Regulating Green Buildings

Green buildings are becoming the new fixation for the building industry because of the impact they have on the carbon footprint and the cost savings they offer for utility costs. Governments have begun to produce policies and regulations that implement and mandate green buildings due to these successes. However, the policies are having troubles increasing the popularity and quantities of green buildings. There is a need for a way to produce better policies and regulations that will increase both the amount of green buildings their popularity. A decision-making tool, such as a decision tree, should be created to help policymakers who do not have the backgrounds to produce well thought out regulations. By researching the green building industry and its current status, key points can be graphed out in a decision tool that will provide the needed education for policy makers to produce better green building regulations.

Sustainable Environments and Pro-Environmental Behavior

This thesis examines the ability of the sustainably designed building to alter occupant behaviors using LEED for New Construction and Major Renovation, Green Building Rating System™ as a standard of measure. A cross sectional survey compares the pro-environmental behaviors, intentions, environmental knowledge, and pro-environmental orientation of occupants working in a traditionally designed building and occupants working in a LEED-NC certified building located on the University of Nebraska - Lincoln Campus. While there is a visible increase in the pro-environmental variables for occupants working in the sustainable environment, data analysis indicates that these differences are not statistically significant for any of the measured variables. Significant correlations were discovered between an individual's environmental knowledge and pro-environmental behaviors as well as between an individual's pro-environmental orientation and pro-environmental intentions. These correlations support past findings of multiple research studies completed in the field of environmental psychology. Due to limitations of this research these findings must be clarified through continued study in the area of behavior influencing design.