LEED’s Green Building Rules Are Becoming More Bird-Friendly—Do They Go Far Enough?

Since 1998 more than 100,000 properties around the world—from apartments and office towers to hospitals, dorms, and churches—have earned a sleek seal emblazoned with three oak leaves and four letters that signify environmental sustainability: LEED.

The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification, administered by the nonprofit U.S. Green Building Council, aims to give architects and developers the tools to create buildings that conserve resources and make their occupants healthy and happy. Builders who incorporate eco-friendly elements like solar panels, bike racks, thermal insulation, and efficient lightbulbs can boast to tenants that their home or workplace is helping make the world a cleaner and greener place.

But LEED-certified does not always equal bird-friendly, experts say. While protecting birds has been a formal goal of the program since 2011, certified structures are not always immune from the epidemic of collisions that claims well over a billion avian lives each year in the U.S. alone. Just ask Anne Lewis, a retired architect who helped found the Washington, D.C.-area rehab organization City Wildlife. “Our volunteers walk around these buildings and there’s a big insignia on the frosted-plate glass saying this building is a LEED platinum building. And right below the insignia, there’s a dead bird,” she says. “It drives us nuts.”

Now the Green Building Council is nearing the end of a months-long update to the LEED code that adds more weight to bird-friendliness than previous versions have. Some avian advocates, though, say the latest draft doesn’t do enough to keep birds safe and could result in projects that use a green veneer to gloss over a significant death toll.

Bird safety takes the stage

In theory, getting a building LEED-certified is simple enough. The Green Building Council offers architects and construction firms a library of credits to peruse for the type of project they’re undertaking. After meeting some baseline prerequisites, an applicant can choose to pursue any number of the credits offered, ranging from habitat conservation to water efficiency, each worth a certain point value. The minimum for certification is 40 points; a builder who wants a flashier gold or platinum award needs to rack up 60 or 80, respectively. The straightforward nature of earning credits has helped make LEED the world’s most widely used system for rating building sustainability.

The credit for bird deterrence, added as a pilot measure in 2011, was a victory for conservationists, but earning it was no easy task for builders, says Christine Sheppard, glass collisions program director for the American Bird Conservancy. To claim it, an applicant had to limit exterior lighting overnight, create a performance monitoring plan, and develop a facade that met a strict threat threshold or featured entirely bird-safe materials—all for just a single point out of 40 or more. Still, it became one of the most frequently used pilot credits in the library, Sheppard says.

That popularity helped the collision-deterrence pilot credit secure a permanent spot in the LEED library in 2022. Now, as part of LEED’s latest comprehensive update, the credit is slated to take a more central place in the catalog, with bird-friendly measures now worth a possible two points for new construction projects. One point, listed under “biodiverse habitat,” calls for applicants to use bird-safe glass, whether etched with patterns, fritted with dots, or coated in UV stripes, for a building’s lower levels and near other areas at high risk of strikes, like near green roofs. The other focuses on reducing unnecessary nighttime light, which disorients migrating birds and increases the risk of strikes. The credits aren’t linked, meaning builders could earn a point for pursuing light mitigations without addressing materials and surfaces, or vice versa.

A missed opportunity?

When the latest proposals dropped in September, some collision experts found them less of an advancement than a disappointment. Michael Mesure, executive director of Canada’s Fatal Light Awareness Program, was one of those underwhelmed activists. “I felt it was weakening what was already a weak credit,” he says. “The outcome doesn’t produce enough reduction in bird collisions.” (Despite its U.S. origins, LEED is popular in Canada and other countries.) Last October, in response, he and more than 60 collision monitors, conservationists, and other bird-safety advocates signed on to a letter to the Green Building Council seeking stronger requirements, including the use of bird-friendly materials as part of any avian credit. “There are people who look at LEED and just think it’s theater,” says Travis Longcore, a UCLA urban ecologist who helped facilitate the group’s effort. “And the recommendations in [the letter] are a way to ensure that if somebody gets the credits, it’s not going to be theater.”

That’s if people do go for the credits. Part of the advocates’ critique is that a single point may not give applicants enough of an incentive to shell out for pricier bird-friendly glass. (A new bird-friendly credit for existing buildings—part of a separate certification called Operations and Maintenance—can be earned without addressing glass at all.) The signatories want to see the bird credits worth at least three points and say it shouldn’t be possible to qualify for the gold or platinum certifications without taking measures to reduce collisions. “Some of these buildings that are pursuing credits are killing hundreds, if not thousands, of birds,” Mesure says. “How can we be issuing, let’s say, a gold award to a building that didn’t even pursue the bird-friendly credit?”

The advocates also worry that the kinds of ecological elements LEED encourages, including green roofs, courtyards, and native plants, might do more harm than good if they are not always paired with bird-friendly glass. “Wherever we’re attracting birds into dangerous locations, we have to take the next step and make sure that we have the fritted glass, or we have the facade that they can see,” says University of Virginia urban planning professor Tim Beatley, whose biophilic city movement promotes projects that benefit entire ecosystems, not just humans. (Beatley has written on bird-friendly design but isn’t a signatory on the letter.)

A movement gains momentum

Though Sheppard, of ABC, acknowledges the latest credits aren’t a panacea, she still sees them as meaningful progress. “You have to be pragmatic if you’re going to get anywhere,” she says. “It’s really essential that you make this doable.” While stricter measures might be ideal, she adds, mandates and interlinked credits aren’t typically part of LEED’s structure. Besides, the more prominently the catalog features bird safety, the more architects and designers will be exposed to it, even if they don’t end up pursuing the credits.

The revised bird-friendly credits have been driven by “balancing stringency with practical implementation,” Karema Seliem, LEED’s associate director for technical development, said in a statement emailed to Audubon. Feedback from conservation advocates “significantly shapes the evolution of these credits,” she added, but “not every request can be incorporated due to practical challenges.” The Green Building Council solicited two rounds of public comment about the new code in 2024, and the final version is due out later this year.

The debate over LEED credits raises a broader question for those concerned with avian safety: Are these voluntary measures even worth bickering over? Now that the movement for bird-safe buildings has attracted enough clout to get in the room with lawmakers, mandatory measures through policy are starting to look a lot more tempting, even if LEED won’t touch them. “We’re at a point where we don’t need to celebrate some platinum LEED building—we need universal citywide standards,” Beatley says.

Lewis, of City Wildlife, still isn’t a fan of seeing dead birds outside buildings bearing LEED’s oak leaf icon. But she’s also a prime example of the movement’s shifting ambitions. Tired of getting blown off when they told building owners about avian fatality rates, she and her fellow collision monitors started approaching local council members about getting a law passed. And, as of October, most new construction projects and exterior renovations in Washington are required to employ bird-friendly materials.

“Whether they apply for the LEED credit or not is up to them,” Lewis says. “All buildings are going to be bird-safe.”