Sustainable development (SD) is rapidly becoming a prime consideration to many diverse groups across the globe. One is hard pressed to define SD in simple terms, but as Peter Kydd addresses in his article, “Sustainable Development: What Does it Really Mean?” it provides solid foundations from which we work to achieve development that balances environmental, societal and economic concerns and results in an improved state for generations to come.

The flower has been used to illustrate SD principles. Each is suited to its local environment, uses only local materials, uses a renewable energy source (the sun), creates no waste, and provides other organisms with shelter, food, and beauty. Experts in the field agree that there are no true SD projects to date, although some are getting close. When we are able to design and build projects that act as the flower, we will know success.

In the meantime, many older projects designed without regard to SD provide us with the opportunity to bring them to a state in which they replicate the activity of the flower. This process is restoration. The problems are not necessarily found in the buildings of the past, but in the landscape of the present. We see land that needs remediation, air that needs filtering, and water that needs cleaning. Restoration attempts to rectify these problems.

Some opponents of SD consider the fate of each generation to be in its own hands. They trust that human ingenuity in concert with science and technology will solve the difficulties of the legacies that we leave. For others, it is the difficulty in pinning down an exact definition that makes the concept hard to accept; and indeed, the concept of SD is not black and white. Others have offered the simple fear of change as reason enough to be against the trend towards SD. These concerns are understandable. Some mistakes have been made since the blossoming of SD in the 1970s, resulting in awkward projects, unexpected outcomes and unhappy clients.

The learning curve that we have been and are still going through is paying off, however. The amount of information now available has greatly increased the success rate of SD projects and strengthened the case for following SD principles. Guidelines and assessment tools are being developed around the world. While their history is short and they are undergoing series of refinements and updates, their presence speaks for the world wide commitment to SD.

PB recognizes the benefits of designing with SD, and has embraced it. We have had many successes in this regard, particularly in Australia , New Zealand , and the UK . The articles that follow provide a variety of outlooks, project types and approaches. Some articles, such as Holland Young's about the new Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, tell about SD being the foundation of the project, while many of the others tell about tools that we can use toward making our projects more sustainable. Although many SD standards being followed around the world apply to buildings, Tom Brooks-Pilling tells how we can apply these principles to our highways and transit projects. Wayne McDaniel explains why life-cycle cost analysis is important, for often if owners look at short-term costs, sustainability can seem too costly, but long term costs can prove just the opposite to be true. Paul Willson tells about a PB invention to improve desalination in independent water and power projects; Jamie Robinson tells how reactive barrier technology will provide a potential break-through for solving problems in contaminated land and groundwater remediation. Other articles tell about exciting work being done in urban development, buildings, and other facilities.

As another testament to PB's commitment to sustainable development, we received a record-breaking number of articles for this issue—many more than we could ever fit into a print version of PB Network . In some cases we shortened the article for print, but included the full, more detailed version on the Web. In other cases, we feature articles only in the Web version (http://www.pbworld.com/news.events/publicantions/network/), but included them in the Table of Contents for readers' reference.

SD is not new to PB. It is in our history, our policy statement on sustainable development, the Henry L. Michel Fellowship for Sustainable Development, and the effort given to the Sustainable Development Initiative. Practice Area Network (PAN) 63 is focused on SD and compliments the PANs for the related issues of environmental planning and analysis, urban and land use planning, and renewable energy sources. Some of our earlier SD work has been featured in other issues of PB Network , including:

• Issue 48, Power Engineering
• Issue 49, Making Better Communities through Contextual Infrastructure Planning
• Issue 52, Intermodal Facilities
• Issue 55, Tracking Environmental commitments
• Issue 56, Projects in Australia and New Zealand

We hope you enjoy reading this issue and use it as a resource to learn about how other project teams are achieving SD or have developed tools that can be used to develop SD solutions. We thank the authors for sharing their ideas and developments, illustrating PB's commitment to SD, and showcasing examples of our work around the world. We look forward to telling you more about our achievements in SD in issues to come.

Suzanne Johnson Crocker, Professional Associate