Green building and sustainability consultant Jerry Yudelson’s annual list of Top 10 Megatrends for the green building industry predicts a bumper year for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) new build and retrofit projects.
Yudelson said: “It looks like a good year ahead for the green building industry. Based on our experience, it seems clear that green building will continue its rapid expansion globally in 2013 in spite of the ongoing economic slowdown in most countries of Europe and North America. More people are building green each year, with 50,000 LEED projects underway by the latest counts; there is nothing on the horizon that will stop this Mega-trend or its constituent elements.”
Yudelson added that, even with commercial and governmental projects proceeding at a lower level, there should be faster growth in green retrofits, with surging college and university projects, along with NGO activity.
He further predicts that the focus of the green building industry will continue its switch from new building design and construction to greening existing buildings.
“Green Buildings will increasingly be managed in the ’Cloud’, represented by the large number of new entrants and new products in fields of building automation, facility management, wireless controls and building services information management in 2011 and 2012,” Yudelson said.
In addition the report forecasts that awareness of the coming crisis in fresh water supply, both globally and in the US, will increase.
Leading building designers, owners and managers will be moved to take further steps to reduce water consumption in buildings by using more conserving fixtures, rainwater recovery systems and innovative new onsite water technologies.
