User-friendliness of current building environmental impact assessment tools: an architect's perspective

Abstract

In the building sector, the global environmental impact of buildings is gaining attention. This environmental impact includes all impacts related to the building (materials) throughout the entire life cycle. A number of tools to assess the environmental impact of buildings as a whole has already been developed, usually with an underlying life cycle approach. As architects are a central actor in the design process, they are responsible for the building design and the accompanying environmental impact. Therefore, in the future, they will most likely perform such an environmental impact assessment (EIA) during the design process. So, environmental impact assessment tools should be adapted to the architect’s work method and practice. In this context, a comparative evaluation of the user-friendliness of four existing EIA tools is performed from a Flemish architect’s perspective. An evaluation framework and a reference building are used to obtain comparable results on the architect-friendliness of these tools. The findings indicate that architectfriendliness is not sufficiently taken into account yet in the existing EIA tools. Therefore, a series of suggestions for improvement of the current tools and guidelines for the development of new EIA tools, oriented to usage by architects, is included.