Are Australian Building Eco-Assessment Tools Meeting Stakeholder Decision-Making Needs

ABSTRACT: The building industry seeks assessment and reduction of environmental, social and economic impacts in the built environment. There is a growing demand for decision-making support tools to facilitate this process. The building sector encompasses a broad range of professional activities including regulation, planning, design, manufacture and site development, and these span fundamentally different applications. Industry sector sustainable development relies on vast amounts of technically rich information, not yet streamlined, being shared between professions for varying applications at different stages and levels of the building life cycle. For consistent stakeholder decision-making, building eco-assessment tools (BEA) that address economic, social and environmental criteria as well as those used only for environmental assessment need to manage vast amounts of information necessary for credible assessment. Information and Communications Technology (ICT) platforms for sharing data provide a way forward in compiling and processing such complex information sets. Results of studies of twenty-eight tools showed that irrespective of the economic, social and environmental criteria they addressed most did not support: • The majority of key stakeholders ’ criteria or provide sufficiently flexible applications; • Stakeholder decision-making integrated over whole of building life considerations; • Early intervention such as at policy development, investment and concept planning; and • Functionality measures for pre/post occupancy and operational assessmen