Although performance-based building regulations are in use or under development in numerous countries worldwide, there remain significant challenges in adequately identifying and defining performance, in understanding and addressing diverse societal expectations, and in establishing robust performance-based regulatory systems. These challenges become intensified as the building construction market becomes increasingly global, with the resulting expectation that building regulatory instruments remain valid across borders and do not create barriers to trade, while at the same time address local and national needs without compromising local cultural and societal norms. Many of these issues are just now beginning to be explored, and there is significant opportunity and need for future research and development in these areas.

Building regulatory systems have been evolving in recent decades, first with a transition to a functional or performance basis, and more recently with the introduction of new societal objectives, including those related to sustainability and climate change resiliency. Various policy and technical challenges have been identified with this evolution, including the lack of a common basis for establishing performance expectations, quantified performance metrics, and robust mechanisms to incorporate new objectives in a manner that effectively integrates a diversity of stakeholder input and results in regulatory requirements that do not compete with long-standing objectives. Among the mechanisms being explored to facilitate a managed evolution is the use of risk as a basis for performance, and modifications within the building regulatory environment to enable this. It is posited that framing the building regulatory system as a socio-technical system (STS) will highlight the complex interactions that exist between regulators and the market, the roles stakeholders play in characterizing risk for use in building regulation, and what steps are required to shift to a risk-informed performance-based building regulatory system, taking into account different legal structures and regulatory approaches that exist between jurisdictions.

Building regulatory agencies worldwide are grappling with how to define and implement appropriate mandatory and voluntary measures for new and existing buildings that address societal and political demands for increased environmental and resource sustainability and resiliency to the effects of climate change without lessening the historical building regulatory focus on health, safety and welfare of building occupants. It can be argued that a transition from prescriptive to performance-based building regulatory regimes, coupled with the introduction of new policy objectives for sustainability and resiliency, in a rather short period of time, without full assessment of how they interact with existing building regulatory objectives, and without broadly agreed holistic solutions, has led to the introduction of new objectives that have the potential to result in increased hazards and risks to occupants. To explore the current situation and future needs associated with performance building regulatory regimes and the inclusion of sustainability and resiliency objectives for new and existing buildings, the literature was reviewed and a survey of building regulatory bodies and institutions in 12 countries was conducted to obtain perspectives on whether and how sustainability and resiliency objectives are being incorporated into their building regulations and if any challenges have been identified.

A review of two decades of worldwide experience using standards, codes and guidelines related to performance-based fire protection design for buildings has identified shortcomings in the interpretation, application and implementation of the performance-based design process, apparent inconsistency in the resulting levels of performance achieved and several opportunities to enhance the process. In a constantly evolving building environment, technical challenges have to be overcome because fire safety engineering still depends greatly on knowledge gained from scientific and engineering research across a broad range of disciplines (e.g., better understanding of the fire phenomena, the behavior and response of the building occupants/contents/structure to the fire, tools for engineering analysis and all the necessary data needed to support tool application). Political challenges also need to be considered as performance-based fire protection design requires the approval of the authority having jurisdiction and other involved stakeholders, at several of its different steps (design, construction, original usage, modifications of usage). The review presented here has been undertaken from an engineering perspective rather than a regulatory perspective. Two key outcomes of this engineering review are that several of the challenges that have been identified are strongly linked to the application of generic guidance to specific problems, which results in critical details being missed, and that some of the engineering issues are treated within a political context, while they should be addressed as purely technical issues.

The topics of performance-based fire safety engineering* and performance-based building codes are the focus of significant discussion, research, and development worldwide. Although the two topics are highly related, they are indeed separate concepts that can each stand alone. This paper discusses the elements of performance-based fire safety engineering and outlines a basic application of methodology. Special attention is given to identifying specific client objectives that can be quantified in engineering terms as the basis for design.