Sustainability Office Achieves Sustainability Credentials
From the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure
UMBC's Office of Sustainability now has two Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure Envision Sustainability Professionals (ENV SP) on staff.
Kayla Hickman, Sustainability Coordinator, passed her exam and achieved her ENV SP this month! Ryan Kmetz, Assistant Director, has been an ENV SP since 2016.
Envision provides a consistent, consensus-based framework for assessing sustainability and resilience in infrastructure. Envision:
- Sets the standard for what constitutes sustainable infrastructure;
- Incentivizes higher performance goals beyond minimum requirements;
- Gives recognition to projects that make significant contributions to sustainability; and
- Provides a common language for collaboration and clear communication both internally and externally.
Fundamentally, Envision is about supporting higher performance through more sustainable choices in infrastructure development. The framework provides a flexible system of criteria and performance objectives to aid decision makers and help project teams identify sustainable approaches during planning, design and construction that will continue throughout the project’s operations and maintenance and end-of-life phases.
Envision recognizes resource constraints and the diversity of mandates, schedules, budget cycles and funding sources. For that reason, external benefits, most notably, how well infrastructure projects contribute to the efficiency and long-term sustainability of communities the projects serve is paramount. Envision not only asks are we doing the project right, but also are we doing the right project?
Posted: November 30, 2020, 8:36 AM
