The Envision™ rating system to design sustainable infrastructures 

Envision™ is an innovative rating system for sustainable infrastructure, which provides guidance on sustainable best practices at no cost to users, and serves not only as a planning and design tool, but also as a means of evaluating infrastructure projects once complete. Whereas LEED® – Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design – is still the most popular certification system for sustainable buildings, Envision™ has contributed to fill a gap by allowing the certification of any kind of infrastructure – not only buildings – from roads to ports, from power plants to water pipelines and so forth. It provides a holistic framework for evaluating and rating the community, environmental, and economic benefits of all types and sizes of infrastructure projects. The Envision sustainable infrastructure rating system is a comprehensive framework of 60 sustainability criteria that address the full range of environmental, social, and economic impacts to sustainability in project design, construction, and operation. These criteria—called “credits”—are arranged in five categories: Quality of Life, Leadership, Resource Allocation, Natural World, and Climate and Risk. Envision™ has been recently brought to Italy thanks to the collaboration between the engineering company MWH, now part of Stantec, and the certification body ICMQ. Metropolitana Milanese S.p.A. (MM) has been one of the first Italian companies who have experienced the application of the Envision ™ system to a project. The project involved the construction of retention basins in the Seveso river, north of Milan, in order to protect the area from its frequent floodings. A gap analysis on the preliminary project based on the Envision™ criteria has been carried out in order to identify any potential improvement areas of the sustainability performance of the project. However, North America is the part of the world where Envision™ is most widely applied. In fact, the protocol was launched in 2012 thanks to a collaboration between the ISI – Institute of Sustainable Infrastructure – and the Zofnass Program for Sustainable Infrastructure of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. Some of the North American certified projects are, for instance, a Sport Fish Hatchery in Anchorage, Alaska, the first completed project using the Envision sustainable infrastructure rating system, and the Grand Bend Area Wastewater Treatment Facility, located in Ontario Canada, which is the first ISI Envision verification in Canada. Envision™ is a very flexible protocol, which can be applied to a variety of projects, including tunneling works. A good example is the Tarrant Regional Water District Integrated Pipeline Project which earned the Envision Platinum Award in 2016. The pipeline, which will help meet water demands in rapidly growing Tarrant, Dallas and surrounding counties, extends from Lake Palestine in East Texas to Lake Benbrook just south of Fort Worth for about 240 km.