Sustainability and performance assessment and benchmarking of buildings: Final report

This report is presents and summarises the results of the European SuPerBuild-ings project. The project developed and selected sustainability indicators for buildings, de-velop understanding about performance levels considering new and existing buildings, different building types and different national and local requirements, developed methods for the assessment and benchmarking of sustainable buildings and made recommendations for the effective use of benchmarking systems as instruments of steering and in different stages of building projects. The final report presents the main results of the project and makes references to the original project deliverables available on the project's web site: http://cic.vtt.fi/superbuildings/ The final reported has been edited by the project coordinator Dr Tarja Häk-kinen. The main authors of the report are prof. Thomas Lützkendorf, Maria Balouktsi, Andrea Immendörfer, KIT-U, Syviane Nibel, Boris Bosdevigie, Alexeandra Lebert and Bruno Fies, CSTB, Dr Patxi Hernandez Iñarra, TECNALIA, Antonín Lupísek and prof. Petr Hajek, CVUT, Susanne Supper, ÖGUT, Erki Alsema W/E, Laetitia Delem and Johan Van Dessel, CSTB, together with Tarja Häkkinen, Carmen Antuña, Tarja Mäkeläinen from VTT. The final report introduces the current SB assessment systems and dicsusses barrier and drviers for sustainable building. From the beginning, SuPerBuildings agreed not to add another sustainability system to the numerous existing ones. Instead, the principles for the design and development of assessment systems should be worked out, discussed and made publicly available. As the sustainability of buildings should always be assessed with the help of indicators, one of the key objectives of SuPerBuildings is to ensure "validity" for sustainability indicator systems. This determines the true possibility of an indicator system to give information about the sustainability of buildings. Project selected indicators for further development. Regarding these indicators the final report presents information about their validity, assessment methods, and performance levels. The final report also discusses the problematics and functional equivalent, and weighting and normalization criteria. Finally, the report gives recommendations for the use of indicators in different stages of building processes, in connection of building information models and in the connection of different steering instruments.