The importance of designing sustainable buildings is gaining greater acceptance worldwide. Evidence of this is how regulators
are incorporating sustainable design principles into building regulations and requirements. The aim being to increase the number
of sustainable buildings and move from a traditional voluntary compliance to one that is mandatory. However, developing
regulations that actually achieve these aims can be a difficult exercise.
Several countries in South East Asia, such as Singapore and Malaysia, have performance based building regulations that are
supplemented by prescriptive measures for achieving the desired performance. Australia too has similar building regulations and
has had energy efficiency regulations within the Building Code of Australia for over a decade. This paper explores some of the
difficulties and problems that Australian regulators have experienced with the performance-based method and the prescriptive or
“deemed-to-comply” method and measures that have been taken to try and overcome these problems. These experiences act as
a useful guide to all regulators considering the incorporation of sustainable design measures into their countries building
regulations.
The paper also speculates on future environmental requirements being incorporated into regulations, including the possibility of
non-residential buildings being required to meet minimum energy efficiency requirements, and the possible systems that would
need to be in place before such requirements were included.
Finally, the paper looks at a possible way forward using direct assessment from electronic designs and introduces several
software tools that are currently being developed that move towards achieving this goal.
Keywords: Sustainable buildings, Performance-based, Regulations, Energy efficiency, Assessment tools
