Tag Archives: green infrastructure

November 2014 in Review

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At the end of October, my Hope for the Future Index stood at -2.  I’ll give November posts a score from -3 to +3 based on how negative or positive they are.

Negative trends and predictions (-6):

  • There is mounting evidence that the world economy is slowing, financial corporations are still engaged in all sorts of dirty tricks, and overall investment may be dropping. Financial authorities are trying to respond through financial means, but the connections are not being made to the right kinds of investments in infrastructure, skills, and protection of natural capital that would set the stage for long-term sustainable growth in the future. (-2)
  • Public apathy over climate change in the U.S. may have been manufactured by a cynical, immoral corporate disinformation campaign over climate change taken right out of the tobacco companies’ playbook. It’s true that the tobacco companies ultimately were called to account, but not until millions of lives were lost. Will it be billions this time? (-2)
  • Glenn Beck has gone even further off his rocker, producing a video suggesting the U.N. is going to ration food and burn old people alive while playing vaguely middle eastern music. One negative point because some people out there might not laugh. (-1)
  • The new IPCC report predicts generally negative effects of climate change on crops and fisheries. The good news is it doesn’t seem to predict catastrophic collapse, but we need to remember that the food supply needs to grow substantially in the coming decades, not just hold steady, so any headwinds making that more difficult are potentially threatening. (-1)

Positive trends and predictions (+6):

  • A lot is known about how to grow healthy trees in the most urbanized environments. But only a few cities really take advantage of this readily available knowledge. (+0)
  • As manufacturing becomes increasingly high-tech, automation vs. employment is emerging as a big theme for the future. The balance may swing back and forth over time, but in the long term I think automation has to win. New wealth will be created, but the question is how broadly it will be shared. The question is not just an economic one – it depends on the kind of social and political systems people will live under in various places. This might be why the field of economics was originally called “political economy”. So I’m putting this in the positive column but giving it no points because the jury is out. (+0)
  • Google is working on nanobots that can swim around in your blood and give an early diagnosis of cancer and other diseases. (+1)
  • Economic slowing is probably the main reason why oil prices are way down. Increased supply capacity from the U.S. also probably plays a role, although there are dissenting voices how long that is going to last. I find it hard to say whether cheaper oil is good or bad. I tend to think it is just meaningless noise on the longer time scale, but you won’t hear me complain if it brings down the price of transportation and groceries for a year or two. (+0)
  • Millennials aren’t buying cars in large numbers. I don’t believe for a second that this means they are less materialistic than past generations, but I think a shift in consumption from cars to almost anything else is a net gain for sustainability. (+2)
  • I discovered the FRAGSTATS package for comprehensive spatial analysis of ecosystems and habitats. This gives us quantitative tools to design green webs that work well for both people and wildlife. Bringing land back into our economic framework in an explicit way might also help. (+1)
  • “Perennial polyculture” gardens may be able to provide food year round on small urban footprints in temperate climates. (+1)
  • A vision for smart, sustainable infrastructure involves walkable communities, closing water and material loops, and using energy wisely. Pretty much the same points I made in my book, which I don’t actively promote on this site;) (+1)

Hope for the Future Index (end of October 2014): -2

change during November 2014: -6 + 6 = 0

Hope for the Future Index (end of November 2014): -2 + 0 = -2

smart, sustainable infrastructure

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This long report is called Infrastructure Crisis, Sustainable Solutions: Rethinking Our Infrastructure Investment Strategies. They try to take all the talk about sustainable and smart infrastructure and boil it down to some actionable recommendations and goals. It’s worth a skim. Just to give some highlights, here are four goals they recommend for 2040:

  • Convert 95% of all types of energy use to renewables; fully deploy efficiency to cut demand 60%

  • Wring out water waste by 60%; integrate across water-wastewater-stormwater silos

  • Upgrade 75% of neighborhoods to“Very Walkable”; connect cities with high speed transit

  • Ensure 90% of products are managed by producers after use, and most ‘waste’ material is recovered by local industry

They talk about green infrastructure elsewhere in the text. Actually, it is now called “natural infrastructure”. People are probably a little burned out on the green buzzword. Some other interesting buzzwords they use are “sustainable asset management” and “performance-based infrastructure”.

more trees!

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This article in Landscape and Urban Planning is all about street trees. You would think this topic would have been exhausted, that is the technology would have been perfected, by now. And it has, in a few places. I am convinced it is not that leading edge knowledge about trees needs to be advanced all that much, but most cities are completely ignorant of what the best practices are. People in charge don’t know what they don’t know and have zero interest in finding out.

