Evaluating Building Sustainability Rating Systems: Standards and Methodologies for Energy-Water Based Assessment Criteria

To implement the principle of sustainable development worldwide, multiple sustainability criteria are utilized. The challenges that significantly impact quality of life and the environment are largely influenced by residential and service buildings, which rely heavily on energy and water demands, as well as the strategies and smart systems used for their optimization. This study aims to investigate the relationship between energy and water usage based on various building assessment standards. The research question explored is how extensively the Global Sustainability Systems approach energy-water assessments. The objectives of the study were to examine the weight and density valuations of six (6) notable global sustainable systems. The various stages of the study include defining the research question, categorizing the data, analyzing the data to generate reportable metrics, and providing an in-depth discussion of the findings. The findings of the study illustrate the strong influence of energy, with a maximum allocation of 55% for the Green Mark (GM) assessment. GM also recorded the highest allocation for the issue of Energy Optimization, at 22%. On the other hand, the maximum allocation for the Water category is 10% in both the Green Star (GS) and Green Building Index systems. Furthermore, GS has the highest allocation for the issue of Water Reduction, at 9%. When considering all the reviewed systems, GM demonstrates the highest share for assessment issue distribution and the highest assessment correlation with the other systems - with a significance of 0.999 at p < 0.01 with Pearson correlation. Further critical evaluation of new assessment methodologies launched by, for instance, GS and GM, was considered a limitation of the research and is recommended for future research.