BREEAM New Construction: Core Concepts
What the scheme measures
BREEAM New Construction assesses a building at the design and construction stage across a fixed set of environmental categories: energy, water, materials, waste, ecology, pollution, transport, health and wellbeing, and management (plus innovation credits). Each category contains issues, each issue contains assessment criteria, and criteria award credits. Credits are converted to category scores, weighted, and aggregated into an overall percentage that maps to a rating band: Pass, Good, Very Good, Excellent, Outstanding.
The two traps candidates lose marks on
First, weightings are not equal. Energy and health/wellbeing carry the heaviest weights in most New Construction versions, so a project can chase many low-weight credits and still miss its target. Second, the rating is not simply credits earned divided by credits available - environmental section weightings and the minimum standards (prerequisite credits) both intervene. A project can technically hit a score for Excellent yet fail because it missed a mandatory minimum in energy or water. Always check whether the question asks about the score or the rating; they are not the same thing.
Worked rule of thumb
When a question describes a project 'just short' of a rating, first ask: is the gap in a heavily weighted category (energy, health and wellbeing, materials) or a light one? A handful of energy credits is usually worth far more than the same number of transport credits. Then check mandatory minimums - those cannot be traded off.
Terminology discipline
Know the difference between an issue, a credit, and a rating. Traps often swap these terms, or imply that an innovation credit can substitute for a mandatory requirement (it cannot).