Amid the growing notoriety for the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED rating system for environmentally sustainable buildings, many landscape industry members have wondered why such a comprehensive program places little emphasis on a building’s landscaping.
Some LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) programs award points for water-smart irrigation systems or brownfield redevelopment, but no specifications focus exclusively on the landscape. Until now.
Enter the Sustainable Sites Initiative (SSI), a partnership of the American Society of Landscape Architects, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center and the United States Botanic Garden in conjunction with other stakeholders.
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Much like LEED does for the building sector, SSI will measure the sustainability of designed landscapes. Though SSI is a standalone system, the USGBC is lending its support to the project and plans to adopt SSI metrics into the LEED system once they’re finished.
The group’s preliminary draft report, designed to introduce SSI’s investigations into soils, hydrology, vegetation, materials and human services, will be available for download at www.sustainablesites.org on Nov. 1 and will have a 45-day public comment period.
In addition to the rating system (set to be complete by 2011), SSI plans to roll out standards and guidelines by 2009, pilot projects that test how well the rating system applies to construction and maintenance practices (beginning in 2010) and a reference guide, due out in 2012.
ASLA’s Vice President and CEO Nancy Somerville and Fritz Steiner, dean of the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture, introduced SSI last week at the ASLA conference in San Francisco. Two years ago, two parallel efforts were taking shape – one in ASLA’s Sustainable Design and Development Professional Practice Network and the other at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. In 2005, the two groups merged their efforts a summit in Austin, Texas. During the summit, at which 10 stakeholder groups were represented, the sentiment was, “We really need something like this yesterday,” Steiner said.
Last year the U.S. Botanical Garden joined as a major partner and a Product Development Committee was chosen to guide the initiative. Earlier this year the USGBC agreed to incorporate the finding of the SSI into future versions of the LEED rating system.
“This will provide the missing link for green building standards,” Somerville said. “Developers, designers, owners and public officials will now have the tools at hand to significantly increase sustainability in the built environment, from interior to landscapes.”
Somerville and Steiner acknowledged such an initiative might be slow to catch on initially, but pointed to the rapid growth of LEED and the USGBC, founded in 1993. Over the last five years alone, more than 4 billion square feet of building space has been involved with the LEED program.