Community. So what do we mean by community? Well, you've got stakeholder involvement and those could be people who live around the project. They could be people who commute through the project. They could be people who work at the project and they're gonna be employed by whoever operates and maintains the project. You have an aspect of public acceptance. That's a big part of projects that are in major cities because you wanna understand what the community needs are and set up partnering with the community so that the project can not only mitigate some of the construction impacts, if there are any. But also, make sure that the community's needs are addressed in designing and building that piece of infrastructure. Because as I mentioned before, it's gonna be there for a considerable period of time. And just just touching on quality of life, again if you can work in a bike path or work in some benches and a seating area or a park that never existed before all these things increase the quality of life around an asset and contribute to a more productive community. So how do we, how do we manage that? Well, we manage that through community engagement. You can conduct town halls. Town halls are advertised and usually held at a facility or in a forum that's accessible by most people. Social media's a big one, we can create web pages, create different accounts and feeds that get the information distributed to a much broader population. And then we can ask for feedback. What do you wanna see in that rail station that's gonna be two blocks from your house? Do you maybe like to ride a bike and you wanna make sure there's bike lockers there. Or maybe you wanted to walk your dog and you wanna make sure there's a dog park, because there's a large community of people that live in the area that have dogs. So, it's things like that, you want to solicit that feedback so that the project is successful from a community acceptance point of view. Volunteer project, this is key. So the team members on a project who are building an asset can get together and do volunteer work within the community. It gives the community a chance to get to know the people who are gonna be in their, sometimes in their backyards working for several years. And it gives the people working on these assets a feel for what their community is like and maybe taught them about some of their needs and it makes that connection that facilitates a partnering between the project and the surrounding community. And lastly, all that will probably help mitigate negative impact. So if you understand the community and you understand their needs and where they're coming from, you'll be in a better place to address issues like noise, dust, vibration, traffic, and light. Light being, if there's any type of night work, where's the light. Is there any light spillage off the project site. Another concept of sustainability is diversity and inclusion. So diversity and inclusion involves first acknowledging that people are different. We're different in terms of ethnicity, religion, gender, age, national origin, disability, sexual orientation and education. That diversity creates opportunity and it's been proven over and over again that a diverse team is a more successful team. But you can't just have diversity, you need to be inclusive. You need to understand that people are different and then you need to harness that power and they need to accept that other people are different and can bring different skills and different perspectives to the table. So again, how do we manage that? Well, we promote it and we promote it by first making diversity inclusion a core value of the organization or the team that you're on. We can also build diverse teams. So look for teams that have different perspectives, maybe different educational background or different experience level. We need to cultivate those relationships and give them a chance to get to know one another. That can be done through team building. It can be done through other social events but it is to get to know one another and even more acceptable to hearing what they have to say. And at the end of the day, be a more diverse and more successful team. And lastly, just make sure that there's mutual respect around the table, and that everyone has a voice, and we're not shooting down people who we feel don't have as much experience, or haven't had the same education that we have. We wanna encourage people to speak their mind and come up with creative, innovative solutions. The last part of sustainability, I saved it for last because it's typically what people would think of and that is green aspect of sustainability. So this hits the point on resource management. All right. So we have designing to construct our structures that are environmentally sensitive right? So we wanna focus on he material that we were using. We wanna look at energy and water consumption throughout the life cycle of the project. We wanna look at the process of actually carrying out the construction of that asset, and also operating and maintaining. Are there any issues that are going to surface when we start maintaining the asset? We want to mitigate potential pollution pathways so that's storing, construction and operation as well. If there's any runoff or air emissions that need to be considered. We should consider them upfront and in the design. And lastly, protecting habitat and by diversity, that's a key concept in making a project green. So how do you achieve that green label, well first you wanna site the project on a previously developed piece of property. That's a good thing. Then you want to specify local materials and materials that have a high recycled content. Next you want to maintain efficiency in terms of water and energy usage and it's a good thing to put right up front a target or performance criteria that any project team would have to meet. You want to institute controls and plans to protect natural resources. And within the US we have a pretty robust set of regulatory requirements that do just that, but, obviously, you can go above and beyond what's required by local law, or state law, or even federal law, in some cases to do more to promote and protect conservation. And lastly diverting waste from landfills. The construction industry in general produces a vast majority of the waste that ends up in landfills. So the amount that a project can divert construction waste and that's both waste in terms of material coming on site building what you need to do and then you have some material left over so there's that waste. But then there's also waste when you come out to a job and you need to essentially demolish an existing structure. That's another type of waste so both those wastes we wanna divert from a landfill through re-use or recycling. So let's just recap, cuz that was a lot of different concepts, and we first started out by defining what the traditional definition of sustainability was and that was using resources responsibly today, so that it doesn't compromise future generations. And that's still a common theme within sustainability, and we label that green but it's more than just green. We talked about ethics, we talked about the community, we talked about safety, we talked about diversity, inclusion. And all this concept form the basis of a successful project. So all these concepts need to be in balance if any things out of balance or there's too much focus on quality and the green aspect falls to the side or there's too much focus on the economics and you don't worry about safety. If there's any shift in priority and things start competing against one another, then you're opening yourself up to a lot of risk on that project. So again, those concepts, safety, green, diversity, inclusion, community, quality, ethics and economics. So, if all this things have to go in to a project, how do we judge how good we are? And how do we judge how good a past project was? Well, there's two things you can measure, you can measure the corporation or the organization itself. You could look at carbon footprinting of the business. You could look at all your water and energy consumption in all your various offices. So all that boils down into what we call strategic indicators. So you can measure these things, and they can tell you how the business is performing. For the purposes of this lecture we're gonna talk about, since it's project focused, we're gonna talk about the second here which is a project rating. So project ratings system is essentially a list of qualifying credits and either you achieved the credits or you didn't achieve the credits. The more credits you achieved or qualified for, the higher point value you attain. And the highest points you attain, or the higher the points you attain, the higher a score you get and the higher ranked the project is.
