climate-change

Alternatives Journal Spells Out Canada’s Map to Sustainability

- Adam Clare

Canada has a horrible international reputation when it comes to the environment. The federal government even has climate change deniers and actively supports the shameful tar sands. At Alternatives Journal they have worked with some of the smartest people in Canada to show Canadians there’s no reason to continue down the self-destructive path we are on.

Within the issue they look at many aspects of Canadian life from cities to mining.

THIS IS THE most important issue that A\J has ever published. It will land in the hands and mailboxes of more Canadians than any issue in A\J’s 44-year existence. What’s so important? We as a nation are on the cusp of embracing and implementing the sustainability that Gro Harlem Brundtland envisioned almost 30 years ago in her pivotal book, Our Common Future.

To help map our sustainable future, A\J has teamed with a group of Canadian scholars called Sustainable Canada Dialogues/Dialogues pour un Canada vert (SCD). Every scholar in this 60-person-plus group puts sustainability central to his or her area of research, whether it is species diversity, resource extraction or how we manage the land that feeds us. All SCD participants have identified what is needed for their specialized science or social science field to become more sustainable – and thus for Canada to become more sustainable. These pages contain articles by more than 20 of those scholars

Check out their map to sustainability issue.

Copenhagen Designed a Neighbourhood to Cope With Climate Change

- Adam Clare

Climate change is happening faster than projected and this means that cities need to react sooner than anticipated. We’ve seen efforts in New York that will create barriers against rising sea levels and other cities have done similar infrastructure improvements. Copenhagen has taken the next logical step: converting an existing neighbourhood into one ready for climate change.

The redesigned chunk of the city use vegetation and reigned streetscapes for a future-proof city.

They went for the green option. “Adding sewers is insanely costly, so a green-and-blue [vegetation and water] approach is more economical,” notes Esben Alslund-Lanthén, an analyst at the Copenhagen-based sustainability think tank Sustainia. There was just one challenge: No city has ever tried climate-change-adapting a whole neighborhood using just plants and water. “It’s a huge amount of water that we’ll have to redirect when the next cloudburst hits,” says Flemming Rafn Thomsen of Tredje Natur, the Danish architecture firm chosen for the project. “We looked at St. Kjeld and thought, ‘That’s a lot of asphalt with no function. We can use some of that space for water.’” On top of having little function, the asphalt gave St. Kjeld, a somewhat rundown working-class neighborhood, an even more depressing feel.

The answer, Rafn Thomsen and the city decided, was to tear up the neighborhood’s squares and replace their asphalt covering with what’s essentially a hilly, grassy carpet interspersed with walking paths. Should a storm, flood or rising sea levels hit the Danish capital again, the bucolic mini-parks will turn into water basins, the hills essentially functioning as the sides of a bowl. Thanks to a new pipe system, the squares will even be able to collect water from surrounding buildings’ roofs. Surrounding streets will, for their part, be turned into “cloudburst boulevards.” Under ordinary circumstances, they’ll just be ordinary streets with raised sidewalks, but during floods and megastorms, they’ll become canals, channeling rainwater away from the squares to the harbor. Millions of gallons of water will be dispatched back to the harbor on such aboveground waterways, St. Kjeld becoming a temporary Venice.

Read more.

Using Turntablism to Address Climate Change

- Adam Clare

Turntable Art

Climate change id the biggest issue facing humanity today and it’s no surprise to see artists express this through art. In Calgary this month there’s an exhibit by John Folsom which was inspired through a walk in the rocky mountains looking at sound and climate change. The way he does this is through a mixture of recordings, turntables, and Alpine horns.

Amidst a series of his two-dimensional works blurring the line between photography and painting, John Folsom’s sound installation Diminishing Returns highlights the problems associated with climate change at higher altitudes, in particular how it affects bird’s migratory zones. This sound installation will be on exhibit at Newzones in Calgary, Canada from October 25 through November 22 with an Artist Reception held on October 25 from 1 to 4 p.m.

Diminishing Returns consists of cast Alpine horns, turntables and lathe cut vinyl records. The sounds of avalanches and bird songs play continuously. As the turntable stylus auto repeats, the ongoing cycle of play effectively erodes the vinyl, diminishing the sound quality. Over time, repeated plays will slowly eliminate the birdcalls resulting in a final wall of white noise. This sound piece aims to call attention to the ominous signals from wildlife in the hope that mitigating the effects of climate change will produce a brighter future.

See more here.

30 Ways in 30 Days

- Adam Clare

The United Nations Environment Program has a new campaign that shows 30 case studies that prove that we already have the knowledge to stop climate change. Their campaign is call 30 Ways in 30 Days and will promote one case study each day – starting today!

This is to drum up support and interest for positive environmental polices for COP16 which takes place at the end of the month.

From creating mass markets for solar water heaters, improving vehicle efficiency, using waste for energy or installing energy-efficient cooking stoves or planting trees and protecting forests, UNEP’s 30 case studies prove that solutions to combat Climate Change are available, accessible and replicable.

Across the globe, in myriad ways, from community-based programmes to large entrepreneurial endeavors, the solutions have much in common. These projects do not represent the status quo, they embody innovation and creativity; they harness benefits for the people they serve as well as help us to take the actions needed to reduce global emissions.

The stories have been arranged according to UNEP’s Climate Change priorities, areas of work that support countries in their accelerated and effective response to a warming world and its unpredictable consequences.

Check out the official site.

What You Can do to Stop Climate Change

- Adam Clare

Here’s an example of what a German family are doing to lower their environmental impact and make the world a little better for their children:

Georg Fürtges’s pride and joy is a green monstrosity standing in the basement of his house in the western German city of Essen, hissing quietly and consuming dark little pellets that look like worms. The pellets, stored in bins reaching up to the ceiling in another room, are made of compressed sawdust. And the monstrosity is a furnace that is at least three times as big as a modern condensing gas boiler. Fürtges, 55, and his wife Karla, 49, have 6.4 tons of the pellets stored in their basement, enough to meet their heating needs for a year and a half. The couple has decided to live in an environmentally friendly way.
They have been doing so for more than 20 years, partly because they have three children and are thinking ahead, beyond their own life spans. They have made mistakes, but they have also learned a lot. They remain convinced that their approach is the right one, but they also know that a life devoted to living green can only be had at a high price. Georg Fürtges spent an entire year researching heating systems before he recently replaced his old gas furnace with a pellet furnace combined with a solar thermal heating system. Some of the pipes in the house had to be replaced. All told, it cost Fürtges €27,000 ($40,200) to retrofit his home. He would have paid about €10,000 for a modern gas furnace.

“We believe that it will pay off in the long term,” says Karla Fürtges. The couple bought their small 1930s house in Stadtwald, an Essen neighborhood, 16 years ago. The heating system was old, the windows weren’t insulated and the house lacked effective heat insulation.

The couple began by insulating the outside walls. Then they purchased the costly new gas furnace and had vinyl thermopane windows installed. The insulation alone brought down their annual natural gas consumption from 22,000 to 12,000 kilowatt hours. An average household currently consumes almost twice as much gas.

Keep reading at Der Spiegel

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