Sustainable building standards and tools
Initiative description: Supporting the improvement of sustainable building standards and tools in Qatar on the basis of lessons learnt from the application of such standards for the design, construction and operation of FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022™ sites.
The Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy (SC) applied the Global Sustainability Assessment System (GSAS) for all the stadiums during design, construction and operations. The SC employed highly skilled on-site sustainability teams to apply the GSAS standards, integrate requirements into the design and construction processes, prepare compliance documentation, provide on-site training and ensure implementation of each stadium’s individual sustainability plan throughout the process via specific assurance audits. Many new best practices and lessons learnt were identified during this massive undertaking by numerous teams of professionals on a wide variety of stadiums in terms of size and design. These learnings were proactively and systematically captured by the SC throughout, and have since been shared publicly for other construction projects to use, as well as being used in GSAS training courses and for the purpose of enhancing future versions of the GSAS certification system.
Through the application of the GSAS standards, the SC identified the need for a tool that has the capability of determining the seasonal energy efficiency ratio of district cooling systems (a key feature of several of the stadium precincts). As a result, a new GSAS tool was developed specifically to help design and assess efficiency of district cooling facilities.
As with most standards, new revisions of GSAS standards are based on advancements in delivering sustainable buildings by the local building sector. The FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022™ stadiums contributed to these advancements along other landmark sustainable building projects in Qatar, such as the Doha Metro, the National Museum of Qatar and Lusail city.