Sustainability Leaders visit New Bedford to Explore IoT Enabled Resilience in Water Management
ImpactLABS and the Green Infrastructure Foundation partnered to bring together leading thinkers and practitioners in all the key disciplines related to resilience in water management. The two-day event included an ImpactLABS Field Day, and a Green Infrastructure Foundation Charrette Day.
Touring sites to see examples of IoT in the field.
Experiencing IoT in the Field: Impact LABS Field Day
Participants boarded a coach bus and saw first hand how an intentional approach to IoT can enhance the operational, financial, and social impact of small to mid-sized businesses. The tour visited a number of ImpactLABS-funded pilot sites and joint ImpactLABS-market-funded commercial program sites, including:
- Sylvan Nursery: example of a resilient horticulture business
- MA Audubon Society: Allen’s Pond Field Station & Stone Barn
- Trustees of Reservations: Haskell Farm and Gardens
- Sid Wainer & Son: North End Greenhouse Operation
- City of New Bedford: Payne Cutlery Urban Infill Redevelopment Site
At Sylvan Nursery, learning about horticulture businesses that are both profitable and sustainable with creative, instrumented, water reclamation systems.
With 117 sites in MA alone, Trustees of Reservations could be a great partner to explore how the right cost-effective environmental instrumentation can enable more resilience, and maybe new revenue.
Bringing it all together: Green Infrastructure Foundation Charette Day
Participants dove into teams and developed detailed concepts and plans on how each of three unique commercial sites could enhance their water security, infrastructure resilience, operational stability, financial performance, and social impact with a series of design approaches that synthesized a number of green infrastructure tools, methods and models with IoT-enabled monitoring and control solutions.
The output of the event will be a series of conceptual plan options that the owners and operators of the target sites can explore as part of their upcoming investment and operating plan meetings.
Back at LABS, developing concepts and plans for enhancing green infrastructure.
Implementation and Next Steps
Work produced during the charrette will be refined, packaged and distributed. ImpactLABS will initiate preliminary proposals for instrumentation plans, and will share the experience with sponsors, tech partners and portfolio companies. ImpactLABS and Green Infrastructure Foundation will publish results through a number of outlets. All parties involved will share their experiences with their internal groups.
Both ImpactLABS and Green Infrastructure Foundation will continue to work with the site owners and operators, and share progress in our networks.
Bringing Stakeholders together to Create Resilience
This two-day event is exactly one of the reasons we created ImpactLABS: to bring together various stakeholder groups to think deeply about how to create more resilience. We had the honor of working with some of the authentic, expert leaders in a number of fields, including:
- Sasaki in urban planning
- Carol R Johnson Associates in Landscape Design
- Rhode Island College in LEED-certified institutional redevelopment</li>
- PTC in machine clouds & AI and more
- Analog Devices in secure sensor to service solutions
- MA Audubon and Trustees for Reservations in conservation
- Sylvan Nurseries in resilient horticulture
- Sid Wainer in advanced operations for specialty food products
- City of New Bedford in the future of public-private partnerships
The work we accomplished addresses four grand challenges: water security, resilient infrastructure, identity-based smart cities, and food security. We look forward to implementing the ideas generated during this event as part of our mission to accelerate IoT deployment for both profit and resilience.