People from marginalized gender and sexual identities can have safer experiences participating in ecological field research when leaders incorporate better field safety protocols and advocate for systemic changes, according to a new paper authored by scientists from Earlham College, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and other institutions.
The paper, published in the Journal of Applied Ecology, offers best practices for LGBTQ+ inclusion based on evidence-based strategies currently in use by the authors. The paper also underscores the role of systematic inclusion in attracting and retaining a qualified, richly diverse workforce.
Climate change is going just as badly for cities as we have been warned it would. Extreme weather is increasingly common and severe globally. Australian cities have endured a number of recent disastrous events.
It’ll get worse, too. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) factsheet outlining impacts on human settlements is a very sobering read. It also pithily sums up the situation cities face:
Concentrated risk and concentrated opportunity for action.
Implicit in this wording is a hopeful truth: adapting to climate change is a daunting task, but the “how” is not a mystery. The opportunity is right in front of us, in our streets, buildings and parklands. Around the world we are seeing effective retrofitting of cities to adapt to more extreme weather.
Medellin in Colombia is one city making inspiring progress on this front. With an urban greening budget of US$16.3 million, it has created a network of 30 “green corridors” through the city. These have reduced urban heat island effects by 2℃ three years into the program. As these densely vegetated corridors mature, they are expected to eventually deliver 4-5℃ of cooling.
One of Medellin’s 30 green corridors with dense tree and understorey plantings runs along La Playa Avenue. Shutterstock
Vienna, Austria, has had an urban heat island strategy in place since 2018. It includes planting 4,500 trees each year and subsidies for street-facing green walls.
The city has developed a series of “cool streets” – traffic-calmed spaces with light-coloured road surfaces, “fog showers” that activate on hot days, water features, shade trees and drinking fountains. Eighteen cool streets were delivered as pop-ups, with another four in place permanently to provide refuges on hot days. Vienna also has an extensive network of public swimming pools where residents can cool off.
Esterhazy park was redesigned in 2020 as Vienna’s first ‘cooling park’, with mist sprays lowering the temperature on hot days. Carla Lo/City of Vienna
Limiting flood damage
Urban green space can also be valuable for intercepting and absorbing stormwater to prevent flooding.
A spectacular example is Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park in Singapore. It was the site of a concrete drainage canal that was transformed into a 3.2km winding stream in 2012.
Bishan Park has become one of Singapore’s most popular parks since a utilitarian concrete channel was transformed into a naturalised river landscape.
The 62-hectare park along the gently sloping banks of the stream serves a densely developed residential area. In wet conditions, the stream swells up to 100 metres wide. As stormwater gently flows downstream, it drains away into the landscape.
Since the park was created, visitor numbers have doubled to 6 million a year. Biodiversity has increased 30%.
A very urban version of this approach is the “floodable square”. A good example is Rotterdam’s Watersquare Benthemplein, a sunken public plaza and basketball court that becomes a major stormwater basin when it rains.
Benthemplein has a series of pools that fill after heavy rain, connected by channels that control stormwater flows through the city. Michiel Brouwer/Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA
While this approach is a win-win on large development sites, it can be tricky to retrofit built-up areas. Fortunately, there are many more compact approaches that can deliver large benefits when delivered at scale.
New York City, for example, has spent over US$1 billion on smaller, distributed solutions in flood-prone streets. These measures include “raingardens” that drain water from streets, and infiltration basins that divert and store stormwater.
Raingardens like this one in Brooklyn, New York, divert water from hard surfaces, so it sinks into the soil instead of overloading drains. Chris Hamsby/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
Green roofs that capture rainwater also help reduce flood risk in built-up areas. Again, Rotterdam’s approach is interesting; while reducing stormwater flows is a focus, the city’s rooftop greening program focuses on multifunctionality by integrating solar panels, social spaces and rooftop farming. The retrofitted “Dakakker” (rooftop farm) has advanced stormwater storage, vegetable beds, beehives, a few chickens and a popular café.
Rotterdam’s ‘Dakakker’ inspired a large rooftop greening program. Shutterstock
Of course, a green roof program usually requires private building owners to get on board. Rotterdam subsidises owners who deliver rooftop greening that intercepts significant amounts of stormwater. In 2021, Rotterdam had 46 hectares of green roofs, equating to around 0.5 square metres per resident.
