**6. Conclusions**

Increasing energy consumption and the resultant carbon emissions in residential buildings is becoming a critical issue that should be focused upon to achieve a green built environment and to mitigate global warming. Green rating systems such as the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) and many others are being actively practised in various regions of the world that aspire to achieve energy savings, reductions in carbon emissions, and occupant satisfaction. There is however, still a considerable performance gap which exists between energy consumption as-designed and the

one in the actual buildings. Occupant behaviour accounts for one of the major reasons behind the significant uncertainty regarding building energy use. Little is known about how the occupants of these buildings cause the performance gap.

Green building initiatives, such as LEED and many other good practices, are now regulated by the UAE governmen<sup>t</sup> in an attempt to achieve energy conservation, sustainability, health, and environmental and economic benefits. The key research question was whether the occupants of these buildings have the knowledge required to change and/or improve their environmental behaviour in order to achieve energy savings, and whether their beliefs and attitudes could lead them towards greener behaviour. The main novelties and objectives of the present work can be summarized as:

Data was collected from four LEED-certified multi-residential buildings in Dubai, UAE to better understand occupant behaviour and their level of involvement in building operations. A total of 203 occupants responded to the survey with valid answers, resulting in a response rate of 76.6%. Survey data was initially tested using SPSS statistics software to obtain descriptive statistics, frequencies, and means. Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) was then used to perform an in-depth analysis of the interrelationships between the three unobserved/latent variables—occupant environmental Attitude, Knowledge and Behaviour (AKB)—based on the observed/measured variables (survey data).

The comparison between the conceptual measurement model and the best fit measurement and structural models revealed significant improvement in all parameters. The final parameters fell within the GOF range, i.e., CMIN/DF improved from 6.187 to 1.273, RESEA from 0.160 to 0.037, RMR from 0.133 to 0.044, GFI from 0.478 to 0.954, CFI from 0.412 to 0.994, IFI from 0.417 to 0.994, and finally TLI from 0.372 to 0.992. On the other hand, the final regression weight from Knowledge to Behaviour was 0.557, and that from Attitude to Behaviour was 0.931; in both cases, the p-value was not less than 0.05, and therefore no significant interrelationship exists between them.

For the best fitting structural model, the estimates for regression weights, covariances and correlations were all below 0.40, without a significant p-value. The standard errors (S.E.) at 0.065 indicated that the model provided a reasonably good fit, as it was between 0 and 1, although being closer to zero indicates a poorer model, based on the explanation by Bentler et al. (1980) [42,55]. The critical ratios (CR) were either small or negative values, e.g., Attitude to Behaviour was -0.086, and the value for covariances among Attitude and Knowledge was 0.379. The CR was only high for variances for Knowledge, at 5.030, and for Attitude, at 9.406, thus indicating none of the correlations between the latent variables were totally supported.

These results indicate a lack of statistically significant interrelationships between the latent variables; however, a significant relationship exists between the latent and the measured/observed variables. In other words, occupants with good attitudes do not necessarily behave in an environmentally friendly manner. Well-fit measurements and structural models were obtained, but only after the elimination of observed variables related to electricity and water consumption in Step 1 of the modification (as explained in Section 5). This reflects the fact that occupant environmental behaviour is not in line with design intent and confirms that "*the occupants of the LEED-certified buildings in UAE are not motivated to behave in an environmentally friendly manner*", by showing the insignificant relationship between the latent variables, AKB.

Since there is no apparent attention being paid to, or concern being expressed with respect to, occupant behaviour in the post-occupancy phase, it is suggested that the LEED-certification process should include a recommissioning/recertification phase after occupancy that includes occupant behaviour measurements and revision. Some of the real potential applications of the developed methodology, for instance, could be a public organisation and/or governmental authority in charge of energy e fficiency in the built environment to review and monitor the interrelationships among AKB in the building's occupants to provide revisions to LEED, rather than changing the LEED process, which is intended to value the work carried out during construction and design of the buildings.

The research findings present a logical guide and a well-fitting structural model (Figure 10), which can form the basis for the development of a Building Occupant Environmental Behaviour model through the inclusion of motivational factors to trigger environmentally friendly actions and influence behaviour. It is accepted that today it is quite possible to produce an eco-friendly green building; however, it is also a priority need to adopt practices such as Soft Landings [63,64] in order to involve industry professionals and educate occupants with the aim of improving and altering their behaviour in an environmentally friendly fashion to achieve potential energy savings in their buildings.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, E.N. and M.S.G.; methodology, E.N.; software, E.N.; validation, E.N. and M.S.G.; formal analysis, E.N.; investigation, E.N. and M.S.G.; resources, E.N. and M.S.G.; data curation, E.N. and M.S.G.; writing—original draft preparation, E.N. and M.S.G.; writing—review and editing, M.S.G.; visualization, M.S.G.; supervision, M.S.G.; project administration, M.S.G.; funding acquisition, E.N. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Acknowledgments:** The authors would like to thank the survey participants to carry out this research

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.

#### **List of Abbreviations**

