Developing Our Sustainability Action Plan and Defining Firm Processes
Author
Juliette Grummon-Beale,
Sustainability Lead, Architect, LEED AP BD+C
The impacts of climate change—wildfires, heatwaves, droughts—are increasingly more apparent in Oregon, and the grim reality is that mitigating, and possibly reversing, them requires immediate action. And the issues are not left at the doorstep; throughout our lives, we will spend roughly 90% of our time indoors in interior environments that often have pollutant and contaminant levels more than twice as high as outdoors. For these reasons and others, we recognize our responsibility as architects and designers to facilitate positive change. In 2022, Scott Edwards Architecture identified advancing our firm’s sustainability efforts as a major priority—we are investing in furthering our sustainable practices by setting a vision, making measurable commitments, developing a holistic approach, and implementing firm-wide best practices. Our hope is that by sharing our experience in the process so far, we can also inspire our industry peers and build a community taking collective action.
As a first step, SEA signed on to the AIA 2030 Commitment, a call for architects to reduce carbon emissions from buildings to net zero by 2030. Target reductions in carbon emissions are incremental over time until meeting net zero, and the current goal is to reduce emissions by eighty percent from a 2003 baseline building. The 2030 Commitment provides guidance and creates an accountability structure for firms to document progress toward achieving the goal. As a part of the 2030 Commitment, firms are required to create a Sustainability Action Plan—a document that describes sustainability values, goals, and processes. Firms must then annually report energy data across their complete portfolio of projects, including energy code use, modeled energy use, renewable energy, embodied energy, and lighting power density.
“The places where we live, work and play represent the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions in America, as well as around the world. The design and construction industry has made significant strides toward creating high-performance buildings of all types and uses. As a result, the industry is positioned to have a profound impact by continuing to foster high building performance and reducing building-related greenhouse gas emissions.”
SEA valued the 2030 Commitment as a positive first step because it is a straightforward and actionable goal that focuses our efforts. As a firm, we have experienced rapid growth over the last few years, alongside a shift to a hybrid work model, which collectively demands new workflows and more internal organization. Because of the urgency of climate change and our evolving office operations, the timing felt right to us. Like many of our peers, we’ve also noticed sustainability initiatives often be placed on hold due to pressing project demands, and we view the 2030 Commitment as something integral to our project workflow that applies across our office’s nine market sectors to every project type and at every scale.
The SEA team tapped to lead the 2030 Commitment efforts used Miro, an online visualization and collaboration platform, during the creation of the Sustainability Action Plan to share ideas, gather inspiration, track progress, and develop solutions and processes.
Shortly after signing on to the 2030 Commitment, we began creating our Sustainability Action Plan. This process helped us identify our current practices, areas of strength, areas for growth, and actions we will need to take. SEA has a long history of implementing sustainability standards on our projects including LEED, PassiveHouse, and Earth Advantage Multi-family certification, often driven by client values, municipality or state requirements, and code developments. Moving forward, we are building an office-wide sustainability culture that will proactively bring ideas and strategies to the table for every project. You can read our Sustainability Action Plan which documents firm values, project processes, and office operations here.
From the outset, we understood the energy data reporting required by the 2030 Commitment would be a large undertaking. On average, SEA has 200 active projects per year and the AIA’s goal is to report all that are in an active design phase and with a scope that includes at minimum lighting design. To make this effort possible, SEA applied for and received Energy Trust of Oregon’s Net Zero Emerging Leaders Internship Grant which funded a student intern to assist us in developing a reporting program and logging our first year’s data. In my role as Sustainability Lead, I worked with our intern, Melanie Guyer, a University of Oregon, Master of Architecture candidate, to develop a firm-wide logging process. We created tools to streamline the procedures, including a Smartsheet spreadsheet for teams to log data and a document that explains the logging process step-by-step. We also identified team members from our Sustainability Committee to champion the effort in each of our seven studios and ensure data was collected promptly.
Energy modeling was not just useful for 2030 benchmarking–we also used our software’s sunlight analysis feature to determine areas where daylight needed to be mitigated. For our Happy Valley Library (above) our modeling efforts helped us target critical locations for vertical sunscreens, roof overhangs, and roller shades ultimately saving our client costs for these where not needed.
Most importantly, SEA initiated shoe-box energy modeling to help benchmark our projects’ predicted energy use, since projects without energy models default to code minimum in the AIA database. Currently, Oregon’s Energy Efficiency Code (OEEC 2021) represents a 52% reduction from the 2003 baseline while the 2030 goal is an 80% reduction. During our work, we identified eighteen SEA projects with on-site solar energy, so we focused energy modeling efforts on those lacking third-party models to capture their performance above code. From this effort, we learned four of our projects were meeting the 2030 target of 80% reduction, one of which was net zero energy. Modeling seven projects back-to-back had the added bonus of rapidly teaching us to use the software, understand its outputs, and begin to develop best practices. Moving forward, we plan to use shoe-box modeling to help us make informed design decisions that improve the energy efficiency of our projects.
We set several first-year goals for ourselves: to create a strong and effective logging process, to report 60% of our active eligible projects, and to gain a comprehensive understanding of our portfolio’s energy use. We exceeded our reporting goal and captured energy data for 88% of our projects, 134 total. These projects represent all the market sectors we design for and all seven of our studios—everything from medical facilities to multi-family communities to hospitality destinations. Our firm learned that our whole-building projects are achieving on average a 51% reduction in emissions, which is on par with other signatory firms according to the latest “AIA 2030 By the Numbers” report. Our tenant improvement projects, which are required to reduce lighting power density by 25% from a 2007 baseline, are averaging a 44% reduction, almost 20% above the goal.
“This data gave us optimism. More than half of our logged projects used codes that are less aggressive than the current OEEC 2021 (which equates to a 52% reduction) suggesting that our portfolio is averaging above code performance.”
This data gave us optimism. More than half of our logged projects used codes that are less aggressive than the current OEEC 2021 (which equates to a 52% reduction) suggesting that our portfolio is averaging above code performance. Projects we energy modeled are all performing above code, and modeled projects only represent 11% of our portfolio, so there are likely additional savings not yet captured. A significant majority of our tenant improvement projects are meeting the 2030 goal for lighting power density, and while these projects are typically small in scale, they comprise almost half of our active projects. Still, we recognize we have a long way to go to meet the 2030 Commitment targets, which is true not just for our firm, but for our industry as a whole.
The lessons learned from our first year of reporting illustrated the importance of energy modeling, understanding a project’s carbon footprint, and collecting and using available data to inform decisions.
So how do we collectively get there? Some of the major lessons we’ve learned from our first year of reporting center around the importance of having organized processes and benchmarking sustainability goals. It was critical to have a clear framework in place that defined roles and responsibilities, eligible and ineligible projects, software tools, and data collection priorities for a successful reporting process. Reporting the majority of our projects has given us a comprehensive and measured understanding of where we are as a firm, and now, we can set intermediate goals and develop strategies for achieving them. The process that we used for reporting can be replicated to benchmark other sustainability metrics such as water usage and embodied energy. More than other aspects of our field, sustainability is data-driven and quantitative. These benchmarks and data aid our advocacy by strengthening arguments for particular strategies and creating priorities. The data also provides a clear means for communicating the added value of these strategies with our clients.
The 2030 Commitment is just the beginning for SEA, but an important one. In the coming months, we plan to begin a firm-wide visioning process to refine our sustainability-focused mission, establish additional key priorities, define goals, and then develop best practices. We look forward to sharing more about SEA’s sustainability actions and progress in the future.
