires a holistic and integrated evaluation (Ding, 2008). In this sense, product labels and certifications are considered a database for starting a sustainability analysis. However, the building and construction sector is a complex input output sector, where the material flux is difficult to standardize and, rarely, a priori programmed (Cole, 1998). Some researchers have started promoting assessments that look at buildings as processes of people’s satisfaction. This means to look at user requests that evolve through occupancy and that change the way in which buildings behave, too. The dynamic perspective is also supported by considering that local parameters such as weather and international phenomena (e.g., climate change or cultural shifts) continually influence the operational needs of the building. Moreover, buildings are constructed according to client’s requests. These aspects prevent buildings from being manufacturestandardized products. Finally, construction stakeholders constitute a variegated network of subjects and differences among them imply several possible points of view in sustainability assessments (Cole, 1998) and later (de Blois et al., 2011; Albino and Berardi, 2012). The next section presents some of the most common systems for sustainability assessment of buildings. DESCRIPTION OF THE SYSTEMS According to ISO 15392 (2008), sustainability in construction includes considering sustainable development in terms of its three primary dimensions (economic, environmental, and social) while meeting the requirements for technical and functional performance. In 2008, the Building Research Establishment found that more than 600 sustainability assessment rating systems for buildings worldwide had been created (BRE, 2008). Meanwhile, new systems are continually proposed, whereas the most diffused ones receive an update yearly. This evolving situation has led to new standards for increasing the comparability among systems, such as “Sustainability in building construction—Framework for methods of assessment of the environmental performance of construction works—Part 1: Buildings” (ISO 21931-1, 2010) and “Sustainability of construction works—Sustainability assessment of buildings—General framework” (ISO 15643-1, 2010). Systems for sustainability assessment span from energy performance evaluation to multidimensional quality assessments. Hastings and Wall (2007) grouped existing systems into: • • • Cumulative energy demand (CED) systems, which focus on energy consumption Life cycle analysis (LCA) systems, which focus on environmental aspects Total quality assessment (TQA) systems, which evaluate the different dimensions of sustainability (ecological, economical, and social aspects) Systems for sustainability assessment of buildings This division should not be strictly considered because many assessment systems do not fit perfectly into one category. CED systems are often monodimensional and aim at measuring sustainability of the building through energy-related indicators. LCA systems measure the impact of the building on the environment by assessing the emission of one or more chemical substances related to the building construction and operation. LCA can have one or more evaluation parameters, whereas TQA systems are multidimensional because they assess several parameters. The first two categories of systems have a quantitative approach to the assessment, whereas a TQA system generally has a qualitative or quantitative approach for different criteria. CED systems CED systems measure and evaluate the energy consumption of the building. Energy is furnished to buildings to cover needs such as heating, ventilation, air conditioning, water heating, lighting, entertainment, and telecommunications. The specification of the energy request is of primary importance because CED systems can refer to just some of these consumptions (often, just heating and hot water consumption) or they can consider all needs without distinction regarding the final use. CED systems evaluate the energy consumption over a time unit that generally corresponds to 1 y. However, monthly or semiannual evaluations have been proposed (Marszal et al., 2011). Energy consumption for residential buildings in developed countries at middle latitudes assumes values of hundreds of kWh/m2 net floor surface per year (kWh/m2y); e.g., heat consumption of traditional US buildings is 300 kWh/m2y on average (Butera, 2010). Energy consumption in European buildings is generally lower than in the United States, but still much higher than current technological achievable standards, with values of 108 kWh/m2y in Greece, 113 kWh/m2y in Italy, 172 kWh/m2y in Germany, 178 kWh/m2y in Poland, and 261 kWh/m2y in the United Kingdom (Butera, 2010). Referring to traditional buildings, operating energy consumption dominates the building energy demand with 80% of the total during the life cycle of the building (Suzuki and Oka, 1998). A small energy percentage is consumed for material manufacture and transportation, construction, and demolition. Consequently, energy-saving policies have typically given attention to operation energy performance only (EC, 2010). However, energy consumption standards in new buildings are largely decreasing under the pressure of more stringent requirements (Figure 15.4). This trend reconsiders the way in which CED systems assess the sustainability of buildings. In the United States, zero-energy buildings (or ZEB) are discussed in the Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA, 2007), whereas the recast of the European Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EC, 2010) has established that all new private buildings should be ZEB after 2020, whereas public buildings are required to achieve this standard by 2018. A ZEB can be defined as a building with a very high level of energy efficiency, so that the overall annual primary 507 CHAPTER 15 Sustainability assessment in the built environment 400 Denmark 350 Max energy consumption kWh/m2a 508 Norway 300 Germany 250 200 150 100 50 0 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 2020 2025 Year FIGURE 15.4 Energy requirements in some European building codes over the years (data taken from national regulations) in kWh/m2y and zero-energy standard forced by the 31/2010 directive in 2020 for private buildings and in 2018 for public buildings. energy consumption is equal to the on-site energy production from renewable energy sources. A universally accepted definition of ZEB is still lacking, and several proposed methodologies for ZEB calculations differ for the metric of the analysis (energy, CO2 emission, costs), the balancing time, and the type of energy use considered in the assessment (Marszal et al., 2011). Table 15.1 reports some recently proposed definitions of ZEB. As highly efficient buildings are built, the energy needs during construction and demolition processes, together with the embodied energy in construction materials, become relatively more significant. Hernandez and Kenny (2010) have defined the life cycle zero-energy building (LC-ZEB) concept for energy consumption equity in a whole-life perspective. A life cycle evaluation of energy use implies enlarging time and space boundaries in the assessment (Suzuki and Oka, 1998) and represents the trend for energy-based sustainability assessment in the construction sector. Overall, CED systems adopt a monodimensional analysis that considers the energy flux only. Apart from an energy analysis, some researchers have accounted for other measurement units, such as exergy or emergy. Exergy is the maximum useful work that brings the system into a heat reservoir equilibrium, whereas emergy is the available solar energy directly and indirectly used in a transformation. These units of measurement are related to thermodynamic principles of resource use and may be more appropriate than energy to evaluate building consumption (Marszal et al., 2011), although energy data are more common in literature. The limits of monodimensional analyses have led to promote systems that consider more assessment criteria. Systems for sustainability assessment of buildings Table 15.1 Definitions of Net ZEB by Order of Appearance Author Definition Gilijamse (1995) A zero-energy house is defined as a house where no fossil fuels are consumed, and annual electricity consumption equals annual electricity production. Unlike the autarkic situation, the electricity grid acts as a virtual buffer with annually balanced delivers and returns. A zero-energy home is one that optimally combines commercially available renewable energy technology with the state-of-the-art energy efficiency construction techniques. A zero-energy home may or may not be grid-connected. In a zero-energy home, annual energy consumption is equal to the annual energy production. Homes that utilize solar thermal and solar photovoltaic (PV) technologies to generate as much energy as their yearly load are referred to as net zero-energy solar homes (ZESH). A ZEB is a residential or commercial building with greatly reduced energy needs through efficiency gains such that the balance of energy needs can be supplied with renewable energy technology. A net zero-energy commercial building is a high-performance commercial building designed, constructed, and operated: (i) to require a greatly reduced quantity of energy to operate; (ii) to meet the balance of energy needs from sources of energy that do not produce greenhouse gases; (iii) to act in a manner that will result in no net emissions of greenhouse gases; and (iv) to be economically viable. Net ZEB are buildings that over the course of a year are neutral, meaning that they deliver as much energy to the supply grids as they use from the grid. Seen in these terms, they do not need any fossil fuels for heating, cooling, lighting, or other energy uses, although they sometimes draw energy from the grid. The nearly zero or very low amount of energy required should be covered to a very significant extent by energy from renewable sources, including energy from renewable sources produced on-site or nearby. An LC-ZEB is one in which the primary energy used in the building in operation plus the energy embodied within its constituent materials and systems, including energy-generating ones, over the life of the building is equal to or less than the energy produced by its renewable energy systems over their lifetime. A ZEB combines highly energy-efficient building designs, technical systems, and equipment to minimize the heating and electricity demand with on-site renewable energy generation typically including a solar hot water production system and a rooftop PV system. A ZEB can be off-grid or on-grid. Iqbal (2004) Charron (2005) Torcellini et al. (2006) EISA (2007) Laustsen (2008) EC, European Commission (2010) Hernandez and Kenny (2010) Lund et al. (2011) Source: From Kibert (2012) and Berardi (2013a,b,c). 