by Brianna Crandall — January 7, 2015—The Green Building Initiative (GBI), a nonprofit organization committed to accelerating the adoption of sustainable building practices, announced last month that Congress passed an act that provides for green building certification of military residential construction, which represents 16 percent of the federal real estate portfolio.
For the first time, Section 2807 of the Carl Levin and Howard P. “Buck” McKeon National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2015 allows federal military services to use Green Globes as a suitable green building rating system in assessing the quality of this construction, says GBI, the organization behind the Green Globes building certification program.
“The Green Building Initiative is pleased that the Congress in this vital act has reaffirmed the value of the Green Globes rating system for federal projects and has extended its use to assessing multifamily residential construction for military facilities. We believe that there is great value in third-party assessments to provide quality assurance for green building construction and operations. We look forward to working with the various military services to provide that value to their future housing developments,” said Jerry Yudelson, GBI’s president.
For the past six years, GBI says it has applied the Green Globes rating system with many federal clients, including the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), U.S. Forest Service, National Institutes of Health (NIH), and U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) for the certification of federal projects.
In addition, the GBI was reportedly the first organization to provide federal agencies with Guiding Principles Compliance to meet the requirements of President Obama’s 2009 Executive Order 13514.
“Green Globes has proven especially suitable for evaluating multifamily projects in the private sector, and we’re pleased to be able to offer this certification program to the military services,” said Yudelson.
