The green architecture is known as a style of design, construction, operation and management of buildings and projects (especially large) on the basis of minimizing or reducing the negative effects of building on the environment, so as to provide the needs of the present without losing sight of the right of future generations of environmental resources, that means improving the design of the building to make it more efficient, and less expensive to run, and more preserving natural resources, while contributing to the improvement of the internal work environment that achieves increased production and health of users, through the following design criteria[i]: Sustainable site, water efficiency, energy conservation, saving materials and resources, improve indoor environment quality.
Green architecture and Sustainable buildings
With the development of awareness of the need to implement sustainable development, appeared in the neighboring African and Asian countries, local systems to apply the concepts of green architecture, and the interest in environmental issues in the neighboring Arab countries was late, the interest appeared first in the Gulf countries perhaps because they are related more to global systems than the other, and to the increase of the huge size of construction development and renaissance in it, so it helped the early affect of sustainability, with the emergence of the need for saving energy to reduce the large cost of continuous buildings operation, and to save water because of its rareness in the region( which is in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar), and in Africa the environmental interests started in South Africa, which enjoys a degree of political and economic stability more than other African countries, and, therefore, this is the countries that have established and used the system for an appropriate period since 2008, then a recent interest in devising local systems in Egypt, Morocco, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, but did not take a share of a real application and practice, based on what the above systems will be studied in the following countries: South Africa, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar.