Let's follow America's LEED

The recent news that the BRE is planning to extend its BREEAM environmental certification system into Europe is potentially positive news.

The last thing the international property and construction industries need is a plethora of diverse or even contradictory national environmental standards and regulations.

However, even if the BRE is successful in achieving some take-up of its system amongst mainland European countries, this would still leave the prospect of two very different certification processes - the UK’s BREEAM and the US’s LEED - operating in parallel, and to some degree in competition, on either side of the pond.

Given the number of US-owned companies opening operations in Europe, and vice versa, the most constructive thing that US and UK environmental authorities could do would be to collaborate to encourage the earliest possible development of a common system - one which is familiar to, understood and trusted, by companies on both sides of the Atlantic.

A merged standard could possibly operate under the umbrella of the respective Green Business Councils of the US and UK whilst, if political imperatives dictated, the actual compliance and performance parameters could be set at different levels by each country to give them national ‘sovereignty’ over their environmental polices. But at least the system’s architecture and process would still be recognisably the same.

LEED with a shot of BREEAM, please

Although any new common system should of course incorporate and integrate the best of both LEED and BREEAM, the international consensus seems to be, firmly, that the LEED system provides the simpler and more broadly-based basic model for one; indeed, it is at the base of most green rating systems outside the UK.

We believe by also making use of LEED, UK businesses could help to foster an internationally-recognised language and standard for environmental impact assessment for building and construction.

This is why at the Property Merchant Group, in addition to BREEAM ratings and EPCs, we shall be undertaking and providing voluntary LEED assessments for all our forthcoming central London office developments.

LEED is enjoying a rapid uptake by the US construction and property sectors and has already notched up demonstrable, measurable success in improving the environmental performance of many US buildings.

Moreover LEED’s sponsor, the US Green Building Council, has shown itself to be particularly responsive to constructive criticism, recently tightening their system’s ratings criteria over concerns that it was not stringent enough on certain energy use parameters