Global green building ratings committee appoints chair

The Chief Executive of the Green Building Council of Australia (GBCA), Romilly Madew, has been appointed chair of a new committee tasked with overseeing consistent standards for global green building rating.

The World Green Building Council’s (WorldGBC’s) new committee will develop an international standard for quality assurance of global green building rating tools.

“Our immediate priority is to provide guidance on the Common Carbon Metric project, which is working towards a globally accepted and consistent methodology for measuring the carbon performance of our building stock,” Madew says.

“With Australia moving towards a price on carbon, robust carbon accounting within the built environment will become increasingly critical.

“We will also be complementing the work commenced by the South African Green Building Council on socioeconomic criteria for green building rating systems.”

According to WorldGBC Chair Tony Arnel, “The potential of the built environment to deliver cost-effective, global carbon emission reductions is unrivalled. Building rating systems are one of the most powerful mechanisms for affecting positive change and market transformation.”

Jane Henley, Chief Executive of the WorldGBC, says: “Building rating systems have contributed enormously to driving higher environmental expectations and are both directly and indirectly influencing the performance of buildings. In some marketplaces, rating tools have been extremely successful and their widespread adoption has generated the critical mass required to create new sustainable benchmarks. It is this success that we must replicate around the world, and the WorldGBC is very pleased that Romilly Madew will drive this agenda,” Henley says.

Other nations represented on the committee include the US, UK, Japan, Singapore, South Africa and Germany.

“I’m delighted to take on the role of chair of this new committee. Australia’s property and construction industry should take this as further evidence of our leadership role in the formation and delivery of green building rating tools,” Madew says.

“Being part of this new committee enables us to continue to play an active role in the evolution of the global green building movement,” Madew concludes.