From Sweden Green Building Council:
The International WELL Building Institute™ (IWBI™) and Sweden Green Building Council today announced their intent to collaborate on the advancement of practices that improve human health and well-being in buildings and communities. The goal is to promote the successful adoption of IWBI’s WELL Building Standard™ (WELL), a performance-based system for measuring, certifying, and monitoring features of the built environment that impact the health and well-being of the people who live, work, and learn in the buildings.
“Sweden has long been at the forefront of sustainable practices that save energy, improve indoor air quality and reduce hazardous chemicals and emissions,” said Bengt Wånggren, CEO, Sweden Green Building Council. “We think WELL provides us a pathway to continue this leadership and expand our work to focus specifically on human health.”
WELL is the first building standard focused exclusively on the health and well-being of building occupants. WELL is grounded in evidence-based research that demonstrates the connection between the buildings where we spend more than 90 percent of our time and health and wellness impacts on us as occupants. WELL complements green building rating programs such as LEED, Three Star and BREEAM, and is third-party certified by Green Business Certification, Inc.—the same body that administers 10+ billion square feet of LEED buildings globally. To date, WELL has enrolled more than 350 building projects in 28 countries, encompassing over 73 million square feet.
“WELL is a powerful tool, and we are excited about the prospects of extending its immediate and measurable impact in the Swedish real estate market,” said IWBI Chairman and CEO Rick Fedrizzi. “We know that every market has unique challenges, but a single global standard that has a mechanism for flexibility and adaptation without reducing rigor or compromising on the elements that are common across geographies is an effective and cost efficient approach, and we look forward to working with SGBC to advance its use in Sweden.”