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Scientists and politicians the world over are looking for ways to halt or reverse [climate changes], a task that is fraught with difficulties in a world hooked on fossil fuels. One option increasingly discussed is terraforming—deliberately altering the environment in a way that cools the planet... Instead of creating global engineering projects, why not create life forms that do a similar job instead... — MIT Technology Review
Ricard Sole and his associates at the ICREA-Complex Systems Lab in Barcelona are experimenting with the potentials of using synthetic organisms to terraform the planet. One advantage to such a project – as opposed to other terraforming ideas that would require engineering feats of unprecedented... View full entry
SCAPE founder and Columbia GSAPP Associate Professor Katherine Orff will succeed leading urban housing authority Professor Richard Plunz as the new GSAPP Director of the Urban Design Program starting this June. As a longtime GSAPP and Urban Design Program faculty member and landscape architect... View full entry
California Gov. Jerry Brown on Wednesday imposed mandatory water restrictions for the first time on residents, businesses and farms, ordering cities and towns in the drought-ravaged state to reduce usage by 25%... [amounting] to roughly 1.5 million acre-feet of water (an acre-foot of water equals about 325,000 gallons) over the next nine months... "We're in a new era," Brown said. "The idea of your nice little green grass getting lots of water every day, that's going to be a thing of the past." — CNN
Brown's executive order will also mandate:Require agriculture to report more on their water usage so as to better "enforce against illegal diversions and waste"A ban on watering lawns on public street mediansSignificant cuts in water use for large landscapes like universities, golf courses, and... View full entry
In both cold and hot conditions, the study found, a rowhouse would be the best place to be. Being attached to other houses limits its exposure and keeps it better insulated — NYT
Ginia Bellafante reported on the release of a report by the New York City Panel on Climate Change. Titled 'Building the Knowledge Base for Climate Resiliency' it assesses impact of climate trends and advises resiliency and monitoring. Another group, the Urban Green Council also found the... View full entry
Florida is largely seen as the U.S. state that is most vulnerable to the effects of global warming. But even uttering the term global warming in official communications can get employees at the state’s Department of Environmental Protection in trouble...“We were told not to use the terms climate change, global warming, or sustainability,” said Christopher Byrd, who worked at the DEP from 2008 to 2013. — Slate
On Tuesday, Gov. Rick Scott, an open skeptic of climate change (who is also openly, "not a scientist") denied the allegations. "Well, first off, that's not true," Scott told reporters. "At our Department of Environmental Protection, there's lots of conversation about this issue. From my... View full entry
Beneath the vertiginous LED-strip lighting of Michael Maltzan's Billy Wilder Theater, a diverse audience gathered last Tuesday for a talk entitled "The Next Wave: Urban Adaptations for Rising Sea Levels." Co-presented by the Hammer Museum and UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and... View full entry
In July 2010, heavy monsoon rains flooded nearly 20% of Pakistan, producing a crisis later described by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon as the worst disaster he had ever seen. The floods affected around 20 million people and claimed the lives of nearly 2,000. Ravaging infrastructure and... View full entry
Living at land’s edge has always come with a certain amount of risk: storms coming off the ocean can be violent and proximity to water always carries with it a possibility of getting wet.
[...] in three communities on Staten Island, a New York State program to encourage managed retreat through homeowner buyouts has elicited strong interest and vocal support.
— urbanomnibus.net
Should a storm, flood or rising sea levels hit the Danish capital again, the bucolic mini-parks will turn into water basins, the hills essentially functioning as the sides of a bowl. Thanks to a new pipe system, the squares will even be able to collect water from surrounding buildings’ roofs. Surrounding streets will, for their part, be turned into “cloudburst boulevards.” — Al Jazeera
Miami, Florida is one of those cities that is projected to be underwater over the next 100 years. And with climate change and rising sea levels continuing to occur worldwide, it's never too early to start preparing for what natural disasters may lie ahead. Students at the Florida International... View full entry
Sometimes it's easy to pretend that architecture exists outside of this world, erupting instead in the blank of a 3D space governed only by the laissez-fair laws of software. But sometimes a news headline will penetrate through this fog of imagination, appearing as a blazing light shining forth... View full entry
...As a practical matter, limiting global warming to no more than 2C seemed like the most ambitious target that could possibly be achieved, since it would require virtually ending fossil fuel emissions within 30 to 40 years... Yet even as the 2C target has become a touchstone for the climate talks, scientific theory and real-world observations have begun to raise serious questions about whether the target is stringent enough." — NY Times
As is documented in the article, the recent climate talks in Lima ended with an agreement to try to limit the long-term warming of the planet to below 2 degree celsius above the global average temperature at the start of the Industrial Revolution. This limit has been central to talks aimed at... View full entry
1. By current estimates, if the polar ice caps melt, sea levels around the world will rise by between 80 and 100m.
2. Many cities (and, by default, around 70 per cent of the world's population) border on a body of water of some kind. According to 2010 government figures, 39 per cent of US population live on a coast. Half live within 50 miles of the ocean.
— citymetric.com
Based on worst-case scenarios for sea-level rise, cartographer Jeremy Linn imagined the future of three of America's major Western cities. He used topographic information to speculate on what an 80m – ≈262 ft – rise would look like as well as coming up with new names for this new... View full entry
South America's biggest and wealthiest city may run out of water by mid-November if it doesn't rain soon. São Paulo, a Brazilian megacity of 20 million people, is suffering its worst drought in at least 80 years, with key reservoirs that supply the city dried up after an unusually dry year. — Thompson Reuters Foundation
One of the most important reservoirs in Brazil is the Cantareira watershed, which supplies around 45% of the city of São Paulo's water. Back in August, authorities warned that the city, which is the largest on the continent, could run out of water in 100 days if the waters dropped to 12%. Now... View full entry
The US state of Louisiana is slowly disappearing into the Gulf of Mexico as its fragile wetlands are eroded by rising sea levels. Approximately 75 square kilometres are lost each year and the US Geological Survey has warned that the entire habitat - which represents 40% of all wetlands in the US - could be destroyed within 200 years. The loss is partly down to natural evolutionary processes, but experts say human behaviour... has made the region more vulnerable to storm surges. — BBC
