Insufficient Understanding, Technical Information, Skills or Tools

The World Wide Fund for Nature (n.d.) considered the absence of a standard definition of a ‘sustainable home’ to be one of six key barriers to greater mainstream adoption by house builders, while the Sustainable Building Task Force Blueprint (Kats et al., 2003) identified a lack of technical information as a barrier to sustainable buildings,

However, others note that there is in fact an overwhelming and growing selection of information, and the problem is instead a lack of knowledge or ability to access

appropriate information as required. This applies to both builders and designers as well as clients. Penman (2000) found that commonly cited problems were information overload and poor retrievability. One designer she interviewed commented that resources were stumbled upon largely by chance.

Housing customers interviewed by Penman (2000) tended to find available materials too technical and/or bulky, or difficult to access, and tended to rely on building information and trade shows; professional designers; house and garden magazines; the internet (although some interviewees raised quality assurance as an issue with this method) and local councils. Other less commonly used resources included friends and colleagues;

display homes and other people’s houses; bookstores; alternative magazines; short courses and the library.

Building designers interviewed by Penman (2000) most frequently mentioned the

Environment Design Guide published by the Australian Institute of Architects. The internet

was used, but there was “overwhelming agreement that information on the web is hard to find, many web sites are hard to use, most are American…” (Penman, 2000, p. 9).

Amongst builders, more usual sources of information were technical data from material suppliers and in general manuals; professional magazines; hardware stores for builders and personal and professional contacts (Penman, 2000). Only two out of 15 interviewed used computers as an information source. (These findings might be expected to have changed more than a decade later, particularly with the release of manuals such as Your Home (Reardon et al., 2011) and with the proliferation of sustainability training such as the GreenSmart program run by the Housing Industry Association). However, limited subsequent research has updated these findings.

Although there is likewise limited literature to support this claim, it appears that

universities and other technology transfer programs are not very effectively supporting the adoption of sustainability, or innovation more generally, within the construction industry.

They were rated as the least influential sources of information on innovation in a study of volume builders by Koebel (2003, cited in Koebel & Cavell, 2006). Higher education institutions have also been criticised for not adequately implementing strategies to avoid a shortage of skills required to implement it. For example, (Palmer et al., 2006, p. 2) noted that:

“…there is a significant skills shortage in the [UK] construction and planning industry in terms of delivering more sustainable housing and ensuring compliance with Building Regulations”.

Numerous scholars have commented on the need to better integrate consideration of sustainability into undergraduate programs relating to the built environment (for example, Abdul-Wahab et al., 2003; Biswas, 2012; Cotgrave & Kokkarinen, 2010; Graham, 2000, Paten et al., 2005). Despite this, progress for universities incorporating sustainability into curriculum remains slow (Thomas, 2004).

Although there are concerns about the (lack of) quality or availability of information and educational opportunities, Ambrose et al. (2005) do not consider this necessarily has significantly adverse outcomes for sustainable housing, observing:

“One of the impediments to the uptake of energy efficient design principles is a lack of understanding of the concepts by the house building industry. However,

two recent surveys of house builders in South East Queensland suggest that builders do understand the concepts behind energy efficiency in their climate with respondents in both surveys indicating the top five energy saving features as: 1) cross-ventilation, 2) roof insulation, 3) window shading, 4) landscaping 5) wall insulation. These responses demonstrate a good understanding of the issue…”

(pp. 338-339).

Another related barrier is that scepticism about green building appears to be wide spread, a situation described by authors such as Blengini & Shields (2010), Hinnells et al. (2008) and Richardson & Lynes (2007). In part, this could link to a wider scepticism about issues such as human-induced climate change which is being stimulated by certain groups, as was briefly described in Chapter 2, or to a broader phenomenon of ‘green fatigue’ which is starting to be discussed in the mass media (Marriner, 2012) but it can also stem from more specific doubts about whether green buildings really deliver benefits, or are really required (Richardson & Lynes, 2007).

A factor potentially contributing to this situation is the fact that sustainability rating tools are not necessarily comprehensive, and thus can, to some extent, function as a form of greenwashing. Birkeland (2008) notes that many green building tools have typically aimed only to achieve a certain percentage lower for energy consumption or ‘carbon neutrality’

by counting offsets. As she wryly comments, “…if we labelled cigarettes the way we label buildings, people might start smoking ‘light’ cigarettes to get healthier” (2008, p. 15).

Scepticism is not entirely unreasonable, given that there is also a growing body of evidence suggesting that, at least in some cases, green buildings do not perform as they were designed to in practice (Arnold, 2011; Sims and Meier, 2012). For example, a study of the energy performance of 121 LEED New Construction (commercial) buildings found that while there were on average substantial energy performance improvements in LEED certified buildings compared to non-LEED building stock (with average LEED energy use 25-30 per cent better than the national average), there was wide variation across the projects (Turner and Frankel, 2008). Measured energy use intensities for more than half the studied buildings deviated by more than 25 per cent from design projections, with 30 per cent significantly better and 25 per cent significantly worse.

Arnold (2011) suggests that a key factor in the gap between predictions and performance is a lack of scientific rigour applied to the process of building simulations, particularly energy modelling, and the design process for an individual building. He suggests the

building simulation process should be thought of as a scientific experiment, requiring the formation of a hypothesis that is tested through modelling, results analysed and

conclusions drawn; but that this is not how the process is typically applied in practice by the construction industry. Likewise, he considers the design process of creating a building is similarly a series of experiments, testing a variety of design hypotheses, but notes that feedback loops are not strong in the construction industry. As he puts it:

“Once a building is complete and (hopefully) commissioned the design team simply move on to the next design project. This means that there is no common mechanism for designers to test their work, or design hypotheses to see if they were correct. The finished building in itself is an experiment in design, yet few designers bother to collect the results” (p. 488).

Scott & Harris (1998) similarly bemoaned the lack of appropriate feedback processes to support improvements to the work of building designers, noting that where such systems were in place they were mostly informal and unstructured. More recently, Shnapp &

Laustsen (2013) reiterated the need to provide available (and storable) and credible (verifiable and transparent) data on energy savings if the confidence of policy-makers, buildings, architects and other stakeholders is to be won.

Arnold (2011) notes, instead of enhancing designs through a feedback process, the construction industry (at least in New Zealand) typically uses building simulation only for compliance or rating processes, whereby energy simulation is viewed as a “means to an end” and “…the results are often misinterpreted or even misappropriated by some in the industry” (p. 482). He also notes that at times the various sources of error or bias inherent in simulation tools are exploited, providing the example of a particular software package which is favoured by the construction industry for Green Star simulation work as it is known to give favourable results for thermal comfort and energy credits.

Until such scepticism can be seriously tackled, including by addressing both the valid causes and the more scurrilous claims being made by a minority on wider sustainability issues, it is likely to remain a barrier to greater uptake of sustainable houses. If these issues are addressed and scepticism remains, then it becomes more of a specifically cognitive barrier, described below.