Erik’s work on SuROI won him the RICS Education Trust’s annual Research Fellowship prize in 2014.
In his winning application Prof. Bichard promised to apply his Sustainable Return on Investment approach in the pursuit of three main tasks:
- To show how approaches such as social return on investment, ecosystem services analysis, and life cycle assessment can provide a complete resource for sustainable change assessors, decision-makers and built environment professionals.
- Recruit a community of practice around those who are seeking to understand, evaluate or predict sustainable change in the built environment.
- Test the emerging method on relevant case study developments in the three key regions.
The two-year study tested the SuROI approach in the USA (Pittsburgh), Brazil (Porto Alegre) and the UK (East Salford). The resulting report sought to help conventional built environment valuers to understand and appreciate the importance of using non-market approaches to value impacts experienced by people affected by development. The report was entitled ‘Developing an Approach to Sustainable Return on Investment in the UK, Brazil and the USA’ and it can be downloaded by clicking here.
