Comparison of evaluation standards for green building in China, Britain, United States

Buildings consume large amounts of energy and resources and have a significant impact on environment. In 2010 buildings accounted for 32% of total global final energy use and 19% of energy-related GHG emissions. This energy use and related emissions may double or potentially even triple by mid-century. China is the world's largest energy consumer and CO2 emitter. With the process of urbanization, China has been entering into a period of great prosperity for construction, about 1.6-2.0 billion m2 buildings are constructed each year, which accounts for about 40% of the world's total new buildings. It is predicted that China's building energy use and related emissions will continue to increase over the next 15 years. Therefore, promoting green building development has become an urgent issue in China. However, green building is a highly complicated system engineering, its promotion needs evaluation standards as technical support. Many countries had issued a series of green building evaluation standards since 1990. Currently, there are some representative green building assessment schemes. Code for Sustainable Homes (CSH) has been fully implemented as the national authoritative standard of the UK since 2010. Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) developed by the USA, was revised and updated regularly with the latest version issued in 2013. China enacted its national evaluation standard for green building in 2006, and revised the standard in 2014. Based on introducing the latest evaluation standards for green buildings in China, Britain and United States, the paper compared these standards from 5 aspects including energy-saving, water-saving, material-saving, site selection and the outdoor and indoor environmental quality. The comparison mainly focuses on evaluation methods and evaluation indicators in the three standard systems. Besides, the characteristics of each standard system were summarized and some suggestions for improving China's evaluation standard for green building were proposed.