WEDG Certifications: Why GZA has 14 WEDG Associates and Counting

Waterfront property owners around the world are adapting to increasing challenges related to climate change, flooding, erosion, sea level rise, sustainability, and equitable public access. To help guide the professionals who design solutions for these problems in the United States, the Waterfront Alliance developed the Waterfront Edge Design Guidelines (WEDG) Associate certification. The WEDG Associate credential equips practitioners with the knowledge to apply waterfront standards in real-world projects. Here’s what the certification means, and why it’s so important for GZA and our clients.

WEDG Associates help clients meet these challenges by planning and designing projects that meet the standards of WEDG project verification, which require:

• Inclusion of the water’s edge on the property as an integral part of the project’s scope.
  
  • While the certification primarily focused on coastal waterfronts, current efforts are expanding into riverine waterfronts.
• Flood resilience planning including:
  
  • Establishing a Design Flood Elevation (DFE) that exceeds FEMA’s Base Flood Elevation (BFE) or the mapped one-percent annual chance flood event, incorporates required freeboard, and accounts for projected sea level rise over the design life of the project for coastal sites. A DFE as the BFE plus at least two feet of freeboard or the buildings need to be located outside the mapped area of the 0.2 percent chance annual flood event for inland waterfront or riverine properties.
• A soft or natural shoreline within the project bounds or ecological enhancement on a hardened shoreline.
• Other ecological considerations such as avoiding the intentional introduction of invasive plant species.
• Meaningful community engagement during project planning and design.
• Public access to the waterfront, or, for industrial and working waterfronts, provision of safe and appropriate alternative access consistent with site operations. 

“Waterfront development projects are becoming more complex to design,” says GZA’s Wayne Cobleigh. “The design process and principles of WEDG offer a framework for designing waterfronts for the future conditions rather than the present or past conditions.”  WEDG Associates learn to incorporate forward-thinking strategies and adaptive management techniques to reduce the physical risks of property damage and business disruption from extreme weather events and increase the return on investment of the resilience measures through avoided financial losses over the lifespan of the buildings and waterfront structures.

WEDG associates also learn best practices for stakeholder engagement and community outreach. “Even private development projects can create positive public impacts,” explains Lindsay Woodson, AICP a climate resiliency specialist at GZA “and WEDG practices help integrate community voices into the process of planning, designing and completing these projects.”

It also provides a useful starting point even for projects that aren’t seeking formal WEDG Certification. “Stakeholders across communities, agencies, and project teams are increasingly focused on developments that must anticipate risks decades into the future,” says Rosemarie Fusco, AICP. “Because the WEDG guidelines are publicly available and grounded in established professional standards of care, they provide a clear and credible framework for evaluating proposed projects and supporting design of waterfront development.” Resilience to flooding and natural hazards is becoming the critical design and funding issue of our time. Being certified as WEDG Associates gives GZA’s design teams a measurable method to positively impact waterfront projects of all scales, now and into the future.