F E AT U R E By Scott McAulay
Championing landscape as a climate solution The landscape profession could be incredibly impactful by strategically placing practitioners within local authorities, argues Scott McAulay of the Anthropocene Architecture School
F
or two years, the Anthropocene Architecture School has blended architectural education, climate literacy and climate justice activism – catalysing workshops, complementing existing structures, and offering challenge or provocation when necessary. It was inspired by Extinction Rebellion Scotland, has been supported by friends and members of the Scottish Ecological Design Association alike, and punches well above its weight internationally for a school with no building. Before existing for a year, the AAS had been invited to guest-lecture for the Architectural Association and provide an educators’ climate literacy session for the Mackintosh School of Architecture. It has also self-generated 30 workshops of its own – with the project directly engaging over 2600 people, to date. The AAS amplifies scientists’ call for meaningful climate action that has been ringing out for decades – since before the first Earth Day in 1970, preceding the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s first report in 1990 that made the science crystal clear. Calls that, 52
before 2018, should have already been impossible for any of us to ignore. On the 8th of October 2018, the IPCC published the“Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C”, which stated that, to keep global heating below 1.5°C, humanity must reduce its carbon dioxide emissions to net zero by 2050¹. Achieving this would mean halving global emissions by 2030, halving them again by 2040, and reaching zero no later than 2050². To do this equitably, industrialised countries – particularly those with colonial histories, like the U.K. – must decarbonise entirely well before 2050, to enable countries in the Global South to emit carbon as they transition their economies to net zero, whilst raising standards of living³. Using historical carbon emissions data, a recent study in The Lancet calculated that the Global North is responsible for 92% of climate breakdown, whilst those least responsible, in the Global South, are the ones disproportionately affected by its impacts4. Globally, carbon emissions vary extensively: the Confronting Carbon Inequality Report shows that the richest 1% of humanity now emit
twice as much carbon as the poorest 50% 5 but it cannot be forgotten that just 100 companies are responsible for 70% of carbon emissions since 1980 6. International resilience-building efforts and Net Zero Targets must acknowledge and address this context of climate injustice, so as to neither repeat nor exacerbate it. In ecological terms, resilience is a system’s ability to absorb disturbances and shocks, whilst retaining its basic structure. Resilience – or a lack of – also describes a system’s capacity to adapt to short term disruption and longterm change 7. Building resilience into the built environment and landscape intervention is urgent because the Climate and Ecological Emergency is not impending – it has been in motion and worsening for decades. It is critical that the construction industry urgently reduces its impact on the Earth, which currently accounts for 39% of global greenhouse gas emissions8. With COP26 on the horizon, construction cannot be left out of discussions as it has been historically – it is not addressed thoroughly enough in awareness campaigns from NGOs, nor is it meaningfully included in policy
