INDOOR ENVIRONMENT AND SUSTAINABLE BUILDINGS

Integration of indoor environmental concerns in sustainable buildings requires a comprehensive, science-based assessment of building environmental performance. Indoor environmental quality must be assessed in the context of total building performance and the aggregated impacts on the indoor and total environment. This requires articulated targets established on the basis of the carrying capacity (”ecocapacity”) of the local and global environment and agreed targets for indoor environmental performance. These “sustainable ” targets can be used with total building environmental performance assessment tools in building design and evaluation of completed buildings to create better indoor environments and reduce impacts on the general environment recognizing local context and global environmental concerns. Targets will be based on priorities that vary considerably in developed and less developed countries (Ehrlich and Kennedy 2005). The local context will affect regional and local targets and should be considered in established sustainability targets for resource consumption and pollution emissions. This paper presents an approach to determining sustainability targets based on a Building Ecology framework and an established approach to determine targets for overall global, national, and building sector sustainability. Establishing benchmarks or targets that are sustainable using the environmental capacity concept is shown by example for the building sector