Autodesk Forma’s environmental impact analysis for architects

Environmental impact analysis (EIA) is the process by which architects, designers, and planners evaluate potential environmental effects of a building project, ensuring sustainable, outcome-focused development. An effective EIA considers various factors and design options to identify the project’s environmental impacts. Often these factors are local or regional and follow a checklist from a governing body. Few techniques in running an EIA include: 

• Scoping and screening of the project

• Impact evaluation methods

• Comparison techniques

• Data presentation and analysis techniques

The different environmental analyses capabilities in Autodesk Forma include sun hours analysis, daylight potential analysis, solar energy analysis, embodied carbon analysis, noise analysis, microclimate analysis, wind analysis and area analysis. 

Forma’s environmental impact analyses empower you to adopt outcome-based design principles in the initial planning phase itself. It enables you to:

• Uncover information of your site and access insights on how your design decisions influence outcomes.
• Free up time for creativity by diminishing tedious tasks and feedback loops in securing preliminary environmental data.
• Utilize the analysis and its data-driven results, to quickly explore design options, and select the best proposals.
• Easily collaborate and visually convey your site's potential to stakeholders.

Forma’s rapid analyses, such as wind and noise, utilize machine learning (ML) to provide near-instantaneous, educated predictions, comparable in accuracy to full-scale analyses, that can be used as pre-analyses for rapid experimentation. With instant access to design impacts, designers are empowered to quickly react to these insights during the design phase, precisely when snap decisions are made. ML models bring these insights closer to the design workflow, providing real-time guidance, after which Forma’s detailed analyses help in more precise verification.

The daylight potential analysis works on the basis of how much of the skybox is exposed to a specific area of the facade and predicts how that impacts the need of windows to achieve suitable indoor daylight conditions. 

The sun hours analysis identifies the number of sunlight hours at different points on the ground and on the building’s facade. This helps understand an area’s shading needs, or for finding optimal placement for balconies, outdoor areas or other sun-dependent elements.

Here are the steps to run an environmental impact analysis on your site and buildings using Forma: 

• Design buildings or models you want to evaluate

• Define areas of the model that needs to be analyzed

• Configure and trigger selected analysis for those areas

• Assess analysis results   

• Compare different design proposals and qualities

• Based on these insights adjust your design concept to react to learned insights

• Represent the data and how it aligns with your EIA in an easily comprehensible presentation

An EIA often includes checklists with impacts dependent on the local or regional area. To conduct an EIA, the designer must follow these checklists and provide answers to every point using different tools at their disposal. This includes specialist evaluations, documentations confirming contingency plans, direct environmental analyses and so on. While Forma can't complete an EIA alone, it empowers designers to address several environmental factors earlier than traditional workflows.

How responsibilities are generally assigned in an EIA: 

• Stakeholders in the project team, such as the Architect, Urban Planner, or a more specialist permit application team are responsible for the EIA to be conducted.

• The Project Owner is the accountable party, who's legally responsible for the EIA to be completed. 

• Several stakeholders may be consulted including Sustainability Consultants, Engineers, Biologists etc. 

• The informed parties would be executive leadership, admin and external stakeholders such as the governing body, state, or municipality.