Occupancy Comfort Evaluation in Green Building Rating Tools in Malaysia: A Comparative Review

Passive design strategy is the approach that maximizing utilization of natural resources to achieve occupancy comfort which covers the thermal comfort, visual comfort and acoustic comfort while minimizing secondary energy usage. Adapting passive design strategy during building design-stage is beneficial in reducing energy load of the building for long term, furthermore to reduce the energy consumption in day to day building operation. Applying Green Building Rating Tools, GBRT promotes passive design strategy for non-residential building and will assist the building designer to comply with the local and international standard. The minimum requirement of occupancy comfort is captured in GBRT rating system with different approach and intension of the system. This review summarize the coverage of passive design strategy sectors for non-residential building in Malaysia by comparing three GBRT system namely Green Building Index, GBI NCNR, MyCREST ICSAS and GreenRE NRB system. GreenRE NRB seems more aggressive in occupancy comfort evaluation compared to GBI NCNR and MyCREST ICSAS. GreenRE allocates 48.7% of total marks focus on occupancy comfort aspect while GBI and MyCREST allocates 14% and 13.2% respectively from the total score. MyCrest had enforce the mandatory compliance of OTTV, RTTV and Uroof to meet baseline requirement as per MS1525:2019 with zero marks allocation. Based on marks percentage allocation, GBI and MyCrest prioritizing visual comfort while GreenRE give more focus on thermal comfort with higher marks allocation. All rating system give less focus on acoustic comfort. On average, 16.3% of marks covers the thermal comfort, 9% covers visual comfort and 1% cover acoustic comfort. GBI and MyCrest focus more on green building materials which covers the building lifecycle includes water management and waste disposal. All system contributes to Malaysia-UNFCCC ratification of Paris Agreement on 45% GHG reduction in longer runs.