509 510 CHAPTER 15 Sustainability assessment in the built environment LCA systems Several systems have been developed for the environmental assessment of manufactured products according to a life cycle perspective, such as environmental risk assessment (ERA), material flow accounting (MFA), input output analysis (IOA), and LCA. These systems generally breakdown products and processes into elementary parts. LCA is the most commonly used of these systems. It divides a building into elementary activities and raw materials to assess the environmental impact over a life cycle from manufacture and transportation to deconstruction and recycling (Seo et al., 2006). LCA is a robust methodology refined on the basis of manufacturing sector experiences. It consists of four phases (ISO 14040, 2006): the goal and definition phase; the life cycle inventory; the life cycle impact assessment; and the improvement assessment phase. LCA systems allow the comparison of products on the basis of the same functional quality. This describes the quality of a product service as well as its duration (e.g., square meter of a building element with a substitution rate of 50 y). The scientific rigor of LCA is inherent to assessments from cradle-to-grave phases, although it is limited by uncertainties in collecting data relating to building processes. LCA diffusion in the building sector is limited by a lack of information (Seo et al., 2006). In fact, the specificities of the construction processes require data for every building material in any region. Databases have been created for LCA evaluations and implemented in specifically designed software in several geographic areas: BEES in the United States, BEQUEST and ENVEST in England; SIMAPRO and Eco-Quantum in the Netherlands; Ecoinvent in Switzerland; and GaBi in Germany. However, these databases are only valid for assessments in a specific region. The United Nations Environment Program’s Sustainable Buildings and Climate Initiative (UNEP-SBCI, 2010) has recently adopted the common carbon metric. This system allows emissions from buildings around the world to be consistently assessed and compared. The assessment reports the carbon intensity, which is the evaluation in weight equivalent of carbon dioxide emitted per square meter per year (kgCO2e/m2y). The assessment is mainly based on the operational consumption, but it can be extended to the whole life cycle of the building. An obstacle for LCA diffusion is its specialist structure: outputs of LCA systems are represented by environmental impacts expressed through chemical substances, which are not easily understood by construction sector stakeholders (Langston and Ding, 2001). Another limit that has been discussed is related to the fact that LCA systems do not consider social and economic impacts. To fit this limit, some studies combine the disaggregation analysis necessary for an LCA with an evaluation of economic costs. Such an approach is interesting for the building sector because life cycle cost (LCC) analysis represents a familiar paradigm to construction stakeholders. Combined LCA LCC can be useful to evaluate environmental and economic aspects in life terms by assigning a price to the different chemical elements. For example, BEES and GaBi systems already permit the selection of cost-effective environmentally preferable products. Systems for sustainability assessment of buildings TQA systems TQA systems aim at considering the three aspects of sustainability of buildings: environmental issues such as GHG emission and energy consumption; economic aspects such as investment and equity; and social requirements such as accessibility and quality of spaces. The most common TQA systems are the multicriteria systems. They are largely increasing the attention for sustainable assessment of buildings because they are well related to market interests and stakeholders’ culture (Newsham et al., 2009). Multicriteria systems base the evaluation on criteria measured by several parameters and compare real performances with reference ones. Each criteria has a certain amount of available points over the total assessment, whereas the evaluation of sustainability comes from summing the results of assessed criteria. Multicriteria systems are generally easy to understand and can be implemented in steps for each criteria. Moreover, step implementation is allowed during the analysis; in fact, these systems enable the assessment of the building at several stages, from the concept design to the final construction, and can be used during construction. A critical aspect of multicriteria systems is their additional structure (Hahn, 2008). COMPARISON BETWEEN SYSTEMS Several multicriteria systems exist worldwide. Because many are just the adaptation of more famous ones to a regional level or for specific scopes, only the most adopted systems are considered here. These are BREEAM, LEED, CASBEE, SBTool, and Green Globes (Berardi, 2012). Other famous rating systems are the Australian Building Greenhouse Rating (ABGR), the Green Home Evaluation Manual (GHEM), the Chinese Three Star, the US Assessment and Rating System (STARS), and the South African sustainable building assessment tool (SBAT). The United Kingdom was the first country to release a multicriteria system for sustainability assessment before this concept entered into the agenda of international policies with the Rio Conference. The British Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM) was planned at the beginning of the 1990s by the British Research Establishment and was released in 1993. The system has a large diffusion in the United Kingdom, where almost 20,000 buildings have been certified (Figure 15.5), and several hundreds of thousands have registered for assessment since it was first launched in 1990. Since 2009, as a consequence of the worldwide attention garnered for this system, an international version has been released and BREEAM has released versions for Canada, Australia, and Hong Kong. The system is differentiated for 11 building typologies and its evaluations are expressed as percentage of successful over total available points: 25% for pass classification; 40% for good; 55% for very good; 70% for excellent; and 85% for outstanding. The evaluation categories are management, health and well-being, energy, transport, water, materials, land use, ecology, pollution, and innovation. 511 512 CHAPTER 15 Sustainability assessment in the built environment The most well-known TQA system is LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), which was released in 1998 by the US Green Building Council (USGBC). LEED allocates points to incentivize building project teams to comply with requirements that address the social, environmental, and economic outcomes identified by USGBC. Points are allocated through a weighting process whereby a credit receives one or more LEED points based on each credit’s relative effectiveness. The more effective a building is at addressing the goals of the system, the more points it receives. The fourth version of this system was released at the end of 2013. This system is currently available for several building typologies (Table 15.2). There are six evaluation categories to obtain the 100 possible BREEAM project certifications Total floor area (million m2) 18,000 50 16,000 45 14,000 40 35 12,000 30 10,000 25 8,000 20 6,000 15 4,000 10 2,000 5 0 0 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 FIGURE 15.5 Diffusion of BREEAM certifications toward the years. From BRE (2014). Table 15.2 Current Available LEED Systems Building Design 1 Construction Building Operations 1 Maintenance New construction Core and shell Schools Retail Hospitality Data centers Warehouses and distribution centers Health care Existing buildings Schools Retail Hospitality Data centers Warehouses and distribution centers Interior Design 1 Construction Commercial interiors Retail Hospitality Homes Neighborhood Development Homes and multifamily low rise Multifamily mid-rise Plan Built Project Systems for sustainability assessment of buildings points of the standard: location and transportation; sustainable site; water efficiency; energy and atmosphere; material and resources; and indoor environment quality. A weighting approach in LEED was introduced in version 3 (2009); the basic approach is that each of the LEED credits are independently evaluated along each impact category in a matrix-style format with credits as rows, impact categories as columns, and associations between credits and impact categories as individual cells. For each cell, an association between credit and impact category is determined and given a weight that depends on the relative strength of that association (i.e., credit outcome weighting). The weighting is established according to the goals to which a LEED project should answer: reverse contribution to global climate change; enhance individual human health and well-being; protect and restore water resources; protect, enhance, and restore biodiversity and ecosystem services; promote sustainable and regenerative material resources cycles; build a greener economy; and enhance social equity, environmental justice, and community quality of life. LEED points accumulated are divided in the following categories: at least 40 points for certified buildings; 50 for silver; 60 for gold; and 80 for platinum. Although released in the United States, GBC has diffused worldwide over the years, and recently the World GBC has opened regional chapters in Europe, Africa, America, and Asia. At the end of May 2013, almost 60,000 buildings were registered for certifications, of which almost 50,000 were in the United States, whereas the registered LEED projects were 1,156 in China, 808 in the United Arab Emirates, 638 in Brazil, and 405 in India. Current requests for new certifications for buildings are pending in 110 countries (Berardi, 2012). CASBEE (Comprehensive Assessment System for Building Environmental Efficiency) is a Japanese rating system developed in 2001 that is also available in English. CASBEE covers a family of assessment tools based on a life cycle evaluation: predesign; new construction; existing buildings; and renovation (CASBEE, 2010). This system is based on the concept of closed ecosystems and considers two assessment categories, building performance and environmental load. Building performance covers criteria such as indoor environment, quality of services, and outdoor environment, whereas environmental loads cover criteria such as energy, resources and materials, reuse and reusability, and off-site environment. By relating the previous two main criteria, CASBEE results are presented as a measure of eco-efficiency on a graph with environmental loads on one axis and quality on the other, so that sustainable buildings for CASBEE have the lowest environmental loads and highest quality. Two hundred buildings have been certified with this system, although the number is rapidly increasing. At the