Sustainable and Resistant Road Infrastructures: The Role of the Envision Framework as a Guide to a New Design Approach

Abstract

In Italy, resilience and sustainability concepts are generally applied to road infrastructures (mainly in terms of pavements) in order to minimize the environmental impacts of their construction and maintenance. In this paper the Envision framework has been adopted to evaluate the sustain-ability of a road project, optimizing its resilience for both short-term and long-term impacts. The rating approach has been applied considering not only pavements analysis but also the complete project process. The authors have upgraded the original Envision framework to road infrastructures, in compliance with the Italian regulatory framework. Four scenarios have been considered. The first allowed us to understand which credits can be evaluated with the available project documentation. The second represents a snapshot of the state of the project. The third evaluates the effect of the improvement in the performance level obtained by analyzing the potential increases. Finally, the last considers also for “pending” credits.