Hi, we documented an ID credit where the comment are:
The strategy consists of ensuring the survival and reproduction of plants while promoting the care and value of nature among the people. Documentation describing the strategy has been provided. An Innovation in Design strategy must be significantly better than standard sustainable design practices and meet two basic criteria: 1. quantitative performance improvements (comparing a baseline and design case) and 2. a comprehensive strategy (more than one product or process)
"However, the community outreach strategy is not quantified nor significantly better than standard sustainable design practices"
The question is, in this case for the community outreach strategy
: What are the standard sustainable design practices? and How can I quantified it?
Thank you in advance
Glen Phillips
Sustainability ProfessionalBright Green
42 thumbs up
March 17, 2015 - 5:23 pm
To substantiate this as an eligible ID credit strategy, it will be the responsibility of the project team to hang some metrics on this and show a "significant" improvement. While this sounds potentially insurmountable, you are lucky here in that LEED has deemed "biodiversity" as one of the 7 Impact Categories from LEED v4, so while the hard scientist in me would prefer that these benefits be quantified in more concrete units of measure (like tons of carbon dioxide), it is likely that a simple increase in the number of established species could alone warrant a quantification, as LEED appears to accept an increase in biodiversity as inherently good without qualification.
To contrast this with "standard design", you will essentially define (and justify) the baseline, and if you quantify this based on # of established species (or similar), you can simply show that the design case is significantly improved over your self-defined standard design.
Now you just need a really good narrative, and an open minded cert reviewer. Good Luck!