Green building watch

Five Trends to Watch

While the following are not “megatrends,” they deserve watching for future impact on the green building industry.

1. Building Performance: My new book, The World’s Greenest Buildings: Promise vs. Performance in Sustainable Design, due out in January 2013, makes a persuasive case that absolute building performance (vs. the relative improvement approach still enshrined in LEED) is going to be an increasing focus for project teams in designing all new buildings.
2. Green chemistry: The new Health Product Declaration, along with myriad other forces, will begin to influence product development and product selection in 2013 and beyond. The trend toward greater disclosure of the makeup of building materials has great momentum.
3. LEED v4:The first new version of LEED in four years will take effect in mid-2013, though not for all projects until 2015. We expect to see project teams trying out LEED v4 with selected clients for projects that begin in the second half of 2013, aiming to get a leg up on the competition when LEED v4 reaches full implementation in 2015.
4. Green schools: The USGBC commitment to green schools, now five years old, has acquired considerable momentum in the past two years. We expect to see significant use of LEED at K-12 schools in 2013-2015, something that had been a hard sell in prior years.
5. Carbon management: While implicit in all green building calculations since 2006, carbon accounting and reduction in building design and operations will grow under both the leadership of the State of California, which implemented carbon auctions for the first time in November 2012, and the federal government, which I expect to put a renewed focus on climate change mitigation measures with the re-election of President Obama.

Jerry Yudelson heads up the Yudelson Associates leading international sustainability and green building consultancy. Yudelson, a LEED Fellow, is widely acknowledged as one of the nation’s leading green building consultants and sustainability experts. He is the author of 13 green building books and chaired the country’s largest annual green building conference, Greenbuild, for six years. Jerry also served for two years as “Research Scholar for Retail Real Estate Sustainability” for the International Council of Shopping Centers, a 70,000-member international trade organization. For more information please contact Jerry Yudelson, +1-520-243-0996, or visit http://www.greenbuildconsult.com.

Photos courtesy of twk954 and A. Jarrett.