R/M has a growing number of Envision Sustainability Professionals (ENV SP) on our team. What does this mean for your project? It means that when a sustainability issue is brought to the attention of any member of the team, more often than not those engineers will be called upon for their expertise in the area. When they are, the Envision framework will be used and the benefits of the program will affect more than just that community’s project.

Envision supports the long-term viability of the infrastructure, lowers costs through management and collaboration, reduces negative impacts on both the community and the environment, and can increase public confidence and involvement in decision making. Because this process works throughout a project’s life cycle, the earlier a sustainability expert is brought on, the better for your project.

What Envision brings to your projects

According to the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure, Envision is “a framework that provides the guidance needed to initiate systematic change in planning, design, and delivery of sustainable and resilient infrastructure.” The bigger purpose is to foster a more dramatic and necessary improvement of the sustainability performance and resiliency of physical infrastructure. Those who earn the ENV SP credential understand how to utilize the holistic sustainability rating system and planning guide to introduce more sustainable considerations into their projects.

The framework specifically includes 64 sustainability and resilience indicators, which ISI calls “credits.” These are branched into five categories:

Quality of Life
Leadership
Resource Allocation
Natural World
Climate and Resilience

Each credit assists projects in reaching another level of improvement. The assessment of those 64 credits determines the project’s sustainability and ability to achieve improved results. ISI explains that the ENV SP credential helps to point out those project engineers dedicated to better understanding their projects’ contributions to sustainability.