Building labeling strategies and trends in Finland and China

Nowadays, the built environment has a large impact on the natural environment, economy, health and productivity. In the Europe, building sector is attributed with more than 40% of the total energy use, 30% the CO2 emissions, and is estimated to generate 40% of all man-made waste. To fight against global warming and the degradation of the environment, different countries are striving to develop regional solutions to improve the building performance and mitigate the impact of building on the environment. The sub-objectives of this study are: to identify the different strategies of the two national labelling systems, to analyze the trends of the national labeling systems regarding building environment. In different building labeling system, various weighting systems are employed. On the other hand, these tools highlighted some common issues of building sustainable performance, which can be summarized as five key issues of building sector through the whole lifecycle phases: site, water, energy, material, and IEQ. Other issues can be regarded as the technique and strategy innovation to achieve the sustainable performance of the above five issues. As a benchmarking system, it must identify best practices under specific climate conditions and development stage. Through the view of the four countries' building labeling system, it was found that besides energy aspect, the health and wellbeing or indoor environment quality are ranked the most important aspect to assess the building environment. The Chinese building labelling is supported by various separated regulations and thus needs more effort to be improved in the future regarding the different local conditions.