The U.S. Green Building Council has adopted a national construction resilience standard developed by the Minneapolis office of the Perkins + Will architecture firm.
The standard, called RELi, will be incorporated into the council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification, better known as LEED. Perkins + Will senior associate and architect Doug Pierce developed the standard as the principal investigator for the Washington, D.C.-based Capital Markets Partnership, which promotes incorporating green building practices into the standard real estate underwriting processes.
RELi is a point-based system in which buildings gain recognition and certification through hazard preparedness, disaster recovery, crisis communications, resilient food production, health promotion, energy efficiency, water-use reduction and other practices.
“We’re hoping to move things to the next level of transformation,” said Pierce, co-director of Perkins + Will’s Resilience Research Lab. “This will offer a more robust look at sustainability and resilience.”
Pierce will chair the council’s Resilience Steering Committee to determine how RELi will become part of the LEED system.
One of the first efforts will be to synthesize the RELi and LEED standards to reduce overlap. RELi has an “adaption and mitigation” section involving mitigating hazards such as 500-year floods, safe designs for extreme weather caused by earthquakes, wildfires, exceptional rain and rising sea levels. LEED offers pilot credits for resilient design that include practices found in RELi.
As it stands, the two standards share many of the same characteristics. Both are point-based. Buildings seeking RELi need to fulfill LEED prerequisites regarding sustainability practices. The idea is to merge the two standards so they reflect the best thinking of both. “Sustainability doesn’t go off the table, we just need to add resiliency to it,” he said.
A second impact of the combining of LEED and RELi will make buildings more attractive to investors looking to finance through bonds the construction and renovation of buildings to make them eligible for LEED and RELi certification.
(Source: Finance & Commerce)
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