Sustainability & Resilience

We worked with a municipal entity to identify organizational changes that support their vision of transforming into a sustainability leader. We started by collaboratively developing a sustainability vision and associated goals. We identified gaps in the current structure and identified changes to support their vision and goals to both increase visibility and focus on sustainability throughout the organization.

In collaboration with our client, a publicly owned utility, we developed a startegic water data management plan and roadmap. We documented the current state, identified goals, and performed a gap analysis that set the groundwork for meeting their future state. We identified areas of improvement along with a roadmap for how changes could be implemented toward meeting goals, which tasks were required to establish business processes, and which technologies would improve effectiveness and reduce cost of data collection, processing, integration, analysis, reporting, and maintenance.

Recreation opportunities are one of the benefits of hydropower projects. However, managing recreational resource demands in a sustainable and resilient manner while remaining in compliance with regulations is a challenge for project owners, especially for projects with reservoirs with housing and boating docks. We helped our client improve their Shoreline Use Permitting process to address a five-year backlog in permitting while complying with Federal Energy Regulatory Commission license and plan requirements for a hydropower facility. We accomplished this by providing regulatory strategy and process improvement services to streamline the existing permitting process and to demonstrate permitting could be achieved within the prescribed timeline. In addition, we provided communication tools and templates to improve communication with permittees, other agencies, and the public.

Power bills are a significant economic risk to tenants of affordable housing. Incentives offered by the Inflation Reduction Act to install renewable distributed energy sources, like solar energy, on affordable housing offer the opportunity to reduce these cost risks to tenants, while providing property owners with financial incentives to facilitate their implementation. These renewable distributed energy resources also have the additional benefit of improving energy grid resilience by reducing load (during peak demand) and reducing carbon emissions from the built environment.

We are assisting an energy resource developer scale their operations to enable development and interconnection of solar power on affordable housing across the United States. Our services helped our client improve their understanding of the market value and potential, transform their internal operations to enable their ability to scale the number of projects they can undertake, across a wider geographic footprint, and improve their project delivery.

Utility-owned infrastructure is at risk from the direct and indirect impacts of climate change. Our client engaged us to help them develop an infrastructure-climate vulnerability assessment and proactive strategies to address vulnerabilities over several time spans. To accomplish this, we worked across the utility business units to identify the direct and indirect impacts from climate change to the utility's operations, legal compliance, finance, natural resource stewardship, and customer/stakeholder interactions. The vulnerabilities were operationalized through integration into existing risk management process and project development criteria to assure climate resilience is an integral part of the utility's decision making processes.

Conducted a feasibility study on developing a scaled, mid-tier value chain for eco-tanned sheep hides sourced from animals raised on carbon-managed rangelands.

We engaged a diverse group of stakeholders, including impact investors, tanners, designers, manufacturers, retailers, and agricultural producers. By bringing this multi-dimensional coalition together, we fostered a deeper understanding of shared challenges, opportunities, and obstacles. This collaborative approach led to the development of recommended best practices to ensure project success.