planted city

Related:

• ‘In the darkness, solar industry sees some light’ (Globe & Mail)
• Report: ‘Solar power: darkest before dawn’ (McKinsey)

Extreme weather: ”Epic dryness’ feeding Western wildfires’

From USA Today:

In the Rocky Mountain West, firefighters say they’ve never seen the trees and grasses this dry so early in the summer.

“It’s epic dryness,” says Beth Lund, leader of the incident management team assigned to the High Park Fire, which has burned 135 square miles near Fort Collins, Colo., and destroyed at least 257 homes. It is now the most destructive in recorded Colorado history.

But hardly the only one. Ten separate fires are burning in Colorado, prompting a planned visit Friday by President Obama. They threaten the U.S. Air Force Academy, the town of Boulder and the city of Colorado Springs.

Colorado isn’t the only state affected by an exceptionally severe fire season, with crews battling blazes in Alaska, Arizona, California, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.

“The whole Central Rocky Mountain range is a tinderbox,” says Ron Roth, of the Rocky Mountain Area Coordinating Center in Lakewood, Colo.

A light winter snow pack, dry spring, more people living in what was once wilderness and the long-term effects of climate change have all conspired to make this an especially bad fire season, Roth says. “We’ve got trees torching, tornadoes of fire — this is extreme fire behavior,” he says.

…

Climate change is undoubtedly playing a role, if only in the distribution of invasive insects, Delgado says. The pine bark beetle has been migrating north for years as warmer winters allow it to survive outside its previous range. The insects have killed millions of acres of forest, leaving behind tinder-dry wood.

“When that timber goes dead, it doesn’t make for a real good situation when the fire comes,” Bently says.

Check out the rest of the article here.

Related:

• ‘West’s wildfires a preview of changed climate: scientists’ (Reuters)
• ‘Climate change will boost number of West’s wildfires’ (Reuters)

(Map credit: NASA via Yale e360) 

Visualizing climate change in Vancouver 

Here’s a shot of the freshly painted columns of the Cambie Bridge stretching across Vancouver’s False Creek. The blue shading is meant to show the potential impacts of the melting of Earth’s major ice sheets in terms of sea level rise. Details here. 

Related:

• ‘New public art installations function as an understated but alarming urban intervention’ (Georgia Straight)
• ‘Report illustrates toll of climate change in Vancouver’ (Georgia Straight)
• ‘Vancouver in the research spotlight as one of the world’s most vulnerable cities to rising sea levels’ (Adaptation to Climate Change Team - SFU)
• ‘Sea level rise underestimated, say BC scientists’ (CBC)
• ‘Coastal Cities at Risk’
• ‘Sea level rise for the coasts of California, Oregon, and Washington: Past, Present, and Future’ (National Academies Press)
• ‘Sea Level Rise Will Hit California Harder than Rest of West’ (Climate Central)
• ‘Warmer seas rising faster on U.S. east coast than elsewhere’ (CBC)

From The Washington Post:

Countries or regions that have already passed cap-and-trade: This includes the European Union, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, California, and Quebec. They’ve all set hard limits on a significant portion of their carbon emissions. (Different countries have different targets and exemptions for various sectors.) This is a sizeable chunk of the planet: By my calculations, these countries and regions represented roughly 19 percent of the world’s carbon emissions in 2008.

Countries that could shift to cap-and-trade this decade. Mexico and Brazil have both recently passed laws to significantly slow their rate of emissions growth by 2020. (Brazil’s target is voluntary.) They’ve both set up task forces to study various ways to achieve this, with cap-and-trade as an option. Japan, for its part, has set up a limited cap-and-trade scheme for Tokyo and has a voluntary carbon-trading scheme at the national level that has slightly curbed emissions.

Meanwhile, China is setting up its own regional cap-and-trade systems in several of its provinces and is looking to set up a national program by the end of the decade. Jennifer Morgan says that her organization, WRI, recently hosted a Chinese delegation in the United States to study California’s climate program, as well as the small cap-and-trade system for electric utilities in the Northeast. While China’s program likely wouldn’t shrink the country’s overall level of emissions, it would at least slow the country’s ferocious growth in greenhouse gases.

Countries that are still pondering the idea. According to the World Bank report, there are at least 14 developing countries that are in various stages of study. Chile, Costa Rica, Indonesia, Thailand, and Jordan are all developing some sort of “crediting mechanism.” South Africa has a carbon tax that could well be converted to a cap-and-trade program.

Add these programs all up, and it’s potentially quite significant. Right now, about 6 percent of the world’s greenhouse-gas sources are capped and traded. By the end of the decade, according to some estimates, that could rise to as much as one-third of all emissions.

