SFPE and SFPE Foundation Advance Sustainability Objectives Through Numerous Initiatives

October 27, 2023

The Society of Fire Protection Engineers (SFPE), a world-leading professional society for fire protection and fire safety engineering, and the SFPE Foundation have made considerable progress in advancing sustainability objectives for fire protection engineers.

Earlier this year, the SFPE Board of Directors approved a position statement titled “Engineering a Sustainable and Fire Resilient Built Environment” that acknowledges sustainability and fire resilience are important objectives for the built environment and that every project should balance these objectives. SFPE President, Jimmy Jönsson, FSFPE, along with Interim Chief Executive Officer, Chris Jelenewicz, PE, FSFPE, then authored the article “How SFPE is Developing Opportunities for the Fire Protection Engineering Profession to Influence & Elevate Sustainability in the Built Environment” in support of this position that informs how fire protection engineers, architects, policymakers, researchers, code officials, fire service representatives, and sustainability professionals can engage in a meaningful dialogue on promoting sustainable and fire-resilient built environments.

To further adoption into the daily work of fire protection engineers, SFPE hosted three live webinars. Featuring SFPE expert members and sustainability professionals, each webinar is now available on-demand, including:

Additionally, SFPE has partnered with Fire-Safe Sustainable Built Environment (FRISSBE) to host an engineering solutions symposium to be held on November 29-30, 2023, in Ljubljana, Slovenia, exploring design concepts, tools, and approaches for fire-safe buildings, while highlighting the role of fire safety in sustainable design and education. Speakers at the symposium will share engineering solutions on topics related to sustainable building design, reducing embodied carbon, fire performance of sustainable construction products, fire testing, fire service opportunities, holistic building performance design, building information modeling (BIM), and more. The event will also present insight into external living walls, battery/energy storage systems, façade systems, photovoltaics, mass timber, and more. To learn more or to register for the SFPE Engineering Solutions Symposium for Fire Safety and Sustainable Building Design, visit www.sfpe.org/fssbdsymposium today.

Sustainability is at the forefront of the SFPE Foundation’s work, following the adoption of a new vision statement in December 2022 to focus on engineering a resilient, sustainable, fire-safe world for all. Most recently, the SFPE Foundation, a charitable non-profit organization focused on enhancing the scientific understanding of fire and its interaction with the social, natural, and built environments, published a report to prepare for future development of risk-informed performance-based tools for the assessment of sustainable and fire-resilient buildings. Titled “Risk and Performance Assessment Framework for a Sustainable and Fire Resilient Building Environment (SAFR-BE),” the report was authored by Brian Meacham, Håkan Frantzich, Margaret McNamee, and Erik Kimblad. The webinar “Risk and Performance Assessment Framework for a Sustainable and Fire Resilient Building Environment (SAFR-BE)” highlighted the findings published in the report, was presented live, and is now available for on-demand viewing.

As part of its Grand Challenges Initiative (GCI), the SFPE Foundation published a white paper on sustainability and resilience. Titled “Grand Challenges in Resilience & Sustainability: A 10-Year Plan for Strategic Cooperation in Research and Education to Advance Fire Engineering,” the paper presents a framework for strategic cooperation in research and education to advance fire engineering and can be downloaded from sfpe.org/foundation. The paper was also presented during the 2023 Virtual GCI Summit, a recording of which is now available for on-demand viewing. The GCI is a multi-year collaboration between 34 industry, academic, government, and non-profit partner organizations. With the white papers now published, implementation of the 10-year action plan is underway and new partner organizations are welcome to join the effort.

To learn more about these and other SFPE and SFPE Foundation initiatives focused on advancing sustainability objectives, visit sfpe.org and sfpe.org/foundation.

The core group of the SFPE sustainability committee includes Greg Baker, Jimmy Jönsson, Margaret McNamee, Brian Meacham, Benjamin Ralph, and Amanda Robbins; members of the committee’s advisory board include Anna Andersson, Brian Ashe, Fabia Bauman, George Braga, Antonio Cicione, Simon Davis, David Dowdell, Anne Steen-Hansen, Endrit Hoxha, Xinyan Huang, Wolfram Jahn, Anders Johansson, Grunde Jomaas, Steve Kerber, Charles Kahanji, David Lange, Kiara Long, David Maguire, Nelly Martinez Fonseca, Birgitte Messerschmidt, Nathan Millar, Finn Nilsson, Sandra Vaiciulyte, and Hideki Yoshioka.

The SFPE Foundation Grand Challenges Initiative working group on resilience and sustainability is led by chair Seth Sienkiewicz and fellow Natalia Flores-Quiroz; members include: Gaurav Agarwal, Keith Calder, Kyle Collins, Joshua Greene, Md Kamrul Hassan, Will Higgins, Chris Jelenewicz, Yuhan Jiang, Grunde Jomaas, Steve Kerber, Yoon Ko, Erica Kuligowski, John LeBlanc, Leslie Marshall, Ricardo Medina, Birgitte Messerschmidt, Brian Metzger, Shuna Ni, Haejun Park, Dennis Pau, Shamim Rashid-Sumar, Evan Reis, Diana Rodriguez Coca, Timothee Rodrique, Ulises Rojas-Alva, Ankit Sharma, Stephen Tamburello, Amanda Tarbet, Ruben Van Coile, Elizabeth Weckman, Christopher Wieczorek, Rosalie Wills, Mike Wojcik, and Brent Wunderlich.