end of the 1990s, the Sustainable Building Council promoted an internationalization of rating systems under the leadership of Natural Resources Canada (NRC). Toward this initiative a common protocol, SBMethod, was developed. Using the general scheme, several countries have proposed national versions of this system, such as Verde in Spain, SBTool PT in Portugal, and SBTool CZ in the Czech Republic. In Italy, this protocol was implemented in 2000 as SBTool IT before evolving in ITACA. Ten Italian regions have already adopted 513 CHAPTER 15 Sustainability assessment in the built environment modified versions of this system to more aptly cover regional specificities. In 2005, adapting the Canadian version of BREEAM, the Green Globe Initiative (GBI) launched a new rating system known as Green Globes. Criteria for this include project management, site, energy, water, indoor environment, resource, building materials, and solid waste. A critical aspect of multicriteria systems regards the selection of criteria and the weights given to them. These elements show which aspects of building performance are given more consideration in sustainability assessments. Figure 15.6 shows weights assigned by these five systems grouping the criteria of each into seven main categories. The selection of these categories was based on main sustainability building aspects (Langston and Ding, 2001) and later (Berardi, 2012): site selection, energy efficiency, water efficiency, materials and resources, indoor environmental quality, and waste and pollution. The category “others” contains criteria that do not fit into the other six categories. For LEED, version 2 was used for this comparison. Credits assigned in the LEED system for low-emitting materials were assigned to the IEQ category; however, they could also be assigned to the waste and pollution category. Management and innovation criteria have been included in the category “others.” For example, LEED assigns 7% of its credits to innovations, BREEAM has 15% for construction management, and Green Globe has 12.5% for project management. Moreover, in the category “others,” there are points given by CASBEE for mitigation and off-site solar energy, and by GBTool for the cultural perception of sustainability. It is interesting to note that energy efficiency among assessment systems in Figure 15.6 is always considered the most important category (weight average among the six systems, 25.5%), followed by IEQ (17.7%), waste and pollution (15.9%), sustainable site (13.2%), and materials and resources (11.5%). 40 BREEAM LEED v2 CASBEE SBTool IEQ Waste and pollution Green Globes 35 Percentage (%) 514 30 25 20 15 10 5 0 Sustainable site Energy efficiency Water efficiency Material & resources Others (econinno) Assessment categories FIGURE 15.6 Comparison of the weight assigned by five sustainable assessment systems for building, grouping the respective criteria into seven categories. Readapted from Berardi (2012). Systems for sustainability assessment of buildings The Green Globes assigns a higher percentage of its assessment weight to the energy-efficient (36%). This is established by the inclusion of criteria that are not presented in other systems, such as the correct size energy-efficient system or energy-efficient transportation. Above-averages have no rigorous meaning, standard deviations among systems are high, and percentages may change if other versions of the systems are considered. However, studies have shown similar structures among sustainability rating systems (Smith et al., 2006). Finally, it should be remembered that evaluation criteria and weights comprise just one of the ways to compare systems. Fowler and Rauch (2006) compared the aforementioned systems for other properties (applicability, usability, communicability), again finding some similarities. Differences among the systems have led to the creation of the Sustainable Building Alliance to establish common evaluation categories and to improve comparability among systems (Berardi, 2013b). Many studies have discussed the limits of rating systems. Unscientific criteria selection has been criticized by Rumsey and McLellan (2005) and by Schendler and Udall (2005). Bower et al. (2006) stated the lack of overall life cycle perspective in evaluations is a critical aspect of TQA systems. The US National Institute of Standards and Technology analyzed the LEED system from an LCA perspective, and this is not a completely reliable sustainability assessment system (Scheuer and Keoleian, 2002). From Figure 15.6, it is clear that in the selection of assessment criteria, environmental aspects in existing systems receive much more attention than economic and social aspects (Sev, 2009). Recently, some multicriteria rating systems more closely related to a TQA have been released. For example, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Nachhaltiges Bauen (DGNB), available since 2009, aims at evaluating sustainability through the quality of the building; economic aspects emerge explicitly and, in the category of technical quality, paradigms such as performance, durability, ease of cleaning, as well as dismantling and recycling are considered, too. More attention is given to social aspects than in other rating systems. Functional aspects such as space efficiency, safety, risk of hazardous incidents, handicap accessibility, suitability for conversion, public access, and art and social integration are also considered. Nine-hundred thirteen projects have been assessed through this system, and this number is increasing rapidly. CHARACTERISTICS OF CERTIFIED BUILDINGS In the present section, assessment results with a sustainability rating system are used as a proxy variable to analyze the characteristics of certified buildings. In fact, the results of constructed buildings can be useful to understand the state of the art of sustainability assessment of buildings. This section reports results more extensively described by Berardi (2012). Sustainable rating systems reviewed previously are voluntary standards, and the adoption of which is often motivated by signaling reasons. This means that 515 CHAPTER 15 Sustainability assessment in the built environment the owner of the building decides to perform a sustainability assessment to communicate something to the market and the public (Mlecnik et al., 2010). According to King and Toffel (2007) and Berardi (2012), signaling and intrinsic benefits are mixed together when sustainable rating systems are used. In their analysis, this clearly emerged from the decreasing number of buildings that obtained a larger number of credits than the minimum number for a given certification level. Buildings generally aim at an established certification level and rarely show higher performance than the minimum ones for the given certification level. Although there is space for improvement in LEED (Bower et al., 2006) and later (Hahn, 2008; Newsham et al., 2009), this system is the most diffused system worldwide; hence, it was chosen for the following analysis. A sample of 490 buildings was selected in the GBC database from already-built projects assessed with version 2 of LEED. The sample was composed of buildings that had allowed diffusion of their evaluation data. Selected buildings belonged to several typologies, with a majority being commercial (52%) and residential (30%) buildings. The time of construction was very similar among buildings, from 2002 to 2009. Figure 15.7 shows points earned on average over the total possible points. The data suggest several considerations: • Sustainable sites is an important category in the overall evaluation; however, assessed buildings reach less than 50% of the available points on average. The selection of a sustainable site is often influenced by property possibilities, municipal policies, and previous land uses, making a free selection difficult. Energy and atmosphere is the category with the largest number of points, but with the lowest rate of successful points over possible points (38%). • 100 90 80 Percentage (%) 516 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 Sustainable sites Water efficiency Certified Energy and atmosphere Silver Material and resources Gold Platinum IEQ Innovation Average Categories FIGURE 15.7 Earned points over the total possible points in each assessment category for different classes of 490 LEED-rated buildings (Berardi, 2012). Systems for sustainability assessment of buildings • • • • Indoor environmental quality is the second category for available points but the first for contributing to the total score, and earned points on average are 56% of available points. Water efficiency receives only a few points in the standard, despite its importance for a sustainable building. The most probable reason for this is that few actions can lead to a significant efficiency in the use of this resource and, in fact, buildings obtained 62% of the available points. Material and resources category has a considerable number of available points, but effectively earned ones are few, with an average of 40%. Innovation and design process category has a low number of available points and, on average, buildings are successful in this category (66%). Figure 15.7 also represents the percentages for buildings of different classes. In platinum buildings, the percentage of earned points in the energy and atmosphere category increases with respect to other classes of buildings, becoming the most contributing category to the overall score in absolute value. However, if compared with the total available points in this category, obtained points have a lower percentage than in other categories. The material and resources category is characterized by the high percentage of points. The high percentage of success in the innovation category can be justified by the freedom the LEED system allows for points in this category. Moreover, it is interesting to look at the results for the water efficiency category; the importance of this resource, together with the ease of building systems for water harvesting, suggest that water efficiency can be reached independently from the rate of certification. The comparison between achieved points in silver and gold buildings shows that the improvement in the assessment is slightly influenced by the material and resources category. Conversely, a larger improvement occurs in the energy and atmosphere category. Figure 15.8 disaggregates the statistics in Figure 15.7 by representing the earned points for any of the 69 criteria in LEED version 2. Figure 15.7 shows which points are more often reached. In the indoor environmental quality category, criteria from IEQ 1.0 to 5.0 are earned by a high percentage of buildings in any class; these criteria correspond to the air-monitoring system, an increase in ventilation, management of air quality during construction, use of low-emitting materials, and control of pollutant source. This suggests