csdCenter for Sustainable Development

Sustainable Sites Initiative

Dr. Steve Windhager

Editor

Werner LangAurora McClain

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3.1 Sustainable Sites Initiative

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Sustainable Sites Initiative

Dr. Steve Windhager

Introduction

The Sustainable Sites Initiative is a joint project between the American Society of Landscape Architects, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, and the United States Bo-tanic Garden. In recognition of the tremendous burden current landscaping practices place on our infrastructure, wildlife habitats, limited resources and waterways, these organizations have joined to develop a set of guidelines and standards for sustainable landscape practices. They aim not only to protect our environment, but facilitate the development of ecosystem services to improve our quality of life.

The term ‘green’ can be misleading, as not all green landscapes are sustainable. A well functioning landscape provides services that we need to live, free of charge. These Ecosys-tem Services, provided by a well-planned and maintained site, offer many benefits beyond their aesthetic appeal. While a wide range of ecosystem services have been identified by various authors over the last 10 years1 the Sustainable Sites Initiative focuses on 12 primary services: global climate regulation, lo-cal climate regulation, air and water cleansing, water supply and regulation, erosion and sedi-ment control, hazard mitigation, pollination, habitat functions, waste decomposition and treatment, human health and well being ben-efits, food and renewable non-food products,

and cultural benefits.

The 12 primary services

Global climate regulation would create breathable air at historic temperatures by maintaining a balance of atmospheric gases and sequestering greenhouse emissions. As implementation is always at local levels, this would include: regulating local temperature, precipitation, and humidity through plant services such as shading, evapotranspiration, and windbreaks. Research in New York City indicates that a single tree provides $ 5.60 in benefits for every dollar spent on its care.2

In addition to climate regulation, the project strives to cleanse our air and water by remov-ing and reducing pollutants. According to one study in 1991, trees in the Chicago area removed as much as 234 tons of particulate matter, 210 tons of ozone, 93 tons of sulfur dioxide and 17 tons of carbon monoxide from the air annually.3

25-50% of all municipal energy use in the US is used for pumping or treating wastewa-ter.4 Coupled with the fact that 30-60% of all residential water use is used for landscape irrigation,5 this indicates a serious need to reconsider our current water management practices.

Figure 1: This bio-retention system in Missouri helps to filter water back into the ground after a heavy rain event

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Figure 2: Garden/Garden, Santa Monica, CA. A 4 year comparison in Santa Monica between a native garden and a traditional garden showed that the native garden used 219,585 fewer gallons of water, produced 428.5 fewer pounds of green waste, and cost $152.78 less than the traditional garden below

Rainwater can be harvested on site and ap-plied to landscape needs, thus turning what is seen as a problem into a resource. Stormwa-ter can be retained on site or slowed using Low Impact Development (LID)6 techniques such as green roofs, rain gardens, bioswales, biofiltration basins, and similar technology that allow water to infiltration into the soil to

provide water and nutrients for plant growth and recharge local aquifers or groundwater. A site with reduced impervious cover and rain gardens puts a reduced rate of stormwater discharge into stormwater systems, which re-duces the downstream pollution resulting from combined sewer overflows.7 These systems convey both raw sewage and stormwater in

Figure 3: Garden/Garden, Santa Monica, CA. Traditional Garden

the same lines, and when the capacity of the pipes are exceeded, result in the discharge of raw sewage into our creeks, streams and rivers. Effective stormwater management and responsible construction practices also prevent damage from erosion and siltation thus protecting downstream ecosystems. Site development practices which preserve riparian buffers and coastal wetlands provide signifi-cant hazard mitigation benefits by reducing ecosystem vulnerability to flooding and storm surges.8 Well designed landscape will also reduce local vulnerability to hazards of wildfire and drought.9

LEED and sustainable landscape design

The LEED program is a voluntary rating sys-tem under which building design and construc-tion goes through a performance based rating for energy efficiency and overall sustainability which is verifies by a third party reviewer. The program has had a marked impact on the building industry. In the first ten year’s of the program’s existence, it has had significant effects not only in design and construction, but also in material manufacture, transport, resource harvesting, and post consumer handling of all building materials. Its more sys-tematic assessment of building performance is reforming the ways in which both profes-sionals and increasingly the public gauges quality in construction and design. While green building currently only affects 1% of the total construction market in the United States, this already represented over $10 billion and is rapidly increasing. The Sustainable Sites Initia-tive hopes to have a similar effect in making sustainable design and construction practices in the landscape much more common by pro-viding a voluntary recognition based program based on the LEED model.

The U.S. Green Building Council along with a number of other participating organiza-tions is cooperating in the development of the Sustainable Sites Initiative which will supple-ment existing LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) rating system criteria with a greater array of guidelines for more sustainable site construction and landscape design criteria. The current LEED program only minimally addresses issues of siting and landscape performance. Additionally, these guidelines would apply to sites with only mini-mal building components, allowing a greater array of projects such as parks, campgrounds, highways, and campuses to participate in sustainable design practices. The following pages show the system that the Sustainable Sites Initiative has developed to measure the effectiveness of site solutions.

