Assessing the Resilience of LEED Certified Facilities in Oklahoma: Fid-Bau Portal

Assessing the Resilience of LEED Certified Facilities in Oklahoma

Bhattacharjee, S. / Langar, S. / Everett, B.

Researchers have indicated that multiple parts of the globe will experience unprecedented climate change in the next few decades. Between 1995 and 2014, 15,000 extreme weather events were recorded globally. In these extreme weather events, 525,000 people died, and losses were estimated to be more than 3.0 trillion USD. The impact of climate change (regular floods, droughts, and others) is influencing the ability of the society and built environment to operate as they would in usual circumstances. Therefore, along with the concept of self-reliance and resource independence, buildings need to be designed to be operational, functional, and secure while facing natural disasters. Facilities should possess the ability to absorb, adapt, recover quickly from the natural stresses, and be operational and functional. Thus, to design an effective climate resilient building it is important to understand the effectiveness of buildings certified under the current building rating systems (BRS) to address the aforementioned issues. Considering LEED as the most commonly adopted BRS within the nation, the goal of this study is to ascertain the resilience of LEED certified buildings. For this study, four LEED Certified Institutional Buildings within the state of Oklahoma were purposively selected based on the availability of building data, LEED version of the projects, and location for precise comparison. The buildings’ achieved LEED credit data were further analyzed through content analysis method, to assess the resilience of the facilities towards natural disasters incurred within the state. Results indicated that although all four buildings have achieved a few LEED credits, which helps the buildings to be resilient against natural disasters like a tornado, they cannot be considered as resilient buildings due to the lack of optimum energy performance and onsite resource generation ability.