Development and analysis of Climate Sensitivity and Climate Adaptation opportunities indices for buildings

Buildings represent long-term, capital-intensive investments designed to perform for decades into the future. Consequently, the potential for changes in climate across the design lifetime of built environments represents an immediate challenge for planning, design, and construction. In this study, we consider the opportunities to assess Climate Sensitivity and adaptive opportunities associated with green building practice. We developed a pair of complementary indicators called the Climate Sensitivity Index (CSI) and Climate Adaptation Opportunity Index (CAOI). These indicators are applied to evaluate individual strategies ("credits") within the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED (TM)) for New Construction rating system. The indices provide two complementary scores for each strategy. The CSI reflects potential sensitivity to changing conditions (i.e., risks to performance outcomes), and the CAOI indicates potential adaptive opportunities (i.e., plausible strategies to adapt to changing conditions). We apply the indices to retrospectively examine the prevalence of potentially sensitive and adaptive practices among a global set of 2440 LEED-certified projects. Adaptive opportunities were more prevalent than sensitivities in the LEED-NC rating system. The CSI and CAOI indices illustrate how information can be derived by interpreting patterns of LEED credit achievement. The indices will be available within a suite of analytical tools in the Green Building Information Gateway (www.gbig.org). (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.