Human Settlements Review - Parliamentary Monitoring Group

Human Settlements Review, Volume 1, Number 1, 2010
Section 2 Using the Sustainable
Housing Calculator
In this section, we will provide guidelines for
the use of the financial calculator; we will list
several types of costs and various funding
sources within the calculator. These sources
contribute to the financing of life-cycle costs.
We will also provide some thoughts on
potential uses for the calculator in this section.
To ensure the accessibility and transparency
of the calculator, it has been developed in
Microsoft Excel. All of the calculations can be
accessed without a password, although some
sheets remain in the background in order
to reduce the complexity of the tool.
Built
environment professionals, officials, students
and people
with the required technical
skills can quite easily work through the
calculations and make desired adjustments.
The development of the calculator has been
funded by Cordaid, Standard bank and the
NDHS for the purpose of assisting government
officials, contractors and built environment
professionals in measuring sustainable
interventions in settlements. The tool is opensource
and is therefore meant to be used and
adapted as widely as possible.
Jefarres and Green Consulting Engineers,
Meshfield Sustainable Innovation, and ACG
Architects in 2009 and 2010. A number of
the most cost-effective and environmentally
beneficial interventions were selected, and
costs were based on costs in the Western
Cape at the time of the study. Although costs
may vary in other provinces and over time, the
selected interventions provide a good starting
point for cost-effectiveness calculations.
Because the calculator is built in Excel without
locked cells or complicated programming, it is
not overly difficult to replace the base values
with other values that are relevant to any
particular project, in any province. If a Quantity
Surveyor is available to the project team this
task can easily be assigned to the QS.
Working with the input items:
1. Interventions
The calculator comes with a number of preprogrammed
sustainable building interventions.
These interventions resulted from research
carried out by the Sustainability Institute,
Stellenbosch University, Standard Bank,
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