RDI Special Projects

Resilient Design Guidelines – Climate Ready DC

The Climate Ready DC focused on two climate-related vulnerabilities facing Washington DC -flooding, exacerbated by sea level rise, and extreme heat-with an additional focus on power outages, which can be caused by a wide range of natural and anthropogenic disasters.

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Strategies for Multifamily Building Resilience – Enterprise Comunity Partners, New York City

Developed with Enterprise Community Partners following Superstorm Sandy, Strategies for Multifamily Building Resilience includes 19 specific strategies for enhancing the resilience of existing multifamily buildings serving affordable housing needs.

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Building Resilience in Boston

Building Resilience in Boston provides resilient building strategies that property owners and policy makers can make use of to reduce the City’s vulnerability to climate
change.

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Building Resiliency Task Force – NYC

In the wake of Superstorm Sandy, the Building Resiliency Task Force in New York City examined opportunities for enhancing resilience in the City through changes to building codes, regulations and voluntary initiatives.

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LEED Pilot Credits on Resilient Design

]This triad of LEED Pilot Credits assesses vulnerabilities for particular locations, determines best practices to mitigate those vulnerabilities, and ensures that buildings maintain passive survivability in
the event of extended lost power.

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The New Orleans Principles

The New Orleans Principles address sustainability in the post-Katrina
reconstruction of New Orleans.

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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.