328 green buildings in Poland

In total, 247 buildings which hold the BREEAM certificate. Four HQE certificates have been issued in Poland, 83 LEED and 350 BREEAM. A single building can acquire several certificates.Polandhas a total of 328 certified facilities (buildings at the design stage, execution stage or completed) and about 75 pct of these are BREEAM-certified. The 77 LEED-certified buildings constitute around a quarter of the total. Since 2015, when there were 249 certified buildings, the total number has grown by 32 pct. Of the project waiting to be granted certificates, 146 are registered under the LEED system (excluding LEED certificates for existing buildings), 194 for BREEAM certificates (excluding BREEAM In-Use certificates), one project is registered under the DGNB system and two under the HQE system.

“According to my own observations, it is the owners of buildings with a useable area of over 5,000 sqm that are he most interested in certificates, which multiplied by 328 certified buildings translates into hundreds of hectares of top class green buildings granted certificates. Furthermore, there tends to be a significant surge in the number of buildings being certified before a system is upgraded. This will be the case in October 2016, when the option of registering a project under the LEED 2009 system expires. So I’m expecting a large number of registrations, which will certainly affect the data and the analysis in the next edition of this report – as happens every time there is a change of version,” predicts Rafał Schurma, the president of the Polish Green Building Council.

The office sector reigns supreme in terms of certified existing buildings. All the systems available in Poland have one goal – to influence the method of designing, building and using facilities in order to obtain a balance between environmental, economic and social factors. The British BREEAM system was the first to be established, in 1990. It is currently used in over 70 countries across the world. More than 500,000 projects are certified under this system and 2.2 mln buildings have been registered for certification. The American LEED system, the pilot version of which was developed in 1998, is present in more than 150 countries globally, with almost 44,000 projects certified under the system and 43,000 registered. The German DGNB was established in 2009 and has 857 certified projects in 21 countries, with 363 projects (including one in Poland) having been registered under it. The first building was certified under the French HQE system in 2003, since when more than 460,000 buildings have been awarded the certificate; however, as far as the international market is concerned, only the first few buildings have now been certified in this system. According to the latest World Green Building Trends 2016 report, the global green construction market doubles in size every three years.