A Unified Climate-Adaptive Sustainability Benchmarking Framework for Interoperable Assessment of Building Rating Systems

Background The evolution of sustainability assessment methods has become increasingly important for improving environmental performance of the built environment and sustainable urban development. In recent years, various international and regional Green Building Rating Systems (GBRS) have been created to measure sustainability performance in a variety of environmental, climatic and regulatory settings. Major international and regional GBRS, including LEED, BREEAM, CASBEE, GRIHA, Estidama, and GPRS, have been developed to evaluate sustainability performance under different environmental, climatic, and regulatory conditions. These systems have broadly the same sustainability objectives, but vary significantly in their methodology, weighting system, climatic sensitivity and monitoring practices, making interoperability difficult and limiting comparability between different systems. Methods This study develops an integrated climate-adaptive sustainability benchmarking framework that combines the strengths of existing rating systems within a unified analytical structure. The framework was developed through a PRISMA - guided systematic review and comparative analysis of sustainability rating systems. The framework integrates climate classification (hot-arid, tropical, temperate, and cold), adaptive indicator weighting, and min-max normalisation to enable climate-responsive benchmarking across different sustainability assessment systems. Results The comparative synthesis indicates that existing sustainability rating systems rely on static, region-specific weighting structures with limited climate responsiveness, lifecycle integration, and resilience assessment. The proposed framework integrates these dimensions within a unified analytical structure. An illustrative numerical example demonstrates the computational workflow of the proposed adaptive weighting and normalisation procedures. Conclusions The proposed framework provides a conceptual and methodological foundation for climate-adaptive and interoperable sustainability benchmarking. It is intended to support cross-system and cross-climate comparison while maintaining sensitivity to regional sustainability priorities. Empirical validation using real-world building performance data and case studies across different climatic regions is required in future research.