Green building policy : evaluation of the costs and benefits of gross floor area concession policy in Hong Kong

Abstract

With more and more attention paid to environmental issues, people began to focus on the sustainability of buildings and the environment. In order to promote the development of green buildings, many green building incentive policies have been proposed and the GFA concession scheme is one of them. The scheme is designed to reward developers for contributing additional gross floor area to public facilities. It grants developers a 10% GFA concession if buildings register for the BEAM Plus or reach any level of BEAM Plus, fulfill the Sustainable Building Design Guidelines, and provide the prescribed building features. The costs and benefits brought by this project are reflected in three aspects (i.e. stakeholders, policy-makers and environment). Most of the existing studies focus on the costs and benefits brought by the project to stakeholders, but few studies focus on the impact of the project on policy makers and the environment in terms of costs and benefits. Moreover, the existing research has not conducted detailed analysis and research on the situation of existing projects, which can bring more reference value to stakeholders, policy makers and the environment. This study aims to evaluate the costs and benefits brought by the policy, establish an analytical framework through literature research and other methods, and analyze its impact on policy makers, stakeholders and the environment. This paper will also make a case study of construction projects that received GFA concessions for private developments on Hong Kong Island from 2013 to 2022. Through the case study, the GFA exemption situation is statistically analyzed. Then, this study selects data to analyze the impact of the policy on building and environmental sustainability and its relevance. Finally, this paper gives a conclusion to summarize the impact of the costs and benefits of the GFA concession program on stakeholders, policy makers and the environment. The research finds that in terms of stakeholders, the costs and benefits brought by this policy have the greatest impact on the developers who are summarized the most types of costs and benefits. For policy makers, policy improvements can be made from the perspective of the upper limit of the area exempted from GFA and the type of area exempted from GFA to help developers get more benefits from the exempted area from GFA. For the environment, this study finds that the policy can bring great benefits in terms of greening degree and energy reduction. This paper also puts forward some suggestions on the problems and shortcomings of this policy and puts forward the improvement direction for the green building incentive policy, so that it can better play the positive role of developing green buildings.