Sustainability-based design can have a very high initial cost. Although this design provision might help the environment. people might get affected financial due to mandatory sustainable based design.
Criteria approaches to Sustainable Design, such as LEED or CEEQUAL, find an combination of alternatives that is expected to produce the 'best' solution in a given setting. Since the same concept is applied in a very wide range of settings, it can't be said to provide an optimal solution. It might, but that can't be proven.
Balance approaches, such as PSM II and TBL, find the unique 'best' balance between the competing requirements of the industry. There is no consistent way to compare one project to another. One can be sure of finding a 'good' solution, but we don't know if the $1M spent on making a slightly better widget would be better spend improving whatzits, instead.
So, you can make it mandatory that some particular approach is taken, but a) it will be sub-optimal b) it will be better than 'do nothing', but 'do nothing' isn't even close to sustainable, so it's entirely possible that the solution isn't good enough and c) "carrots and sticks" - either subsidies or penalties - won't be reasonably balanced, and will lag the cutting edge significantly, which means we will keep building with yesterday's ideas.
A better approach, I think, is to decide what you mean by Sustainability, and design for it. To me, that's a feature of a community, so if one focuses only at a building scale, you won't be able to achieve what you're trying to do. I think the best one can get is to not cause the community to be less sustainable, but that means you would have to work with the community to decide what is Sustainable within that specific community.
If you decide there is a definition of 'Sustainability' that is self-consistent at a building scale (and I guess that is possible, even if I don't think so), then you will have included the Transition reality - every piece of infrastructure being built today will receive it's first maintenance in a low-energy-intensity future. Per capita energy consumption will be dropping on a planetary basis in about 20 years, and there is nothing we can do today to stop that. So, when you are planning your sustainable building, know how it is going to be repaired in 40 years using much less energy than is available today. Look up G.A.T.E - Global Association of Transition Engineers - it's being worked on, but it's a non trivial problem. And quite possibly doesn't require new expensive technologies.
Yes, we should not be allowed to destroy the planet (environment) at the expense of the future generations who do not have a voice at present. Regulations, laws and standards are necessary in the process to adjust the costs and make them fair and real. However, more research is needed to find feasible methodologies and frameworks to design, assess and make decisions sustainably in many fields including structural engineering.