Sustainability check

Outdoor facilities are still a marginal topic in sustainability certification. The existing systems of the German Sustainable Building Council (DGNB) and the German Federal Government (BNB) are still primarily geared towards building construction. In order to promote the sustainability of communal open spaces, the Forschungsgesellschaft Landschaftsentwicklung Landschaftsbau (FLL) has been working on a guideline since 2014. This has now been available since fall 2018.

When it comes to the sustainability certification of open spaces, there have been three systems to date, all of which relate to building construction: the DGNB systems, the German government’s Assessment System for Sustainable Building (BNB) and NaWoh (Sustainable Housing) primarily cover building-related outdoor facilities at different scales.

Only a few landscape architecture firms have the necessary expertise to accompany the mandatory sustainability certifications for federal projects with a construction volume of 250,000 euros or more. One of the reasons for this may be that until 2014 there was no system for outdoor facilities that are not related to buildings, such as parks and squares.

New FLL brochure: Guide to sustainable open spaces

The FLL therefore founded the “Sustainability of outdoor facilities” working group with the aim of also promoting the sustainability of municipal outdoor facilities. After four years of work, the working group was able to present the “Guideline for Sustainable Outdoor Facilities” at GaLaBau in Nuremberg in September 2018. The guideline, which explicitly does not see itself as a certification system, contains criteria for classifying a project according to the “traffic light model” (green, yellow, red), which were developed from the “primary basis” BNB_AA. Although this does not provide an “overall grade” for a certification, it does give a good picture of the strengths and weaknesses of a project. If you want to assess a project from a sustainability perspective, you can either work through all 55 criteria checklists or answer one to three key questions per criterion as a quick or “basic assessment”. This is supplemented by an “on-site assessment” questionnaire.

Proving sustainability

Even if, with the exception of federal construction projects, there is currently no obligation for certification, landscape architects should not only declare in their own interest that they plan and act sustainably, but also prove this with the help of verifiable criteria. Well-developed catalogs of criteria are now available for both building-related outdoor facilities and municipal open spaces: important and helpful tools for improving the quality of projects and promoting acceptance in discussions with clients, politicians and the public, who are often not experts in the field.

Literature:

You can read the entire article in Garten + Landschaft, issue 4/2019