In response to call for environmental and energy efficient buildings more attention would be paid to passive architectural design/construction such as earth buildings. Promotion of this building type requires an accurate and reliable building evaluation system by which buildings could be assessed in free running mode. Unfortunately, most of the regulations and developed building evaluation systems undervalue the free running buildings. This presentation highlights the challenges and limitations of current regulations, standards and building thermal performance evaluation systems. It demonstrates how earth buildings have been the victim of wrong evaluation on the basis of inappropriate indicators.
