The Top 10 Global Cities for Green Buildings

As socially conscious “green buildings” become the standard in world-class architecture, it has also become one of the fastest-growing design and construction concepts. Whether motivated by cost efficiencies, energy usage, quality of life or modern materials, developers and architects have been building green-certified buildings at a rate that has been doubling every three years around the world.

With the goal of better understanding how these green buildings translate to green “global cities,” Singapore-based growth strategy firm Solidiance recently conducted a studyto see which 10 international cities came out on top.

To rank each of the global cities, criteria were developed to measure the total number of green buildings within the urban boundary, along with initiatives put in place by the city to foster a sustainable and healthy green building movement. Specifically, these criteria included city-wide green building landscapes, green building efficiency and performance, green building policies and targets and green city culture and environment.

Unsurprisingly, the green architecture movement in Paris has helped propel it to the number one global city for green buildings, while Singapore and London weren’t too far behind at two and three, respectively. Following the top three were Sydney, Tokyo, Hong Kong, New York, Dubai, Beijing, and finally, Shanghai.

Paris—the number one ranked global city—has the lowest CO₂ emissions and energy consumption…