全球变化知识资源中心

Buildings contribute to climate change and other environmental harms, largely through resource use. Reducing demand for resources like energy and water has become a major goal of sustainable building. Green building rating systems like Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) present normative pathways to sustainability by rewarding certain types of activity deemed "sustainable." One challenge is that rewards are often delinked from environmental outcomes. We demonstrate this delinkage with a California case study that shows variability in the implied carbon dioxide avoided per LEED energy or water efficiency point can span multiple orders of magnitude, even for similar building contexts. This variability is related both to issues that LEED already considers, like building type, and to supply chain issues not directly considered in LEED, like the electricity fuel mix for buildings and water infrastructure. Additional variability comes from the structure of point allocation itself. We suggest that in order to fulfill LEED's goal of improving linkages between points and priority outcomes, future iterations can and should more directly account for interconnected systems and supply chains, with a particular focus on regional context. Such a change would extend existing practice for LEED Material and Resources credits and Regional Priority credits. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.