TABLE OF CONTENTS - The Professional Green Building Council

Theme B: Creating a livable, healthy and environmentally viable citiesdata in terms of assigning a “value” to position relative to the median; in essence,the range of realistic consumption is different from one climate region to another.Nonetheless, it is also clear from the data that the potential range of consumptionwithin in any one climate zone is extremely large, typically covering a factor of 5-7 between the lowest and highest consumption.2.4.Comparison with International DataWater consumption has received little focus internationally, and this is reflected inthe dearth of available international data. A simple web-search reveals that thevast majority of available references are Australian, a perhaps unsurprisingreflection of Australia’s position as the driest inhabited continent. The mostprominent non-Australian work has been published by CIRIA in the UK [5]. Thisidentifies benchmarks of 0.4 kl/m² for best practice, 0.6 kl/m² for typical practiceand 0.8 kl/m² for excessive consumption for offices in the UK. Given the coolnature of the UK climate, these figures can be compared with the data in Figure 1by looking at the extrapolated intercept of the data trend at the nil cooling degreedays point. This figure is 0.65 kl/m², almost exactly corresponding to the midpointof the CIRIA benchmarks.This alignment of the data is indicative not only of an alignment of the data butalso of a further demonstration of the importance of climate in determining waterconsumption. If one were to merely compare the median of the Australian datasample (0.91kl/m²) against the CIRIA benchmarks, the indication would be oflesser efficiency. Inspection of Figure 1 indicates that the difference is climaterelated rather than efficiency related.This climate relationship is particularly important when considering waterconsumption figures for tropical and sub-tropical regions, as the climate is moreextreme and thus one would expect a larger difference to be present.170