United Nation’s sustainable development goals: establishing baseline for Australian building sector

ABSTRACT In order to achieve the United Nations (UN) sustainable development goals (SDGs) targets by 2030, there is a clear need for building sector to re-shape its practices. Therefore, this research aims to develop a scoring model for building sector to identify the baseline conditions required achieving the UN’s SDGs in Australia. Initially, this research study carried out an in-depth evaluation of the 17 goals to identify the goals that require a contribution from building sector. Most of these SDG requirements are fulfilled by leadership in energy and environmental design (LEED)-certified buildings. LEED has a separate credit system that evaluates the performance of various sustainability requirements. Therefore, LEED version 3 rating tool for buildings design and construction is analysed to identify the linter-links among UN’s SDGs and LEED credits. Upon establishing the inter-links, researchers developed a scoring system of newly constructed buildings in Australia in achieving the given SDGs. Building sector has a significant impact on goals such as ‘SDG6 Clean water and sanitation’, ‘SDG7 Affordable clean energy’, ‘SDG 12 Responsible consumption’, ‘SDG 13 Climate change’ and ‘SDG 15 Life on land’. Finally, considering all the impacts, a comprehensive contribution to development (CCDI) was established as a baseline with a value of 9.58 to evaluate buildings. This baseline can be used as a guide to evaluate whether new buildings positively contribute to UN’s SDGs.