About Envision
Envision is a leading tool to achieve infrastructure sustainability and resiliency.
Infrastructure is the foundation on which our communities live. It provides us with drinking water, handles our waste, creates spaces for us to enjoy, and allows us to effectively communicate and connect with one another.
Infrastructure provides the basis for personal security, public health, and it impacts the economic viability and competitiveness of our cities.
It’s important. Yet, in today’s world, infrastructure is often underfunded and overlooked until it breaks down and communities are impacted.
In 2017, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres stated:
Infrastructure investment will be crucial. The world should adopt a simple rule: if big infrastructure projects are not green [sustainable], they should not be given the green light. Otherwise, we will be locked into bad choices for decades to come.
As cities continue to grow and development continues to move forward, the need for sustainable infrastructure becomes paramount. That’s where Envision comes in.
Envision provides a consistent, consensus-based framework for assessing sustainability and resilience in infrastructure. The Envision framework:
- Sets the standard for what constitutes sustainable infrastructure.
- Incentivizes higher performance goals beyond minimum requirements.
- Gives recognition to projects that make significant contributions to sustainability.
- Provides a common language for collaboration and clear communication with stakeholders, both internally and externally.
Fundamentally, Envision is about supporting higher performance through more sustainable choices in infrastructure development. The framework provides a flexible system of criteria and performance objectives to aid decision makers and help project teams identify sustainable approaches during planning, design and construction that will continue throughout the project’s operations and maintenance and end-of-life phases.
Envision recognizes resource constraints and the diversity of mandates, schedules, budget cycles and funding sources. For that reason, external benefits, such as how well infrastructure projects contribute to the efficiency and long-term sustainability of communities is paramount.
Envision not only asks are we doing the project right, but also are we doing the right project?