Street trees are an integral element of urban life. They provide a vast range of benefits in residential and commercial precincts, and they support healthy communities by providing environmental, economic and social benefits. However, increasing areas of impermeable surface can increase the stresses placed upon urban ecosystems and urban forests. These stresses often lead tree roots to proliferate in sites that provide more-favourable conditions for growth, but where they cause infrastructure damage and pavement uplift. This damage is costly and a variety of preventative measures has been tested to sustain tree health and reduce pavement damage. This review explores a wide range of literature spanning 30 years that demonstrates the benefits provided by street trees, the perceptions of street trees conveyed by urban residents, the costs of pavement damage by tree roots, and some tried and tested measures for preventing pavement damage and improving tree growth.

green web

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From a blog called Better Institutions, I like this concept of a “green web”, which combines a more traditional green belt outside the city with a network of green spaces and corridors inside the city. This is the real green infrastructure vision – a system that connects patches and larger habitats and brings people, plants, and animals together and allows them to move around in a safe and low stress way. This post isn’t about that though, it’s about urban planning – green infrastructure is potentially one of the key intersection points of water, energy, transportation, air, food, climate, ecology, and urban planning.

Source: http://www.betterinstitutions.com/2014/11/green-webs-connecting-not-containing.html

Source: http://www.betterinstitutions.com/2014/11/green-webs-connecting-not-containing.html

habitat fragmentation and connectivity

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Did you ever wonder how to quantitatively analyze the quality, shape, and degree of connectivity of natural habitats? Well, there’s an open source app for that, called FRAGSTATS, and good documentation that describes the theory behind it. To summarize, it looks at area and edge, shape, core area, contrast, aggregation, and diversity. Here are just a few quotes describing some of the metrics.

“Core area is defined as the area within a patch beyond some specified depth-of-edge influence (i.e., edge distance) or buffer width.”

“Contrast refers to the magnitude of difference between adjacent patch types with respect to one or more ecological attributes at a given scale that are relevant to the organism or process under consideration.”

“Aggregation refers to the tendency of patch types to be spatially aggregated; that is,
to occur in large, aggregated or “contagious” distributions.”

“FRAGSTATS computes 3 diversity indices. These diversity measures are influenced by 2 components- richness and evenness. Richness refers to the number of patch types present; evenness refers to the distribution of area among different types.”

trees!

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Here’s a long document from the “Trees and Design Action Group” in the UK about everything to do with planting trees in the city. Of particular use to me are some good references on dealing with underground utilities, species selection, and just lots and lots of great pictures. Even some nice stats on the odds of being killed by a tree compared to car accidents and cancer (the odds are very low, but not zero).  Trees really can be done a lot better than most American cities do them.

September 2014 in Review

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At the end of August, my Hope for the Future Index stood at +1.  As I did last month, I’ll sort selected posts that talk about positive trends and ideas vs. negative trends, predictions, and risks. Just for fun, I’ll keep a score card and pretend my posts are some kind of indicator of whether things are getting better or worse. I’ll give posts a score from -3 to +3 based on how negative or positive they are.

Negative trends and predictions (-8):

  • The drought in California’s Central Valley and on the Great Plains continues to get worse. (-1)
  • There are signs that Europe may be in a long-term economic depression. The term “new normal” is being batted around to describe a possible long term slowdown in growth affecting the entire world. (-2)
  • Governments and corporations are starting to use armed drones in crowd control. (-1)
  • In a new simulation of a society with increasing resource scarcity and technological innovation, increasing resource scarcity wins. (-1)
  • Meat and dairy consumption can’t continue rising at their current rate forever. (-1)
  • Herman Daly reminds us that the most common measure of economic growth does not distinguish between costs and benefits. Benjamin Friedman, in arguing that there is a moral imperative for economic growth, also used a more socially inclusive definition of growth than the most common one in use today. (-1)
  • The Ebola outbreak continues to get worse and worse, although people are arguing that this is not the type of plague that could threaten civilization itself. (-1)

Positive trends and predictions (+8):

