From Green to Sustainable: Keeping it Honest

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.