Sustainability & Resilience

Our planners and designers use a collaborative, interdisciplinary approach. We work with stakeholders to develop projects that are flexible and responsive, sensitive to the environment and local character, and safe. These projects fit within larger community plans and become assets to their communities — preserving views and historic resources, improving the economy, and elevating natural settings.

When disasters strike, our experienced professionals assess the event’s impacts and organize activities focused on life, safety and health to prevent continued damage. Our teams deploy to serve alongside our clients. We focus on bringing order to the disaster, providing clients with proven emergency management professionals and industry-leading technical expertise. We work alongside our client's staff — attending on-site meetings with agency representatives, assisting with emergency repairs, and joining public meetings to facilitate discussions with multiple departments and agencies. We return bridges, roadways, water/wastewater facilities, buildings and other infrastructure to operation as quickly as possible. Our grant management services support client reimbursement activities, including Federal Emergency Management Agency - Public Assistance (FEMA PA), Federal Highway Administration - Emergency Relief (FHWA ER), Natural Resources Conservation Service - Emergency Watershed Protection (NRCS - EWP), United States Department of Housing and Urban Development - Community Development Block Grant (HUD - CDBG) and related programs.

Whether designing buildings or infrastructure, we use a holistic, outcomes-focused design approach that goes beyond resource conservation to encompass promoting the health and wellness of individuals and communities. We actively work with our on-staff researchers and public health experts to understand and document how our design interventions impact the health and wellness outcomes that our clients and communities care about. We are also evolving our practices to promote positive outcomes in our own spaces, using our own sustainability standards alongside healthy building rating systems.

Our experienced professionals work with a variety of green rating systems, including LEED, Envision, Greenroads, INVEST, and Green Globes. We collaborate with clients in an efficient process that focuses attention on project goals, helping to define sustainability for the project and linking the project’s solutions within the context of sustainability. We strive to leverage the great benefits that can be realized using these systems, such as an enhanced design process, expanded economic benefits, reduced risk, increased accountability and additional recognition opportunities. Learn more  

Our cross-functional team of experts in disciplines such as hydro-meteorology, air quality, renewable energy, and economics work seamlessly to help our clients identify and implement meaningful strategies to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Whether our clients need to develop a first greenhouse gas (GHG) inventory or engage stakeholders in creating a Climate Action Plan, we can be their trusted advisor to help mitigate risk, seize opportunities, and make meaningful progress against our client's goals. Greenhouse Gas Management

Our integrative design process establishes a strong link between early building strategic planning, programming, design and eventual operations to optimize lifecycle performance. To create a net-zero project, it is necessary to consider a balance between passive, active and renewable energy solutions. The balance of design considerations should constantly be analyzed for lifecycle benefit and operational feasibility. We conduct energy analyses early and often in the design process, beginning with our Rapid Energy Performance Simulator (REPS), to effectively achieve this balance. We have the benefit of a full range of in-house experts and services to support energy management, energy efficiency, renewable energy and integrated energy solutions to make net-zero targets a reality.

We assist organizations in proactively developing capabilities to manage and respond to hazards and risks. This process begins by helping clients understand the relationships between infrastructure, facilities, the environment and communities, and then progresses toward the implementation of resilient and sustainable mitigation solutions that help reduce risk. We support clients while hardening their infrastructure and restoring the environment — reducing the impacts of natural and man-made disasters. We build off of insights gained from recent response and recovery efforts to provide mitigation project conceptualization, analysis, scoping and funding strategies, as well as sustainable and resilient engineering and design services.

Even high performance design has some negative impact on the environment and individuals. We have created a design framework that moves beyond basic high performance design and will start to target Restorative design metrics at various scales of the built environment. This framework will move designs into “net Positive” territory through performance lenses that includes the expertise of not just our Architects and Building Engineers, but our Environmental Engineers and Scientists as well. This framework seeks “Net Positive” impacts for the Carbon Cycle, Water Cycle, Nutrient Cycle, Biodiversity and Health.

We understand the need to look at triple bottom-line outcomes — economic, social, and environmental. Some of these aspects are easy to quantify, analyze and compare, but others are more difficult. For this reason, we've developed our sustainable value analysis (SVA) process to provide a thorough, transparent alternatives analysis. We explore each of our 10 SVA principles–from accounting for risks and uncertainty to involving stakeholders and subject matter experts–using a suite of proven sustainability valuation methods.

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We assist organizations in understanding and proactively developing capabilities to examine the potential for, and manage and respond to, hazards and risks. Our multidisciplinary teams perform threat and vulnerability assessments, hazard identification and analysis, economic and risk analysis, and condition and performance assessments to determine risk exposure and provide a more complete understanding of risks to support decision-making. We then support development and implementation of strategies to efficiently and effectively manage and mitigate those risks.