  • Some countries have more sustainable policies than others, and the world could become more sustainable if we all copy the best examples. But even then, the world would probably not be sustainable enough. (+0)
  • People have come up with some novel ideas for backyard wildlife habitat. (+1)
  • Big companies are figuring out how to set up units that innovate more like startups. (+1)
  • Walkable cities with green infrastructure may help boost creativity and problem solving. There is plenty of evidence that walkability might be the single most important key to more sustainable cities. (+1)
  • There have actually been small advances in telepathy. Too soon to say if this will be used for good or evil. (+0)
  • There is a new generation of robot vacuum cleaners. Anything that can free humanity from the drudgery of house work has to be a good thing – almost any other use of our time has to be more productive, creative, or at least more fun. (+1)
  • There is some buzz about sustainable consumption. I just don’t know – the whole concept of “consumption” as an end in itself seems unsustainable to me. (+0)
  • There is also continuing buzz about “green growth” and “de-growth”, but in my opinion very little evidence that these ideas are catching on. (+0)
  • We were reminded that green infrastructure is more than just stormwater management. It’s a beautiful vision to link stormwater management, urban trees and parks, corridors and rural reserves together. But we need more people to share the vision and make it happen. (+1)
  • Another way to make cities a lot more sustainable is to have the price of parking actually reflect its total economic, social, and environmental cost, including the opportunity cost of the oceans of land that are just wasted. (+1)
  • Worldwide child mortality has dropped almost by half just since 1990. (+2)

Hope for the Future Index (August 2014): +1

August 2014 change: -8 + 8 = 0

Hope for the Future Index (September 2014): +1

green infrastructure reminder

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The American Society of Landscape Architects reminds us that green infrastructure is more than what we used to call stormwater management practices. It’s a network of designed and natural ecosystems linked together to perform critical functions cheaper and better than purely manmade systems could:

Green infrastructure includes park systems, urban forests, wildlife habitat and corridors, and green roofs and green walls. These infrastructure systems protect communities against flooding or excessive heat, or help to improve air and water quality, which underpin human and environmental health…

Here are just some of the many benefits that these systems provide all at once: green infrastructure absorbs and sequesters atmospheric carbon dioxide (C02); filters air and water pollutants; stabilizes soil to prevent or reduce erosion; provides wildlife habitat; decreases solar heat gain; lowers the public cost of stormwater management infrastructure and provides flood control; and reduces energy usage through passive heating and cooling. In contrast, grey infrastructure usually provides just a single benefit.

“All at once” and “single benefit” are key phrases. You have entities like wastewater authorities, transportation authorities, parks and wildlife agencies that are each trying to maximize the single benefit they have been tasked within the limited budget each has given. Each is trying to be efficient, but together they are inefficient, redundant, and even working at cross purposes. There is nothing responsible or ethical about sitting inside your bubble making “cost-effective” decisions that ignore everything happening outside your bubble.

This article drills down to a fantastic wealth of references that we should all take a year off and read.

(By the way, this article also contains some questionable numbers about at least one program I happen to be familiar with. But never mind, the concepts are right even if the numbers are questionable.)

backyard wildlife projects

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This Permaculture Research Institute article has some interesting videos about projects to attract more backyard wildlife. I don’t think I could convince my urban neighbors that these are a good idea (a “hotel” for centipedes and bees?) They need some adaptation and scaling for urban areas. It could be done though. I especially like the idea of girls playing with bugs – it is natural for children to be covered in bugs most of the time and modern society has gotten away from that.

“blue carbon”

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This article in Ecological Economics is about carbon sequestration in “mangrove forests, seagrass meadows, and tidal salt marshes”, and policy and market mechanisms that can help make this happen. To me carbon sequestration is not the only or the primary reason to try to conserve these ecosystems, but I will certainly support it if it gets the job done. Plus if we can come up with hard-nosed market-based approaches that actually work, we can apply them to conservation and restoration of a whole range of ecosystems.

Blue carbon – the carbon stored and sequestered in mangrove forests, seagrass meadows, and tidal salt marshes – is considered a cost-effective means to achieve positive climate change mitigation and adaptation outcomes. Blue carbon is therefore of considerable interest to the scientific and policy communities, and is frequently discussed in relation to carbon markets and climate finance opportunities. This paper identifies peer-reviewed and ‘gray literature’ documents that discuss blue carbon in the context of finance and market mechanisms. The document set is analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively, and the principal scientific, economic, regulatory, social, and management issues that emerge are discussed. The study reveals that (1) the blue carbon literature is dominated by technical and policy commentary, with a dearth of research into practical social considerations and a stark absence of private sector perspectives; (2) there is confusion over the nature and role of important concepts including private and public sector finance and instruments; and (3) understanding of the important issues of investment priorities and risk considerations is also limited. This paper therefore identifies gaps in the blue carbon literature, clarifies critical concepts and issues, and proposes novel pathways for blue carbon research and project development.