Geof Sypher (L) - Kevin Hydes (R)

Geof Syphers, Chief Sustainability Officer at Codding Enterprises and Kevin Hydes, CEO of deep green building services engineering company, Integral Group, and former Chair of the World Green Building Council (pictured left to right) discuss the relative strengths of One Planet Living and LEED methodologies for sustainable community developments.

Ever been in this situation?

A developer sets out to build a community that will use only half the typical amount of drinking water.  He has a clear set of strategies and technologies to cut water use, but is left wondering why environmental groups say he is not doing enough to protect water resources.  Exasperated, he asks, “Isn’t this green enough?  What more can I do?”

Or maybe this is more like it.  Another developer sets out to design a zero carbon neighborhood but gets bogged down along the way. The zero carbon challenge seems to encompass everything from street trees to city bus service. With so many ways in which development seems to impact the climate, the developer has a hard time creating a plan to achieve his vision of zero carbon living.  He is overwhelmed and in need of a plan.

These situations are the legacy of two rating systems.  But they don’t have to be.

In the first case, the developer used the US Green Building Council’s LEED® rating system, known for encouraging high efficiency, low-impact building and neighborhood developments.  The strength of LEED comes from its guideline reference manuals which provide specific recommendations on everything from the amount of fresh air needed in buildings to encouraging development near existing grocery stores, schools and jobs.

The developer working with LEED has an easy time setting a clear performance goal to use less than 50% of the drinking water allowed under a national standard, but has no idea of whether his water efficient project will help or hurt local water resources.  By only looking at the project’s performance relative to a standard, he cannot draw any conclusions about the impact on local infrastructure, streams, wetlands and habitat.  He has no idea about the actual impact of his project.

In the second case, the developer is using BioRegional’s One Planet Communities® program, a system known for encouraging development where everyone can easily live with a one-planet ecological footprint.  The strength of One Planet Communities comes from its reference to absolute impacts like species diversity, aquifer depth and self-reported happiness.  These ultimate goals are clearly more important than proximate goals like water efficiency because they actually test for sustainability.  A project’s water use that further stresses a limited supply—no matter how efficient—is not sustainable.  But because ultimate goals can seem so distant from our day-to-day decisions, the developer looking for a clear plan to reach zero carbon has no idea where to begin.

As LEED and One Planet Communities continue to refine their programs, we are starting to experiment with how the two can work together.  At Sonoma Mountain Village in California, both programs are in use, where they perform very different functions.  The LEED provides a great collection of best practices and helps the team develop detailed tasks to move toward sustainability, while One Planet Communities provides verification that the sum total of actions suggested by LEED achieves “true sustainability,” meaning that if everyone on Earth lived in identical communities we would need just one planet to provide all of our resources.

The One Planet Communities program also verifies that every action suggested by LEED truly contributes to achieving sustainability.  In one example, LEED-ND suggested leaving soil with steep slopes undisturbed, but the process used in One Planet Communities revealed that the berms on site were stockpiled topsoil which needed to be spread to restore soil health, improve community connectivity and support better stormwater controls. But such stories are nuanced and can be difficult to communicate.

The success of any rating system lies in its ability to tell a complex story in a simple way. LEED gained its popularity and effectiveness by doing that for building performance, and used the Olympic standard (silver/gold/platinum) to generate some healthy competition as well. BREAAM offered a similar “ladder to success” with Bespoke, as has Green Star, CASBEE and other programs around the world.

One Planet Communities uses these other rating systems as a baseline standard for issues like efficiency and material selection, and then reaches out to the social, land use and lifestyle issues beyond.  This is long overdue, for what good is an energy efficient building if it is full of unhappy people who will not maintain it?

Others are moving in this direction, too.  Green-minded groups around the world are shifting focus from single buildings to communities to Ecodistricts, searching for ways to get the most out of our efficient technologies by really looking at what drives social behavior, and it is precisely at this intersection where we need both LEED and One Planet Communities.

One system provides the detailed guidance and performance standards, the commissioning feedback and a competitive spirit.  The other keeps us honest, verifies that we are not simply “buying green,” and gets us to consider how the design of a town square can shape our behavior in ways that impacts our health and our environment.

As Sonoma Mountain Village and other projects experiment with using LEED and One Planet Communities together, we will keep you posted on what we learn. So far, it seems like an excellent pairing.

As part of the ongoing endorsement of Sonoma Mountain Village (SOMO) in California, USA, BioRegional has recently reviewed the progress against the project’s One Planet Action Plan. SOMO’s developer, Codding Enterprises, have been operating within a particularly difficult economic climate resulting in the delay of construction of the new build residential phase. However, a significant amount of progress has been made, focusing on the existing buildings and the business space.

Some of the key achievements include good progress against the pathway to zero carbon, with a 1.14 MWe PV array and the start of construction of an additional 1 MWe array. All occupied existing buildings have undergone significant retrofits for water and energy efficiency and one tenant, Comcast, achieved the Platinum LEED rating. The Comcast retrofit managed to achieve a 98% diversion of waste away from landfill which is the highest in LEED history. Furthermore, Codding have been working very hard lobbying for a regional passenger train service in Sonoma county, which will have a station located in a 10 minute walk from the town square, as part of the sustainable transport strategy for the site.

