National Building Regulations of Iran Benchmarked with BREEAM and LEED: A Comparative Analysis for Regional Adaptations

Building sector is responsible for consuming nearly 40 percent of the total primary energy in Iran. There have been implemented several efforts to diminish the amount of energy utilization in building sector. In early 90s, Iranian Ministry of Housing and Urbanism released the first version of building codes under the appellation of Issue 19. Although these codes address the importance of energy saving in building, they are deemed to be ineffective in fully mitigating the energy consumption in building sector. This paper attempts to benchmark the two most widely-used sustainable assessment tools, LEED and BREEAM, against Issue 19 in order to underline their strengths in dealing with the energy utilization and environmental issues of building sector. The primary aim of this paper is to identify the potential areas in Issue 19 for considering future improvements based on the acquired results. This study found that, LEED & BREEAM and Issue 19 have various differences in their approaches toward sustainable built environment, and energy usage in building sector. These differences are classified into five categories, ‘the environmental concerns’, ‘energy optimization’, ‘waste management’, ‘indoor air quality’, and ‘innovation’. Accordingly, this study puts forward necessary recommendations which can be potentially considered for the future improvements of Issue 19.