Achieving green building certification feels like the finish line. But it’s not. It’s more of a starting point for a sustained effort that many owners are not prepared to meet.
It’s rarely sudden. Buildings that receive sustainable ratings usually start strong but fall silently in the following years. Performance metrics decline. Critical systems no longer are monitored. At the time of reassessment, the certification is either gone or downgraded.
The industry is loathe to acknowledge how often this happens, and even more, to acknowledge which reasons are repeatedly to blame.
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No One Is Watching The Metrics
The number one reason that buildings lose their certification is ironically simple: it stops being monitored.
When pursuing sustainability certification, everything is measured. Energy use, water consumption, waste streams, air quality readings. A team is often assigned to track everything, ensuring that every data point gets read and subsequently reported.
And then when certification is granted, the team disbands. The platforms that were monitored at least intermittently become overlooked either permanently or checked erratically just by happenstance.
Buildings are not static. Systems age and drift out of calibration. Equipment performs differently. Tenant mix changes how spaces are used. A building with once ideal performance may now be bleeding energy after a two-year stretch – but if no one is measuring it, no one knows.
Performance documentation is necessary for most certification programs to achieve continual ratings. You have to prove the building is still performing to standards. Arriving at renewal time with gaping holes or no documentation puts you in a position of failure – and by then, it’s usually too late to do anything.
Maintenance Budgets Are Squeezed
This is predictable but it happens anyway. Budget constraints come in. Facilities teams are over-extended. Systems that make the buildings work efficiently fall apart.
High efficiency HVAC requires maintenance to remain highly efficient. Automated lighting controls drift. Rainwater catchment systems need cleaning. Solar arrays need inspection. Any of these deferred maintenance practices will result in failing metrics quickly.
But it’s even more complicated: systems that inherently possess an element of sustainability also have more complexity than the more conventional counterparts. While it may be easy for an older air conditioner to continue pumping (and failing to be efficient), a smart climate system that adjusts based on occupancy sensors and outdoor climate considerations starts making poor decisions the moment those sensors get dirty or calibration fails.
Deferred maintenance impacts your scorecard, but worse, it kills documentation. The bca green mark scheme, for example, requires evidence that systems are maintained per specifications. No maintenance logs equals failing parts of the assessment before anyone looks at current energy usage.
Tenants Do What They Want
It’s unfortunate, but even if a building is designed and maintained perfectly, tenant behavior can still derail sustainability efforts. But where can facility managers control what happens behind closed doors?
They override thermostats. They bring space heaters into the building or old mini-fridges from college. They prop doors open, leave entire floors lit overnight without occupancy checks, neglect recycling bins or set up server rooms without cooling provisions at best.
This all impacts building performance negatively.
Without any lease stipulations to prevent this behavior – and without monitoring when things go wrong – the problems compound. Some buildings lose significant points upon reassessment because tenant spaces now exceed 30 to 40 percent greater usage levels than they did during the original certification process. But the building hasn’t changed; the systems are still the same. Only now, usage patterns went unmanaged.
The buildings that keep their ratings long-term engage tenants as part of facilities management best practices. They communicate with tenants about policies and include sustainability requirements in leasing agreements while even sometimes monitoring tenant spaces so that internal problems can be avoided for the entire building instead of compounded into one issue.
The Paperwork Falls Apart
Sustainability certification relies on documentation: energy bills, maintenance logs, waste audits, water readings, service records for equipment, air quality tests.
More often than not, buildings that lose their certification didn’t do so because they operated poorly; they lost it because they couldn’t prove they weren’t operating poorly because of failed paperwork. Either none existed, all existed in jumbled fragments or each document was across various systems and filing cabinets to the point where piecing together one successful reassessment was impossible.
This occurs over time when someone responsible for sustainability reporting leaves, a new property management system fails to migrate historical information effectively, maintenance contractors change and their record-keeping format differs completely. Years later, everyone has gone through changes and now holes exist everywhere.
Deadlines do not care about the state of your disorganization; standards are maintained regardless. Should you find yourself with messy records and holes everywhere, you either get desperate in the last minute – and it’s expensive – or you let your renewal lapse because you know you cannot fulfill documentation requirements.
Renovations Break Things
No matter how strategic an initial construction process may be, buildings will change through tenant requests for different layouts, upgrades in technology and renovations for common areas. All of this can negatively impact performance if done without forethought regarding the existing certification – but if changes are made without input from someone who understands the value of certification, years of effort can go down the drain.
Renovations kick out energy-efficient features installed for cost reasons; new construction throws down cheap materials without regard for original approvals for sustainable programs; equipment gets swapped out based on availability rather than what keeps efficiency; little things add up and before anyone knows it, there’s no match between what’s approved and sustainable effort implemented in comparison with what’s been changed.
Buildings that keep their green status change over time because every construction project or change becomes an opportunity to maintain performance or improve it – but only if they have someone involved who knows sustainability before decisions are locked in.
What Actually Works
It’s clear to see the trend: once sustainability becomes something no longer actively managed but instead, something that’s a nice memory from years prior, a building loses its funding credentials.
To avoid this problem means making performance management part of standard operations as usual – assigning someone to own sustainability metrics (even if it’s only one piece of a larger metric), automated monitoring can keep someone from forgetting to read specific measures; consistent preventative maintenance scheduled and delivered keeps deferred maintenance miles away; writing sustainability components into leases with regular meetings helps keep tenants engaged; systems should all be integrated into one comprehensive space where documentation remains organized from day one instead of scrambling six months before reassessment.
Sustainability isn’t something you earn and forget about; it’s an ongoing component of building operation and those who keep their ratings through time recognize that from day one.
