In terms of negatives users should be aware of, I find the origins of Green globes quite troubling. The original system was launched as a competitor to LEED, although it was actually was very similar to LEED, with over 80% of the credits (by my count) being copied from LEED. One of the most notable differences was that the credits for certified wood put SFI and other industry-sponsored forest certification schemes on an equal footing with FSC, which was developed in partnership with the environmental community. (LEED has only accepted FSC, which is the higher environmental standard.) In fact, Green Globes was originally supported by only two major players: American Forest & Plywood Association (who also wrote the SFI forestry standard), and National Association of Homebuilders (representing AFPA's biggest customers). Neither organization has environmental credibility. As I see it, after AFPA launched SFI to compete with FSC, it launched Green Globes to compete with LEED. This is a classic "greenwashing" tactic -- to confuse the marketplace by introducing bogus competing certifications.

The authors defend this practice by claiming that the green building sector benefits from more choice among certification standards. I think that's a poor argument. We don't need competing standards to the national Organic standard for food -- but what we get from industry are attempts to pressure the National Organic Standards Board to lower their standards and misleading claims of "natural" foods (which is an unregulated term) to confuse the marketplace. In the building arena, we don't need competing building codes; we need a clear standard for the protection of life safety. Nor will competing standards for green help the building industry to educate our clients and partners who have less time to learn about the environmental impacts of our industry than we do. When planning for long-term sustainability and environmental protection, we need clear standards with a high bar, not a dubious competition. The forest industry couldn't get SFI accepted by LEED (although they are still trying), so they set up this dubious competitor.

In a recent LEED EBO&M project I undertook for a large commercial office tower one of the tenants was a forestry company that objected to the property management using LEED as their standard as they would have preferred Green Globes. Their objection was based purely on the forest standards used by the two rating systems, which account for 1-2% of the total content. To me that indicated that Green Globes is still very much a creature of the forestry industry. I think that potential Green Globes users should be aware of the lack of credibility that the rating system has within the environmental community.