Environmental assessment of construction projects

Abstract

Building designers are increasingly concerned about the environmental impact of building projects. Coupled with this is the heightened demand of client organizations for environmentally ‘friendly’ buildings. Commercial buildings are often the most tangible expression of an organization's values; values it wishes to convey to employees and customers. The complexity of issues influencing a building's ‘greenness’ does present a problem for the designer. To address this problem the Building Research Establishment (BRE) produced an assessment framework entitled the Building Research Establishment's Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM). The purpose of this method is to monitor designs and raise the awareness of designers to environmental issues. It is not intended for use as a comparative basis for competing designs. Instead, it provides technical guidance on the issues which need to be addressed in an environmental assessment. The author considers that this framework should be extended to assess explicitly the values of the client and the priorities of the environmental community.

The methodology advocated in this paper is based on multi-attribute utility theory (MA UT). This allows the combining of information obtained from experts, with values elicited from the eventual building users and owners. It provides a tool to assist the designer in the briefing stage as a negotiation mechanism, and at the proposal stage as a device for advocacy.

Keywords:

• environmental assessment
• appraisal
• risk
• green buildings