Common European Sustainable Built Environment Assessment

CESBA is a collective European bottom-up initiative that provides knowledge on harmonised built environment assessment. The inducement of CESBA in 2011 was the perception of actors from different EU-project that the variety and high number of assessment tools require for a harmonization. In April 2015, the CESBA Association was founded.

The Vision of CESBA is: A Europe where a high quality living in a sustainable built environment is the common standard practice. Therefore CESBA wants to be Europe’s leading organization for the harmonization of existing and future built environment assessment systems.

​Mission

CESBA's mission is to facilitate the diffusion and adoption of sustainable built environment principles among all the stakeholders of the built environment sector through the use of harmonized assessment systems in the whole life cycle of the built environment.

• CESBA is a meeting point between top-down and bottom-up approach.
• CESBA is a framework for the preservation of local and regional autonomy.

The CESBA cycle encompasses the tools, services, core assessment indicators and steps of the built environment life cycle that represent CESBA.

The CESBA initiative policy paper establishes the policy position of CESBA regarding EU policy developments on sustainable buildings.

Building assessments harmonized by CESBA

Currently, there are more than 80 building assessment tools in Europe. Those assessment tools are not comparable and lead to export burdens for SMEs as well as profusion among the actors of the sustainable construction market. There is indeed a clear need for the harmonization of those building assessment tools.

CESBA aims at this harmonization by the following measures:

• Holistic approach to building and neighbourhood assessment
• Establishment and discussion of common European Key performance indicators for harmonized indicators
• Definition of further Reference performance indicators that can be included in the assessment of buildings and their neighbourhoods
• Depiction of different assessment systems
• The CESBA generic tool
• The CESBA Circle

The CESBA initiative is aimed at a variety of CESBA users.

_{Source: CESBA}