Land Use Impacts

LEED addresses impacts to the land in a wide variety of ways, which can be summarized in three principal categories: (1) Location efficiency, (2) Site protection & restoration and (3) Site performance.

Unlike most of the other impact categories where benefits of LEED are directly related to project floor area, site impacts relate to the number of projects. Thus, our assessment of progress to date is based on actual project figures from USGBC. Our projections of the number of projects derive from the growth in floor space and the average size of LEED projects.

We did not evaluate site impacts for LEED EBOM in this study. These impacts relate to pesticide use and other measures that are difficult to quantify. We will attempt to evaluate this next year.

Location Efficiency: We chose reductions in vehicle miles traveled (VMT) to illustrate the benefits of location efficiency and alternative transportation methods promoted by LEED. According to research by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), location-efficient development results in a 30% reduction in VMT. Overall, we estimate a reduction of nearly 400 million VMT annually because of current LEED projects. Our projections indicate that roughly 2.5 billion VMT will be reduced each year by 2015, which grows to more than 4.2 billion VMT by 2020.

These reductions are the equivalent of taking nearly 32,000 vehicles off the road and saving more than 15 million gallons of fuel to date, all of which has eliminated nearly 4 million tons of CO2. These figures will grow to 350,000 vehicle-equivalents and more than 172 million gallons of fuel saved by 2020, avoiding more than 40 million tons of CO2, as well as more than 16,000 tons of air pollutants like carbon monoxide, NOx and hydrocarbons, each year.