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Updates to the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) P100 Facilities Standards in 2024 expanded the requirement to include “value ecosystem services” for GSA-owned buildings and building projects. Will it be an inflection point for greater sustainability in the federal building sector?

Action to address global biodiversity loss has been picking up pace since 2022 when 196 countries signed off on the Kunming-Montreal agreement, which aims to halt and reverse nature loss, including protecting 30% of the lands and oceans by 2030.¹  

Multiple jurisdictions are legislating policies that put a firmer focus on sustainability in the built environment, including in the U.K. where changes to the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 released in April 2024, now require developers to deliver a 10% biodiversity net gain for all building developments.² 

In May, the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) released the new updates to P100 Facilities Standards for the Public Building Service. P100 sets design and construction standards and performance criteria for around 300,000 federal buildings across the country.³ 

The updated standards include stringent sustainability requirements for new and renovated GSA-owned buildings around energy conservation and use, low carbon materials and water reuse. For the first time, GSA also requires developers to “value ecosystem services”. 

Ecosystem services are the services and benefits that we derive from the natural world, such as clean air and water, healthy soils and climate regulation. They are services that we — and all other species on the planet — rely on - for health, wellbeing and, ultimately, survival.

Requiring federal projects to value ecosystem services is a firm step towards ensuring the built environment is nature-positive, says ���سԹϺ���һ���������� Global Principal - Regenerative & Nature-Based Solutions Chris Allen.

“In the past, the environment was often sacrificed for development and ecosystems were degraded by built environment projects. Today, we are far more aware of the vital role ecosystems play in species health and wellbeing, as well as the economic success of many global industries and businesses.”

“Policies like this are a first step towards improving and even restoring ecosystems and ecosystem services performance, but it stops short at specifying how these services should be measured.”

“Currently, there are no widely accepted or standardised metrics for valuing and measuring ecosystem service performance. To shift the dial even further on sustainability in the federal building sector will require a consistent set of metrics for developers to use to measure ecosystem services and track changes to service performance over time.” 

Moving beyond measuring to delivering ecosystem services

���سԹϺ���һ����������’ long-term partner, Biomimicry 3.8, was key to getting the new requirement added to the standards and see it as a positive step.

“Understanding the level of ecosystem service performance on a project site provides a baseline for measuring the net impact of construction and design interventions on nature, which includes employees, and the local community embedded in the larger web of Life,” explains Zeynep Arhon, a Certified Biomimicry Professional with ���سԹϺ���һ����������’ long-term partner, Biomimicry 3.8. 

“It is the first step in designing a built environment that functions like the wild lands next door.”

���سԹϺ���һ���������� and Biomimicry 3.8, in collaboration with EcoMetrix Solutions Group, help built environment projects move beyond measuring ecosystem services to designing with these services in mind. 

Using Biomimicry 3.8’s built-environment-specific methodology “Positive Performance”, the team works with clients to deliver large-scale projects such as hospitals, schools, facilities and even cities, aligning the project site’s ecosystem service performance with that of a healthy local habitat by integrating nature-based, nature-inspired, and nature-informed solutions in the building design. The local, healthy habitat not only shapes the project goals for delivering ecosystem services but also informs the selection of optimal solutions tailored to the project site.

“The methodology helps organizations identify innovative, holistic and regenerative design strategies that close the gap between environmental commitments and actual performance in a way that is meaningful to the places where the organization operates,” explains Zeynep.