Mark Vender
The National Australian Built Environment Rating System (NABERS) has published a new five-year plan for 2019–2023. It contains some ambitious goals.
NABERS is a national government initiative to measure and compare the environmental performance of Australian buildings and tenancies. Since its inception, the program and its well-known star system has clocked up some impressive numbers. Among other things it is claimed that users have saved $400 million in energy bills since 2010, and 826,578 tonnes of CO2 emissions have been prevented.
Now the program is looking to build on that success. The new five-year plan sets two core goals.
First, NABERS will seek to cover more types of buildings. As things stand it is only available in six sectors: offices, hotels, shopping centres, data centres, apartment buildings and hospitals.
The focus will be on building types where there is “a demonstrated major gap in building performance”. This includes schools, industrial buildings, retail stores and, healthcare buildings.
The five-year plan also recognises the importance of furthering sustainability in individual dwellings, a sector with multiple government and industry initiatives trying to create nationally consistent sustainability certification.
“We will work with these organisations to help further their work, ensure consistency with the NABERS for apartment buildings tool and drive greater change in the residential sustainability sector,” according to the plan.
The second core goal is to double the number of NABERS ratings, compared to 2017/18 figures, by driving uptake and improving existing tools. In 2017/18, NABERS certified 3,229 ratings.
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