The 2016 California Infrastructure Symposium will be held on Friday, March 18 (http://cais16.org/). You have probably seen the announcements with the Symposium’s impressive list of speakers. I look forward to seeing some of you there.
I’d like to call your attention to the bottom of the announcement for the Symposium where you will see a promotion for an Envision® Workshop on March 17. Until recently, I hadn’t heard of Envision®, so I assume that there might also be a few of you who aren’t yet familiar with it.
Envision® is a program that is for infrastructure what LEED is for buildings. The Envision® program is run by the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure (ISI), which is a 501 (c) (3) not-for-profit organization structured to develop and maintain a sustainability rating system for civil infrastructure. That system, called Envision®, is a collaboration between ISI in Washington, D.C. and the Zofnass Program for Sustainable Infrastructure at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
ISI was founded by the American Council of Engineering Companies (ACEC), the American Public Works Association (APWA), and the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). Considering the large scale of this founding group, all civil engineers would be well-advised to learn about it.
The Envision® rating system for sustainable infrastructure is a relatively new international baseline for infrastructure best practices. Envision® provides a holistic framework for evaluating and rating the environmental and economic benefits of all types and sizes of infrastructure projects for the community. It evaluates, grades, and gives recognition to infrastructure projects that use transformational, collaborative approaches to assess the sustainability indicators over the course of the project’s lifecycle. It features 60 credits, or sustainability concepts, categorized under Quality of Life, Leadership, Resource Allocation, Natural World, and Climate and Risk.
The Envision® assessment tools have been developed to evaluate costs and benefits over the project’s lifecycle. Instead of just looking at the immediate costs and performance objectives, the Envision® process takes into account the sustainability of the infrastructure along with environmental and social considerations. Taking a holistic view of infrastructure projects better guides us toward supporting the right projects and designing them the right way.
The goal of Envision® is to provide project planning, design and construction guidance that reduces the environmental footprint and supports the broad goal of improving quality of life.
When you learn how to use the Envision® program, you can become an Envision® Sustainability Professional (ENV SP). That brings us back to the workshop on March 17. This workshop will provide you with the training you need to become an ENV SP. I encourage you to attend if you would like to learn how to rate a project in terms quality of life, leadership, resources allocation, natural world and climate impact and resilience, and especially if you do not currently have anyone in your office who has this certification.
I’m going to be there.
