Examining the most important issues in achieving the goal of building more efficient and less damaging buildings, this book highlight the significant statutes and regulations as well as other legal issues that need to be considered when advising clients in the development, construction, financing, and leasing of a green building. Topics include federal incentive programs, financing, alternative energy, site selection, land use planning, green construction practices and materials, emerging legal issues, and the effects of climate change on planning and architectural design.

The legal and economic landscape for building and development have fundamentally been altered by the country's major environmental problems - climate change, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, ozone depletion, pollution, and unsustainable natural resource consumption rates. The editors provide practical information for lawyers to assist their clients in fully understanding green building and sustainable development concepts so they can operate successfully in the evolving economic and regulatory environment while minimizing the potential cost penalty of business-as-usual practices.

Legislation and regulation are driving green development and compliance in a wide variety of ways. This review of the law in key jurisdictions for the research community, lawyers, the construction industry and government examines some of the mechanisms in place - from the more traditional building regulation controls to green leases and the law relating to buildings and their natural environment.

This is the 2015 edition of a casebook for an advanced law school course on the emerging law of green buildings. Everyone wants new buildings to be green and old buildings to be "greened". What will this mean for legal agreemens? What will be other legal consequences? Students identify and analyze types of green issues affecting every type of real estate transaction and construction project. They consider, also, legal and policy issues of green legislation which mandates compliance with green rules or creates incentives for green development and sustainability. In short, the course provokes answers to the question, "what is the role of the lawyer in the green revolution?" In short, in this course the students address green issues as lawyers.

In early 2009, the United States Green Building Council (USGBC) released a white paper that claimed green building legal risks are merely 'old wine in new bottles'. However, in identifying a variety of the typical claims that are asserted in connection with construction projects, USGBC's effort fell short of elevating the analysis of green building legal issues to the level necessary for policymakers and project teams to make informed decisions about legislative activity and project-specific risk management. The paper concluded by suggesting that 'conjecture, anecdote, and even rumor swirl around recent presentations, workshops and discussions circling the question of what legal claims may be based on the design, development, and construction of sustainable buildings'. This book will definitively address the potential for such legal claims in way which will allow stakeholders to fully appreciate and evaluate the legal issues that may - and indeed already have - ferment into 'new wine.'

Each day in the United States, 1.85 million square feet are certified as "green building." Growth projections suggest that more than 70 percent of the world's population will live in densely urbanized areas by 2050. While not the universal remedy for sustainable urbanization, the green building movement has emerged as an effective approach to addresses concerns associated with rapid urbanization. One aspect of the rapid rise in green buildings is the increase in specific and often highly technical green-building regulations. In the last five years alone, eleven new nationally recognized green building certification programs have been developed. As a result, local governments often mandate a particular certification as a prerequisite to building development. Yet, cities need to have a coherent set of regulations and construction industry professionals to deliver against these regulations. Similarly, as cities pass and develop new regulations, they need to consider how their new laws create potential unintended consequences. For instance, between the 1930s and '40s the Federal Housing Administration ("FHA") transformed the housing industry by implementing policies that increased home ownership. Intending to benefit the majority of American citizens, hindsight has taught today's policymakers that the FHA's actions ultimately created greater social divide between the "haves and have-nots, " increasing racial and socioeconomic segregation through urban sprawl and gentrification. (Ehrenreich, 1985). As green-building regulations become ubiquitous at the state and local levels, it is imperative that we understand how regulations impact the dynamics between local, state, and federal regulatory systems in order to fully consider the intended and unintended potential consequences of the recent green revolution (Abair, 2008). As a result, we should develop a deeper understanding of the intended and unintended benefits of the growth of green buildings. For instance, we should analyze how energy efficiency can be implemented as a proxy to identify which buildings in a portfolio need broader green building initiatives. The analysis will speed up the due diligence process in identifying buildings in need of initiatives. Growth in green buildings leaves a number of important and heretofore unanswered questions: How do we define green building regulations? How can we compare different regulatory guidances? What are the appropriate methodologies for comparing regulatory guidances? What are the potential unintended (and intended) unidentified consequences of green regulations? What is the dynamic between green building and gentrification? How can we use green building indicators, such as energy efficiency, as a proxy for implementing other green building initiatives? To complement the vast body of research on building energy efficiency and certification schemes, this dissertation analyzes three areas of green building: (1) standardization of green building guidance and the types of various green building systems; (2) the role of green buildings within cities and towns; and (3) a data-driven approach to better understand how energy efficiency can be implemented as a proxy for identifying a need for broader green building initiatives. To accomplish this, my research builds on the interdisciplinary nature of green building and the holistic view of sustainability (United Nations, 2016) by applying different points of departure including building regulation, local government law, and energy efficiency. First the research identifies important differences between green building policy and provides a methodology to identify appropriate guidance based on project priorities and location. Second, the research identifies the potential for unintended consequences of green building and draws parallels between historical dynamics of local government law and green building regulation within local jurisdictions. Next, the research examines the potential unintended consequences of green buildings by investigating the socio-economic patterns of current Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certified buildings in California cities and towns. Finally, the research uses an established statistical approach to cost-effectively and efficiently identify which buildings within a large-scale portfolio are most likely ripe for energy efficiency investment. This dissertation contributes to a better practical and theoretical understanding of green building policy and regulations within local, state and federal jurisdictions. Additionally, this research provides an approach to examining and identifying which buildings in a portfolio are ripe for broader green building initiatives. Policymakers and municipalities can use the contributions when evaluating green building options. Firms can use the contributions to cost-effectively and efficiently identify existing buildings in need of green building initiatives.

This comprehensive guide examines the issues, problems and pitfalls involved in the intersection of real estate, business, and environmental law. Chapters are written by a team of accomplished real estate, environmental, tax, land use and business lawyers and technical experts, in private practice, corporations, government and law schools.

The book reveals how green buildings are currently being adapted and applied in developing countries. It includes the major developing countries such as China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Pakistan, Cambodia, Ghana, Nigeria and countries from the Middle East and gathers the insights of respected green building researchers from these areas to map out the developing world’s green building revolution. The book highlights these countries’ contribution to tackling climate change, emphasising the green building benefits and the research behind them. The contributing authors explore how the green building revolution has spread to developing countries and how national governments have initiated their own green building policies and agendas. They also explore how the market has echoed the green building policy, and how a business case for green buildings has been established. In turn, they show how an international set of green building standards, in the form of various techniques and tools, has been incorporated into local building and construction practices. In closing, they demonstrate how the developing world is emerging as a key player for addressing the energy and environmental problems currently facing the world. The book helps developers, designers and policy-makers in governments and green building stakeholders to make better decisions on the basis of global and local conditions. It is also of interest to engineers, designers, facility managers and researchers, as it provides a holistic picture of how the industry is responding to the worldwide call for greener and more sustainable buildings.