Starting next week, the meaning of “green building,” at least in a technical sense, will change depending on where you live. On Monday, the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) will launch the third version of its LEED rating system for green buildings, and it includes a few key updates. Among them is a new regional bonus point system released today that’s meant to address some of the criticism that earlier versions used a one-size-fits-all metric for buildings in very different settings.
“Because environmental priorities differ among various regions of the country — the challenges in the Southeast differ from those in the Northwest, for example — regionally specific credits give LEED a way to directly respond to diverse, regionally grounded issues,” Brendan Owens, vice president of technical development for the USGBC, explained in an announcement today. “The inclusion of these regional LEED credits is the Council’s first step toward addressing regional environmental issues.”
In the new rating system, projects that incorporate at least one of six green building strategies identified as regional priorities (based on a project’s zip code) can get “bonus points” toward toward LEED certification — one point per regional element, up to four.
In parts of Los Angeles, Calif., for example, new construction projects can get an extra point for reducing water use, while in Amherst, N.H., there’s a bonus for brownfield redevelopment. In rural Michigan, the USGBC has set up extra credit for elements meant to further the local priorities of preserving prime agricultural land, reducing light pollution in neighboring natural habitats and minimizing the amount (and improve the quality) of stormwater gushing into the Great Lakes. In urban Florida, on the other hand, it’s largely about solar, with points designed to encourage (among other things) use of abundant solar resources and decreased reliance on fossil fuels. Sure, this extra credit system represents a max of four points out of a possible 110, but a few points can mean the difference between certification and nothing, so it offers one more reason to go solar in the Sunshine state.
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