LEED Pilot Credits on Resilient Design

In early-2013, the Resilient Design Institute proposed to the U.S. Green Building Council the development of a suite of pilot credits for the LEED Rating System focusing on resilient design. With encouragement from USGBC, a pilot credit committee was assembled and work commenced on three pilot credits.

Co-chaired by Alex Wilson and Mary Ann Lazarus, FAIA, the committee spent nearly two years developing three pilot credits: the first to assess vulnerabilities for a particular location; the second to use best practices to mitigate the most pertinent vulnerabilities; and the third to ensure that a building maintain at least limited functionality in the event of extended lost power. The pilot credits were adopted in the fall of 2015, removed a year later as USGBC moved toward the adoption of the RELi Rating System, then relaunched as revised pilot credits aligned with RELi in November 2018.

As part of this process, the Pilot Credit Committee developed metrics and a methodology for verifying that a building will maintain habitable conditions in the event of an extended power outage (passive survivability).

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David W. Orr, Ph.D

David W. Orr is Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies & Politics, Emeritus. He also served as “Counselor to the President” of Oberlin College for ten years. He is the author of eight books, including Dangerous Years: Climate Change and the Long Emergency (Yale, 2016) and Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse (Oxford, 2009) and co-editor of three others. He has authored over 220 articles, reviews, book chapters, and professional publications. In the past twenty-five years he has served as a board member or adviser to ten foundations and on the Boards of many organizations including the Rocky Mountain Institute, Bioneers, and the Aldo Leopold Foundation.

He is currently a Trustee of the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado, Children and Nature Network, and the WorldWatch Institute. He has been awarded nine honorary degrees and a dozen other awards including a Lyndhurst Prize, a National Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Federation, leadership awards from the U.S. Green Building Council (2014) and from Second Nature (2012), and a lifetime achievement award from Green Energy Ohio and the North American Association for Environmental Education. He has lectured at hundreds of colleges and universities throughout the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and Asia. He headed the effort to design, fund, and build the Adam Joseph Lewis Center, which was named by an AIA panel in 2010 as “the most important green building of the past thirty years,” as “one of thirty milestone buildings of the twentieth century” by the U.S. Department of Energy, and as one of “52 game-changing buildings of the past 170 years” by the editors of Building Design +Construction in January, 2016. He was instrumental in the design and funding of the Peter B. Lewis Gateway Center. He is the founder of the Oberlin Project and a founder of the journal Solutions. His current work is on the state of American democracy.