that sustainable buildings have learned how to achieve good indoor quality or, on the contrary, that the required target levels are in line with or below the common practice of sustainable buildings. Energy-related criteria are among the less achieved ones. In particular, the percentage of buildings with renewable energy production is low for any class of buildings, with only 1% of certified buildings in the selected sample able to produce 20% of energy from renewable sources (E&A 2.3). High energy performance (E&A 1) is partially achieved, and many buildings make only limited choices toward optimization: high success rates for E&A 1.1 and 1.2 (optimize energy performance through lighting power and lighting controls) but low success 517 CHAPTER 15 Sustainability assessment in the built environment Percentage (%) 100 80 60 40 20 0 Certified Silver Gold Platinum Class of buildings Average Percentage (%) 100 60 40 20 Certified Silver Gold Platinum Class of buildings Average Percentage (%) 100 Average E&A 1.1 E&A 1.2 E&A 1.3 E&A 1.4 E&A 1.5 E&A 2.1 E&A 2.2 E&A 2.3 E&A 3.0 E&A 4.0 E&A 5.0 E&A 6.0 Average M&R 1.1 M&R 1.2 M&R 1.3 M&R 2.1 M&R 2.2 M&R 3.1 M&R 3.2 M&R 4.1 M&R 4.2 M&R 5.1 M&R 5.2 M&R 6.0 M&R 7.0 80 60 40 20 0 Certified Silver Gold Platinum Class of buildings 100 Percentage (%) SS 1.0 SS 2.0 SS 3.0 SS 4.1 SS 4.2 SS 4.3 SS 4.4 SS 5.1 SS 5.2 SS 6.1 SS 6.2 SS 7.1 SS 7.2 SS 8.0 WE 1.1 WE 1.2 WE 2.0 WE 3.1 WE 3.2 80 0 80 60 40 20 0 Certified Silver Gold Platinum Class of buildings 100 Percentage (%) 518 80 60 40 20 0 Certified Silver Gold Platinum Class of buildings Average IEQ 1.0 IEQ 2.0 IEQ 3.1 IEQ 3.2 IEQ 4.1 IEQ 4.2 IEQ 4.3 IEQ 4.4 IEQ 5.0 IEQ 6.1 IEQ 6.2 IEQ 7.1 IEQ 7.2 IEQ 8.1 FIGURE 15.8 Percentages of earned points over total points in several categories of the LEED system in buildings of different classes. From Berardi (2012). Systems for sustainability assessment of buildings rates for E&A 1.3, 1.4, and 1.5 criteria, which are related to energy saving of HVAC, equipment, and appliances. Urban and brownfield redevelopment criteria (SS 2.0, 3.0) have low success rates, confirming that the possibility of selecting a “more sustainable” land occurs after the priority of construction. On the contrary, criteria regarding alternative transportation (Public Transportation Access SS 4.1 and Bicycle Storage and Changing Rooms SS 4.2) have a high success rate. A similar discourse is valid for other criteria in the sustainable site category, such as the mitigation of the heat island effect (SS 7.2). In the water efficiency category, water use reduction has a high percentage of success among all certification levels with values that, in certified buildings, go from 60% for 20% reduction in water use (WE 3.1) to 37% for 30% reduction (WE 3.2). In contrast, the implementation of innovative wastewater technologies (WE 2.0) represents a complicated target for best-rated buildings. Finally, criteria in the material and resources category have different behavior. In fact, high successful percentages are reached for construction waste management (M&R 2.1, 2.2) and use of local and regional materials (M&R 5.1, 5.2) in any class of buildings. In contrast, other criteria in this category show a low success rate even in platinum buildings, and among these are criteria for adoption of building reuse materials (M&R 1.1, 1.2, 1.3) and rapidly renewable materials (M&R 6.0). LIMITS AND TRENDS IN SUSTAINABILITY ASSESSMENT OF BUILDINGS As described in the previous section, single and multidimension systems for sustainability assessment of buildings exist. However, assessments through a single dimension have received much criticism (Nijkamp et al., 1990). An increasing awareness of externalities, risk, and long-term effects have led to a larger diffusion for multicriteria systems (Janikowski et al., 2000). Available multicriteria systems have been accused of a lack of completeness because they neglect some criteria; e.g., they rarely take into account the economic and social dimensions of sustainability (Ding, 2008). Moreover, by neglecting the evaluation of economic aspects, current systems allow and incentivize an additive logic, which has been largely criticized. The importance of economic and social evaluations has recently emerged in defining systems for developing countries (Gibberd, 2005). Limits of sustainability assessments suggest that more complete rating systems are necessary to assess the multidimensional aspects of sustainability. A comprehensive approach to the evaluation has led to design systems that require more detailed information. For example, the last version of GBTool comprises more than 120 criteria. However, the complexity has been pointed out as a limit for the diffusion of current rating systems (Mlecnik et al., 2010). In fact, when sustainability rating systems are perceived as too complex by building 519 520 CHAPTER 15 Sustainability assessment in the built environment stakeholders, then sustainable practices are slowly adopted (Albino and Berardi, 2012). A balance between completeness in coverage and simplicity of use is necessary to spread sustainability assessment systems. The larger diffusion of multicriteria TQA systems than LCA ones is probably because of their simplicity and checklist structure. In fact, although LCA analysis is often more rigorous than that of multicriteria systems, they are still complex and their diffusion is limited to a few specialists. The importance of simple systems is also emerging as a factor in making them useful as design tools by introducing them when only preliminary information is available. The review among some TQA systems has shown a trend for whole-life perspective analysis as the assessment is moving to cover the operation phases and sometimes the dismantling phase. An open aspect of sustainability rating systems regards possible regional adaptations in assessment criteria. The experience of BREEAM and SBC-ITACA, similar to many other experiences, shows that regions are adapting the original system to local characteristics and priorities with regional criteria. It is evident that sustainability evaluation needs site adaptations to fit sustainable requirements with contextual aspects. This approach is shared more and more worldwide. An important trend in sustainability assessment is seen in the increasing attention to the neighborhood and construction site. First, assessment systems considered the building a manufactured product, and evaluated it almost in isolation. However, the importance given to the surrounding site is largely increasing; e.g., available points for sustainable sites have increased from 15% to 23% from version 2.2 to version 3 of LEED. The next section shows how the rating systems have recently evolved to consider aggregation of buildings, neighbors, and communities. SUSTAINABILITY ASSESSMENT OF URBAN COMMUNITIES In this section, the most internationally well-known systems for sustainability assessment of urban communities through multicriterion ratings are described and compared. The considered systems were selected for their established worldwide diffusion and resonance with the help of institutions and organizations actively involved in promoting their use. This criterion resulted in neglecting the systems that have been developed for specific cases and communities (Cartwright, 2000) or the indicators developed within research projects (Xing et al., 2009). However, these last references were considered for the framework of comparison and for the discussion about the critical aspects of the selected systems. DESCRIPTION OF THE SYSTEMS Current systems for communities were developed within the past years as an evolution of sustainability assessments systems for buildings. They maintain the Sustainability assessment of urban communities logic and structure of the analogous building assessment systems, but they have gone beyond the building scale by redefining the assessment criteria. The most well-known systems are BREEAM Communities (Com), CASBEE for Urban Development (UD), and LEED for Neighborhood Development (ND). In addition to their worldwide adoption, they were selected because BREEAM, CASBEE, and LEED protocols have already reached a significant diffusion for sustainability assessments of buildings, and they are quickly diffusing to communities. In 2009, the British Building Research Establishment launched BREEAM Com. This system received an update in 2012. The new version is simpler, less prescriptive, and better-aligned with the planning process with respect to the original one. BREEAM Com applies the BREEAM methodology to the community level and can be used for both new and regeneration development projects. BREEAM Com assesses the environmental, social, and economic impacts of a community. The assessment criteria are divided into eight categories: climate and energy; resources; place shaping; transport and movement; ecology and biodiversity; buildings; business and economy; and community (BREEAM, 2009). At this time, eight projects have been certified under BREEAM Communities, and another 18 are currently registered and undergoing assessment, with the size of development ranging from 2 to 179 ha. CASBEE UD results, similarly to those for the analogous system for buildings, are presented as a measure of eco-efficiency on a graph with loads on one axis and quality on the other. Sustainability for CASBEE corresponds to the lowest environmental loads and the highest quality and performance. The performance criteria consider aspects as the natural environment, quality of services, and the contribution to the local environment, whereas the environmental load covers aspects related to the impact on local environment, social infrastructure, and energy and material consumptions. CASBEE UD was developed in 2007 to assess urban areas (CASBEE, 2007), and since then it has officially been used as a self-assessment tool in many projects. CASBEE UD partially promotes local stakeholders’ engagement in the choice of the weighting coefficients assigned to different criteria. This often uses a qualitative assessment. LEED for ND is a system developed by the USGBC in partnership with Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). It was developed in 2009 for the United States, and it was later applied in Canada and China; versions for other countries are currently being developed (LEED, 2009). LEED ND places emphasis on the site selection, design, and construction elements that bring buildings and infrastructures together into a neighborhood and relates this to its landscape and regional context. Smart location, neighborhood pattern, eco-design, green infrastructure, and buildings are the main categories considered by LEED ND (LEED, 2009). Moreover, LEED ND rates innovative practices and regional priorities as the sustainable features of a community. 