Key credit criteria among international green building rating tools

The construction industry has a significant contribution towards numerous adverse environmental impacts. Therefore, green building concept has gained wide recognition. In line with this, numerous international green building rating tools have been developed providing a yardstick for measuring green building performance. These rating tools have different credit criteria for evaluating the green building performance. According to the existing literature, there are many researches comparing different green building rating tools on specific credit criteria such as “Energy”. However, there is a clear lack of research on establishing a baseline to develop new green building rating tools and to evaluate existing green building rating tools. Therefore, this research aims to establish key credit criteria based on an extensive literature study and evaluate these criteria based on widely used eight green building rating tools. The comparison analysis is based on a quantitative measure, namely, a normalised score, which is obtained through allocating credit points of selected green building rating tools to the established key credit criteria. The comparison result is presented with radar diagrams and bar charts. This research established seven key credit criteria for these rating tools which are namely (1) Site, (2) Energy, (3) Water, (4) Indoor Environment Quality (IEQ), (5) Material, (6) Waste and pollution, and (7) Management. It is found that ‘Energy’ criterion is the most widely considered key credit criteria and then followed by ‘IEQ’ and ‘Water’ criteria. Apart from that, credit criteria such as ‘Triple bottom line reporting’, ‘Education and awareness’, ‘Economic aspects relating to various costs’, ‘Sustainable designing and planning’ and ‘Stakeholder relations’ are identified as possible credit criteria which can be included in developing the rating tools in future. These key credit criteria can be adopted as a baseline to develop new green building rating tools, and it provides fruitful results to develop the existing tools further.