LEED v5
The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) released LEED v5 for its first public comment period on April 3, 2024, giving us our first detailed look at the next generation of the program that has defined green building in North America and around the world for more than twenty years. A lot has changed since LEED v4, including parts of the rating system structure and how the credits address climate change, social equity, and biodiversity. USGBC plans to launch LEED v5 in 2025 and has promised updates on a five-year cycle thereafter.
Three goals: carbon, well-being, ecologyCarbon, climate resilience, and social equity assessments are now prerequisites for every project, and they show up throughout the credits as well. And although electrification is not required—except for Platinum-level certification in the design and construction rating systems—it is strongly encouraged in the point structure. Every prerequires and credit is now tagged with one or more of the “rating system goals”:
- Decarbonization
- Quality of life
- Ecological conservation and restoration
Notably, there is no longer one massive energy efficiency and carbon emissions credit—energy and carbon are now decoupled. It will now be easier to earn energy efficiency points without doing energy simulations for compliance, and measures to reduce operational and embodied carbon are rewarded separately.
The documents include scorecards, intent statements, and credit language for four rating systems:
- Building Operations + Maintenance: Existing Buildings (O+M, which has been out in pilot since last September
- Building Design + Construction (BD+C): New Construction
- BD+C: Core & Shell
- Interior Design + Construction (ID+C): Commercial Interiors
System GoalsLEED v5, the latest version of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system, is structured around three key system goals:
- Climate Action: This goal emphasizes strategies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, enhance energy efficiency, and promote sustainable practices related to climate change mitigation.
- Quality of Life: LEED v5 aims to improve occupants’ well-being by focusing on indoor environmental quality, occupant comfort, and health. It encourages designs that prioritize human experience and wellness.
- Ecological Conservation and Restoration: LEED v5 promotes sustainable land use, biodiversity, and ecosystem health. It encourages projects to consider ecological impacts and restoration efforts.
These system goals serve as guiding principles for LEED v5 and will influence future versions of the rating system.
Special Platinum requirements
Both O+M and the design and construction rating systems now have an entirely new element: LEED Platinum requirements.
That is right: to achieve Platinum-level certification, it is no longer enough to meet all the prerequisites and get to 80 points. You now also must achieve a bundle of specific decarbonization thresholds.
For example, high levels of energy efficiency are now required across the board to hit Platinum, and design and construction projects must be all-electric, include renewable energy, and reduce embodied carbon.
New Construction: pilot credits
Some of the new credits, and new approaches to existing credits, in v5 BD+C are familiar to those who have been taking advantage of the pilot credit library: USGBC has leaned into the process of testing new credit concepts and then integrating some of them into the core rating systems.
- Bird-safe glass is finally integral to LEED—not as its own credit, but as part of a new Light-Pollution- and Bird-Collision-Reduction credit, which requires projects to address both issues to earn the point.
- Biophilia now has its own credit: Connecting with Nature. The requirements appear simpler than those of the biophilic design pilot credit, and the language references a classic text, The Practice of Biophilic Design, rather than the 14 patterns later established by Terrapin Bright Green. But teams have flexibility, provided their chosen biophilic attributes also fit into three prescribed categories and they hit the minimum of 12 attributes across those categories.
- Procurement of low-carbon construction materials is now Option 2 of three within a credit called Reduce Embodied Carbon. The credit offers six total points, and Option 2 is far simpler in the v5 draft than the pilot version of this credit was. There is a laser focus on hotspots like concrete, steel, Aluminum, and other carbon-intensive materials. This is where whole-building life-cycle assessment ended up (Option 1), along with environmental product declarations (Option 3), which is also hotspot-focused and references federal Buy Clean requirements established through the Inflation Reduction Act.
- Resilient design is now integrated across the rating system. These include the Climate Resilience Assessment prerequisite, Resilient Site Design (which sounds broader than it is since it only addresses flooding), Enhanced Resilient Site Design, and Resilient Spaces. Many of the fundamentals appeared in the original pilot credits on resilient design—since discontinued and then rebooted to address resilience planning, design, and passive survivability in new ways. The v5 drafts takes several new approaches, perhaps in part because we now have more standards to reference than the creators of the early pilot credits had.
- Grid Interactive has taken a much simpler approach than the complicated calculations in the Grid Optimal Building Alternative Compliance Path pilot credit. It now leans into electrical and thermal storage, demand response, and power resilience.
Other popular pilot credits whose features appear in the v5 draft: Inclusive Design (in Occupant Experience as well as Enhanced Building Accessibility), All-Gender Restrooms (in Enhanced Building Accessibility), and the Safety First pilot credits (in Option 2 of the Resilient Spaces credit: Management Mode for Respiratory Diseases).
Materials Innovations
The Materials & Resources category has gotten a major overhaul:
- Assessing embodied carbon from structural materials is now a prerequisite.
- Jobsite carbon emissions are now explicitly included in the Reduce Embodied Carbon credit, which replaces LEED v4’s Whole Building LCA credit—tracking those emissions is worth up to three of the eight available points.
- The Low-Emitting Materials credit did not change dramatically, but it has found a new home in the MR category.
- Products with certain certifications and declarations can now count toward a new Optimized Building Products credit. Products are assigned a score based on a matrix modeled on Mindful Materials’ Common Materials Framework, which builds on the five “buckets” of the A&D Materials Pledge created by The American Institute of Architects. These points are in addition to any points those same products might help the project earn through reduced embodied carbon and low indoor emissions.
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