Evaluation of sustainability criteria for residential buildings of tropical climate: The stakeholder perspective

The efforts made in the building industry in pursuance of sustainable development is widely acknowledged as green building assessment/rating systems. The existing systems primarily concentrated on the environmental dimension, but the economic and social dimensions have earned only limited attention. In this context, both developed and developing countries are acquainted with several studies incorporating the three sustainability dimensions. However, region-specific assessment systems hardly exist, especially in India, a country with diverse climatic conditions. Therefore, the current study aims to establish the critical criteria influencing sustainability by focusing the residential buildings in the tropical climatic zone of India as a precursor to developing a new sustainability assessment system. An extensive review of the published literature and green building rating systems, along with expert interview, was adopted to establish the initial pool of criteria. Further, the perception of building stakeholders on the importance of each criterion towards the sustainability of residential buildings in the tropical climate was recorded through a questionnaire survey. The data gathered was evaluated using Fuzzy TOPSIS and Pareto analysis to arrive at the critical criteria. The findings of the current study will help practitioners, researchers, and academicians accomplish building sustainability in the tropical climate. © 2020 Elsevier B.V.