ICF’s WayPoint technology wins environmental industry awards
The road to recovery is long and complicated. And when a community needs to rebuild, they need it done as quickly—and correctly—as possible.
It’s a tall order, made at tad shorter thanks to WayPoint, a technology platform that analyzes and evaluates thousands of sites for possible impact on environmental and historic resources. This ICF-developed tool is customizable, sharable, and completely secure.
ICF project teams, partners, and clients have already used WayPoint to...
- Evaluate utility corridor constraints and estimate capital and mitigation costs.
- Visualize renewable energy potential alongside permitting and land constraints.
- Crowdsource information through participator commenting tools.
- Connect with remote field surveys through real-time dashboards and email alerts.
- Manage critical project documentation access alongside compliance, permit, and mitigation measure tracking.
And in doing so, it caught the attention of—and captured two awards from—the Environmental Business Journal.
Groundbreaking technology
The first award was in the Information Technology category, specifically for the technology behind WayPoint. The platform compiles project-specific and publicly available data and automates routine analytic tasks such as a proximity analysis to sensitive resources—then makes it easy to share this information with local officials, subject matter experts, federal officials, and the public. As a result, evaluations are accurate and timely—no matter the size of the staff. Storing the data in a secure environment makes it easy to keep as a historical record.
Says Richard Starzak, one of ICF’s historic preservationists, “WayPoint increased the efficiency, accuracy, and consistency among our staff. And it cut the time it takes to fill out environmental checklists from 4 hours to less than a minute.”
Building a new practice
ICF captured a second Business Achievement Award in the Information Technology category for building a practice around WayPoint. Our extended team now includes more than 10 developers, and ICF anticipates expanding the WayPoint team another 50% to meet our clients’ growing needs in disaster management, biological modeling, energy infrastructure planning and modeling, cultural resources, species habitat modeling, and transportation planning.
Industry leaders
Our third Business Achievement Award, in the Industry Leadership category, is again for our resilience work—though from a different angle. The award recognized a white paper (and final report) we helped develop for the Federal Highway Administration.
The recently published Nature-Based Solutions for Coastal Highway Resilience: An Implementation Guide provides step-by-step guidance on how transportation agencies can use nature-based solutions to develop more sustainable and resilient coastal transportation infrastructure.
Learn more about ICF’s resilience and transportation work.
