King Abdullah Financial District builds on green drive success

King Abdullah Financial District (KAFD) is the world’s largest green building development with more than 1.6m square meters of gross site area.
Saudi Binladin Group disclosed this at the fourth annual Saudi Green Building Forum (SGBF) in Riyadh recently.
According to the company, KAFD comprises more than 40 individual buildings including the Capital Market Authority (CMA) tower. The tower, still under construction, is already the tallest building in Riyadh.
The annual conference was organized in response to King Abdullah initiative that aims at benefiting from the general location of buildings for lighting and ventilation, renewable energy, water purification, environmentally friendly building materials for health, safety and the security of the environment.
This is a combined effort of engineering design, implementation, operation and management of construction assembly, waste and recycling.
The event has the support of of Prince Mansour bin Miteb, minister of municipalities and rural affairs. Strategic partners are the Ministry of Water and Electricity, The King Saudi Foundation, the Electricity and Co-generation Regulatory Authority, the Saudi Standards and Meteorology and Quality Organization (SASO), the Saudi Council of Engineers, the US Green Building Council, UN Habitat and Egyptian Green Building Council.
Addressing the conference, SGBF Secretary General Faisal Alfadl said there are 134 projects with a combined built-up area of 12 million square meters at present. They have been developed under the US Green Building Council’s LEED-rating methodology.
“In 2009, the opening of King Abdullah University for Science and Technology (KAUST) marked a ground-breaking development and Saudi Arabia’s first green building project.”
The first SGBF was held in Riyadh in October 2010 and it was the setting for the launch of the King Abdullah initiative for Green Buildings partnered by Minister of Municipality and Rural Affairs.
This has set the scene for a rapid expansion in the number of Saudi Arabian projects securing and seeking green building accreditation.
In his presentation, Whysal Numan, LEED in-charge officer for the, provided an update in progress on the Numan said the entire KAFD project is subject to a comprehensive environmental plan which encompasses erosion issues and construction waste; water and energy efficiency and recycling.
The project calls for the construction of an energy-efficient monorail system.
A minimum of 10 percent by value of the construction materials used in the project are extracted and manufactured within 500 miles of the project site.