Roy, M.; Ghosh, B.; Das Gupta, A.
Year:
2007
Bibliographic info:
The 6th International Conference on Indoor Air Quality, Ventilation & Energy Conservation in Buildings IAQVEC 2007, Oct. 28 - 31 2007, Sendai, Japan

Since our earth has finite material resources and biological capacity, human must live within thecarrying capacity on the earth.As we exceed the carrying capacity of the earths ecosystem over thetime they stressed, then go into decline and finally collapse. They are expanded further than renewed.The construction and operation of built environment contribute to the environmental loads. Those whodesign and purchase building have little or no methods to asses the environmental impact of theiractions. Thus, there is a need to study the impact of the building design to the ecosystem and finalizethe design rule for Green Building.The qualification of a healthy built environment is judged with respect to several factors and of courseparameters where one of them is how it is compatible to the environment with the ecology. Thus whiledesigning a built environment conjoins two disciplines that is subject of architecture and that ofecology. To develop a green building and environmental building is a subject of applied ecology,where the designers understand the constitutions, organization and structure of ecosystems, and theirimpact of architecture are considered from environmental perspectives. By utilizing the concepts,methods and language of ecology, designers can create architecture that is very much embedded inthe site and the surroundings.To asses on the compatibility of the building with the local or regional environment there should besome criteria for assessment, which implies the definition of building design criteria. If we establish thecriteria that are based to our best scientific understanding of environmental capacity that we begin todevelop a building stock that is sustainable. To do this one must quantify the linkage between theresulting environmental impacts and their cause in building production and use. This are not done intraditional building environmental impact assessment methods, which are based on qualificationassumed negative impacts on man made inventions on the natural environment, typically using a codecomplaint reference building as a standard and improved upon. These indices lack on ecologicallyderived base line or standard of measure, under which sustainable development can be analyzed andcompared with a universal basis.Using ecosystem services as a baseline, a duel-criteria frame can determine the sustainability.Evaluation may be done in terms of input and output. In the first case, the quantitiesabsorbed/consumed from the ecosystem during built up process and in last case the emission fromthe building systems during operation and use.The input assessment can be defined in terms of mathematical equations considering the ecosystemsinput and output, are total land, materials, water and energy used. A term ecosystems productivity, i.e.a quantity for carrying earths environmental carrying capacity will be taken as the reference scale.Those scale will dictate about the quantity of land required to absorb the waste of the materials andecology from the building to eco systems.An ecologically derived baselines can be used to qualify both positive and negative impacts ofbuildings which will allow equal base lines of the vastly different types of projects depending upon theirlocations, types and sizes. The present paper will derive a tool to evaluate the effectiveness of thebuilding design to the environment. The ecosystems service criteria use an objective to develop ashelter which consume low energy from the conventional sources, generate energy to meet itsmaximum demand, create a clean and safe environment. The details of the relative ecological impactof energy and materials in the built in environment as well as identification of effective strategies forreducing environmental impacts will be discussed in the text of the paper.