Greenbuild Blog
Cartography for Change: Strategies for Sustainable Communication
By Nick Vener
February 3, 2025
Communication is the difference between a high-level executive understanding your point of view regarding sustainability and passing on a project because it’s “too extensive” or just “too technical.” Two sustainability professionals from JLL are developing a sustainable communication method that could change how we have sustainability conversations.
In Greenbuild’s 2024 session “Cartography for Change: A Workshop on Sustainable Communication,” speakers Garret Ferguson, Senior Sustainability Manager at JLL, and Julie Hendricks, LEED Fellow and Senior Sustainability Manager at JLL, discuss a new concept for communicating sustainability goals and progress using cartography.
A common challenge with sustainable communication among sustainability consultants refers to technical, in-depth data that can cause your client’s eyes to glaze over. This can happen when referring to the LEED Scorecard, which often requires training to understand.
Cartography is the study of maps, and both JLL speakers have pulled four cartography principles that will help people clearly understand sustainability targets, progress, and action items.
Cartography Principles for Sustainable Communication
Principle 1: Concept and Purpose. Your map should have a clear concept and purpose that needs to be identified before drawing. In this step, you will identify your main idea, who your audience is, and how the map will be used.
Principle 2: Hierarchy and Harmony. It is crucial for important features to stand out, whereas the less critical points should recede.
Principle 3: Simplicity. A successful map is complete when no more elements can be removed.
Principle 4: Emotion. A key element in a sustainable communication map is to incorporate storytelling and humanize the data where possible.
Many of these cartography principles come into play in everyday sustainability projects, specifically, the speakers in this session detailed how they were planning to incorporate into re-envisioning the LEED scorecard.
When it comes to the LEED scorecard, the goals of using the cartography principles are to help the reader focus on the big idea in their language (Concept and Purpose), relate the scorecard to tangible human-scaled objects in the real world (Emotion), and visualize the impact of the decisions (hierarchy and Harmony).
To put these principles into practice, the corresponding images show the organization of JLL’s upcoming cartography methods for simplifying sustainable communication.
- Status and action items
- Building Section with Layered Info
- Graphics and Bar Charts
- Process and Bar Charts
- Timeline and Scorecard Timing
Early mock-ups show the direction of displaying the data in a way that people want to see. This helps visualize your goals and concepts, especially for stakeholders that might not be familiar with sustainability language.
Here we start to understand everything from where a location strategy has a specific application to how many points you are currently achieving (the weight/success of each category) and understand the categories that are available.
Mapping principles: presenting complex data in a way you can grasp it via a single glance. The ability to tell a story and relay the strategy that are human-scaled and already existing in the world.
Although JLL is in the early stages of producing and implementing its cartography strategy, it serves as a strong example of what they’ve found when communicating many of the critical aspects of the LEED scorecard, LEED checklist, and the overarching goal of your sustainability project.
As further development progresses, these principles, ideas, and strategies will be useful when applied to other technical aspects of sustainable building, specifically sustainable construction, the WELL Building checklist, and other projects.
Limitations were also acknowledged. These maps must remain generic, as most sustainability projects are extremely nuanced, but the overall communication strategy has shown significant potential for pushing projects closer to their goals and remaining on their scheduled timelines.
For more information about mapping in sustainable communication, please refer to Mapping for a sustainable world by Menno-Jan Kraak, Robert E. Roth, Britta Ricker, Ayako Kagawa and Guillaume Le Sourd.
