Importance of occupants’ expectations for acceptance of green buildings: a literature review

Abstract

The buildings, where people live, work, and protect people from nature's extremes, yet they also affect human health and environment in countless ways. The increasing consensus on climate change has resulted in escalating demands on the public to make better environmental choices in building construction. The term ‘green design' has been used fairly consistently over the past decade to emphasize such environmental performance of buildings. Many studies have found that the construction clients are demanding assurance of their buildings' long-term economic and environmental performance and costs. Further, the occupants have been favourably disposed to green buildings from their conventional environments. Moreover, in the early stages of a transition towards sustainability, the priorities placed on environmental issues are subscribed by society as a whole and those implicit in building owner's priorities and expectations. Hence, the modern practice has extended and complemented the conventional building construction process to achieve sustainable or high performance building. Accordingly, key research papers were reviewed in this research paper in order to identify occupants' expectations and its importance for the acceptance of green building. Literature stated that there is more potential to change the existing buildings to be more ‘green', as the quality of built environment is a major expectation of building occupants. Further, most of the occupants expect quality indoor environment with properly controlled and maintained temperature, humidity, noise, lighting and thermal comfort parameters within buildings. It is due to the certainty of reaching their expectations specially to obtain comfortable working environment. Hence, it implies that the occupants' expectations are significance for the acceptance of any green building specially in moving from their typical working environments. The reason is that the poor fit between the built environment and the needs and expectations of the occupants may lead to dissatisfaction, health issues and productivity losses.