LEED 2009: Lurching Toward a New Era for US Green Buildings

Rumor has it that the US Green Building Council (USGBC) is about to unclog its big backlog of LEED registration certificates. So reports the Huffington Post.

Good news for green developers because that backlog is crazy.

Take New York City. By the end of 2007 -- after four years in the program -- the USGBC had LEED-certified 15 buildings. Meanwhile, the number of projects waiting for approval had swelled to 294.

That’s a ratio of one certification for every 20 registrations -- just five percent. Pretty poor. Especially when you compare it with the UK’s equivalent green building program BREEAM, which boasts a ratio of one in five.

The reported fix? Come 2009, the USGBC will abandon certifying buildings to the LEED standard. Instead, its sister agency, the Green Building Certification Institute (GBCI), will morph into an accreditation body, churning out third-party certifying bodies to shrink the backlog and add more green buildings.

To date, the USGBC has been the agency that sets and adjusts the LEED standard and the body that certifies buildings to the standard. It’s an inefficiency that’s become too large to ignore. And it’s not the only one.

Here's another: LEED doesn’t adapt to local environments. Take water conservation, for example, one of the more urgent green issues in construction. Under the "one size fits all" LEED model, developers earn the same amount of points for water protection measures in waterlogged Seattle as they do in drought-prone Phoenix.

But that’s about to be remedied, too. Thanks to "regionalization," to be introduced in LEED '09. Regional councils across the nation are coming up with the crediting schemes right now that will give more points for measures most beneficial to local environments.

(Note: the USGBC's public comment period is open until June 22.)

In a way, the USGBC has been bitten by its own wild success. But the fixes to come bode well for its future ability to evolve and grow even more. Especially as LEED is seen increasingly as the global standard of the green building industry.

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