Despite ongoing economic difficulties in most developed countries, the global rebound of green building will continue in 2012, green-building and sustainability consultant Jerry Yudelson predicts in his annual list of top 10 green-building “MegaTrends.”
“What we’re seeing is that more people are building green each year, and there is nothing on the horizon that will stop this MegaTrend or its constituent elements,” Yudelson, chief executive officer of Tucson, Ariz.-based Yudelson Associates, says.
Following is Yudelson’s list of the top 10 green-building trends for 2012, gleaned, he said, from conversations with green-building-industry leaders in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Australia over the past year:
1. Green building in North America will rebound in 2012. “In 2010 and 2011, the continuing slowdown in commercial real estate and the end of federal recovery funding put a crimp in new green-building projects,” Yudelson, author of 12 books on green building, says. But while the growth rate of new green-building projects fell dramatically in 2010 and 2011, domestic Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design- (LEED-) project registrations are up almost 40 percent over 2010 levels. “We see faster growth in green retrofits and notice that ongoing college and university projects and NGO (non-governmental organization) activity are serving to backstop the fall in commercial and governmental construction,” Yudelson says.
2. Green building will continue to benefit from the Obama administration’s strengthened focus on greening the executive branch, which includes a commitment to a minimum of LEED Gold certification for all federal projects and a concentration on major energy-efficiency renovations.
To read the others, visit http://hpac.com/news/megatrends-2012/.
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