Backus Appointed to International Sustainable Communities Committee

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April 25, 2024

Clarkson Professor of Practice and Howard E. Lechler Director of Construction Engineering Management, Erik C. Backus has been appointed to the U.S. Green Building Council's (USGBC) Cities and Communities Consensus Committee starting 2024 for an initial one-year term. USGBC is a leading authority on green building and the global developer of the Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED), the world's most preeminent green building system, with more than 105,000 LEED-certified buildings in nearly 190 countries.

USGBC developed the LEED for Cities and Communities programs to help local leaders create and operationalize responsible, sustainable, and specific plans for natural systems, energy, water, waste, transportation, and many other factors that contribute to quality of life, revolutionizing the way cities and communities are planned, developed, and operated.

"I am very excited to join the consensus committee to help advance the development of LEED for Cities and Communities while also helping improve understanding of how sustainable holistic planning systems (SHPS) work within a range of communities from our largest metropolises to the most rural farming communities as we have here in the North Country of New York State," Backus said. "Ultimately, for me, it's about helping communities develop in ways that enable human thriving while respecting and enabling the thriving of the ecology in which these communities exist. Building a better world is what this is all about."

The consensus committee is assembled at the state of the development process to allow for input on the creation of the LEED rating system in a process that includes specialization within the group. Nineteen members were selected from 60 applications of experienced professionals. As part of its responsibilities, the committee will:

• Advise on global, city-scale, urban sustainability issues across the USGBC's programs, policies and products.
• Support the development, deployment and evolution of the LEED for Cities and Communities standard and program.

Professor Backus has many years of service with the USGBC, having become a LEED accredited professional in 2008 and worked on numerous LEED certified projects. Starting in 2016, Erik served on the New York Upstate Board as the Volunteer Chair for the two calendar years of 2018 & 2019. Additionally, he has served on the Steering Committee for the USGBC & Society of Military Engineers (SAME) Resilience Series partnership since late 2019 and the New York State Climate Impact Assessment, Buildings Technical Working Group, for the last 2 years. He will be rotating from the NY Upstate Board as he takes on this new role but will be deeply involved in sustainable and resilient building efforts across New York state and locally.

Backus has been working for several years with a group of colleagues, including Steven Bird (Political Science), Susan Powers (Environmental Engineering/Director of Clarkson's Institute for a Sustainable Environment), Santosh Mahapatra (Operations Management), and Joseph Skufca (Mathematics/Data Science), at Clarkson along with Anne Mosher (Geography) at Syracuse University, researching sustainable holistic planning systems (SHPS), which are a set of planning toolkits that seek to help communities develop the understanding and abilities to realize environmental, social, and economic sustainability results, and provide structured programs for doing so. SHPS have a range of rigor, usability and relevance across the communities and organizations that use them, but center on a trio of sustainability, holism, and planning. This inter/trans-disciplinary team, having defined SHPS across ten dimensions, has developed a screening instrument to help assess these toolkits. A forthcoming paper will address the initial findings of this effort and future avenues of this research. LEED for Communities (LfC) is among those SHPS that the group has studied most thoroughly. In part, Dr. Backus was selected to bring this team's expertise to this globally applied SHPS.

For more information about USGBC please visit them at https://www.usgbc.org/. For more local information about the USGBC New York Upstate Chapter please visit them on the web at https://www.usgbc.org/community/usgbc-new-york-upstate. For more information about Clarkson, its Sustainability efforts and the ISE, visit us at http://clarkson.edu/green/.