Sustainable building practice assessment tool for Ghana

Abstract

The built environment uses large amounts of scarce resources and contributes significantly to the production of global emissions and waste. It is of importance to adopt sustainable means to curb the dire consequences of the built environment. The purpose of this research is to analyze the existing sustainable building assessment tools and develop one for the Ghanaian construction industry. The study employed the mixed research method approach including literature review, and questionnaire survey. Data collected were analyzed using mean score, frequencies and relative importance index (RII) ranking and analytic hierarchy process method (AHP). The results of the study revealed that policies backing sustainable building construction in Ghana is inadequate and scattered around many departments and agencies and that the practice is likely to flourish to make the needed impact if it is backed by government in a centralized manner to guide the practice. It was also revealed that sustainable building practice can be fully embraced if the legislation backing it makes it mandatory for at least some forms of buildings especially in the city centers. It was also found that the absence of direction and uniformity in government strategy frameworks hinders the development of sustainable building constructions in the country. From the study it was also observed that most of the practitioners in Ghana did not know the exact name and functions of the existing rating tools. Most of them cited its complexity and the fact that it wasn‘t designed for the use in the conditions of Ghana as the reason of its inefficiency and ineffectiveness. Finally, based on careful study and review of existing rating tools used globally, this work developed a rating tool ―Green Rating & Measurement System for Ghana‖ (GRMSG). The study recommended for existing policy guiding sustainable practice in Ghana to be amended and centralized in a single body for effective monitoring and supervision and further recommends that Ghana adopts the new rating tool developed in the study.