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Figure 4: The natural hydrologic cycle

Figure 5: This schematic diagram suggests how well different types of sites provide ecosystem services. The goal of the Sustainable Sites Initiative is to rehabilitate all sites to perform as greenfields.

Conclusion: The need for ‘green’ site solutions

World population is only increasing plac-ing greater demands on natural processes to provide ecosystem services. Greenfield development will continue even with urban infill and brownfield redevelopment10 and this will place even greater demands on ecosystems which are already stressed. Conservation of these remaining systems is not enough under these circumstances. Increasingly, we must find ways to design sites so that they enhance the production of critical ecosystem services. We can no longer rely on preserved open space to meet our demands for clean air and water, carbon sequestration, or a host of other services. We must identify the critical services which need to be provided for in our communi-ties and design our sites – both buildings and landscapes – to be able to produce them.

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Notes

1. G Daily, ed. Nature’s Services: Societal Dependence on Natural Ecosystems (Wash-ington, DC: Island Press, 1997) and RS de Groot, MA Wilson, and RMJ Boumans. “A typology for the classification, description and valuation of ecosystem functions, goods and services,” Ecological Economics 41, no. 3 (2002): pp 401-402.)

2. Peper,PJ et all, New York, New York: Mu-nicipal Forest resource Analysis.2007,Center forUrban Forest Research, USDA Forest Service,Pacific Southwest Research Station. p.72

3. McPherson,G, D.J. Nowak and R.A. Rown-tree, Chicago Urban Forest Ecosystem:results of the ChicagoUrban Forest climate Project, Department of Agriculture,Forest Service and Northestern Forest Experiment Station, Editors.1994.p.201

4. From Water and Energy Technology Team (WETT) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) http://water-energy.lbl.gov/node/16

5. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “ Outdoor Water Use in the United States”, 2007

6. Low Impact Development Center, “Sustain-able Design and Water Quality Research,” http://www.lowimpactdevelopment.org/links.htm

7. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Why Water Efficiency? Water Sense: Efficiency Made Easy [webpage] 2007 [cited 30 Aug 2007]; Available from: www.epa.gov/Wa-terSense/water/why.htm.

8. Bourne, Jr., Joel, “The Big Uneasy.” National Geographic http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0410/feature5/index.html (2004)

9. U.S. Forest Service, “Firewise Communi-ties,” http://www.firewise.org/ 10. Heid, J, “Greenfield Development Without Sprawl: The Role of Planned Communities,” Washington, D.C.: ULI – the Urban Land Insti-tute Working Paper Series, (2004).

11. Biographical Information from the UTSOA website at http://soa.utexas.edu/people/profile/windhager/steve

Figures

All images used by permission from the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center Sustainable Sites Initiative.

Resources

www.sustainablesites.org/

www.wildflower.org/

buildcarbonneutral.org

www.austinenergy.com/Energy%20Efficiency/Programs/Green%20Building/index.htm -

Biography

As Director of the Landscape Restoration Program at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, Steve oversees the Center’s eco-logical research, natural areas management, and consulting programs. He holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Texas A&M University, and a M.A. in Environmental Ethics and a Ph.D. in Environmental Science from the University of North Texas. Steve has over 10 years of experience in ecological restoration, with most that experience dealing with Texas’ Blackland Prairie and the Eastern portion of the Edward’s Plateau. Steve is a past board member of the Society for Ecological International and is currently on the editorial board for Restoration Ecology and Environmental Ethics and Chairs the program committee for the American As-sociation of Botanical Gardens and Arboreta. Steve sits on the technical advisory boards for the South Texas Natives (a project of the Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute) and the North American Butterfly Associa-tion’s Butterfly Park in Mission, Texas. His past commitments have included the finance committee of the Texas Section of the Grazing Lands Conservation Initiative, board member for the Hays County Parks Advisory Board, and founding president of the Texas Society for Ecological Restoration.

Steve’s program is currently working with the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) on the development of Sustainable Design and Development Standards for Landscapes. This program will create design standards for landscapes (such as parks, road-ways, and gardens) which will be similar to the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED program (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. Closer to home, Steve’s program is also developing Conservation Development standards for Texas, and working with regional

governmental entities and developers to make this development method more common.

Steve’s recent consulting projects include working with Carter Burgess on a restoration plan for the Mission Reach of the San Antonio River - an 8-mile stretch of the river which will be restored to native vegetation and contain hiking and biking trails to connect the four historic Spanish missions along the river, work-ing with NASA to convert much of the turf at the Johnson Space Center to native wildflower meadows, and working with Denver Botanic Gardens at Chatfield to develop a site master plan for that location.

Steve’s research interests include the role of fire and other historic ecological processes in restoring the Texas Hill Country, and the role of competition in controlling invasive species.