The Sustainable Sites Initiative is on track for releasing a final rating system and reference guide sometime during the summer of 2013, a pair of officials involved with the organization told Green Building Insider earlier this month.

Will the rating system and guide differ significantly from what is already offered through other programs, such as Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) from the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC)? Ray Mims, sustainability manager for U.S. Botanic Garden and a player in the formation of sustainable site guidelines, believes so.

"Basically LEED is a great tool, and we've worked very closely with USGBC in the development of sustainable sites, but LEED is a building tool for buildings, and they will admit that they don't deal completely or sufficiently outside the building skin," Mims said. "Very little. You can build a LEED Platinum building and really not have gotten a lot of points or done things that we think are necessary with the site, with the land up to the building, with the soil, with the vegetation, and we like to say that buildings can only be less bad because they are destructive in the environment no matter how green they are whereas landscapes really can give back and, if done correctly, mimic nature and be regenerative and actually help the environment over time.

"I think LEED, not completely, but certainly focuses to some degree on the occupants of the building, which is very important, [and] we take that into consideration as well, [but] we sort of based everything on ecosystem services, those things that we get from nature -- clean water, clean air, cooling-effective trees, and we're trying to mimic and replicate the natural systems in a built landscape." More details about the Sustainable Sites Initiative are included in this edition of GBI.

Also in this issue, formal launching of a green building council for France is drawing closer, roughly $300 million in federal appliance rebates are generating an estimated $2.2 billion in energy-efficient product sales, the City of Las Vegas and Hara have reached a deal for optimizing sustainability initiatives for the city, several new entries have been added to our calendar of newsworthy developments that are expected to occur in the green building community over the next several years, green construction bills in five more states are profiled, and the Affordable Green Neighborhoods Grant Program is under way.