Signal 3：Think Beyond the Green Building Certification Data

Third-party green building rating systems like LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification program）are playing a critical role in influencing societies to transition to energy efficient buildings and neighborhoods. What’s more, the results of LEED certification are useful to explore what factors related to the green buildings and livable cities. In-depth analysis of these data will present a new perspective on the city sustainability.

The certification processes for low energy built environments including different building categories such as existing buildings, neighborhood development and homes. I want to focus on homes which is consistently consuming much more energy than commercial buildings on a global scale, as the pro-life rating residences use more than double the energy used in commercial ones. I am interested in the characteristics of sustainable LEED residential buildings in USA and factors significantly affect the rating results.

I suppose that the pattern of green building distribution may be the same as the pattern of household income distribution. And the number of LEED homes is related to the number of policies and incentives. I plan to use the LEED Homes data, a residential platform which fully implemented in 2008, to find the correlation between the “green” and socioeconomic factors.