521 522 CHAPTER 15 Sustainability assessment in the built environment COMPARISON BETWEEN THE SYSTEMS The systems described in the previous section are compared according to the assessment criteria. First, it is important to clarify the dimensions of an urban community in the different systems. BREEAM allows consideration of sizes from 10 units (small projects) to 6,000 units (large projects) as an urban community; however, it also considers bespoke projects of more than 6,000 units after confirmation by the British Research Establishment. LEED suggests considering communities with an extension less than 1.3 km2 and suggests dividing the project if the surface exceeds this value (LEED, 2009). For example, the pilot projects that have been assessed with LEED ND have an average project size of 1.2 km2 and a median size of 0.12 km2. In particular, the smallest size was 687 m2, whereas the largest was approximately 51.8 km2 (LEED, 2009). No indication regarding the dimensions of an urban community is presented in CASBEE UD. These data confirm that the dimension of a community has been particularly heterogeneous, ranging from a single building to a medium city. Each sustainability assessment system bases its evaluation on several parameters whose rates are generally obtained comparing real performances with referenced ones (benchmarks). However, a few criteria are evaluated by looking at the presence of an element. For example, LEED ND enables earning 1 point for the presence of a bicycle network without going into the assessment of its characteristics. Points earned in this simple way are rarer than those in the other systems. In multicriterion systems, each criterion has a certain weight over the total assessment, and the overall sustainability evaluation comes from the weighted sum of the results for all the criteria. A fundamental aspect in multicriterion systems is the selection of the criteria. Unfortunately, reasons for the choice of the criteria are not explicitly discussed by any of the responsible agencies (Haapio, 2012). Table 15.3 reports the main categories of the assessment criteria that are used by the three systems considered here. Similarities between the main categories of the different systems exist. For example, all consider the sustainability of the land in terms of ecology and natural environments. However, other sustainability aspects are considered in only some systems. BREEAM Com, for example, attributes more importance to business opportunities, whereas social aspects such as the history, tradition, and culture preservation are only considered in CASBEE UD. Using the respective manuals, the assessment criteria of each system were divided into seven main categories. These categories were chosen according to both the structure of the systems and the requirements of a sustainable urban community (Kellett, 2009). Selected categories were sustainable land (sustainable planning, design and buildings, microclimates), location (previous land use, reduction of sprawl), transportation (pedestrian, bicycle, or public transportation), resource and energy (use and selection of materials, waste management, energy production, and efficiency), ecology (biodiversity), economy and business (employment and new opportunities), and well-being (quality of life). Table 15.3 Main Categories in the Three Sustainability Assessment Systems Considered in This Chapter CASBEE for Urban Development BREEAM Communities Performance Load LEED for ND Climate and energy: reducing the contribution to climate change through energy efficiency and passive design Natural environment, microclimates, and ecosystems Resources: emphasizes sustainable and efficient use of resources through construction management Service functions for the designated area Environmental impact on microclimates, façades, and landscape Social infrastructure Place shaping: provides a framework for the design and layout of local area Contribution to the local community: history, culture, scenery, and revitalization Smart location and linkage: emphasizes development of preferred urban areas, brownfield redevelopment, bicycle network or housing and jobs proximity, and wetlands and water bodies conservation Neighborhood pattern and design: focuses on walkable streets, public transportation access, reduction of car-dependency compact development, and also mixed-use neighborhood centers and mixed-income communities Green infrastructure and buildings: decreasing environmental impact caused by construction and maintenance of buildings and infrastructure; energy and water efficiencies are mainly emphasized; some attention to waste management Innovation and design process Transportation: focuses on sustainable public transportations, walking, and cycling Community: encourages integrating the community with surrounding areas and emphasizes mixed use Ecology and biodiversity: aims at conserving the site ecological value by reducing pollution Business: aims at providing opportunities for local businesses Buildings: focuses on the sustainability performance of buildings Management of the local environment Regional priority CHAPTER 15 Sustainability assessment in the built environment Content analysis was used to attribute the criteria of each system to the previous categories. However, the organization of assessment criteria into the previous seven categories resulted in some difficulties because the systems were not easily and fully accessible and criteria among systems did not perfectly overlap. Figure 15.9 depicts the categories with a high frequency of occurrence in the varied systems. The results show that great importance is assigned to the sustainable use of the land, ecological measures, and sustainable transportations. On the contrary, economic themes are scarcely considered. The average weights among systems for each category were 33% for sustainable land, 9% for location, 13% for transportation, 16% for resources and energy, 21% for ecology, 3% for economy and opportunity, and 5% for well-being. Surprisingly, existing systems assign a low weight to energy and resourcerelated topics. This is significantly different from the sustainability assessment of buildings where energy-related criteria represent the most influencing category (Berardi, 2012). For example, the weight assigned to the criteria related to building energy efficiency, solar orientation, on-site renewable energy sources, and district heating and cooling was only 8 points more than the possible 110 in LEED ND. Together with the attribution of criteria in the seven categories, the analysis showed the level of detail and the difference among criteria in each system. The number of criteria used by each system is particularly different. For example, transportation is assessed through 11 criteria within BREEAM Com (over the 51 parameters used by this system), whereas fewer criteria are considered in the other two systems. This also corresponds to different weights that transportation criteria have: 22% of total weight in BREEAM Com; 8% in CASBEE UD; and 15% in 50 45 BREEAM Com CASBEE UD LEED ND 40 Percentage (%) 524 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0 Sustainable land Location Trasportation Energy and resources Ecology Economy Well-being opportunity Assessment categories FIGURE 15.9 Comparison of the weight given by three sustainability assessment systems for urban communities grouping the assessment criteria into seven categories (Berardi, 2013c). Sustainability assessment of urban communities LEED ND. In particular, LEED ND is more focused on the promotion of a compact design of the community, favoring walkable streets. This reminds us of the different status and types of public transportation in the United Kingdom and United States where previous systems have been developed. As a consequence, US communities are first interested in increasing compactness to accommodate walkable streets and, second, they consider the public transportation (Berardi, 2013c). The different weights given to the location category are probably influenced by the different scopes and applications of the systems. LEED ND aims to be applied in new urban communities, whereas BREEAM Com is mainly focused on interventions of rehabilitation. This different field of application has probably discouraged assigning a high weight to location in BREEAM Com, because this category is generally satisfied in rehabilitation projects. The well-being category has received a low average weight in Figure 15.9. This is also related to the fact that only assessment parameters that exclusively referred to social aspects of the quality of life have been considered in this category. However, other parameters, such as bike transportation or urban microclimate, play a fundamental role for the quality of life. CHARACTERISTICS OF CERTIFIED COMMUNITIES In this section, a sample of certified communities with LEED ND system is used for a detailed examination of the characteristics of sustainable communities. LEED ND was chosen because there are a large number of assessed communities versus other rating systems. Forty-two communities assessed with LEED ND were considered. Table 15.4 gives the percentage of total and mean earned points of each assessment criteria. This allows consideration of the frequency of successfully achieved points and the criteria most influential on the final rate. The data suggest several considerations. In the smart location and linkage category, the selection of a sustainable site was often difficult because it was influenced by property possibilities and municipal policies. Moreover, the selection of a brownfield redevelopment was uncommon, whereas many communities preferred reduced automobile-dependence categories (Berardi, 2013c). The neighborhood pattern and design category had the largest number of points within LEED ND. Criteria in this category showed significant differences in their success rates; criteria such as the diversity of uses or the presence of walkable streets were commonly satisfied in assessed projects, whereas other criteria, such as the affordability of rental housing, the restoration of habitat, or wetlands and water bodies, were uncommon. The green construction and technology category showed that sampled communities were able to minimize site disturbance, reduce water use, and plan a storm water management. However, they became particularly unsuccessful with criteria such as building reuse and adaptive reuse, solar orientation, on-site energy generation, wastewater management, contaminant reduction, and district heating and cooling. This suggests that energy and resource efficiency is still difficult to 525 526 CHAPTER 15 Sustainability assessment in the built environment Table 15.4 Criteria of LEED ND Version 3 and Percentages of Total and Mean Earned Points Over the Total Possible Points Among the Assessment Categories in a Sample of Assessed Communities (Berardi, 2013c) Max. Available Points Smart location and linkage Smart location Imperiled species and