Identification of green building attributes for the development of an assessment tool: a case study in India

Green building rating systems have been developed to measure the level of sustainability of buildings. Existing methods can be applied to different regions by addressing additional aspects such as varied climatic conditions and regional variations. This paper investigated the most widely used environmental building assessment methods, namely BREEAM, LEED, SB-Tool, CASBEE, LEED-India, GRIHA and Eco-housing. Comparative studies revealed that the existing assessment schemes had some limitations when applied to an Indian built environment. This necessitates the development of a new building environmental assessment scheme. An attempt is made to develop a framework to evaluate sustainability of buildings in India by applying principal component analysis (PCA). The PCA of 82 valid responses on the attributes measuring sustainability of buildings has extracted nine components: (1) site selection; (2) environment; (3) building resources and re-use; (4) building services and management; (5) innovative construction techniques, (6) environmental health and safety, (7) mechanical systems; (8) indoor air quality; (9) economy. Further, a framework suggested in this study can be applied for countries having similar climatic conditions. Findings of this paper can be helpful to designers and developers to achieve green development in developing countries.