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BREEAM 2011

by Stuart Barlow
Head of Sustainability, 3DReid

The ever-changing context of environmental design saw the publication recently of a new version of the BREEAM UK New Construction Scheme (BREEAM 2011). Slightly simplified but nonetheless beefed up, it meets the need to:

Accommodate the revised methodology used to calculated compliance in the 2010 version of Part L2A: Conservation of fuel and power in new buildings other than dwellings of the Building Regulations. The requirement to achieve a 25% aggregate reduction in carbon emissions meant that it was no longer possible to use a single benchmark scale based on an Energy Performance Certificate Carbon Index Rating. Continuing this approach might have resulted in some buildings which just comply with the Building Regulations scoring better in a BREEAM assessment than other buildings with lower carbon emissions.
Align BREEAM's methodologies with the emerging raft of European construction sustainability standards which will operate at the framework, building and product levels. BS EN 15643: Part 1 Sustainability of construction works – Sustainability assessment of buildings: General framework, which has already been published. It establishes a framework of principles, objectives and requirements for the sustainability assessment of buildings. More standards will be published through 2011-12 to establish frameworks for the environmental, social and economic assessment of buildings, core rules for the environmental assessment of construction products and calculation methods for the environmental assessment of buildings.
Align BREEAM with international standards such as the United Nations Environment Programme Sustainable Buildings and Climate Initiative's Common carbon metric for measuring energy use and reporting greenhouse gas emissions from building operations.
Satisfy the requirements of BRE's own recently launched Code for sustainable environment which requires an integrated approach to the design, management, evaluation and certification on environmental, social and economic impacts of buildings.
Respond to industry feedback through BRE's own survey and the consultation undertaken by the UK Green Building Council to provide market-focused but science-led procedures.

As with all audit systems, BREEAM is not perfect, but it does offer a verifiable and independent assessment of sustainability performance of the design and construction of buildings. Yet the requirements of any audit system are to some extent arbitrary and BREEAM is no exception. For example, contaminated sites that are treated score better than sites that are not contaminated, regardless of location. This seems illogical to many clients.

RIBA Publishing's Guide to BREEAM, to be published later this year, responds to a call from architects for an architect-friendly, editorially independent guide of the sort that BRE cannot provide. But BREEAM is voluntary and costly, so what is the likelihood of clients commissioning them in a financially constrained future? There are a number of reasons why. For example, carrying out an assessment might:

Be a requirement of the client organisation, to help them demonstrate that they are meeting their corporate social responsibility objectives. For example, the private sector property landlord and developer British Land uses BREEAM for that reason. Land Securities and the retailer Marks and Spencer also benchmark their developments using BREEAM.
Be a requirement for receiving development funding, from either a public body or a private institution. For example, in 2005 the then Department for Education and Skills made it a condition of any capital funding that they granted for schools to be designed and constructed to achieve a BREEAM Very Good Rating.
Demonstrate an acceptable level of sustainability performance to regulatory approval bodies, such as planning authorities. In 2007 a BRE study found that over 200 local authorities intended to or might use BREEAM to set a sustainability performance standard of BREEAM Very Good for non-residential developments in their Local Development Frameworks or supplementary planning documents.
Provide a marketable sustainable asset. While slow in coming, there is now growing evidence that sustainable buildings are more marketable than less sustainable ones, and will increasingly be so in the future. A 2007 survey showed that while 30% of property investors/agents felt sustainability affected property yields at that time, 60% felt it would do so in the future. In 2008, by CB Richard Ellis, found that energy efficiency was an essential requirement for 58% of tenants in central London and green attributes an essential requirement for 50%. More specifically, recent research by Maastricht University and the University of California into the UK property market found that offices designed and constructed to meet the performance standards required for BREEAM Excellent are attracting a 22–27% premium on their rents.

Each new launch of a BREEAM scheme has driven up the standards of assessed buildings. Whether it has been responsible, on its own, for stimulating the demand for more sustainable buildings over recent years is debatable. Without doubt though, BREEAM is increasingly being used both by those who commission buildings and those who regulate their construction. The need to undertake a BREEAM assessment at the post-construction stage, introduced as part of the BREEAM 2008 Scheme, has extended the auditing process to cover more of the life cycle stages of a building's life, giving it a robustness that was previously lacking. The influence of BREEAM beyond this point is yet to be fully quantified but it's clear that knowing how to design for it is a critical professional skill.