Footprint

Friday’s announcement that the world’s leading green building organisations -which includes those under the umbrella of the World Green Building Council and BREEAM - have reached an agreement to use a common metric to compare the carbon footprint of buildings is welcome news.  Measurement and comparison of buildings across different metrics and even within the same metrics is often confusing and misleading. Any initiative which attempts to bring clarity to this area is positive.

The common metric, which will be recognised by the UNEP Sustainable Building and Climate Initiative, will be presented in Copenhagen. The Sustainable Building Alliance (SB Alliance), a non-profit international network of standard setting and research organisations and property and construction industry representatives, commented that the common carbon metric agreement represents “a coming together of technical minds, worldwide experience and a collaboration of organisations with global reach [in order to] provide a robust and dynamic launch pad to take buildings to the heart of global carbon mitigation action.”

Let’s hope the SB Alliance is right.

The ‘Common Carbon Metric’ will be piloted by the leading green building rating tools and made available to anyone dedicated to promoting a low-carbon built environment. The real impact of this initiative lies in the detail which has yet to be announced, but it is an indication of the growing consensus about the role the built environment can play in mitigating climate change.

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Filed under: Green practice