Sustainable Building Practice: Assessment Tool for Ghana

The emergence of sustainable building practices has promoted the development of sustainable building assessment tools. The study aims at analyzing the existing sustainable assessment tools and develop one for the Ghanaian construction industry. It also seeks to assess sustainability policies and challenges for effective delivering of sustainable buildings in Ghana. Data was collected from 146 construction professionals with questionnaire and interview guide. The results of the study revealed that policies backing sustainable building construction in Ghana is inadequate and scattered around many departments and agencies and that the practice is likely to flourish to make the needed impact if it is backed by government in a centralized manner to guide the practice. It was also revealed that sustainable building practice can be fully embraced if the legislation backing it makes it mandatory for at least some forms of buildings especially in the city centers. It was also found that the absence of direction and uniformity in government strategy frameworks hinders the development of sustainable building constructions in the country.