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<p data-block-key="k4mxg">This study focuses on the embodied carbon contribution that building services can make to the carbon footprint of New Zealand residential and office buildings.</p>

<p data-block-key="hwf9e">This report summarises the methodology for a research project aimed at determining how healthy New Zealand office buildings are and what physical factors contribute to their health performance.</p><p data-block-key="4j8to">Preliminary New Zealand research suggests that office buildings in this country are performing similar to overseas buildings, in particular those in the UK. That research suggests that sick building syndrome (SBS) is present in a significant number of New Zealand buildings.</p><p data-block-key="1pvhi">The intended outcome of this research methodology is to enable the industry to improve the health performance of New Zealand office buildings beyond the current level.</p>

<p data-block-key="00br1">This is the third report in a series prepared during research into the implications of climate change for the construction sector. It deals with climate change impacts on office buildings, extending the research of the first report on houses (SR94).</p><p data-block-key="laxbv">Climate change impacts on office buildings are similar to those for houses for many climate change factors, with the exception of: damage from flooding, stormwater flooding, overheating, heating and life cycle greenhouse gas emissions.</p><p data-block-key="p49bp">Office buildings may be more susceptible to climate change-induced flooding damage than houses. Detecting changes in flooding incidence for office buildings in highly urbanised areas is expected to be more difficult than for houses, as the drainage characteristics of the cityscape have changed much historically and will continue to change in the future.</p><p data-block-key="jw8hn">The life cycle GHG emissions of office buildings have been studied in brief to find estimates of yearly GHG emissions for various building phases. In order from largest to smallest they are transport of office workers, operating energy, refurbishment, initial manufacture and leakage of CFC and HCFC from HVAC systems.</p>

<p>BRANZ has calculated the carbon footprint and other environmental impacts of a set of reference buildings using the current data available in LCAQuick.</p>

<p data-block-key="tdxdz">BRANZ, with industry and research partners, has developed the New Zealand whole-building whole-of-life framework, which aims to provide resources to facilitate more consistent use of life cycle assessment (LCA) applied to buildings. This is especially important now that building LCA is recognised within the Innovation category of the Green Star building environmental rating tool.</p><p data-block-key="kw9ow">To help designers to understand the life cycle environmental implications of their designs based on LCA, reference office buildings have been developed to act as comparators during the design process. These reference office buildings are based on consented New Zealand buildings (that are entirely offices or largely offices) with gross floor areas exceeding 1,500 m², located in either Auckland, Wellington or Christchurch. They have been developed for application to early design and reflect building structure and thermal envelope, as well as simulated energy use during occupation according to energy model outputs.</p><p data-block-key="rwa9r">Generic environmental impact data for products used in the structure and thermal envelope have been developed in order to calculate environmental indicators for the reference office buildings, normalised to floor area.</p><p data-block-key="1pnzk">These reference office buildings are embedded within the awareness raising tool LCAQuick – Office to provide a basis for comparison during early design.</p>

<p data-block-key="tlb9k">LCAQuick is a free tool for evaluating the carbon footprint and other environmental impacts of a building design.</p>

<p data-block-key="kpkv3">Provides mean carbon footprint values for New Zealand case study residential and office buildings.</p>

<p>The BEES team worked hard to ensure the results of BEES were available to the widest possible range of stakeholders - including the public, special interest groups, government agencies, universities and other researchers.</p>

<p>The following definitions were used in the BEES project.</p>

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