Dubai green buildings: convert requirements into project responsibilities

The practical difficulty with a green building framework is not understanding that requirements exist. It is ensuring that each requirement is actually discharged as the project moves from concept through design, procurement and construction — a period during which the design changes continuously and the people involved change too.

A requirement tends to be discharged reliably when four things are attached to it. First, a named owner: a specific person or role in the design team responsible for satisfying it, not a general understanding that the team will. Second, a defined piece of evidence: the calculation, drawing, specification, certificate or test result that demonstrates compliance, identified in advance rather than assembled afterwards. Third, a date by which the evidence must exist, tied to a project milestone rather than to the end of the programme. And fourth, a change-control route, so that a later design change that affects the requirement is caught and re-assessed.

The register that results is unglamorous and it is the difference between a framework that shapes a building and a framework that is addressed at the end. The table below sets out the structure.

Three points in a project typically account for most lost requirements, and each is predictable.

Value engineering is the first. A cost reduction exercise late in design can remove or substitute a component that a requirement depended on, and the change may be recorded as a saving without reference to the requirement it affected. Where the register includes a change trigger, the substitution is flagged and re-assessed; where it does not, the requirement quietly fails.

Procurement is the second. A specification written to satisfy a requirement may be met by a compliant product, but substitutions offered during procurement are frequently judged on price and availability alone. The register should identify which specifications are requirement-bearing, so that substitutions against them are assessed rather than accepted.

Handover is the third. Evidence that is required to demonstrate compliance is often generated during construction and then lost in the volume of documentation produced. Defining the evidence in advance, and collecting it against the milestone rather than at the end, is what prevents a completed building from being unable to demonstrate what was built into it.

It is worth being explicit about the boundary, because green building work attracts claims it should not.

This article concerns how to organise the discharge of requirements a project is subject to. It is not compliance advice for any specific project, and it cannot be: the applicable requirements depend on the building type, the edition in force at the relevant time, and the authority's current position, all of which must be established for the project in question.

Nor does anything here constitute certification. Gambit Reign does not certify buildings, does not issue green building classification, and does not act as the authority for any of the requirements discussed. Those functions sit with the issuing authority and with the qualified professionals — architects, engineers and specialists — responsible for design, verification and submission. What an advisory role can properly do is ensure the requirements are identified, owned, evidenced and tracked, so that the professionals who must discharge them can do so without discovering them late.