Much has been done to set up community facilities including developing an Event Centre which held 200 events last year and gives priority to environmental groups. There are now over 700 jobs on site in the commercial premises and a successful green business incubator has been set up.

Codding worked with BioRegional to assess the embodied carbon impacts of their light weight steel frame system. It was found that for the building specification being considered this system had a significantly lower carbon impact than a standard concrete frame (though savings were smaller if compared to low carbon concrete).

There are early indications that SOMO has become a catalyst in their region and inspired other developers to create plans for zero carbon zero waste communities. Codding are showing that it is possible for a developer to reach outside the typical scope of a company and really influence the wider community to become more sustainable. Congratulations to Codding Enterprises on the many successes achieved in the first North American One Planet Community!

You can read the full Annual Review report by clicking on the link below:

• SOMO Annual Review 2011 (pdf)

And you can find the original One Planet Action Plan here:

• SOMO One Planet Action Plan (pdf)

With an initial focus on the One Planet Communities programme, panel members have been selected for their expertise in areas including urban planning, green building, ecological footprinting, policy, and campaigning.

Its six independent members are: Susan Burns, CEO of ecological footprinting think tank, Global Footprint Network; Jim Heid, President and co-founder of US based sustainable development advisory company, UrbanGreen; Kevin Hydes, CEO of deep green building services engineering company, Integral Group and former Chair of the World Green Building Council; Tony Juniper, UK based author and environmental campaigner; Professor Li Shirong, Professor of construction management at Chongqing University and Deputy Director General of Chongqing Foreign Trade and Economic Relations Commission, China; and Raf Tuts, Chief of the Urban Environment and Planning Branch, UN-HABITAT.

They are joined by representatives from BioRegional’s endorsed One Planet Communities partner organisations, with their experience of practical delivery of the One Planet Communities programme: Pete Halsall, BioRegional Quintain Ltd; Geof Syphers, Codding Enterprises and Paulo Reis Silva, Pelicano.

The role of the Expert Panel is to ensure that the ‘planet with a heart’ logo remains, and is increasingly recognised as, a symbol of truly exemplary commitment to, and leadership in, sustainability.

The One Planet Communities programme is using the concepts of One Planet Living and sustainable ecological footprint to create a network of the earth’s greenest neighbourhoods. These neighbourhoods will be showcased at the Rio+20 World Summit in 2012 to demonstrate to policy makers, business leaders and civil society that it can be easy, attractive and affordable for people to live happy and healthy lives within a fair share of the earth’s resources. BioRegional are excited and pleased to have the support of the Expert Panel in making this happen.

The Panel will be run using a virtual network, with three group sessions each year – the first is scheduled for 17^th March.

To read more visit the role of the panel and member profile pages of this site.

Click here for more details

Pooran Desai OBE, the International Director for the OPC programme and Co-founder of BioRegional gave his views in the film on how to make sustainable living easy, attractive and affordable.

Geof Syphers from Codding Enterprises, the developer of Sonoma Mountain Village, USA, also shared his experience on creating a sustainable community.

Here is another chance to see what they said about these ground breaking sustainable projects around the world.

More Videos about One Planet Communities can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/1planetcommunities.

Tune into your region’s CNBC channel at the following times to see several of the ground-breaking projects showcased and an interview with International Director,  Pooran Desai OBE:

CNBC Asia

1st Broadcast: 30 October 17:30 SIN/HK Time

2nd Broadcast: 31 October 09:30 SIN/HK Time

CNBC Europe

1st Broadcast: 30 October 08:30 CET

2nd Broadcast: 30 October 13:30 CET

CNBC USA

Single Broadcast: 30 October 16:00 EST

If you miss the broadcast the film will go up on www.oneplanetcommunities.org early next week.

The company provides the full spectrum of employee benefits, along with telecommuting, flextime and social events. “Wine and Worms” had the employees making composting worm bins, while enjoying local wines. Another event had them volunteering to plant native grasses along Cotati Creek. Read the full article in the North Bay Business Journal.

Wednesday October 27 2010 @ 9:00am PST. ONE PLANET TRAINING COURSE. Eco-districts + Eco-lifestyles = One Planet Communities. Learn from Geof Syphers, Chief Sustainability Officer at Sonoma Mountain Village, how this 1,900 unit masterplanned, solar-powered community is being designed to create an 83% reduction in total carbon footprint of its residents — and creating thousands of green jobs with its green business incubator. The workshop goes on to teach the practical implementation of the One Planet Living process, including strategies for Zero Carbon, Zero Waste, and Sustainable Food and Transportation. You will help create a Sustainability Action Plan for a real-world new project and learn the science and process of the One Planet Living program through its application. The program will emphasize “fostering” and “enabling” eco-lifestyles for residents in new build and existing building situations, which have been shown at the BedZED eco-neighborhood in the UK to have contributed 42% of total carbon savings. Learn from Greg Searle, Executive Director at BioRegional North America and a former BedZED resident, how this eco-lifestyles program succeeded and is evolving in One Planet Communities around the world. Read More.

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