The Swiss city of Basel leads the world with 5.7m² of green roofs per person (as of 2019). Basel has had incentives as well as laws requiring green roofs since the late 1990s; this highlights the value of putting regulations in place early.
The principle seems to work for bigger cities too: Tokyo has mandated green roofs since 2000, and has around 250ha of them.
Our cities remain woefully unprepared for extreme weather. But many of the above approaches are starting to crop up in Australia. The challenge is to move from a handful of trials to a large-scale, systematic roll out of infrastructure to adapt our cities to climate change.
The experience of the cities profiled above points to a few crucial ingredients.
First, cities must be willing to invest heavily, both in new green spaces and in subsidies to encourage greening by private property owners.
Second, reallocation of existing grey space, like roads and canals, must be pursued fearlessly and systematically. Paris’s elected mayor since 2014, Anne Hidalgo, is a spectacular example of the political courage required for large-scale greening.
The mayor of Paris has announced plans to turn the Champs-Élysées into an ‘extraordinary garden’.
Third, the law can play a real role in guiding development, through measures such as mandating greening on buildings. This can be achieved through fairly simple tools like Toyko’s green roof requirement, or more sophisticated area-based instruments that require a portion of a development to have green walls and/or roofs. Cities like Seattle and Brisbane are using these tools, which are also being mooted in Melbourne.
Recent disasters have made clear the urgent need to step up urban climate adaptation. The costs of not acting decisively to protect ourselves and our cities will be considerable, but the playbook is ready for us.
Nearly nine in ten major ports globally are exposed to damaging climate hazards, resulting in escalating economic impacts on global trade, according to new research from the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute (ECI).
I often surprise people when I say I do not want a sustainability strategy. I believe for sustainability to succeed; a sustainability strategy must be fully intertwined into a company’s business strategy. These days, sustainability is often seen as a buzz word – a word that holds so much meaning but is often watered down by overuse creating confusion to what it truly means in the marketplace. We should move beyond seeing sustainability as a descriptor and start seeing it as an action. Sustainability is not only a useful tool to manage risk, but also on the forefront of innovation and allows us to think in new ways in serving our customers, engaging our employees, supporting our communities, and driving long-term value for our shareholders.
A new study has found that chemicals that accumulate in the vagina, potentially originating from personal care products, may contribute to preterm birth.
A startup with ties to Alliant Energy said it’s building a plant near Cedar Rapids that will recycle decommissioned wind turbine blades, preventing the spent equipment from going into landfills and addressing critics’ challenges that wind energy is environmentally friendly.
Travero, an Alliant subsidiary, is spinning off a new business called REGEN Fiber. The startup announced Thursday it’s building a plant in Fairfax that will convert used wind turbine blades into reusable materials that increase the strength and durability of concrete, mortar and other products.
REGEN Fiber said it has a patent pending for an “eco-friendly process” that it piloted last year at a facility in Des Moines.
Nature is important in its own right, and provides value to the lives of all Americans. To increase our knowledge of nature in the United States and its links to global change, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), on behalf of the United States Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), requests input from the public to help inform the framing, development, and eventual use of the first National Nature Assessment (NNA). USGCRP committed to conducting a National Nature Assessment on April 8, 2022, under the authority of the Global Change Research Act of 1990. President Biden reinforced and elevated the importance of this assessment to a matter of national policy by calling for it in Executive Order 14072 ( https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2022/04/27/2022-09138/strengthening-the-nations-forests-communities-and-local-economies) on Strengthening the Nation’s Forests, Communities and Local Economies (April 22, 2022). This request for information (RFI) will inform USGCRP as it develops this first-of-its-kind assessment.
National Wildlife Federation’s interactive database for communities interested in pursuing federal funding and/or technical assistance for nature-based solutions. Use the filters to search for nature-based solutions funding and technical assistance resources that fit your needs.
Here, we compile detailed and specific resources and strategies that reporters can use to make that goal a reality, drawing on the wealth of information available from many U.S.-based organizations and scientists. Strategies for finding diverse sources can include drawing on publicly available scientist databases, social media accounts and hashtags, affinity organizations in STEM, sources, colleagues, public information officers, expert-referral services, and online discussion groups. We also suggest ways for editors to support reporters’ efforts to include more diverse sources, including by creating a newsroom culture that welcomes collaborative discussion about diversity (in sourcing and other respects), by setting and tracking goals, and by encouraging and concretely supporting reporters’ sourcing efforts.
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