-By Katie Weeks

Let's face it: It's hip to be green. Since 2000, the USGBC's membership has increased tenfold, with more than 14,000 member organizations now on board and 91,000 individuals engaged as members. McGraw-Hill Construction Analytics predicts that the value of green building construction starts to increase from $12 billion in 2008 to $60 billion by 2010, and by 2009, 80 percent of corporate America is expected to be engaged in green at least 16 percent of the time, while 20 percent will be engaged in green 60 percent of the time.But while sustainability is the topic du jour in the United States, is the green scene growing elsewhere?

At first glance, the answer is a resounding yes. While the debate continues as to what actually constitutes a sustainable project, the USGBC's LEED ranking system continues to, well, lead the way across the globe. "LEED has become the lingua franca of sustainability," notes Dr. David Craig, a director with DEGW, an international design consultancy. It also has become a global marketing tool. "When you see a company looking to establish a presence in China or India, they're not just looking to get certified. They want to make a statement," says Tom Hicks, vice president of international programs at the USGBC. "We've had reports from some countries that, from a cultural perspective, if you don't get at least Gold certification, it's seen as a failure."

In most countries, the American versions of the LEED rating systems provide the de facto benchmarks. However, the USGBC has licensed out the system to two countries—India and Canada—for local adaptation, and other areas are exploring ways to modify the system to their local conditions. In the past year, for example, the Emirates Green Building Council (EmiratesGBC) drafted a modified version of the system, which increases the total rating points from 69 to 72 and places more emphasis on water conservation in the arid region. The proposal is currently with the USGBC for evaluation and the EmiratesGBC hopes to have the system ratified by September 2008. The popularity of LEED also is pushing the development of other systems: In Europe, Building Research Establishment (BRE) is overhauling its Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM ratings) to include more stringent requirements after criticism for weak criteria.

In addition, the European green scene may be poised to move east: Emerging Trends in Real Estate Europe 2008, the most recent European market report from the Urban Land Institute and PricewaterhouseCoopers, named Moscow as the top real estate market for Europe in investment and development prospects. Whether these new developments will also be green is still up in the air. "It varies by client," says Peter Gross, a principal with Swanke Hayden Connell Architects (SCHA) in New York, who is currently working on a number of projects in Russia. "The international companies and international design teams are coming in and bringing sustainability with them, and the local players are fully aware of what their competition is doing, so they're asking for it as well," Gross notes. However, he says, sustainability is still brought to the table on a client-by-client basis, and Hicks notes that out of Russia, Asia, the Middle East, and India, the least amount of green activity is going on in Russia. Of course, the Russian market, while ranked favorably in the Emerging Trends report, is dwarfed by the rampant development going on in Asia, the Middle East, and India.

It's no secret that the Chinese construction market is on fire, which may fuel the green movement. More than half of the globe's new buildings are rising in this arena, and it may soon come to pass that sustainability is regarded as a necessity, especially when it comes to energy efficiency. According to Xinhua News, should this rate of construction continue (essentially doubling the area of existing buildings by 2020), it will be nearly impossible for China to provide enough energy to properly operate all of the structures.

But is the green scene burgeoning as quickly as it seems? Not necessarily. For the most part, sustainability across the globe, as in Russia, remains a case-by-case consideration. In China, for instance, the country's largest buildings cover nearly 43 billion sq. m., but by early 2007, only 4 percent of them had adopted energy-efficient measure, despite a 2006 government-issued design standard encouraging energy conservation and use of energy-efficient materials and technologies. And many of the country's green cities and buildings under construction may not meet international standards. In India and Dubai, many developers are most concerned with simply completing projects as quickly as possible in order to keep up with the frenetic pace of construction.

However, sustainable efforts persist. Earlier this year, Shanghai and Baoding joined the World Wildlife Fund's Low Carbon City Initiative, which focuses on improving energy efficiency, expanding renewable energy, and manufacturing energy-efficient products. In Kunming, the capital of southwest China's Yunnan province, Horti-Expo Real Estate Company is developing the Kunming Eco-Communities, an ongoing project that promotes eco-friendly living with a master plan that seeks to restore balance in the natural landscape through eco-sensitive development. In the Middle East, Abu Dhabi's "Sustainability Action Plan" seeks to make Masdar City, which is expected to be functioning by 2015, the first zero-carbon, zero-waste, car-free city.

There's also the idea that the best sustainable approach to building may be not to build at all. "There's a danger of focusing too much on energy use, or materials, or carbon and not looking enough at patterns of occupancy and the need for space in the first place," notes Dr. Andrew Laing, managing director at DEGW. The growing global emergence of the mobile workforce and the increase of sprawl in developing countries, he explains, should have us questioning how much space is really necessary and whether pollution-causing commutes can be shortened by working from satellite offices or from home. Notes Laing, "In a sense, it's an opportunity for some of these newer cities or regions to leapfrog over the mistakes we've made in the past."