ecological communities Wetland and water body conservation Agricultural land conservation Floodplain avoidance Preferred locations Brownfield redevelopment Locations with reduced automobile dependence Bicycle network and storage Housing and jobs proximity Steep slope protection Site design for habitat or wetlands and water body conservation Restoration of habitat or wetlands and water bodies Long-term conservation management of habitat Neighborhood pattern and design criteria Walkable streets Compact development Connected and open community Walkable streets Compact development Mixed-use neighborhood centers Mixed-income diverse communities Reduced parking footprint Street network Transit facilities Transportation demand management Access to civic and public spaces Access to recreation facilities Visitability and universal design Community outreach and involvement % of Communities That Earned Points 27 Prerequisite Prerequisite Mean Earned Points 16.8 Prerequisite Prerequisite Prerequisite 10 2 7 96 45 92 6.9 0.9 4.0 1 3 1 1 77 85 66 56 0.8 2.3 0.7 0.6 1 36 0.3 1 34 0.3 44 25.6 Prerequisite Prerequisite Prerequisite 12 6 4 7 96 87 99 80 6.1 2.9 3.3 5.3 1 2 1 2 73 80 63 55 0.7 1.3 0.6 0.8 1 1 1 2 89 88 63 90 0.9 0.9 0.6 0.9 Sustainability assessment of urban communities Table 15.4 Criteria of LEED ND Version 3 and Percentages of Total and Mean Earned Points Over the Total Possible Points Among the Assessment Categories in a Sample of Assessed Communities (Berardi, 2013c) Continued Max. Available Points Local food production Tree-lined and shaded streets Neighborhood schools Green construction and technology Certified green building Minimum building energy efficiency Minimum building water efficiency Construction activity pollution prevention Certified green buildings Building energy efficiency Building water efficiency Water-efficient landscaping Existing building reuse Historic resource preservation and adaptive use Minimize site disturbance during construction Stormwater management Heat island reduction Solar orientation On-site renewable energy sources District heating and cooling Infrastructure energy efficiency Wastewater management Recycled content in infrastructure Solid waste management infrastructure Light pollution reduction 1 2 1 29 % of Communities That Earned Points Mean Earned Points 27 40 40 0.4 0.4 0.3 13.3 5 2 1 1 1 1 86 73 40 40 18 18 2.9 1.5 0.6 0.6 0.2 0.2 1 82 0.8 4 1 1 3 2 1 1 1 1 86 75 32 30 15 22 22 53 53 2.9 0.8 0.3 0.3 0.2 0.2 0.2 0.5 0.5 1 64 0.6 Prerequisite Prerequisite Prerequisite Prerequisite achieve on the community scale, and that communities aiming at sustainability certification do not rigorously pursue solutions within this category. Moreover, results in Table 15.4 suggest that sustainable communities are generally able to reduce the impact of their material uses, although this ability is shown by selecting new virgin materials rather than by using recycled ones. 527 528 CHAPTER 15 Sustainability assessment in the built environment LIMITS OF SUSTAINABILITY ASSESSMENT OF COMMUNITIES This section discusses the following limits of sustainability; assessment systems of communities; assessment of a weak sustainability and lack of an appropriate assessment of social, environmental, and economic sustainability; static sustainability assessment; and minimal adaptability and lack of stakeholders’ engagement. Assessment of a weak sustainability Although the number of criteria that are considered in the sustainability assessment systems for communities is generally high (51 criteria in BREEAM Com, 80 in CASBEE UD, and 59 in LEED ND), every system is dominated by an environmentally biased approach. The analysis has also revealed that every system lacks integration of the different aspects and criteria but follows a strict additional approach. This weakness was recognized as a possible incentive to the promotion of weak sustainability (Berardi, 2013c). Bourdic and Salat (2012) criticized existing systems because they only assess the different criteria by comparison to benchmark values, and they stated that there is no quantitative evidence that a high-rated community emits less carbon or is more sustainable than a lower-rated one. Considering the often untransparent process for the selection of the criteria, their weights, and their benchmarks, previous criticisms are difficult to overcome. Moreover, the aggregated level of assessment, which synthesizes the evaluation in one single rate, reduces the ability to obtain a robust and transparent output (Mori and Christodoulou, 2012). An important leakage in existing systems involves the social features of sustainability. Although it is unavoidable that a sustainable community should promote social relationships and well-being of citizens, the analyzed systems poorly assess the importance of social life and the sense of citizenship. They misrepresent one of the main reasons for urban life. The low importance of social aspects is caused by the adoption of an approach that considers almost exclusively the physical and material properties of the built environment. On the contrary, the new interpretations of sustainability and the increasing awareness that the built environment is more than the physical space should lead to consideration of social criteria (Bond and Morrison-Saunders, 2011). Vallance et al. (2011) discussed the importance for the built environment to assume the status of the locus of a community, and they emphasized the importance of assessing the sense of community. This suggests that other criteria have to be considered. A proposal for a set of social indicators has been given by Albino and Dangelico (2012). Based on a review of country-relevant well-being indicators, they proposed three main domains of well-being criteria: material well-being; quality of life; and social inclusion. Moreover, they indicated 10 relevant dimensions with 45 indicators: • • • Material well-being: income and wealth, employment, and housing Quality of life: health, education, work life balance, political well-being, and safety Social inclusion: social cohesion and equity Sustainability assessment of urban communities Several of these indicators have been introduced in a recently proposed tool for city (CASBEE), which considers crime prevention and quality of housing for the living environment, educational, cultural, medical, and child care services for social services, and information pressure for social vitality (Murakami et al., 2011). Obviously, the application of previous criteria raises difficulties such as the lack of benchmarking data. A possible solution may be represented by parameters that compose the Better Index Life indicator, for which national open source values are available (OECD, 2011b). However, further studies are necessary to evaluate social sustainability parameters on the community scale. Another limitation in existing systems regards the misrepresentation of economic sustainability. Figure 15.9 showed that low importance is given in current systems to the ability to promote business and economic opportunities within a sustainable development. Reasons for this can be related to the strong attention to economic aspects historically given in the evaluations of development. However, local businesses and new economic activities are critical for sustainable communities. Consequently, sustainability assessment systems should be able to take these into account, decouple, and promote both economic growth and environment protection. Among the dimensions of the social sustainability assessment proposed by Albino and Dangelico (2012), few also referred to economic sustainability. For example, in the category of material well-being, they consider the household net income, the employment rate, and the percentage of homeless people. Moreover, criteria referring to socioeconomic aspects within an urban community have to be taken into account to prevent decoupling between these two aspects. Another limit in the current systems for urban communities refers to environmental protection measurements. Given the high consumption of resources in urban environments, sustainable communities should increase their focus on reusing materials and their circulation in closed-loop cycles of production, recovery, and remanufacture (Mang and Reed, 2012). This should result in more ecofriendly practices. Existing sustainable assessment systems rarely focus on a lifestyle in harmony with nature. Criteria aiming to integrate physical, functional, and emotional properties of a community in a holistic perspective would help promote a more integrated idea of sustainability and would overcome the ecotechnocratic trend that can be seen in Table 15.3. Limits of static sustainability assessment In current systems, the assessment is a process realized once at the beginning of the urban community development. However, recent definitions of sustainability have encouraged looking at the assessment as a moving target and have shown that doing so only once is not sufficient (Brandon and Lombardi, 2005). Moreover, existing systems are seldom considered later, especially because the sustainability assessments are often promoted by developers alone. The static assessment prevents looking at the trends in the evolution and performance of a community (Berardi, 2013c). Instead, continuous evaluations should be incentivized in a way that sustainability assessments become an interactive process that 529 530 CHAPTER 15 Sustainability assessment in the built environment could be used to map the evolution of the urban development (Lowe, 2008). This means that it is particularly important to monitor progress through a continuous check (Innes and Booher, 2000). The importance of dynamic evaluations is also related to the time dependence of sustainability and to the changes of the requisites and benchmarks that sustainability requires (Martens, 2006) and later (Berardi, 2011). Criteria that consider the evolution of a community should be introduced in the assessments. Limits of adaptability and stakeholders’ engagement The analysis of existing systems has shown a link between the assessment systems and the context in which they have been developed. This relationship limits the use of these systems in other countries, unless the criteria are modified to consider specific culture and laws of those countries (Haapio, 2012). BREEAM has recently made available different regional weightings to account for different priorities. Similarly, the Canadian Green Building Council has developed Canadian Alternative Compliance Paths to apply the LEED ND rating system. This process of adaptation of the assessment systems aims to contextualize new assessment criteria. A larger adaptability of the systems should be encouraged to use the systems in countries besides those for which they have been formulated, especially considering the rapid urbanization processes in developing countries. An important