Webinar – Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure
Pathways to Climate and Nature Positive Site Infrastructure

Pathways to Climate and Nature Positive Site Infrastructure

Wednesday, May 21, 2025
2:00 pm – 3:00 pm

ENV SP Credential Maintenance hours: 1 Elective hour

Qualification Credentials: RCEP PDH

Our world is grappling with complex challenges, including climate change, biodiversity loss, and socioeconomic inequality. Those that plan, design, and engineer our communities and ecosystems have a pivotal role in shaping solutions that promote future resilience.

In this webinar, Pamela Conrad will share insights into addressing these crises through tangible approaches. She will introduce Pathfinder 3.0–a free online tool for measuring the performance of infrastructure and sites, including embodied carbon. Eva Koester, sustainability and civil specialist will highlight project approaches supported by Envision and other commitment programs such as Infrastructure 2050.

This session offers tools and guidance for integrating ecological, social, and economic benefits into projects while contributing to global efforts to combat climate and biodiversity challenges. 

Register

Learning Objectives

  1. Learn strategies and ways to reduce embodied and operational carbon emissions from sites and infrastructure.  
  2. Gain insights on approaches that increase carbon sequestration, biodiversity, cooling and equity while reducing heat and other growing threats. 
  3. Understand how to use performance tools to measure these impacts, including the Pathfinder app.
  4. Through project case studies, realize strategies, approaches and tools that can help meet Envision credits as well as other rating systems and programs. 

Webinar Presenters:

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Pamela Conrad, PLA, ASLA, LEED AP, is a licensed landscape architect, founder of Climate Positive Design, and faculty at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. She is also a Senior Fellow at Architecture 2030 and ASLA’s inaugural Biodiversity and Climate Fellow. Building on her decades-long expertise in coastal adaptation, she spearheaded the Climate Positive Design Challenge and developed the Pathfinder app. Her contributions have been widely recognized, garnering recognition at the last three UN Climate Conferences, as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, TIME for Kids, and the Metropolis Planet Positive Award, among many others. 

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Eva Koester, PA, LFA, LEED GA, is a sustainability specialist and licensed civil engineer at SmithGroup. She is the co-leader of the firm’s Embodied Carbon Task Force, performing company’s first whole building and site LCA, standardizing low carbon specifications, and providing decarbonization strategies for over 20 projects, resulting in over 5 million kg CO2e avoided so far. She is also an active member of the Illinois Green Alliance Auxiliary Board and the Carbon Leadership Forum Chicago Hub. 

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Lauren Alger, the National Director of Sustainable Design at STV, is a civil engineer experienced in supporting LEED-certified and Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure (ISI) award-winning projects. Lauren promotes sustainable design practices with a focus on greenhouse gas emission analyses and reduction efforts, while working closely with STV’s Digital Advisory teams to develop tools and processes to effectively measure, track and reduce emissions within project designs. As a member of SE 2050, the ASCE-SEI commitment to reduce embodied carbon within structural systems of buildings, Lauren launched ASCE Infrastructure 2050 which expands the scope to prioritize various infrastructure systems.