By Tonie Miyamoto
It seems that each day brings with it a new story about the dangers of climate change. The challenges are daunting enough, but on college and university campuses the efforts must work on a variety of levels in order to connect the built environments to students’ health and wellness, as well as approaching sustainability in ways that include elements supporting equity and access. This means that the buildings, programs, and policies should not
only support sustainability goals, but should also educate students to take those lessons with them after they leave campus. And, as students often carry the banner for sustainability – demanding green buildings, divestment, and composting programs – those efforts must be highly visible. Enter the value of standards and certifications.
A number of campuses have heard the students’ wishes and have taken up the cause, driving sustainability initiatives with well-established climate action plans, strategic and master plans that include sustainability, and active efforts to address the impacts of climate change to make campuses more resilient against droughts, natural disasters, rising sea levels, and heat waves. They have also pursued a variety of programs that demonstrate and validate their work. Since the Building Research Establishment’s Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM) was released in England in 1990 as the world’s first green building rating system, green building certification programs have slowly grown both in terms of use and awareness. Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), launched in 2000, is considered the most well-known and prominent certification in the United States. Today there are a host of additional programs, organizations, certifications, and more, all related to sustainability. How can a campus know which efforts are best for them? Where is the most valuable place to focus finite resources? Navigating the acronym forest is no easy task.
To meet aggressive climate neutrality goals, new rating systems go beyond LEED, which focuses on how a building is constructed (site selection, materials, systems, etc.), to measure how it actually performs. Does the building operate as designed? How much energy does it use on an annual basis? Does it have the ability to keep operating in the event of a power outage? Unlike LEED, which is based on a building’s modeled performance, many of the newer certifications require tracking a building’s actual performance for a full year for verification before certification is awarded.
“Clients are going beyond LEED because it got us where we are today, and we are comfortable with it, but it’s not challenging us to get to the next level we need to be at,” says Yanel de Angel, a principal at Perkins & Will. “Back in the day, students were pushing for green buildings, and now campuses are seeing the value and the impact. We have more clients focused on climate action plans and energy use intensity,” says Lynne Deninger, principal at CannonDesign.
Tracking actual performance encourages a lifecycle cost analysis perspective. How will the upfront costs of this building be offset by lower operational costs over time? “Unlike developers and corporate clients, who frequently sell buildings, universities make long-term investments and can project out operational savings over several decades,” de Angel explains. As a result, the focus for green building certifications is increasingly encompassing not just new buildings but existing buildings as well. “Retro-commissioning for existing buildings is a trend we are seeing,” confirms Deninger. “Existing buildings on campus may have another 30 to 50 years. We can address older buildings and make it possible to add a new higher-performance building without adding any energy use intensity to campus.”
With so many certification options available, project teams must choose the certification or building standards that are the best fit for their project’s unique goals, location, audience, and budget.
Campuses are also considering sustainability from a broader lens that includes occupant health, wellness, and equity. Are the occupants healthier and more productive in the space? How does the building support campus goals around student access and success? Many of the newer certifications out today take a systems approach and examine not just a single building but a whole campus or even an entire city. The systems approach can also lead to campus-wide application of the policies and practices created for one building to get certified.
As with LEED in its early years, proponents of these emerging certifications praise the higher standards for raising the bar and elevating the industry while opponents lament the cost and the level of difficulty for certification. Scott Waddell from CannonDesign advises campuses to avoid getting too caught up in a specific certification or the complexities of new standards. “Fifteen years ago LEED was very intimidating,” he recalls. “Aspiring to build high-performance buildings with mindful materials, whether or not it ends up with a certain certification, we can still bring all this knowledge to the table and build better buildings.” Brian Dunbar, director of the Institute for the Built Environment, a pioneer in the field, agrees that when the U.S. Green Building Council “launched LEED they had a vision to transform the built environment, and they have taken a slow-to-change industry and transformed it, so today building certifications are the norm. With the birth of all these other rating systems, along with the evolution of LEED, we are going to see higher and higher performing buildings, campuses, and cities.”
