1. The Need for Envision March 2016
The Envision rating system is an objective framework of criteria and performance achievements. It is designed to help users identify ways in which sustainable approaches can be used to plan, design, construct and operate infrastructure projects. The goal is to improve the sustainable performance of infrastructure projects in terms of not only the technical performance but also from a social, environmental and economic perspective. Envision provides an opportunity for infrastructure owners and designers to provide higher performing solutions by using a lifecycle approach, by working with communities, and by using a restorative approach to infrastructure projects.
March 2016

2. ASCE’s Report Card 2013
ASCE’s 2013 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure gives an overall grade of D+ across 16 categories, up just slightly from the D given in ASCE’s 2009 Report Card.
The estimated six-year investment need to bring our infrastructure into good condition is $3.6 trillion, up from $2.2 trillion in America’s infrastructure now ranks 23rd overall, between Spain and Chile
An efficiently-operating infrastructure is an essential component for a prosperous and growing economy. Effective transportation systems bring goods to market, workers to jobs, children to schools, and families to stores and recreation areas in a safe and timely manner. Dependable water and wastewater systems bring fresh water to industry, agriculture and people. Reliable electricity supplies allow businesses and factories to work unimpeded, and bring a high level of convenience and productivity to home life across the nation. Extensive telecommunication networks connect people and businesses across the globe and enable the fast flow of information essential to commerce.
An efficiently-operating infrastructure is one that delivers the required services at affordable costs while conserving the country’s natural resources and energy. Moreover, these services must be continually maintained and improved in order to remain competitive in the global marketplace. Unfortunately over the last several decades, the state of U.S. infrastructure has declined substantially, eroding our competitive base.
For a long time, the engineering community has studied this decline and publicly appealed for fixes. Since 1988, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) has reported regularly on the condition of U.S. infrastructure in the form of a report card. In its most recent 2013 report, ASCE gave U.S. infrastructure an overall grade of “D+” and priced the needed repair and refurbishment work at $3.6 trillion. ASCE further noted that this degraded condition is having a negative impact on the U.S. economy.
Failing infrastructure is not only an inconvenience, it financially impacts our families and our country. Our infrastructure is the foundation of our economy and our quality of life, and repairing and modernizing it has exponential benefits, including: increasing our gross domestic product, growing household income, protecting jobs, and maintaining a strong U.S. position in international markets. Unless we address the backlog of projects and deferred maintenance throughout the country, the cost to each American family will reach $3,100 per year in personal disposable income.

3. Today’s Infrastructure
Our water supply systems leak, wasting that precious commodity – extended droughts and resultant water shortages exacerbate the problem. Our electric grids are increasingly fragile and subject to interruptions and price spikes, and our roads are crowded and deteriorating, wasting untold quantities of fossil fuel and human potential through long delays. Bridges are failing and funding to repair them is unattainable. Weather patterns are changing, resulting in much more frequent, resulting in more frequent forest fires and unprecedented flood damage. Individually, each of these examples are manageable, but collectively, they become a significant problem.
Leaking water pipes lose 7 billion gallons a day
Billions of gallons of untreated wastewater are discharged each year from aging systems
U.S. produces 254 million tons of solid waste a year
188 cities with brownfields sites awaiting cleanup and redevelopment
More than 4 billion hours a year stuck in traffic cost $78 billion
1 in 4 bridges structurally deficient or functionally obsolete
No access to bus or rail transit for nearly half of American households
Electricity demand has grown by 25% since 1990
All of this shows we can do better.

4. Development vs. Impact Note to speakers: Briefly explain graph
The challenge faced by developed countries worldwide, is how to reduce our net environmental footprint, i.e., make a meaningful shift towards the sustainability quadrant, without sacrificing our quality of life. Clearly, there are a number of obvious actions to take, e.g., improving energy efficiency, reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, increase water recycling, reclamation and conservation, to name a few. However, our ability to instigate any comprehensive and well thought out action is severely hampered, not only by limited resources, but by multiple priorities and agendas of those potentially affected by the actions proposed.
In addition, this challenge is not small. Taken to its logical conclusion, reaching the sustainable quadrant involves, more or less, a complete overhaul of our nation’s infrastructure, replacing old components with those that are more effective and efficient. Absent huge and unprecedented investments or the emergence of some “silver bullet” technologies, progress will be made incrementally by project owners, designers and constructors delivering infrastructure projects that make significant improvements in performance across multiple dimensions of sustainability. To be efficient and effective, these projects must also integrate well with the infrastructure in the community, both existing and planned. Lastly, the designers must take into account changes in the environment in which the delivered works must operate.
The consequences of conventional building practices are substantially altering the practice of engineering. Shortages in resources, such as fresh water and energy, are changing the assumptions regarding their future costs and availability. Resource substitutes or recycled materials have different properties and performance characteristics, all of which need to be factored into the design. The effects of a changing climate are forcing designers to change their assumptions about design parameters in terms of the expected averages, variances and possible extremes. Variables such as increases in mean temperature, the possible cost of fuel, the length and severity of droughts or increases in rainfall intensity are now part of the conversation at the preliminary design stage. In addition, new parameters such as carbon emission rates and embodied energy of materials are emerging and need to be accounted for.
Over the last decade, the notion that society’s approach to economic development is not sustainable has moved from extremist thinking to mainstream opinion. Spiking energy prices, extended droughts and water shortages, overtaxed electrical power grids, traffic congestion, collapsing bridges, urban sprawl, frequent forest fires and unprecedented flood damage: incidents once seen as disturbing but manageable are now viewed as challenges to maintaining and improving our quality of life.
Viewed individually, these trends and events might be dismissed as the inevitable consequences of an increasingly complex world, problems to be addressed or perhaps tolerated in order to maintain a high standard of living. Viewed collectively, however, they can be interpreted as the consequences of society’s current approach to economic development. This is an approach that uses resources without much restraint, burdens our ecosystems with more waste and pollution, neglects the care and upgrading of our supporting infrastructures, and disrupts the social fabric of societies. These incidents are evidence of an unsustainable model for development, one which treats materials, energy and fresh water supplies as if they were inexhaustible and the environment as if it were infinitely regenerative.
In terms of its ecological footprint, the U.S. is operating as if it had 5 planets to work with instead of 1. The current world average usage is 1.5 planets. If allowed to continue, this overuse of natural resources and reduction of ecosystem services will have devastating consequences, not only for this country but also for the rest of society. Projections suggest that humanity’s footprint will grow to over double the Earth’s capacity by 2050.

