Say what you will about LEED, but it has staying power. Beyond the cloistered halls and abstruse reaches of the comments sections where green building evangelists gather, there is little in the way of sustainability speak that resonates with the average layperson more than LEED. Go ahead and mention similar standards and certifications (e.g., WELL, BREEAM, Living Building Challenge) to people outside the industry, let alone buzzwords like βcircularityβ and βregenerative,β and prepare to be met with blank stares. LEED, on the other hand, is the common denominator. Finer points aside, folks at least know what it represents. How appropriate then that, at long last, the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), the non-profit body that oversees LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), is now poised to release a version of the certification system thatβs on par with what the going public demands: greater accountability.
On the heels of this yearβs Greenbuild Conference, held last month in Washington, DC, and the USGBCβs newly published report on embodied carbon, co-authored with RMI, the fifth iteration of LEED (LEED v5) was officially debuted. This version of βthe worldβs most widely used green building rating systemβ is, according to its authors, designed to advance βdecarbonization, equity, health, biodiversity, and resilience in the built environment.β
All sounds good. But this begs the question: what was missing beforehand?
According to Wes Sullens, USGBCβs director of LEED and one of the co-authors of βDriving Action on Embodied Carbon in Buildings,β quite a bit. βWe felt the rating system really needed an update, to be more relevant to todayβs kind of market and more scalable,β Sullens says. Past criticisms of LEED for existing buildings, Sullens concedes, have focused on the systemβs preoccupation with tallyingΒ scores that perhaps didnβt represent a buildingβsβ¦
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