CASBEE-Wellness Office: An objective measure of the building potential for a healthily built environment

Abstract

The CASBEE-Wellness Office (hereinafter CASBEE-WO) was launched in June 2019 as a new CASBEE tool for assessing buildings and workplaces from the viewpoints of workers' health, workplace productivity, and resilience. In this paper, we introduce the structure of the evaluation system. The tool development has begun in response to emerging demands following recent social movements related to PRI and ESG investments. The new tool has added a function that evaluates wellness factors in the building evaluation process using the CASBEE family. While CASBEE-WO can be used alone, the simultaneous evaluation with existing CASBEE tools can be selected. Two types of new building certifications are launched. The “Wellness Office” is the one certified with CASBEE-WO alone, and the “Smart Wellness Office” is the simultaneous certification with the existing CASBEE tools. The technical background, such as the correlations with other evaluation tools, CASBEE-OHC and WFun, is also explained. It shows that the CASBEE-WO can properly evaluate buildings providing a work environment to reduce the risk of a high work functioning impairment. The third-party certification process has been started, and the data are analyzed. The new version was released in May 2020 to fix some defects found through the analysis.