The rapid acceptance of green buildings internationally has led to awareness of green building features and initiatives (GBFIs) in the South African property industry; however, among South African valuers, it seems the awareness is still in its infancy. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with valuers of varying degrees of experience in Cape Town, online surveys were completed by a sample of South African valuers, and a valuation simulation was conducted to determine the impact of GBFIs.

Proposed changes flowing from the former Council of Australian Government’s Trajectory for Low Energy Buildings project1 (the trajectory) are expected to reduce annual electricity consumption of new and refurbished residential and commercial premises by 36 TWh by 2050, compared to current standards.

The main aim of this report is to contribute to the exchange of good practices and to support EU MS by providing potential ideas for the elaboration of long-term renovation plans. The report compiles renovation requirements as well as financial instruments, support programmes and market mechanisms for building renovation in a number of countries and regions. While the main focus of the report is on selected EU MS, a few global examples are also presented.

A Global Survey of Building Energy Efficiency Policies in Cities is a resource for city officials around the world as they design new policies for building energy efficiency, or review existing ones. The research should help close the evidence gap regarding city-level activity in building energy efficiency. As such, it is designed to be accessible to those working in the field in general, including researchers.

The research examines the installation of sustainable (green) property development, typified by Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification in legacy cities in comparison to non-legacy cities. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), green buildings represent resource-efficient models for construction and operation that are designed to use fewer resources and generate less pollution.

This article provides useful information that could help you address some barriers to sustainable initiatives: Every executive that you speak to is aware that data can be manipulated and may be skeptical of studies conducted by organizations that could benefit from a particular set of results. So I've included information on independent third-party studies. In challenging economic times, people are particularly concerned about short-term cash flow.

The Dutch Government stimulates the application of energy efficiency measures to reduce the energy requirements of buildings, which are responsible for about 20% of the Dutch CO2 emissions. For our assessment, we followed a qualitative approach, due to a lack of data. We reviewed the mix of policy instruments and used stakeholder surveys and interviews. We found that energy use is not very likely to decline fast enough to achieve the Dutch policy targets for 2020. For new buildings, the policy mix works well, but its contribution to the policy targets is limited.

This chapter examines the experience of construction unions and community organizations as they enter into strategic alliances to create new markets in energy efficient systems. I focus on two recent policy initiatives: PlaNYC for the retrofitting of public and commercial properties in New York City, and Green Jobs/Green New York (GJ/GNY) for the retrofitting of non-commercial residential properties in the rest of the city and the state.

Building energy code change in Australia, and many other developed nations, is subject to standardised economic tests, with a net present value calculation at the heart of the economic analysis. Although many nations have introduced minimum energy efficiency standards for residential and commercial buildings, increases in stringency have been hindered by limitations to the range of private and societal impacts typically incorporated in regulatory impact assessments.

Global warming and environment problems caused by the excessive emission of greenhouse gases (GHGs), along with rapid economic development has attracted the attention of many countries and regions of the world. Reducing GHG emissions is essential to mitigate the threat of global warming. Household carbon (dioxide) emissions have been recognized as one of the most important contributors to climate change, with a significant impact on both the local and global environment, and various policy instruments have been implemented by governments to bring about the reduction.

Standards, subsidies, and carbon taxes are among the measures often considered to reduce energy consumption and carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions in the buildings sector. Using a modeling system developed by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, residential and commercial sector standards and subsidies were each modeled with and without a carbon tax to determine if a multipolicy approach would be redundant. A separate case examining a carbon tax was also completed for comparison.

This study compares and contrasts Australian and global best practices in policy and regulation for the energy and carbon performance of the built environment. It examines the drivers and opportunities for, and barriers to, the adoption of best practices in Australia. Finally, and as a stimulus to debate, it proposes a potential set of optimal measures, at national, state/territory and local levels, along with an indicative pathway for their implementation.

Nowadays, energy efficiency (EE) is presented as a reliable strategy towards sustainable development, but its application has not been developed equitably worldwide, since most EE policies have been implemented in industrialised nations, and developing countries are still in the process of improving their EE levels.

In this work, the literature about the relationship between thermal comfort and productivity in workplaces is reviewed and explored by means of a co-citation analysis—i.e., a factor analysis applied to the mutual citations of the most relevant contributions. A structure of three main clusters of papers describing the relationships between workers’ thermal comfort and productivity were identified according to the factor analysis and then confirmed with a multidimensional scaling.

Buildings are the largest energy consuming sector in the world. Accounting for over one-third of total final energy consumption, they are an equally important source of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Achieving significant energy and emissions reduction in the buildings sector is a challenging but achievable policy goal. Transition to Sustainable Buildings presents detailed scenarios and strategies to 2050 and demonstrates how to reach deep energy and emissions reduction through a combination of best available technologies and intelligent public policy.