5. We’re Building 2070 Today! Highways 20-50 years Bridges 30-75 years
Pipelines
years
Infrastructure is long lived. The highways, bridges, power stations and wastewater treatment plants we build today have design lives ranging from 20 to over 75 years. This means that the infrastructure we are building today will establish the energy, water and materials efficiencies, and ecosystem impacts for decades to come. Therefore, whatever we build today, we better get it right. We must do the best we can with existing technologies, designing and delivering the most resource and energy conserving infrastructure within the limits of budgets and priorities. In addition, the efficiency and effectiveness of infrastructure depends not only on its intrinsic design, but on how that design integrates and functions for the community in which it resides.
We know that efficient infrastructure is essential for a prosperous economy. For example:
Effective transportation brings goods to market, workers to jobs, children to schools, and families to stores and recreation areas.
Dependable water and wastewater brings fresh water to industry, agriculture and people. Essentially, it enables us to live.
Reliable electricity powers businesses and brings convenience and productivity to home life.
Extensive telecommunication networks connect people and businesses across the globe, and have increasingly become indispensable to daily life in business, science, personal life, and recreation.
A few things define efficient infrastructure: It’s working, it’s cost effective, and it meet’s society’s needs without wasting resources. It also balances inputs and outputs and is fully optimized.
Dams
years

6. The Future of Infrastructure
It is no longer enough that infrastructure work, that it be constructed on time and within budget, or even that it last.
It now must be sustainable.
Here are a few examples of a sustainable infrastructure to illustrate that sustainability takes many shapes and forms.
The photos from top left going clockwise are:
A water reservoir and pumping station. There are 3.5 acres of solar panels on top of a buried water reservoir. The land on top of the reservoir was put to good use generating renewable energy that adds redundancy to the power grid.
A curbside infiltration planter to contain and treat stormwater runoff. It is also an aesthetic feature that improves the quality of life in the neighborhood.
A green roof and reflective panels to reduce the heat island effect, manage the temperature in the building below, and provide natural interior lighting.
A rain garden for containing and treating stormwater runoff. This is located at an elementary school and served as a education feature to teach students about the water cycle and gardening.

7. Envision Is Uniquely Qualified to Address America’s Infrastructure
Envision Applies to All Civil Infrastructure
Addresses Planning, Design, Construction and Maintenance
Applicable At Any Point in an Infrastructure Project's Life Cycle
Speaks to the Triple Bottom Line: Social, Economic and Environmental Goals
Designed to Keep Pace With the Changing Concept of Sustainability
Envision Is Uniquely Qualified to Address America’s Infrastructure
Envision Applies to All Civil Infrastructure
Addresses Planning, Design, Construction and Maintenance
Applicable At Any Point in an Infrastructure Project's Life Cycle
Speaks to the Triple Bottom Line: Social, Economic and Environmental Goals
Designed to Keep Pace With the Changing Concept of Sustainability
Infrastructure rating systems must account for the new engineering design paradigm, one in which the engineering design constants and behavior of design variables of the past can no longer be taken for granted. At this juncture, there is no prescriptive solution for how to properly account for these changes. Instead, the rating systems need to incorporate a process by which the project owner, designer and constructor explicitly consider the possibility of new constants, new variable behaviors and new extreme values, and devise an effective approach for dealing with them. It is we these considerations that the Envision rating system was created.

