planted city

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)

Connect the Dots: Lester Brown on ‘Why Food Is The New Oil And Land The New Gold’

From CNBC:

The United Nations food agency reports that food prices are rising again, reaching 6-month highs and nearing levels not since 2008. Higher prices then spurred food riots in the Middle East and North Africa, which fueled the Arab Spring.

There’s no sign of widespread food riots now but eventually there could be, says Lester Brown, president and founder of the Earth Policy Institute and author of the new book “Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity.”

“The term ‘food unrest’ will become part of our daily vocabulary,” Brown tells The Daily Ticker.

It reflects the imbalance between the supply of food and demand for food globally.

Check out the rest of the article here.

Related:

• New England Complex Systems Institute ‘Food Briefing’
• ‘Americans waste, throw away nearly half their food: study’ (Reuters)
• ‘How much in food do Canadians waste a year? Think billions’ (Globe & Mail)
• ‘7 ways to reduce household food waste’ (CBC)

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)

I recently stumbled upon this article from Postmedia’s award-winning national science writer, Margaret Munro. It was written in advance of June’s Rio+20 summit, which was widely viewed to have achieved limited results. That said, the article offers a good summary of some of the big systemic changes that we’re likely going to have to pull off on the long road to building a sustainable and resilient future. In other words, it’s going to take a whole lot more than riding a bike, recycling, and using cloth shopping bags.

The article has a bit of a Canadian focus, but the steps are universal:

1. Start a revolution

2. Energy game change

3. Put a price on carbon

4. Overhaul corporate motives and mindsets

5. Green Canada’s blackened record 

6. Transform cities

7. Connect the dots before you buy

8. Eat less meat

9. Embrace education (and contraception)

10. Get politically active

You can read the rest of the article and an explanation of each of the steps here, but I’ll post the first one here as an example:

“For most of the last century, economic growth was fuelled by what seemed to be a certain truth: the abundance of natural resources. We mined our way to growth. We burned our way to prosperity. We believed in consumption without consequences,” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last year. He went on to describe it as a “recipe for national disaster. It is a global suicide pact.”

“We need a revolution,” he said. “Revolutionary thinking. Revolutionary action. A free-market revolution for global sustainability”.

Related:

Lester Brown on ‘How the battle for water will reshape our world’

From AlterNet via YouTube:

By 2025, two-thirds of people worldwide are expected to face water shortages as businesses, agriculture and growing populations compete for the ever more precious commodity.

Map source: Water for Life Decade (UN)

From Coursera:

This course introduces the academic approach of Sustainability and explores how today’s human societies can endure in the face of global change, ecosystem degradation and resource limitations. The course focuses on key knowledge areas of sustainability theory and practice, including population, ecosystems, global change, energy, agriculture, water, environmental economics and policy, ethics, and cultural history.

This subject is of vital importance, seeking as it does to uncover the principles of the long-term welfare of all the peoples of the planet. As sustainability is a cross-disciplinary field of study, this foundation requires intellectual breadth: as I describe it in the class text, understanding our motivations requires the humanities, measuring the challenges of sustainability requires knowledge of the sciences (both natural and social), and building solutions requires technical insight into systems (such as provided by engineering, planning, and management).

All you need to participate is a decent internet connection and an up to date browser. More details including how to sign up here. You can download the class text for free here.

(Image source: Globaia)

From The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign:

This course introduces the academic approach of Sustainability and explores how today’s human societies can endure in the face of global change, ecosystem degradation and resource limitations. The course focuses on key knowledge areas of sustainability theory and practice, including population, ecosystems, global change, energy, agriculture, water, environmental economics and policy, ethics, and cultural history.

.

This subject is of vital importance, seeking as it does to uncover the principles of the long-term welfare of all the peoples of the planet. As sustainability is a cross-disciplinary field of study, this foundation requires intellectual breadth: as I describe it in the class text, understanding our motivations requires the humanities, measuring the challenges of sustainability requires knowledge of the sciences (both natural and social), and building solutions requires technical insight into systems (such as provided by engineering, planning, and management).

Ecological Footprint creator William Rees on ‘Why We’re in Denial’  

From The Extra-Environmentalist:

Dr. William Rees is a professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia and former director of the School of Community and Regional Planning (SCARP). He is the originator of the “ecological footprint” concept and co-developer of the method… We ask Bill about the reasons we’re in denial and how we could start adapting to our ecological challenges through a new cultural narrative.

From The Vancouver Sun:

Humans are so altering Earth’s biosphere that an international team is warning “a state shift” could be just decades away.

They don’t use the word doomsday, but they come close.

“Humans now dominate Earth, changing it in ways that threaten its ability to sustain us and other species,” the researchers report Thursday in the journal Nature.

The researchers stress it is not known how close Earth is to a global tipping point, or if it is inevitable.

But they suggest that the planet’s ecosystems could shift into a new state within just a few decades or a few generations if human population and consumption rates continue to soar.

… 

The Nature paper grew out of a 2010 conference that raised plenty of questions about whether humans could trigger a state shift, but few answers on how to recognize and avoid it.

The 22 biologists, ecologists, theoreticians, geologists and paleontologists who produced Thursday’s report reviewed past stateshifts — the latest being end of the most recent ice age — and the remarkable changes humans are driving on the planet.

The climate is warming so fast that the “mean global temperature by 2070 (or possibly a few decades earlier) will be higher than it has been since the human species evolved,” they say.

And to support the current population of seven billion people, about 43 per cent of Earth’s land surface has been converted to agricultural or urban use. The population is expected to hit nine billion by 2045 and they say current trends suggest that half Earth’s land surface will be altered by humans by 2025.

That’s “disturbingly close” to a potential global tipping point, Barnosky says in a release issued with the report. The study says tipping points tend to occur when 50 to 90 per cent of smaller ecosystems have been disrupted.

“I think that if we want to avoid the most unpleasant surprises, we want to stay away from that 50 per cent mark,” Barnosky says.

The “ultimate effects” of a state shift are unknown, but the researchers suggest it could have severe impact on the world’s fisheries, agriculture, forests and water resources. And they warn that “widespread social unrest, economic instability and loss of human life could result.”

…

The report is one of series of papers in Nature this week on the huge challenges facing international leaders and delegates gathering in Rio de Janeiro on June 20 for the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, known as Rio+20. It is the 20th anniversary of 1992 Earth Summit in Rio.

The journal notes there has been little progress on key international commitments made 20 years ago.

Instead of curbing carbon emissions to try slow climate change, global greenhouse emissions have soared 45 per cent since 1990. And governments are nowhere near meeting 20-year-old pledges to better protect biodiversity — 30 per cent of amphibians, 21 per cent of birds and 25 per cent of mammals are at risk of extinction, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Check out the rest of the article here.

Related:

• Green decline ‘may bring irreversible change’ (BBC)
• Environmental collapse now a serious threat: scientists (The Province)
• Evidence of impending tipping point for Earth (Science Daily)

(Image sources: NASA; Grist)

Thinking Globally: ‘Living Planet Report 2012’

From WWF:

The Living Planet Report is the world’s leading, science-based analysis on the health of our only planet and the impact of human activity. Its key finding? Humanity’s demands exceed our planet’s capacity to sustain us. That is, we ask for more than what we have.