Building resilience, risk assessment shape new Green Globes rating system

Sources: Green Building Initiative, Portland, Ore.; CP staff

After three years of open dialogue and consensus-based decision making, Green Building Initiative (GBI) is consummating an American National Standards Institute-modeled process to update ANSI/GBI 01-2010: Green Building Assessment Protocol for Commercial Buildings, which frames the 2013 Green Globes building rating system.

The forthcoming American National Standard, Green Globes Assessment Protocol for Commercial Buildings, builds on its predecessor with new sections, criteria or topics: Site and building resilience; Resource conservation, addressing minimized raw material use; and, Building risk assessment, spurring project teams to review sites for potential weather, flood, soil stability, and earthquake hazards, while crafting emergency response plans.

A unique aspect of Green Globes, GRI notes, is the assignment of an assessor who provides teams behind certification candidate projects a customized report on achievements and opportunities for improvement. “One thing GBI has consistently done well is collect input from users and put that to work in the certification process,” affirms project assessor Eric Truelove, a principal of Green Building Resources. “Green Globes offers a superior delivery mechanism with a user-friendly system that doesn’t simply tell people what to do, it shows them how to do it. This is something users highly value, as it helps them put their green building aspirations into practice.”

A revision of the American National Standard, coupled with pilot projects abiding forthcoming criteria, builds upon Green Globes’ reputation as a third-party green building rating system. In the past five years, GBI has certified 850-plus Green Globes projects in the U.S. The number of certified buildings increased 118 percent from 2015 to 2017, nearly two thirds of that gain last year. — www.TheGBI.org