If sustainability is a three-legged stool of environmental, economic, and social performance, then LEED is a bit wobbly: historically, the rating system has not taken on community welfare with the same breadth and depth as it has climate change and resource conservation. “It’s not as if social-equity benefit was absent from LEED,” says U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) vice president of LEED Brendan Owens, citing how power-plant emissions disproportionately impact marginalized communities. “But we knew we could do more.”
To begin righting the imbalance, USGBC posited social equity as one of seven system goals for LEED v4, and formed a Social Equity Working Group to, as Owens puts it, “encourage and reward project team actions that delivered it.” Three pilot credits for LEED v4 have now been introduced.
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