Green Building Rating Systems in Canada

Green buildings, also known as sustainable buildings, are structures that are designed to use valuable resources such as energy, water, materials, and land more efficiently than buildings that are simply built to code. Green buildings reduce their impact on the environment, and provide healthy, comfortable, productive indoor spaces. For the construction industry, the issue of green building will only continue to grow in importance - whether it's because of regulatory requirements, the cost of energy going up, or the tangible effects that construction has on the natural environment.

LEED
The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System™ encourages and accelerates global adoption of sustainable green building and development practices through the creation and implementation of universally understood and accepted tools and performance criteria.
LEED is a third-party certification program and an internationally accepted benchmark for the design, construction and operation of high performance green buildings. It provides building owners and operators the tools they need to have an immediate and measurable impact on their buildings’ performance.

Built Green
Built Green™ is owned and managed by the Built Green™ Society of Canada. Membership in Built Green™ is open to all members of participating Home Builders’ Associations (HBA’s) including builders, renovators, product suppliers or manufacturers, service providers, community developers and municipalities. The program includes mandatory Builder Trainingand third-party testing, inspections and audits. Successful completion of the Built Green™ Builder Training is required to become a Built Green™ Certified Builder member. Only Built Green™ Certified Builder members can build a Built Green™ home.

BOMA BESt
BOMA BESt is the next evolution of BOMA Canada's Go Green program.  BESt stands for Building Environmental Standards, and represents the direction of the commercial real estate industry in Canada and BOMA Canada's role in providing the mechanisms for common practices across the industry.

With four possible levels of certification, users can progress through the program and continually use the framework of the Go Green Best Practices and the Go Green Plus assessment to improve environmental performance and management. The BOMA BESt certification builds on Go Green and Go Green Plus by harmonizing these separate certifications into one program.

Green Globes
The Green Globes system is a revolutionary building environmental design and management tool. It delivers an online assessment protocol, rating system and guidance for green building design, operation and management. It is interactive, flexible and affordable, and provides market recognition of a building’s environmental attributes through third-party verification.