Resilient Design Pilot Credits Added to LEED

Alex Wilson, founder of BuildingGreen, has been working to develop the credits since 2013 through the Resilient Design Institute (RDI), a not-for-profit sister organization of BuildingGreen that he founded in 2012. With the help of Mary Ann Lazarus, FAIA, a member of the RDI advisory board, and a committee of practitioners providing input, the credits have now been finalized and approved.

The three credits are intended to ensure that a design team is aware of the type of natural and human-made disasters that are most likely to occur in the project’s region (taking into account longer-term trends like climate change), and that the team addresses the riskiest vulnerabilities through the project’s design. The credits include:

• Credit IPpc98: Assessment and Planning for Resilience
• Credit IPpc99: Design for Enhanced Resilience
• Credit IPpc100: Passive Survivability and Functionality During Emergencies

Project teams are challenged to consider innovative technologies such as microgrids or solar storage to provide electricity in the case of an outage. Option 1 of the Passive Survivability credit sets a particularly high bar, requiring thermal modeling to demonstrate that the building will remain within a range of “livable temperatures” for one week. This range is defined as a standard effective temperature (SET) between 54°F and 86°F, with some deviation allowed for peak summer and winter conditions. (The SET measurement factors in relative humidity and mean radiant temperature, which can drastically skew comfort levels.)

Readers can refer to Wilson’s blog post explaining more about each credit.

More on resilient design

Resilient Design: Smarter Building for a Turbulent Future

Resilient Design: 7 Lessons from Early Adopters

To Become Resilient, NYC Looks to Its Buildings