Many of these countries could eventually link together — Australia’s climate-change minister, Greg Combet, has suggested that eventually South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and China could cooperate on some sort of pan-Asian carbon-trading system. And, the World Bank notes, there’s still plenty of demand for carbon-offset projects in the developing world under the U.N. program. All told, the global carbon-trading market rose to a record $176 billion in 2011.

Check out the rest of the article here.

(Image credit: Climatepedia)

From Sustainable Business:

South Korea passed legislation to begin a national cap-and-trade program with a near unanimous vote of 148-0, with three abstentions. 

The fourth largest economy in Asia, South Korea is the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions among industrialized countries, doubling since 1990. It is the 8th biggest source of GHG emissions in the world and has a national target of cutting them 30% by 2020.

POSCO, the world’s third largest steelmaker, and Samsung Electronics, the largest electronics manufacturer, are among South Korea’s biggest polluters.

Emissions trading is scheduled to begin in Korea in 2015, the same year as those in Australia and China. New Zealand started emissions trading in 2009, and the EU’s went into effect in 2005. South Africa has plans for a program. In the US, the northeastern states have a cap-and-trade program, California’s begins in 2013. 

In April, both Mexico and Peru passed national climate change legislation.

This opens the possibility of linking country cap-and-trade programs - allowing participants to trade regionallly and eventually worldwide - which would raise the value of carbon markets substantially.

Check out the rest of the article here.

(Photo credit: Energy Korea)

A few paragraphs from the CityFix article, ‘User Preference Key to Implementing Sustainable Transportation’, highlighting some important lessons for improving the walkability and bikeability of cities. The article profiles a new report, ‘Integration of Biking and Walking Infrastructure into Urban Communities’, which “highlights best practices and identifies program characteristics associated with high levels of non-motorized travel.” You can check out the rest of the article here.

(Photo credit: TheCityFix)

From USA Today:

The green economy lost fewer jobs than did the overall economy during the height of the United States’ recent recession, finds a study out today on California’s experiences.

The state’s overall economy lost 7% of jobs from January 2009 to January 2010 while its “core green economy” lost 3%, according to the study released by San Francisco-based Next 10, a non-partisan research group focused on innovation. The time period did not cover the collapse of California-based solar manufacturer Solyndra, which filed for bankruptcy protection in September 2011 after receiving a half-billion federal loan guarantee.

Longer term, from 1995-2010, the study found that job growth in the wider economy grew 12% but jumped 53% in businesses devoted to clean energy, recycling, reusing materials, conserving natural resources and reducing pollution.

Check out the rest of the article here and full report here. You might also want to check out Fast Company’s profile of the ‘10 Best Green Jobs for the Next Decade’.

(Graphic credits: Next 10 via Grist; Fast Company)

From Atlantic Cities:

New research from Southern California has found that residents of neighborhoods with a central core of shops and services – a pattern typically found in older, traditional communities – walk nearly three times more often than do residents of neighborhoods whose nearest shops and services lie along a major arterial roadway, a pattern typically found in newer suburban development.  Residents of traditionally styled and centered neighborhoods also drive less than their counterparts residing in the newer pattern.

This is true even when the data are controlled for individual and household economic and demographic characteristics.

…

Notably, the residents of the centered neighborhoods were found to take shorter trips, suggesting that walkable proximity – both closeness and a safe, direct walking route – to shops and services is also important. It may not do much to encourage walking, for example, if the dry cleaner’s is a quarter mile away as the crow flies but you have to travel two or three times that far navigating busy roads around the subdivision to get there.

Check out the rest of the article here.

(Photo credit: Calgary Herald)

From The Montreal Gazette:

Environment Minister Pierre Arcand announced the official adoption of Quebec’s cap-and-trade system to fight climate change Thursday – three days after what Arcand called the federal government’s “utterly regrettable” announcement that Canada will withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol.

Arcand said if industrialized countries abandon Kyoto – the lone legally binding international agreement on greenhouse gas reduction – it becomes all the more crucial for states and provinces to take legislative action to reduce emissions quickly.

Arcand said the cap-and-trade system will be good not just for the climate, but for the economy.

“With the adoption of this legislation, Quebec is positioning itself at the starting line, beside California,” he told a news conference Thursday at Montreal’s Biosphere.

“We are participating in the emergence of an economic tool that will transform one of the most significant environmental challenges of the 21st century into a real trampoline toward a green, prosperous and sustainable economy.”

States and provinces, through endeavours like the Western Climate Initiative, are acting independently to create a linked North American market for carbon credits, which aim to reduce emissions, encourage investment in clean energy technologies, create green jobs and improve public health.

California became the first state to adopt a cap-and-trade program in October, and like Quebec’s system, it comes into full effect in January 2013.

Check out the rest of the article here. 

(Photo credit: Globe & Mail)

(Photo credit: National Geographic)