Jennifer Betancourt on Sustainable Design
Director of Sustainability Jennifer Betancourt discusses the increasing motivation for sustainable design across markets.
www.dewberry.com
Sustainability at Dewberry means balancing long-term environmental, social, and economic outcomes for our clients and through our projects. So, we're looking at the environment and how are we not taxing finite resources with our solutions. We're looking at businesses and organizations and how are we being responsible with those resources and looking to the future. And then also, ultimately, we're designing for people and social outcomes. So we're looking at how are we benefiting human health and wellness in the built environment, and really getting to zero emissions. For many years now, there's been a focus on lowering operational carbon, and now the focus is shifting to embodied carbon in materials and not releasing those greenhouse gases to our environment. There is a projection that the built environment is going to double by 2060, which is insane to think about, that amount of vertical and horizontal infrastructure that's going to be built just in the next few years. So it's our responsibility as designers, as planners, as forward thinkers to do that in the most responsible way, where we're not taxing finite resources. Some of the benefits of sustainable design is that we're looking at an issue from different perspectives. In sustainable design, we're planning and designing for human health and wellness. We're planning and designing around organizations and their structure and their goals, and helping to benefit the organization. We're also planning and designing so that nothing we are doing is at the detriment of our environment. Some of the trends we're seeing is that organizations are trying to understand what's their part in sustainability. Our clients really want to be responsible stewards of the environment. They're getting pressure from stakeholders, from policymakers, to be more sustainable, to lower their carbon footprint. And sometimes they don't even know what that means. At Dewberry we can help our clients achieve their sustainability goals by leveraging our professionals. We have civil on-site engineers, MEP engineers, architects, interior designers, and we work collaboratively on projects to really take a holistic view of what the challenges are and how each of us in our professionalism and in our experience can solve those issues for our clients.