Featured Chapter in Environment Analyst’s Corporate Guide: Delivering Resilient Infrastructure

ISI Staff Conrad McCallum and Jen Ninete recently authored a chapter in Environmental Analyst’s Corporate Guide, Delivering Resilient Infrastructure (February 2025).

With increasing risks from extreme weather events and nature depletion, it’s more important than ever to ensure infrastructure assets are resilient.​​ Environment Analyst’s free Corporate Guide shares expert advice and practical steps to help infrastructure asset owners and investors, construction and engineering organisations, and those that work in Federal, State and Local planning, permitting or policy, to deliver more resilient, sustainable projects.

ISI’s chapter discussed Envision use in the context of making projects investable by embedding ESG throughout project delivery.

Excerpt:

“The transition to ESG is driving changes in project development and causing funders to reassess investments in infrastructure. In response, infrastructure owners have keyed in to the frameworks that most effectively support achieving these goals. One of those systems is the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure’s (ISI) Envision Sustainable Infrastructure Framework, designed for use on all infrastructure types.”

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Envision’s ability to capture the interlocking benefits and trade-offs of infrastructure improvement options, clearly and compellingly, is one of its key strengths. By setting a common language and metrics, the framework is valuable in stakeholder decision-making, as practical experience—and now research—is demonstrating.

One example is a new study looking at how aiding the public to construct preferences may help increase their willingness to support green stormwater infrastructure (e.g., incorporating elements like bioswales, rain gardens, and permeable pavements) over conventional stormwater infrastructure.

Mo Hu, an assistant professor in the department of construction science, Texas A&M School of Architecture and her co-author conducted a national survey with 946 participants in the U.S. Their views were sought on two stormwater management options: one using traditional pipes and pumps and another using natural systems.

Half of the participants were encouraged to think about sustainable design before making a decision, based on a prompt developed using questions from Envision. This group was presented with five Envision credits that were applicable to the case study, as well as an Envision stormwater project example (Buffalo’s Willert Park Green Infrastructure Project), as a guide.

Helping to shape preferences

Among the findings: those who were encouraged to think about the advantages of sustainable design rated the green infrastructure option as significantly more beneficial, and were more likely to recommend it. (When the participants in this experiment were engineers, in a 2022 study by the researchers, the results were similar).

The latest finding is noteworthy, because decision-makers with little prior knowledge or experience tend to construct preferences as they evaluate options, write the authors. Other impediments can also arise. In one study, Krisha Dhakal and Lizette Chevalier showed that people tend to fixate on the traditional functions of stormwater runoff reduction, which can lead to a more pro-traditional mindset.

Professor Hu and Professor Tripp Shealy from Virginia Tech write that their findings help illustrate how “interventions to this preference construction process for the public can help encourage them to adopt more green infrastructure design.”

[Note: The authors, who are not affiliated with ISI, published the study in J. Env. Psych, June 2023]

On a wide variety of infrastructure projects, the Envision framework is providing a consensus-based system and a common language around sustainable design objectives, and similarly with this study, considering sustainable design earlier encourages support for sustainable infrastructure by offering an attractive, well-articulated justification for decision-makers.

In this study, simply asking the public to consider how each option contributes to achieving predefined sustainability goals prior to making other judgements about cost, risk, or benefits “significantly increases their preference for the more sustainable design option.”

For information on Envision, view the Use Envision page and the Envision packet.

Social equity, historically overlooked in the A/E/C industry, is receiving more attention of late as stakeholders have pushed for more diverse approaches to project delivery for communities. When considering equity in the A/E/C industry, it can be instructive to look at how different rating systems grapple with the concept, says new research, published in the journal Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability.

Sustainability frameworks all attempt in different ways to encourage social equity achievement, the authors find. Moreover, they argue that differences in how these systems understand and value the idea can contribute to substantial differences in actual project conception and implementation.

Titled “Social equity in sustainability certification systems for the built environment: understanding concepts, value, and practice implications,” the article cautions that project teams need to bring a clear set of goals regarding equity of what and for whom. Also fundamental are “the ideas of how to measure and evaluate the distribution of social costs / benefits in order to put social equity into practice.”

The research, authored by a team from HDR, Inc., was published at the end of January and can be freely accessed at: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2634-4505/ac949d

“Equity and social justice refer to the responsibility of a society to ensure that civil and human rights are preserved and protected for each individual, and that all persons are treated equally and without prejudice. These issues are particularly relevant to infrastructure development, which often involves the provision of significant benefits as well as potentially significant impacts.” — Envision v3, Introduction, p. 15

Envision® and Equity

Envision provides a consistent, consensus-based framework for assessing sustainability, resiliency, and equity in civil infrastructure. The equity dimension is embedded in Envision and paired with the term “social justice.” The dedicated Credit titled QL3.1 – “Advance Equity & Social Justice” is designed to ensure equity and social justice are “fundamental considerations within project processes and decision making.” The evaluation metric to be used is the degree to which equity and social justice are included in stakeholder engagement, project team commitments, and decision making. Higher levels of achievement for this credit call for empowerment of communities to engage in the development process, or even positively addressing or correcting an existing or historic injustice or imbalance.

The “Advance Equity & Social Justice” credit is related to these other Quality of Life Credits: QL1.2 (“Enhance Public Health and Safety”), QL2.1 (“Improve Community Mobility and Access”), QL2.2 (“Encourage Sustainable Transportation”), and QL3.2 (“Preserve Historic and Cultural Resources”). It is also related to Leadership Credits LD1.3 (“Preserve Historic and Cultural Resources”), LD2.2 (“Plan for Sustainable Communities”), LD3.1 (“Stimulate Economic Prosperity and Development”), and LD3.2 (“Develop Local Skills and Capabilities”).

The Envision framework ties equity goals to a wide array of other project goals and activities. For example, in QL.1 (“Enhance Public Health and Safety”) the historic factors of equity and social justice within the project context are among the criteria that the project team should consider. This is to demonstrate that health and safety risks and impacts are not disproportionately borne by one community over another.