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Notes2012 TED Prize Wish: The City 2.0
From TED Prize:
For the first time in the history of the prize, it is being awarded not to an individual, but to an idea. It is an idea upon which our planet’s future depends.
The 2012 TED Prize is awarded to….the City 2.0.
The City 2.0 is the city of the future… a future in which more than ten billion people on planet Earth must somehow live sustainably.
The City 2.0 is not a sterile utopian dream, but a real-world upgrade tapping into humanity’s collective wisdom.
The City 2.0 promotes innovation, education, culture, and economic opportunity.
The City 2.0 reduces the carbon footprint of its occupants, facilitates smaller families, and eases the environmental pressure on the world’s rural areas.
The City 2.0 is a place of beauty, wonder, excitement, inclusion, diversity, life.
The City 2.0 is the city that works.
(Photo credit: TheCityFix)
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Notes"The chief characteristic of sustainable systems is resilience, or the capacity of the system to “absorb disturbance, to undergo change and still retain essentially the same function, structure, and feedbacks.” It is a concept long familiar to engineers, mathematicians, ecologists, designers, and military planners.
Resilient systems are characterized by redundancy so that failure of any one component does not cause the entire system to crash. They consist of diverse components that are easily repairable, widely distributed, cheap, locally supplied, durable, and loosely coupled. However, resilience differs from sustainable development in one critical respect. Sustainability is sometimes described as an end-state as if it could be achieved once and for all. The goal of resilience, on the other hand, implies the capacity to make ongoing adjustments to changing political, economic, and ecological conditions.
In practical terms, resilience is a design strategy that aims to reduce vulnerabilities by shortening supply lines, improving redundancy in critical areas, bolstering local capacity, and solving for a deeper pattern of dependence and disability.
"Writer David Orr explaining the relationship between sustainability and resilience in his article, ‘Sustainability as National Security’.
(Image source: Green Flow)
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Notes Climate Change & Food Security: 'Act now to diversify crops at risk, say scientists'
From Eco-Business:
Farm chiefs have a narrowing chance to diversify vital crops at rising threat from drought, flood and pests brought by climate change, food researchers warned on Monday.
The world’s nearly 7 billion people are massively dependent on a dozen or so crops that, thanks to modern agriculture, are intensively cultivated in a tiny number of strains, they said.
When climate change gets into higher gear, many of these strains could be crippled by hotter and drier – or conversely wetter – weather and exposed to insects and microbial pests that advance into new habitats.
“Farmers have always adapted, but the pace of change under climate change is going to be much greater than in the past. There’s going to be a real need to move fast,” said Bruce Campbell, head of a research programme called Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS).
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The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) estimates Earth’s surface will probably warm by between 1.8 and 4.0 degrees Celsius over the 21st century.
Campbell said many scientists suspect that climate change is already well on the march, as evidenced by shifts in rainfall patterns and growing seasons in many observed locations.
He cautioned against “waiting 10 years” before the world moves to diversify plant strains.
“There are two sorts of changes that are going to happen. One is a gradual temperature increase, the other is the extremes, extremes of heat and floods, and I think they are already here. In the meteorological records, there are so many extremes that are being beaten, although it’s very difficult to pin them to climate change.”
The adaptation strategies are being published in a compendium book, Crop Adaptation to Climate Change.
(Image credit: Treehugger)
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Under the right circumstances, solar cells from Semprius could produce power more cheaply than fossil fuels
via nextbigfuture
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“Income Inequality As Seen from Space,” Per Square Mile, May 24, 2012
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Cycles of Life by Grant Snider
