• Energy Research

With the rapid development of materials science and construction technology, the concept of sustainable building (SB) and the Building Sustainability Assessment Tool (BSAT) have also evolved and developed. Understanding the development of BSAT and SB is of great significance to the sustainable development of the construction industry. This research used the bibliometric method to analyze the development and evolution in the relevant literature on SB and BSAT from 1990 to 2021, and the correlations and differences between them were investigated. We found that there are many common trends in the development of research efforts in SB and BSAT: (1) they focused solely on the environment, in the early days, and only later considered economic and social impacts; (2) the scales with which they are concerned continue to expand, from individual buildings to communities and even cities; (3) key areas, such as energy, materials, resources, indoor environmental quality, high-tech applications, adaptability, and concern for people are being given more attention by both SB and BSAT. On the other hand, the difference between them is that SB research focuses on more macro aspects, such as policy, culture, climate change, while BSAT research is more concerned with micro aspects, such as its system of tools. Furthermore, some current research gaps in the BSAT field are identified, clarifying its future research directions. By linking the evolution of the SB concept and the development of the BSAT research field, this review provides a new and valuable perspective for the sustainable assessment of the construction industry, which, itself, is conducive to the sustainable transformation of this industry, which could contribute greatly to the mitigation of global climate change.

Abstract Green building rating tools (GBRTs) are well-known and important instruments for assessing building sustainability. GBRTs constantly upgrade to meet rapid development, one of which is achieving a reasonable balance among the “three pillars” of sustainability, namely, environmental, social and economic sustainability. This study analyzes the changes and trends in the three sustainability pillars of GBRT and reinforces the previous GBRT longitudinal studies in terms of research sample, time span, equal terms, and research depth. Ten global GBRTs are selected by specific screening principles, and a unified criterion framework is presented to compare these selected GBRTs on equal terms. The changes of GBRTs are then analyzed on three levels, namely, categories, subcategories, and criteria. The results show that in the past three decades, there is a continuous decrease in the weight of the environmental category, an obvious increase in the weight of the social category and a little rise in the wight of the “economic” category. “Pollution,” “physical comfort,” and “flexibility” are identified as “sensitive criteria” of environmental, social, and economic categories, respectively, given their significant changes; they are also critical factors for the evolution of GBRT for the past three decades.