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The Duke of Cambridge appeared in apt attire last night as he announced the first slate of winners of his newly-launched Earthshot Prize celebrating innovations in the ongoing fight against climate change. The city of Milan was among the five inaugural winners of the prize, which is the brainchild... View full entry
The City of Miami has published a draft of its Stormwater Master Plan; a $3.8 billion plan to be enacted over the next 40 years, seeking to mitigate the impact of rising sea levels on the city. The plan sets out a wide portfolio of measures, from stormwater pumps and sea walls to more novel... View full entry
There is enough room in the world’s existing parks, forests, and abandoned land to plant 1.2 trillion additional trees, which would have the CO2 storage capacity to cancel out a decade of carbon dioxide emissions, according to a new analysis by ecologist Thomas Crowther and colleagues at ETH Zurich, a Swiss university. — Yale Environment 360
Following new research, Thomas Crowther and colleagues at ETH Zurich estimate that there are 3 trillion trees on Earth, more than seven times the number previously estimated. Crowther argues that given this new knowledge, it is possible that new and existing forests could become more... View full entry
At San Francisco's Global Climate Action Summit yesterday, MVRDV presented a report offering 5 recommendations to Bay Area officials on the region’s plans for a resilient future. Their report, titled Too Much + Too Little, was created as part of the NL Resilience Collective. Below are the... View full entry
Liverpool City Council (LCC) has announced a new partnership with a blockchain platform company to offset more than 110% of its carbon emissions, with the city announcing its bid to become the world's first climate-positive city by the end of 2020. LCC will conduct a year-long trial with the Poseidon Foundation to use a blockchain platform to offset the carbon impact of all products and services in the city by supporting global forest conversation projects. — edie.net
Liverpool's ambition to become the world's first climate-positive city by 2020 has been announced with the city's blockchain technology partnership. Committing to a year-long trial of this sustainable technology, Liverpool City Council strives to reduce its carbon impact by installing more than... View full entry
The Austrian branch of Penda reveals a residential high-rise for Tel Aviv defined by arches and cascading terraces. The design responds to the broad display of the city’s Bauhaus era and responds to the city's climate challenges rather than opting for another glass tower. Tel Aviv Arcades... View full entry
Concepts like “making room for the river,” which works well in the Netherlands, can mean mass evictions in the Global South. Too often, the rhetoric of climate adaptation is doublespeak for the displacement of poor communities, and an alibi for unsustainable growth. — Places Journal
As coastal megacities adapt to climate change, they often bring in outside planning experts who push highly engineered, technocratic resilience programs. Lizzie Yarina looks at how this trend is affecting local communities in Bangkok, Manila, Ho Chi Minh City, and Jakarta, and argues that... View full entry
During extreme storms, it's common for city infrastructure — from roads to subways to parking garages — to flood.
Architects from Danish firm Third Nature want to build garages that can cope with future storms. They designed a garage that could automatically move up and down as its water reservoir fills with and empties floodwater.
— Business Insider
Third Nature's conceptual garage structure, Pop-Up, consists of an underground water reservoir, five parking levels, and a pedestrian space on top. Most of this 30,460-square-foot structure could exist underground on dry days. On wet days, the structure would automatically pop up using hydraulics... View full entry
What is the architecture of forward-thinking climate change? One example is the Svalbard Seed Vault, which when full will house roughly 3 million different species of plants in anticipation of a future that may be hotter, drier, or simply climatically different than the one we inhabit now.This... View full entry
At the world's first major geoengineering conference, two separate scientists put forward proposals to use lasers to modify the Earth's climate and fight global warming, from space. One suggested that a satellite equipped with a high-powered laser could grow clouds in the atmosphere below; the other proposed lasers that would blast greenhouse gases from orbit to effectively erase the agents of climate change. — Vice Motherboard
For those unaware, geoengineering, in this context, refers to large-scale, intentional interventions in the Earth's climate, particularly towards the end of fighting global warming. There are two main categories of proposed technologies: carbon-dioxide removal and solar radiation management. In... View full entry
