Read the full story at StreetsBlog NYC.
The city must reform and accelerate the way it builds infrastructure if it has any hope of transforming the streetscape into true public space filled with protected bike lanes, bus lanes, and wider sidewalks, according to a new report by the Regional Plan Association.
Read the full story at Stateline.
From Seattle to Palm Beach, Florida, city leaders agree that urban areas need more trees to alleviate the effects of climate change. Amid the growing attention to tree canopy — and an infusion of federal funding — more than a dozen cities are convening to share ideas and plan the urban forests of the future.
Leaders in many communities now consider trees to be critical infrastructure, providing shade, absorbing stormwater runoff and filtering air pollution. The focus on urban forests has coincided with a growing recognition that low-income neighborhoods and communities of color often have far less tree cover — and suffer increased vulnerability to extreme heat as a result.
Read the full story at Construction Dive.
The Department of Commerce has recommended $562 million in funding for nearly 150 projects across 30 states and territories focused on climate change resiliency projects.
Announced on Friday, the awards will be made under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate-Ready Coasts Initiative with funds from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act.
The projects will focus on helping communities that are experiencing increased flooding, storm surge and more frequent extreme weather events, said Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo in the press release.
At the 2023 Regional Grey to Green Conferences, we will be exploring the most recent green infrastructure science, economic valuation, asset management, public policy, technologies, and best practices in design, installation and maintenance. Our goal is to help inform the current policy debate by making the case for a rapid and significant increase in green infrastructure investment, a trend thatʼs now occurring worldwide.
These will be smaller scale conferences, with a strong focus on providing content tailored for designers, contractors, installers, maintenance professionals, and policy makers. This content includes practical information about the implementation and maintenance of green infrastructure systems. There will also be introductory programming to attract new attendees.
Each event will be 2 days, with training, a plenary session, tours, technical presentations, panel discussions and a central trade show. There is no overarching theme for the conferences, but each will feature regionally significant speakers and presentations.
U.S. EPA’s CRWU initiative provides drinking water, wastewater, and stormwater (water sector) utilities with practical tools, training, and technical assistance needed to increase resilience to climate change. CRWU assists water sector utilities and stakeholders by promoting a clear understanding of climate change and helps to identify potential long-term adaptation options for decision-making related to implementation and infrastructure financing.
Risk assessment tools include:
The site also features:
U.S. EPA’s Resilient Strategies Guide introduces drinking water, wastewater, and stormwater utilities to the adaptation planning process. Utilities can use the Guide to identify their planning priorities, vulnerable assets, potential adaptation strategies and available funding sources.
Information in the Guide is based on the experiences of other utilities adapting to climate change and the resources available to support them in pursuing similar strategies. Users can provide information about their utility on the site to help the Guide identify the most relevant priorities, assets, strategies, and funding sources.
Read the full story from NPR.
Heavy storms have flooded roads and intersections across California and forced thousands to evacuate over the last few weeks. Much of the water isn’t coming from overflowing rivers. Instead, rainfall is simply overwhelming the infrastructure designed to drain the water and keep people safe from flooding.
To top it off, the storms come on the heels of a severe drought. Reservoirs started out with such low water levels that many are only now approaching average levels—and some are still below average.
The state is increasingly a land of extremes.
New infrastructure must accommodate a “new normal” of intense rainfall and long droughts, which has many rethinking the decades-old data and rules used to build existing infrastructure.
by Thami Croeser, RMIT University
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.
Here are a few inspiring exemplars.
Planting trees to create shade is an obvious response to hot weather. However, in many cities it’s still a struggle just to stop the losses of trees. Future hot, dry climates will add to the challenge of urban greening.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thami Croeser, Research Officer, Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Read the full story from Princeton University.
As Earth warms due to climate change, people living near the coasts not only face a higher risk of major hurricanes, but are also more likely to experience a subsequent heat wave while grappling with widespread power outages.
Princeton researchers investigated the risk of this compound hazard occurring in the future under a “business-as-usual” climate scenario, using Harris County, Texas, as an example. They estimated that the risk of undergoing at least one hurricane-blackout-heat wave lasting more than five days in a 20-year span would increase 23 times by the end of the century. But there is some good news: Strategically burying just 5% of power lines — specifically those near main distribution points — would almost halve the number of affected residents.
Read the full story from the Associated Press.
To cushion the impact of extreme weather due to climate change, a Chinese landscape architect has been making the case for China and other countries to create so-called “sponge cities.”
Yu Kongjian, who spoke to The Associated Press in Beijing, uses sweeping language to express his vision for cities that can withstand variable temperatures, drought and heavy rainfall. The challenges for implementing this vision at a time of ambitious economic development in China are multifold.
Yu criticizes much of Asia’s modern infrastructure for being built on ideas imported from Europe, which he says are ill-fitted to the monsoon climate over much of the Asian continent. He points to recent floods that have wreaked havoc in many Asian cities, which he says are caused by this architectural mismatch.
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