Development Process
Your Path:
About NABERS for offices
>
Development Process
NABERS benchmarks are being developed to ensure relevance, realism and
practicality.
The objective of NABERS is to provide a framework for improvement in the
environmental performance of office buildings. NABERS revolves around a
benchmark of the actual environmental performance of offices. NABERS must be
independent, credible and consistent. To drive improved performance, it must be
relevant to the intended market and easily understood.
NABERS must provide a realistic rating scale that recognises and rewards
current performance levels, and encourages and promotes best practice.
NABERS must be easy to use. It should make use of data currently collated
by building owners and managers and complement existing management practices. If
there are environmental issues affecting an existing office building for which
data is not currently collated, there should be broad consultation to determine
the best method for gathering additional data. Consideration should be made of a
transition to better management practices. The cost of a NABERS rating must be
reasonable and should be able to be conducted in a reasonable time frame with
minimal resources.
To ensure these principles are met for each component of NABERS, a
comprehensive development path has been followed. NABERS preliminary
benchmarks, developed by the Australian Government, have been piloted and
trialled. Following this process, DECCW developed a detailed plan to guide the
future direction of the scheme. You can review this plan in the
Resources section (see the
NABERS Trial document).
Technical advisory groups have been established to guide development of
each benchmark. These groups comprise technical experts, government and
industry representatives.
Each component has been redeveloped from first principles to ensure
relevance, realism and practicality, in consultation with the relevant technical
advisory group, and with the assistance of appropriate expert consultancies.
On development, components are launched to the market. Further
feedback is always favourably received, and will contribute to the ongoing
development of NABERS.