Measuring Biodiversity for Built Environment Rating Systems

Biodiversity, the variety of life on earth, is required for the health of the natural environment. Scientific evidence demonstrates that biodiversity depletion and loss can result in social and economic, as well as environmental, collapse. Australia has serious environmental problems resulting from human activities over the past 200 years. The Australian government is developing a performance-based system to rate the overall environmental performance of buildings during their operation. Known as the National Australian Building Environmental Rating System (NABERS), it is intended to provide rational assessments, based as much as possible on actual performance measurements and as little as possible on prescriptive indicators. Measuring the biodiversity of building sites presents unique problems since current building rating systems either use prescriptive indicators or exclude them. Agreed standardised measurement protocols for this purpose do not exist. However, scientists have developed measurement methods capable of being adapted to this purpose. Protocols capable of rating built environment impacts on biodiversity are presented and discussed.