Report: LEED registration gaining popularity among Chinese builders amid green transition

Chinese building enterprises are ramping up green solutions and design, pushing the domestic green building industry onto a fast development track, said a major global association in the industry.

According to the US Green Building Council, the nonprofit and nongovernmental organization behind the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, rating system, there have been over 11,000 projects that acquired, or are in the process of acquiring, LEED certifications in China, with the total area of projects covering more than 480 million square meters as of the end of June.

The LEED system is a globally recognized green building certification and rating. Buildings with LEED certificates are more environmentally friendly than others, utilize energy-efficient equipment and actively adopt renewable energies or other technologies that reduce the negative impact of buildings on the environment.

According to the council's 2022 annual report on China's green building industry, there were 1,688 new LEED registrations last year, up 17.3 percent year-on-year.

"The rapid development of China's urbanization process has reached a plateau. Large cities, such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou and Shenzhen in Guangdong province, already face issues concerning the utilization of existing buildings, while a green transition is a possible solution to this end," said Wang Jing, vice-president of the USGBC North Asia.

"China is playing an increasingly important role in boosting green building. With green efforts to renovate existing buildings accelerating, more and more enterprises are applying for LEED certification, aiming to reach net-zero emissions," she said.

The USGBC report found that the warehouse logistics category turned out to be a dark horse in the green building industry in China, as 224 new LEED registrations in the warehouse logistics sector were reported last year, accounting for nearly 50 percent of the sector's total in China.

The green and sustainable development of the warehouse logistics space is attracting more attention from consumers and clients. Driven by market demand, China's LEED registration in the sector has been growing for four consecutive years, the report said.

"Going green is an uptrend in the sector, as demand for high-quality logistics space is growing. Meanwhile, as modern logistics plays a bigger role in the national economy, the government has been actively promoting the development of the sector," Wang said.

Last May, the State Council, China's Cabinet, issued the first five-year plan for the modern logistics sector, unveiling supportive policies, including optimizing the business environment and innovating institutional mechanisms, to achieve the sector's high-quality development.

"In the logistics real estate sector, there is big business potential in cost reduction and efficiency improvement in China. The prospects for green logistics are also broad," Wang added.

For example, Mapletree Group, a Singapore-based real estate company that leads in green logistics parks in China, said over 200 of its logistics warehouses in China had applied for LEED registrations.

Lee Ark Boon, CEO of logistics development at Mapletree China, said: "It is a noticeable trend that our clients are paying increasing attention to sustainability. For example, some of our tenants ask us to install distributed photovoltaic power generation facilities. We are working with our clients to build greener logistics parks."

To promote a green transition in its logistics parks, the group is ramping up efforts, such as installing more rooftop photovoltaic facilities and using environmentally friendly building materials.