opportunity for adapting the systems is offered by stakeholders’ engagement (Albino and Berardi, 2012). Mathur et al. (2008) and Mascarenhas et al. (2009) have conceptualized the importance of stakeholders’ engagement in the development of sustainability assessment systems. All the systems compared previously do not promote communities’ engagement adequately. A new definition of the implementation steps of these systems is desirable to build a participative context that stimulates citizens and increases their awareness toward sustainability measures in their community (Berardi, 2013a). Citizen-led experiences of sustainability assessment of communities are able to measure indicators that are better suited to individual happiness within the community (Morse and Fraser, 2005). In fact, indicators developed from the bottom have often been proven to be successful for measuring the level of community activity, satisfaction with local area, and perception of community spirit (Hardi and Zdan, 1997). Research in this sense has emphasized the importance of sharing knowledge through a transparent process of citizens’ involvement to define and prioritize indicators (Thomson et al., 2010). As Reed et al. (2006) found, the local context only becomes visible when the indicators are checked through the lens of local citizens, because these are needed to unpack area-specific and hidden local conditions. Integration between expertled and citizen-led indicators and assessment criteria is therefore necessary to synthesize different aspects. Finally, the reader should not forget that the systems compared in this section are often promoted by an urban developer, whereas sustainability assessment systems should be program tools that, after having been contextualized and used for a community in the development stages, can be used for continuous evaluations. Systems for sustainability assessment of cities SYSTEMS FOR SUSTAINABILITY ASSESSMENT OF CITIES DESCRIPTION OF THE SYSTEMS Sustainability implies scale dependence of the attributes. Previous sections have shown the limits of evaluating sustainability at the level of one or more buildings. In fact, the ways in which a building connect and depend on surroundings would be better evaluated on larger scales. The importance of the interaction between buildings and infrastructures (grids, roads, public transportation, parks, etc.) has increasingly been recognized as an unavoidable aspect of sustainability. In fact, although the sustainability has often been performed on a small-scale level, it is clear that connections with city services have to be taken into account. Moreover, although the spacial dependence of sustainable development makes uncertain which is the most appropriate scale in sustainability assessments, the boundaries of a community are often too weak and meaningless in terms of sustainability. The increasing awareness of the role played by public infrastructures and services for a sustainable built environment comes together with the increasing awareness that cities, more than international agreements and national policies, are the leading actors in addressing sustainability (Spiekermann and Wegener, 2003; Reed 2007). Cities are close to citizens and their actions are often more purposeful than generic international agreements and plans because cities have direct control over the natural environment, the social condition of the population, and the economic activities of the community. Cities have the power to influence the design daily by authorizing the development of new area or modifying public services. In 1994, in Aalborg, few cities signed the Charter of European Cities and Towns Towards Sustainability (Aalborg Charter, 1994). This affirms that cities are the largest unit capable of initially addressing the architectural, social, economic, political, natural resource, and environmental imbalances damaging the modern world and the smallest scale at which problems can be meaningfully resolved in an integrated, holistic, and sustainable fashion. Cities have recognized that sustainability is neither a vision nor an unchanging state, but rather a creative, local, balance-seeking process extending into all areas of local decisionmaking. This means that the sustainability assessment should continually evolve following the paths of the city modifications. The number of cities that have adopted this charter is continually increasing and has more than 2,000 cities (Figure 15.10). Several other agreements have been signed after that, such as the Leipzig Charter in 2007, the ICLEI network plan in 2008, and the C40 or the World Sustainable Capitals in 2010 (Berardi, 2011). Meanwhile, the Covenant of Mayors is representing the mainstream European movement involving local authorities, voluntarily committing to increasing energy efficiency and use of renewable energy sources in their territories to meet and exceed the European Union 20% CO2 reduction objective by 2020. This last agreement is, so far, leading almost 6,000 cities in Europe to measure the level of their environmental sustainability. Similar initiatives are increasing at an exponential rate worldwide. 531 532 CHAPTER 15 Sustainability assessment in the built environment FIGURE 15.10 European cities that have signed the Aalborg Charter as of December 1, 2011. From www.aalborgplus10.dk (A). Covenant of Mayors signatories at the end of 2013. From www. covenantofmayors.eu/index_en.html (B). In this section, a review of major sustainability systems for sustainability assessment of cities is provided, discussing their structures, scales, and evaluation methods. In the past few years, a challenging number of sustainability assessment systems for cities have been proposed. These systems often differ significantly because they reflect the many possible approaches to the creation of sustainable development (Tanguay et al., 2010). Table 15.5 gives general information about systems. The European Common Indicators (ECI) was launched by the Environment Commissioner Margot Wallström at the Third European Conference on Sustainable Cities in January 2001. After the launch of the ECI initiative, 80 local authorities signed the agreement on the adoption of the ECI for monitoring progress toward sustainability and reporting back to the European level and actively taking part in the testing phase and process that commenced after adoption, aiming at developing and helping build this new monitoring tool on the basis of practical experiences. Since 2008 the participating cities have been given the possibility to share and compare their data. The systems are used each year for nominating the Green Capital of Europe, an initiative focused on monitoring environmental sustainability at the local level. A set of 10 environmental sustainability indicators have been developed together with the methodologies for collecting the data for each indicator (European Common Indicators, 2003). Ten local sustainability indicators were identified through a bottom-up process: availability of public open areas and services; children’s journeys to and from school; citizen’s satisfaction with the local community; local contribution to global climate change; local mobility and passenger transportation; noise pollution; products promoting sustainability; quality of the air; sustainable land use; sustainable management of the local authority; and local enterprises. Systems for sustainability assessment of cities Table 15.5 General Information About Some Sustainability Assessment Systems for Cities Indicator System Time of Initiation European Common Indicators 2001 Estidama 2007 CASBEE-City 2008 Global City Indicators 2008 Urban Sustainability Index 2010 Indicators for Sustainable Development Goals 2013 Promoter Funded by the European Commission, the Italian Ministry of Environment and Territory, and the Italian National Environmental Protection Agency (APAT) Project partners included Ambiente Italia, Eurocities, and Legambiente The Abu Dhabi Urban Planning Council (UPC) Japan Green Build Council (JaGBC)/ Japan Sustainable Building Consortium (JSBC) Global City Indicators Facility with support from the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the University of Toronto, and the Government of Canada McKinsey & Company, Columbia University, and Tsinghua University’s School of Public Policy and Management Leadership Council of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network # of Indicators 10 65 36 63 18 100 The Global City Indicators Program (GCIP) is a decentralized, city-led initiative that enables cities to measure, report, and improve their performance and quality of life, facilitate capacity building, and share practices through an easy-to-use web portal (GCIP, 2009). The program seeks the improvement of big urban challenges such as poverty reduction, economic development, climate change, and the creation and maintenance of inclusive and peaceful cities and defines a set of standardized indicators that are essential to measure performance, capture trends and developments, and support cities in becoming global partners. The GCIP is suitable and applicable for all cities regardless of their size. However, at the present time, cities with more than one million people are targeted to reach a critical mass. Given the lack of a standardized definition of a “city,” the unit of measurement used is the municipality. The GCIP also accommodates and aggregates data from metropolitan areas. The GCIP is organized into two broad categories: city services (which include services typically provided by city governments and other entities) and quality of life (which includes critical contributors to overall quality of life). The two categories are structured around 18 themes (Table 15.6). 