This credit promotes biodiversity by encouraging project teams to protect existing onsite native habitat or restore the site with native species.
How you go about earning this credit will depend on the existing conditions of your project site. If you have a greenfield site—one that has not been built, graded, or otherwise altered by human activity—you are required to limit site disturbance during construction.
This credit encourages environmental best practices for pest management and landscaping. Its minimal cost impacts and focus on practices that can be employed at any building site make it one of the most commonly pursued credits.
This credit is intended to help Core and Shell projects educate tenants about the base building sustainable design and ways tenants might enhance the sustainability of their tenant spaces, including support for earning LEED-CI.
Support comes in the form of tenant guidelines, which LEED-CS projects must write and submit in order to earn this credit. The guidelines could entail information about lighting efficiency and design, non-toxic paints, water-efficient fixtures, and numerous other topics covered by LEED.
To earn this credit, you need to design a plan for integrated pest management (IPM), and implement it 100% of the time. This approach to pest management limits the negative impacts that conventional pest management often has on the health of building occupants and uses the least-toxic means of pest management possible.
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This credit is intended to promote sites with large areas of vegetated open space that promote biodiversity and recreation—which can also add an amenity to your project, help with natural stormwater management, and mitigate the urban heat island effect.
You already addressed this credit as part of the compliance process for IEQp1: Minimum Indoor Air Quality Performance. If the measurements you took for IEQp1 indicate that your building has ventilation rates that are at least 30% better than ASHRAE 62.1-2007 for every ventilation distribution system, no further action is required, other than checking that any needed documentation is uploaded.
If, on the other hand, your ventilation rates are not at least 30% better than ASHRAE 62.1-2007, you’ll need to consider whether it is appropriate to pursue this credit.
This credit is easily achieved by tracking monthly energy consumption of the project building through the use of Portfolio Manager. In order to comply, you simply need to generate a Statement of Energy Performance (SEP) that shows the associated GHG emissions.
EAc1: Optimize Energy Performance is, by far, the most important credit in LEED, based on the number of points available. Up to 21 points are at stake here based on how much you’re able to reduce the project’s predicted energy cost. That large amount of points also reflects the great importance LEED places on reducing energy use and forestalling climate change.