BREEAM In Use UPDATES!
Yesterday we attended the first BREEAM Assessor Quarterly Update of the year and would like to share with our readers some relevant information that we found particularly interesting, as BRE informs the industry about the various BREEAM certification updates.
In our article we are focusing our attention on the In Use scheme used on existing, operational real estate assets.
The importance of aligning the various schemes (e.g. New Construction, In Use, Refurbishment and Fit-Out) against a common v7 framework lies in the added value creation across the whole lifecycle of a real estate asset through its BREEAM certifications, thus reducing duplications and simplifying evidence collection for all the parties involved. This alignment is being carried out in a number of ways:
- Updating the Energy and Carbon modules to increase the standard for operational performance and to improve inter-operability of the assets across their lifecycle and the certification stages;
- Adoption of dual metrics approach across all schemes i.e. both carbon intensity and energy efficiency factors;
- More enphasys on gathering and measuring data, with the aim of reducing assumptions wherever possible and make BREEAM In-Use a practical tool for reporting (including GRESB);
- Shifting Part 2 focus also on efficiency improvements (and all the industry players are invited to join the v7 Consultation starting in April 2026);
- Review of the Resilience issues and categories, driven also by some alarming statistics:
- climate events caused over $368 billion USD in economic losses worldwide in 2024
- insurance premiums for climate-exposed properties have increased up to 30% year-over-year in some regions, insurers withdrawing coverage from high-risk areas
- climate change could result in cumulative economic losses of 9% to 33% of GDP by 2040
There are still no updates about the exact launch date of the new In Use v7, which will definitely be released after Refurbishment and Fit Out though. The new scheme is still in planning phase and its transition plan from the future launch of v7 (whenever that will tool place) is as below:
- New projects will still be allowed to register against BREEAM In Use version 6 for six months after the launch of version 7;
- From that point of registration they will have 12 months to complete the certification process against version 6;
- Existing version 6 projects that expire during that period would have the option to either complete the certification process as planned or udgrade it to version 7 certification, if they wish.
