Malaysian awareness and willingness towards retrofitted green buildings: community

Abstract

Green building concept has been widely practice around the globe particularly in well developed countries such as in United State and Europe. In the past 5 years, there was growing number of construction in Malaysia that dealing with sustainability in their implementation. There are lots of new and existing buildings that being transformed into green building. Randomly, about one to two million buildings are being newly constructed in Malaysia every year. Even when each of the new buildings would use net-zero energy technology, it will take decades to achieve significant impact on the overall energy consumption for the entire building stock. A much more productive approach for achieving building energy efficiency is to focus on the retrofit of existing buildings. Retrofitting existing buildings into green involves the participation of the community in achieving the purpose. Therefore, this paper attempts to access the community awareness towards retrofitted green buildings (RGB) in Malaysia. This is essential in order to verify the level of Malaysian community awareness on the benefits of retrofitted green buildings and their willingness to retrofit their existing building into green. Hence, in order to serve the purpose, there are two objectives outlined which are: 1) to access the level of the community willingness to retrofit existing building into green and 2) to establish the community awareness towards the benefits of retrofitted green building. There are 100 community respondents involved in this study. The result showed that the Malaysian community is willing to retrofit their existing building into green and they are highly aware of the benefits of green especially on the environmental benefits of green.