Net-zero and net-positive design: a question of value

The past 20 years have witnessed a remarkable range of voluntary and regulatory efforts to improve the environmental performance of buildings. Voluntary building environmental assessment methods are now firmly rooted in the culture of building practice and marketplace expectations. Fundamentally, all these previous approaches have been directed at instilling greater responsibility to produce buildings that reduce the degenerative consequences of human activity on the health and integrity of ecological systems. Recently, however, net-positive propositions and approaches to building design practice have emerged. In part, these are in response to the perceived inadequacies of the discourse on constraints and limits that has guided green building practice over the past 20 plus years and, in part, in the realization of the need to shift the perception that the act of building only has negative environmental consequences to one where it adds benefit and value to its context.