533 534 CHAPTER 15 Sustainability assessment in the built environment Table 15.6 Global City Indicators Themes Program City Services Themes Education Finance Governance Recreation Solid Waste Water Energy Fire and emergency response Health Safety Transportation Wastewater Quality of Life Themes Civic engagement Shelter Economy Social equity Environment Technology and innovation Source: From GCIP (2009). The Leadership Council of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) has recently launched the Action Agenda for Sustainable Development with 10 goals and 30 targets. A series of 100 Indicators for Sustainable Development Goals (ISDG) has followed to map out operational priorities for the post-2015 development agenda (ISDG, 2013). The indicators are arranged across the 10 goals for cross-cutting thematic issues such as: ending extreme poverty including hunger; achieving development within planetary boundaries; ensuring effective learning for all children and youth for life and livelihood; achieving gender equality, social inclusion, and human rights; achieving health and well-being at all ages; improving agriculture systems and raising rural prosperity; empowering inclusive, productive, and resilient cities; curbing human-induced climate change and ensuring sustainable energy; securing biodiversity and ensuring good management of water, oceans, forests, and other natural resources; and transforming governance and technologies for sustainable development. Estidama, which means “sustainability” in Arabic, is the initiative proposed to transform Arabic cities into a model of sustainable urbanization. Its aim is to create more sustainable communities, cities, and global enterprises, and to balance the four pillars of Estidama. This rating system aims to address the sustainability of a given development throughout its life cycle from design to operation. The system is organized into seven categories that are fundamental to more sustainable development (Estidama, 2010): integrated development process; natural systems; liveable communities; precious water; resourceful energy; stewarding materials; and innovating practice. The Urban Sustainability Index (USI) was built to evaluate how cities in developing countries, particularly Chinese cities, are confronting the challenge of balancing environmental sustainability and growth. The indicators were drawn from data readily available from these cities. These indicators are spread across five categories that encompass environmental sustainability as well as a city’s overall standard of living: basic needs; resource efficiency; environmental health; built environment; and commitment to future sustainability (The Urban Sustainability Index, 2011). Systems for sustainability assessment of cities CASBEE-City represents one of the most advanced sustainability assessment systems on a city level. It combines the quality of a city with its environmental load; from the ratio of these two parameters, the system calculates the built environment efficiency. CASBEE-City uses the scalability of CASBEE beyond individual buildings to assess the whole environmental performance with a triple bottom line approach. The system implements the concept of environmental efficiency and allows evaluation of a city from two aspects: decreasing negative environmental load (L) emitted outside the city and improving environmental quality (Q) and activities inside the city. The environmental load emitted from a city focuses on the emissions of GHG as a result of city activities. In CASBEE-City, GHG are calculated by combining the CO2 from energy sources (in industrial, residential, commercial, transportation, and energy conversion sectors), the industrial processes, the waste disposal sector, the emission from the agriculture sector, and other sources of GHGs. Moreover, in CASEBEE-City, the environmental load also takes into account environmental load reduction and the support to other regions for reducing CO2 missions. In this way, the system considers several cross-boundaries effects (Figure 15.11). In CASEBEE-City, the quality of a city measures the environmental, social, and economic situations and improvements in citizens’ and other stakeholders’ activities and quality of life. Almost 30 items are considered for the assessment. For example, the system considers the industrial vitality (amount of gross regional product and change in number of employees), the amount of economic exchanges (number of people visiting the city and efficiency of public transportation) and the financial viability (tax revenues, outstanding local bonds), the living environment (with indicators such as crime prevention, disaster preparedness, and quality of housing), social services (educational, cultural, medical, and child care services), and social vitality (population change attributable to migration or to change in births/deaths, or pressure toward an information society). COMPARISON BETWEEN THE SYSTEMS The systems described in the previous section are compared here. First, Table 15.5 gives that there is a great difference in the number of indicators defined by each system as a consequence of different levels of details among the systems. Although sustainable development goals proposes 100 indicators for evaluating the sustainability, the ECI are summarized with 10. It is also noticeable that the systems have implemented different templates for categorizing the indicators. Although ECI has not defined any set of categories, ISDG has used 16 main issues that, in a cross-cutting combination with the main goals of the system, create the assessment indicators. CASBEE seems to have a different concept in classification of the indicators that is derived from the 535 FIGURE 15.11 Criteria in CASBEE-City. From CASBEE (2011). Systems for sustainability assessment of cities different interpretation of sustainability. CASBEE performs the evaluation after having divided every assessment in two categories, environmental quality and environmental load. Figure 15.12 shows the percentage of indicators allocated to nine categories by each assessment system for cities: natural environment; built environment; mobility; water and waste management; energy; economy; well-being and culture; innovation; and governance. These categories were chosen according to both structure of the systems and the requirements of a sustainable city. The organization of indicators into fully separated categories resulted in some difficulties because some indicators can be classified in more than one category, especially when the categories by themselves had some overlaps. For example, the issues related to watershed management could be considered in water management and natural environment fields. Despite all the conflicts that existed in the classification of indicators, the figure gives a general view of the way that varied issues have received attention by each system. According to Figure 15.12, there is variety in the issues that each system covers. In general, different systems adopted different approaches according to the context they were designed for. For example, Estidama or USI have been designed for cities in developing countries, and the chart reveals that most of their attention is assigned to the water and waste management or energy issues, rather than well-being and culture, which are emphasized more by the other systems. The GCIP and ISDG systems that were developed in a more international consensus apply a general view to the different sustainability fields. 40 ECI GCIP ISDG Estidama CASBEE-City USI 35 Percentage (%) 30 25 20 15 10 5 0 Natural Built environment environment Mobility Water and waste management Energy Economy Well-being and culture Innovation Governance Others Assessment categories FIGURE 15.12 Comparison of the weight given by different sustainability assessment systems for cities. Urban communities grouping the assessment criteria into nine categories. 537 538 CHAPTER 15 Sustainability assessment in the built environment DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS An important trend in sustainability assessment is the increasing attention given to the network of the assessed elements of sustainability (the single buildings within their neighborhoods and scales up to the city or higher). First, assessment systems considered the building as a manufactured product evaluated in isolation. Then, the importance given to the surrounding site largely increased. This is because the scale dependence of sustainability in the built environment is unavoidable. The interactions between elements of the built environment make the sustainable attribute context-related and promote the evaluation of criteria that mirror the strong sustainability of the built environment, more than the presence of single elements or objects. The dependence on the scale has shown the importance of enlarging the spatial cross-boundaries in the evaluation of sustainability. When sustainability assessment at the community level was introduced, it seemed to represent the minimum unit of analysis for a complete evaluation, especially for the social and economic dimensions of sustainability. Later, assessors started considering criteria that could be solved at the level of a city. Among these criteria were: • • • • • • To adhere to ethical standards during development by ethical trading throughout the supply chain and by providing safe and healthy work environments and conditions To provide a mix of type zones To integrate development in the local context, conserve local heritage, and culture To guarantee access to local infrastructure and services to all citizens To involve all interested parties through a collaborative approach To provide social and cultural value over time and for all the people Most of the systems reviewed in previous sections were created for developed countries. Then, they started to being applied to developing countries, where the construction sector is showing high rates pushed by the urbanization process and the increased population. It noteworthy that the potential application of sustainability assessment systems in developing or in less developed countries represents a key opportunity for any sustainability assessment systems. This chapter has presented and discussed different systems for the sustainability assessment of urban communities. A clarification of the concepts behind the sustainability assessment has been achieved by looking at the possible meanings of sustainability, assessment, community, and city. Most well-known systems have been considered, including BREEAM, CASBEE, and LEED. Assessment systems have mainly been compared considering their assessment criteria. This chapter has shown several limits of the available systems, because they lack appropriate assessment of social, economic, and environmental sustainability. The comparison among systems has revealed that they generally promote a weak References sustainability and accept that economic development can reduce natural capitals. This reduces their capability to measure sustainability in the long term. The discussion has also shown that the assessments should support sustainable business as well as the well-being of people and environmental protection. This means that sustainable development needs higher cross-scale considerations. This also corresponds to the use of current sustainability assessment systems as tools for monitoring urban transition. Because the chapter mainly focused on top-down systems, the limits of adaptability of existing systems to different countries have been considered and the need to redefine and adapt the assessment criteria through citizens’ engagement has been discussed. Finally, statistical data of assessed buildings and communities have been reported to understand a few limits and difficulties actually encountered in the promotion of sustainability. No buildings, community, or city can achieve sustainability on its own, but a sustainable built environment should help continue sustainable use of the global hinterland. 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