Developed by the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure and the Harvard Graduate School of Design's Zofnass Program for Sustainable Infrastructure, Envision is designed as a holistic sustainability rating system for all types and sizes of infrastructures. The purpose of Envision is to foster a necessary improvement in sustainable performance of physical infrastructures. To do that, Envision goes beyond trivial solutions and considers a mutual benefit between infrastructures' and stakeholders' resiliency.
Throughout an overview of the main Envision credits and based on a selection of academic papers concerning community resiliency, this work aims to highlight the relevance of the Protocol in proposing a design strengthening this mutual benefit. The Protocol suggests to the project team to widen the project's boundaries, expanding both infrastructures and broader community resilience goals. It promotes a wider concept of resilience that allows infrastructures (especially the critical ones) to promptly respond to external events (acute shocks or chronic stressors) and, at the same time, promotes an equally resilient community.
The above-mentioned approach has been further developed in the latest version of the Envision rating system, released in 2018, where resilience is a key factor in many credits across five categories (Quality of Life, Leadership, Resource Allocation, Natural World, Climate and Resilience).