A New Balance Assessment Method for LEED-EB v4.1-Certified Projects

The transition from Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Existing Buildings version 4 (LEED-EB v4) to version 4.1 (LEED-EB v4.1) increased the proportion of certification points allocated to performance-based indicators. This study proposes and applies a descriptive Balance Assessment Method to 27 LEED-EB v4.1 Gold-certified office projects in five Israeli cities. The method compares the five performance indicators—Transportation, Water, Energy, Waste, and Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ)—in all ten possible pairs using indicator-specific theoretical midpoint thresholds. Each pair is classified by quadrant and assigned an ordinal rank. Median ranks are calculated for each pair within each city and across the ten pairs for each project. At the project level, nine projects (33.3%) were classified as Highly balanced and 18 (66.7%) as Intermediate. Pairwise balance classifications varied across the five city samples. The method complements aggregate LEED scores by describing patterns of joint threshold attainment; it does not directly measure environmental impact or overall sustainability.