LEED for Everything 1.0

Big news from Member Day at Greenbuild '07—the LEED ratings programs are... going away. I'll be updating this post in the next hour or so after listening to the session again, but it boils down to this: there will be a "bookshelf" of credits, and when a project application is made, a custom rating system will be generated. There's a lot more development, public comment periods, and hair-pulling to come, but they hope to roll this out in less than two years. Check back here in about an hour for more details.

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This is my early understanding, which may be flawed. In the wake of significant outreach both within and without the USGBC community to identify the shortcomings and opportunities for improvement in the growing numbers of LEED rating systems, the decision has been made to stop the development of those systems in favor of a simpler, more elegant-yet-thorough process. All of the credits in the existing systems will be extracted and combined into "library" of points and ideas from which to draw to create an appropriate program for each project addressing lifecycle, carbon, and regionalism. A fourth important aspect is how these areas are weighted. For example, a project in the desert southwest will have greater weighting on water conservation than one in the Pacific Northwest. I'm going to abandon listening to this recording for the time being; there's a lot of noise down the hall, making it difficult to hear. I'm going to check it out. Still more on this later—maybe today.