An integrated energy and water footprint for office building sustainable green management system

Abstract

Global energy challenges, depletion of natural resources as a result of wastage and environmental issues are some of the problems facing the world today. Buildings and industries, especially in the urban areas and developed countries are the major consumers of energy and resources and a lot of them are into unsustainable consumption. These affect sustainable development. Though, there are a lot of sustainability footprints available in literature, but with some limitations in expressing combined measure of the environmental impacts of energy and water consumptions. This study presents an integrated footprint to express comprehensive environmental information as regards to energy and water. This study would encourage energy and water efficiency, reduce carbon emissions as well as protecting the environment. The system boundary created for this study has two utilities (water and air emission); four sectors (agriculture, transportation, industrial and domestic) and the Impact Assessment framework in which the IPCC Sectoral Approach was used to convert inventories into emissions and an environmental impact score of 0.590 was calculated. This result when benchmarked with a GEO shows that NO1 (the case study) is not environmentally sustainable. It revealed that there is room for improvement. Policymakers can make use of this footprint when making informed decisions/policies related to sustainability and environmental impacts. The environmental awareness of the general public can also be raised through this footprint.