Shamir Ghumra, BREEAM Director

Every member of the team, both past and present are passionate about what we do, it’s not just the BREEAM standards that are the result of extensive research and learning from worldwide best practise, but also our collaborative work with the construction industry, which helps us to deliver on our purpose; to inspire and empower transformation in the built environment.

Since its inception, the BREEAM family of schemes has been driving innovation and change in the design, construction and operation of our buildings. More recently it has extended its reach beyond the building and into the wider built environment. It has influenced policy, regulation, standards and industry practices around the world and remains at the leading edge.

By providing a rigorous and evidence-based framework that robustly sets targets and benchmarks performance, BREEAM gives decision makers the confidence to innovate. It is based on practical, cost effective and meaningful actions and provides a common understanding and knowledge at all stages in the development life cycle.

Providing impartial, authoritative information that the industry can trust is at the heart of the work that BRE and in particular BREEAM does. The improved efficiencies and quality outcomes associated with sustainability are also helping to make developments more commercially successful. There is growing evidence, for example, that certified and rated buildings provide increased rates of return for investors and increased rental rates and sales premiums for developers and owners.

BREEAM has already been expanded from a single certification scheme and technical standard able to assess single buildings, to multiple standards that can be used on almost any type of building in any location around the globe.  The range of issues addressed by BREEAM has also grown, but many more environmental, social and economic aspects need to be considered. The challenge is to broaden BREEAM without increasing its complexity – expansion must go hand-in hand with efforts to make assessments more accessible and transparent. The support and feedback from the industry that we have enjoyed to date will be vital in this process. The eventual goal is to make sustainability mainstream and routine – involving everybody. We will need to link tools such as BREEAM to BIM and a wide range of other databases to allow sustainability information to be quickly and easily accessed.

We are living in exciting times, and I believe the next 25 years will see even more significant change than the past, the role of data will play an even more significant role in what we do. We will continue to evolve our services so that our users can make better and quicker decisions regarding the key components of our communities, infrastructure and buildings across the entire built environment.