8. Why Was Envision Developed?
Current Rating Systems for Infrastructure Are Sector Specific
No System Covers Entire Life Cycle
Designed to Fill the Gap
During the development of the Envision rating system, over 900 guides and rating systems from around the world were identified. However, none cover all aspects of civil infrastructure.
Current sustainability rating systems for infrastructure in the U.S., such as LEED and Greenroads are sector specific.
No U.S. system covers all aspects of civil infrastructure, so the Envision rating system was designed to fill that gap.
Envision covers the roads, bridges, pipelines, railways, airports, dams, levees, landfills, water treatment systems, and other civil infrastructure that make up the built environment. Envision does not include buildings or facilities, as these are well covered by existing rating systems.
Envision is not intended to replace existing sustainability rating systems. Rather it fills a gap, within North America, for a holistic rating system for sustainable infrastructure. While sector specific systems exist, (e.g., roads, ports) Envision is intended as an overarching tool that covers all aspects of infrastructure.
Why is a holistic approach to infrastructure important? Unlike buildings, convergence and optimization of the various elements of infrastructure are accomplished at the community level. At this level, community infrastructure development is subject to the resources and constraints of multiple departments and agencies, each with different schedules, agendas, mandates, budget cycles, and sources of funding. Thus, rating systems that evaluate and recognize sustainable performance in a single infrastructure element will miss the more important aspects of sustainable performance, i.e., how that element contributes to the overall sustainability of the community that it serves. Using the example of a highway, the first and most important sustainability question is not how much recycled material was used in constructing the highway. The question is whether a highway or some other mode of transportation best fulfills the mobility and access needs of the community, considering the triple bottom line.
Envision encourages the use of additional sustainability rating systems that may address in-depth specific or specialized aspects of a project. However, Envision is key to realizing the overall, and full, impacts of a project.

9. Advantages Restore Whole System Design Reduce, reuse, recycle
Phased development
Adaptive
Post-life
Sustain
Technology Advancement
Performance Goals
DRIVE TOWARD RESTORATIAVE PERFORMANCE
Improve
Improve
Design
Construct
O&M
Reuse
Disassembly
We have the opportunity to plan, design and build infrastructure that extends project boundaries, extends the usefulness of the project, and drives toward restorative performance.
Explanation of the axes
x - extend the usefulness of the project thru reuse and disassembly
y - drive towards restorative performance
z - extend the project boundaries
This rating system encourages opening up traditional project boundaries in order to maximize those opportunities.
Project life-cycle. Credit is given to project teams that extend design considerations to the full extent of the project life-cycle. Designs that offer increased durability and flexibility to extend the useful life of the constructed works are afforded additional recognition. Extending the useful life of constructed works means that replacement structures are needed less. More recognition is given for designs that incorporate deconstruction principles and enable reuse and up-cycling of materials and equipment.
Stakeholder collaboration. Credit is also given to project teams that look for opportunities to work with stakeholders, both internal and external. Internally, establishing a collaborative working relationship between the project owner and the project team will help create an environment for innovation and an inclination for raising the bar on project performance. Based on this positive working relationship, the project team can then engage effectively with project stakeholders to identify issues and concerns. In this rating system, the project team is encourages to contact nearby facilities in search of unused materials that could be used on the project. Moreover, project teams can work with regulators to identify regulations or policies that run counter to sustainability objectives and seek relief. Envision gives credit for these pursuits.
Conventional
EXTEND THE USEFULNESS OF THE PROJECT
Project team
Owner organization
Affected stakeholders
EXTEND PROJECT BOUNDARIES
Team Chartering
Understand/Integrate Community Needs
Deliver as Part of Owner Organization
Partner with Regulators
Partner organizations
Regulatory bodies

10. Why Use Envision? Incorporate Sustainable Philosophies
Quantify Soft Benefits
Apply a Consistent, Transparent Approach
Benchmark and Track Infrastructure Performance
Why use Envision?
Incorporate Sustainable Philosophies
Quantify Soft Benefits
Apply a Consistent, Transparent Approach
Benchmark and Track Infrastructure Performance 10

11. Envision Helps Decision Makers:
Meet Sustainability Goals
Guide Decisions
Evaluate Environmental Benefits
Address Community Priorities
Demonstrate Good Governance
Envision Helps Decision Makers:
Meet Sustainability Goals
Guide Decisions
Evaluate Environmental Benefits
Address Community Priorities
Demonstrate Good Governance
Using Envision demonstrates an organized and comprehensive approach to decision making. You will be demonstrating the use of best practices and garner support from stakeholders. 11

12.
Envision is designed to do more than simply rate and rank projects in the built environment. It is designed as a template for planning, designing and constructing projects that contribute to the reduction of our environmental footprint while not diminishing our overall quality of life. At the same time, it helps engineers and other practitioners take into account the changes in operating conditions in ways that ensure the project will perform as specified over the entire design life. As such, Envision helps to create a new breed of sustainability engineer/practitioner, a person that has good knowledge of what it takes to design a project that truly contributes to sustainability.
The best place to get more information about Envision is the ISI website.
You can find resources, such as
The Envision guidance manual
The Envision pre-assessment checklist
The online scoresheet for project self-assessments or third-party verifications
Project case studies
The training and the exam to earn the Envision Sustainability Professional credential. You can also find a list of credentialed ENV SPs.
Information on ISI membership
You can provide feedback on ISI and Envision and make suggestions for future resources.