Building Regulations for Developing Coutries

The goal of this project lead by the International Finance Corporation (IFC) was to support developing countries in the definition and implementation of new building regulations. Previously, building regulations for developing countries, usually characterized by warmer and more humid climates, were based on international or US based standards that were applied without considering the specificity of the climate and the technological and political environment.

With this series of projects the IFC wanted to develop more rigorous criteria to establish regulations based on computer simulations of typical buildings with the characteristics of the local constructions, actual weather data and specific technological constraints. For example, high efficiency chillers were not easily available in Bangladesh.

The first part of the project was to perform a parametric analysis to establish relationships between key buiding parameters and Energy Use Intensity. EUI was used as the main metric to compare performance and evaluate the impact of the proposed regulation.

Extract from the parametric analysis results

After several consultations with local stakeholders, architects, engineers, government officials, a process was put in place to rigorously select the most impactful measure to reduce the energy consumption of specific buildings and the overall portfolio. These criteria were based on local knowledge such construction methodologies, available technology ad most importantly, climate.

The process for the selection of the energy efficiency measure to be included in the regulations