With so many certification options available, project teams must choose the certification or building standards that are the best fit for their project’s unique goals, location, audience, and budget. In addition, several of the emerging certifications build upon one another and share common elements, making certification in more than one standard feasible. In short, there is no one-size-fits-all answer when it comes to sustainability. Campuses looking to maximize energy savings and operating costs may gravitate towards Passive House or Net Zero standards. Meanwhile, campuses looking to enhance occupant health and well-being will find WELL and Fitwel to be appealing options. Campuses experiencing the impacts of climate change may be drawn to RELi, while those just beginning their sustainability journey may find Green Globes or LEED the easiest entry points into the complex world of green building certifications.
Duane Carter, an associate principal and architect for Ayers Saint Gross, sees these certification options as a plus, particularly in higher education. “These new certifications let universities fine tune what is important to them and then they can work with an expert to determine a certification that works for them.” He also notes how he is seeing more references to Passive House and other standards in requests-for-proposals coming in from campuses and expects that number to only grow as projects are completed and can serve as a model for others. For example, the Garfield House residence hall at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, is one of only two Passive Houses in the state. Amy Johns, director of Williams College’s Zilkha Center for Environmental Initiatives, said of the project in a press release, “From our perspective, it is the responsibility of higher education to lead, experiment with new techniques, and demonstrate best practices to other institutions and businesses.”
Whichever path a campus chooses, Waddell recommends committing early in the project. “It’s much easier to implement a standard at the beginning of the design process than half way through. In some cases, it may be too expensive or impossible to do that, when it would have been possible if conceived at the start.” Committing to a path early on ensures that every decision the project team makes supports the standard rather than having to backtrack or add to the scope of the project later.
Deciding how far to take the standards is another decision each design team must face: build to standards, borrowing concepts here and there, or actually certify the project. While a project can certainly be sustainable without a recognized certification, putting a label on it does visibly demonstrate an additional level of commitment. “For all the pros and cons, certification holds a project accountable,” Deninger says. When hard decisions come along or budgets get tight, sustainability features can be the first thing cut, but a project team committed to certification will have more incentive to stay the course and dig deeper to find solutions that will pay off in the long run by creating a more efficient, healthy, and appealing building. “I believe in certifications,” says Dunbar, “I like the analogy that building to standards but not certifying is like going to school and not getting a diploma. Projects that don’t certify often don’t perform as well, as other priorities take precedence. The certification speaks for the project.”
Perhaps the most powerful aspect of these next-generation certifications is their ability to tell a story. Achieving the mark is a sign that the campus gives to students that it cares about their health and well-being. It turns a residence hall from a place to sleep into a living lab. It sets an example for resiliency in the face of challenging times. Whatever a campus’s objectives, the market for green building certifications has now matured to the point where it can provide a plethora of options to meet most every vision.
A Note on Net Zero
Zero Energy Building (ZEB) certification, administered by the International Living Future Institute, is a building with zero net energy consumption, meaning that the total amount of energy used by the building on an annual basis is roughly equal to the amount of renewable energy (wind, solar, etc.) associated with the project without the use of combustion. ZEB is a certification option under Living Building Challenge that focuses on energy use without pursuing all the petals of an LBC certification.
It is worth noting that LEED in late 2018 also released the LEED Zero certification program, which allows LEED-certified projects to pursue additional net zero certification by tracking energy, carbon, water, and/or waste for one year and demonstrating that the building has achieved net zero in one or more of these categories.
Campuses that are looking to focus in on energy use but aren’t quite ready for the challenge of net zero may find streamlined systems like Energy Star, administered by the EPA, worth considering, as it is a system that tracks building energy use and performance without requiring specific targets or expensive registration fees.
Tonie Miyamoto is the director of communications and sustainability at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. Additional research assistance was provided by Mary Liang, Marianne Wieghaus, and Sylvia Cranmer. Tonie.Miyamoto@ColoState.EDU
