Comparative Analysis of Green Building Rating Standards for Improvement Opportunities

Abstract

The development of economy and society has resulted in an unstoppable and growing consumption of natural resources and the degradation of the environment. Social problems and environmental degradation are the result of these developments. Balancing social, environment and economic is the goal of sustainable development. Many countries have developed environmental assessment standards to support sustainable development concept. This paper presents a comparative study of nine (9) green building evaluation standards from both developed and developing countries to find similarities and differences in order to make future improvement on each standard to fulfill sustainable development concept. The comparison is done by reorganize criteria listed in those standards to match BREEAM evaluation criteria for ease of study. The study found that most building evaluation systems focuses mainly on environment and then economic while pay less attention on social side and most criteria gives higher emphasis to energy and environmental mitigation issues with "proactive" measures. The future development of evaluation standard, social impact need to be improved and minimization of building material use need to be preventive more than reactive management. "This paper is the revised version of the paper that has been published in the proceedings of the Creative Construction Conference 2018 (Luangcharoenrat and Intrachooto, 2018)."