Federal agencies face a number of challenges in implementing current green building requirements, including challenges related to their building inventories, missions, and the criteria for evaluating compliance, GAO has said.
Federal law and policies for improving sustainability across the federal government include construction and maintenance practices designed to reduce environmental impacts, GAO noted. Entities involved in providing guidance, oversight, training and other support to agencies to achieve those goals include the Council on Environmental Quality, Energy, EPA, GSA and OMB. GAO visited a sampling of agencies and found that all of them also use third-party certification systems to help implement key federal green building requirements for new construction and major renovation projects.
Despite that amount of assistance, DoD officials for example “said that the sheer number of buildings in their inventory proves challenging. In addition, according to officials from several agencies, their building inventories include certain building types, such as laboratories, hospitals, and industrial buildings for which some requirements are difficult to implement.”
VA cited mission concerns, including new safety requirements and extended hours to address patient backlogs, as a challenge to implementing energy and water conservation requirements.
“Also, some agency officials said that the criteria for evaluating compliance with the requirements can be a disincentive to implementing some requirements because no credit is received unless all of the requirements are implemented,” GAO said, adding that upcoming revisions to green building requirements may address some of those challenges.