Performance indicators for sustainability assessment of buildings

During the past few decades, the construction industry has been exposed to “sustainable construction” processes, which address the triple bottom line (TBL) that is the environmental, economic, and social dimensions of sustainability, during the entire life cycle of a building. Due to the importance of sustainable construction, it is imperative to comprehensively assess the sustainability of the built environment, such as buildings. A significant step to evaluate the sustainability of buildings is investigating the existing building sustainability performance indicators (SPIs). In this paper, a list of building SPIs, including environmental, economic, and social, has been developed through conducting a content‐analysis based literature review. The literature includes sustainable building rating systems such as Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), Green Globes, Living Building Challenge (LBC), among others. In addition, other published literature related to sustainable construction is reviewed. Similar SPIs or those which have some overlaps are combined or modified. Finally, refined TBL SPI sets are created, which can be used for sustainability assessment of buildings. The results of this study indicate that among various environmental performance criteria used in different publications, 16 SPIs are the most significant ones. In addition, a total number of 9 SPIs and 12 SPIs are identified as the most commonly used criteria related to the life cycle economic and social performance of buildings, respectively.

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