planted city

Seen around town: Bird houses and trees on False Creek’s Habitat Island

It’s Gettin’ Hot in Here: ‘How Many Gigatons of CO2?’ (Infographic)

Designed by David McCandless, this infographic… illustrates the amount of carbon dioxide that has been released into the atmosphere, how much can “safely” be released into the atmosphere and how much fossil fuel companies have ready to burn. It also associates the amount of global warming that will occur after different amounts of carbon release. If you read about climate change, you’ll sometimes hear these figures called the “carbon budget” or “the math of climate change.” It is an important and powerful concept to absorb and should change your thinking on how fast we must act.  (Source: Treehugger)

Infographic source: Information is Beautiful

It’s gettin’ hot in here: ‘Dramatic temperature increases could threaten Canadian health, infrastructure’ (Infographic)

From The Globe and Mail:

In the past 65 years, Canada’s national average winter temperature has risen 3.2 degrees.

This reaffirms what many suspected. Canada is getting hotter faster than ever before and at a faster rate than almost any other country. Rain, snow, sleet and hail storms are becoming more erratic. What were once considered exceptional weather patterns – the kind researchers reject to avoid skewing their data – are becoming common.

…

Canada’s infrastructure wasn’t built for this kind of climate. And much of the burden falls on municipal governments, with road, sewer and transit systems that can barely cope with existing weather conditions, let alone future vagaries.

…

Local public health officials are also paying close attention to vulnerable populations as extreme heat and cold become more frequent. They use climate projections to plan West Nile virus prevention – milder winters and springs can mean more mosquitos carrying the disease.

It’s a big deal for businesses, too, although many don’t know it yet. “Or they don’t want to know: They see it as a kind of capitulation,” said Blair Feltmate, who runs Canada’s Climate Change Adaptation Project.

More here.

Sustainability on the Mind: ‘Externalities’

From Sustainable Man:

David Suzuki explains the fallacy of conventional economics, in an interview done for the BBC. The song is “Outro” by M83.

Seen around town: a bird’s eye view of the Stanley Park seawall this past weekend. The seawall is grade separated with lanes for folks on bikes and foot.

Seen around town: Some straphangers lined up along the rainy block of West 4th ave & Vine earlier this week.

If you don’t know what a straphanger is check out Taras Grescoe’s awesome book on the topic: www.tarasgrescoe.com/straphanger/about.html.

From Reuters:

The world’s urban areas will more than double in size by 2030, presenting an opportunity to build greener and healthier cities, a U.N. study showed on Monday. Simple planning measures such as more parks, trees or roof gardens could make cities less polluted and help protect plants and animals, especially in emerging nations led by China and India where city growth will be fastest, it said.

“Rich biodiversity can exist in cities and is extremely critical to people’s health and well-being,” wrote Thomas Elmqvist of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, scientific editor of the Cities and Biodiversity Outlook.

The world’s urban population is expected to surge from just over 3.5 billion now to 4.9 billion by 2030, according to the assessment by the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity. At the same time, the area to be covered by cities will expand by 150 percent, it said.

“Most of this growth is expected to happen in small and medium-sized cities, not in megacities,” according to the report, issued to coincide with a U.N. meeting on biodiversity in Hyderabad, India. More green spaces in cities can filter dust and pollution and soak up heat-trapping carbon dioxide. Some studies have shown that the presence of trees can help reduce asthma and allergies for children living nearby, it said. And the study said that cities were also home to a wide range of animals and plants.

Check out the rest of the article here.

Related:

• Video: ‘Cities and Biodiversity Outlook’ (Stockholm Resilience Centre)

(Photo: The High Line)

Thomas Malone, senior professor at MIT in the Globe & Mail article, ‘Putting collective intelligence to work on a global threat’. He is one of the lead researchers behind the school’s innovative ‘Climate Co-lab’ project. You can check it out and get involved here.

The first three paragraphs of Peter Calthorpe’s recent article for Foreign Policy magazine, ‘Weapons of Mass Urban Destruction’. Calthorpe is a renowned San Francisco based urban planner and architect and a founding member of the Congress of New Urbanism. You can check out the rest of the article here.

(Photo source: Inhabitat)

Source: Cottage Country & The David Suzuki Foundation