9 minute read
Championing landscape as a climate solution
Scott McAulay
Scott McAulay is an architectural designer, and a climate justice activist with Extinction Rebellion Scotland. He coordinates the Anthropocene Architecture School.
For 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, 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 2050 (1). Achieving this would mean halving global emissions by 2030, halving them again by 2040, and reaching zero no later than 2050 (2). 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 living (3).
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 impacts (4). 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 emissions (8). 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 discussions or public debate. Limiting global heating depends upon addressing this issue.
Global Green House Gas Emissions – Data from World Green Building Council 2020.
© McAulay 2020
Global heating of around 1-1.2°C above pre-industrial levels already amplifies extreme weather events and disrupts seasonal weather patterns (9). This means that long established “rules of thumb” in many localities for drainage and flooding shall eventually no longer apply. Talking of the aversion of the Climate Emergency as opposed to the mitigation of ongoing climate breakdown is to discount the lived experience of hundreds of thousands of people experiencing climate impacts and shocks – as there is documented evidence of climate change every single day since 2012 (10). Human activity has shifted the planet into the Anthropocene: an uncharted territory, where atmospheric carbon dioxide levels sit at around 415ppm – well above the 350ppm “threshold of safety” – and have not been as high in over 800,000 years (11).
Concurrently, global heating affects the Earth’s hydrological cycle: as global temperatures rise, warmer air and warmer seas increase the amount of water that evaporates from the oceans. Warmer air in turn can hold more water vapour, its capacity increasing by 7% for each additional 1°C of heating (12). As a result, this excess of water vapour in the air means that when the air does cool down enough for clouds to form, not only will there be more frequent rainfall, but there is also a greater chance that downpours will be heavier, amounting to an acceleration and intensification of weather systems.
This intensification, coupled with rising sea levels, demands that we do more than just manage water, and go beyond reactively responding to flooding. Current government policy is not conducive to this – a 2019 Greenpeace investigation revealed that thousands of homes are still planned to be built in high-risk flooding zones across England (13) – and legislation enabling such irresponsibility must be challenged. In Retrofitting for Flood Resilience: A Guide to Building & Community Design, author Edward Barsley states that “sealevel rise will lead to many communities around the world being flooded on a regular basis. Boundaries between land and sea will become blurred.” He also stresses that there is no silver bullet flood resilience strategy (14).
This graphic is an Anthropocene Architecture School illustration: its root is the Adaptive Cycle - conceptually describing the resilience of any given system, and it is overlaid with the MET Office data for average global average temperature changes from 1850-2018. It essentially conveys the changes climate in which we now live, and stresses the need for resilience thinking and systems approaches.
© McAulay 2020
But, what if our future, reimagined relationship with water were not quite so apocalyptic? What if every single act of adaptation, defence or mitigation was intentionally designed to simultaneously yield both community and ecological benefit?
Now, for the good news. The Centre for Alternative Technology’s “Zero Carbon Britain Report – Rising to the Climate Emergency” illustrates that we already have sufficient technologies to operate as a zerocarbon society (15). It stresses that the barrier to carbon neutrality is not technological, but political.
Complementing CAT’s Net Zero scenario is a report from the Committee on Climate Change, that states that 62% of the changes necessary to achieve net zero are behavioural and societal (16) . Solutions have existed for decades, but the political will and public pressure that would make implementing potentially unpopular solutions feasible for politicians on election cycles is in short supply. Figures from the “BEIS Public Attitudes Tracker” stress that 64% of those questioned had not heard of the concept of net zero prior, and only 3% considered themselves to have a great deal of awareness (17). Those of us aware of sustainability issues are operating in echo chambers more than we realise and must get significantly better at communicating this to clients, colleagues, politicians, and the public alike.
There is also a myth that the financial cost of climate action is prohibitive, but the truth is much to the contrary: inaction costs substantially more. Fourteen years ago, the UK government commissioned “Stern Review” warned that inaction on climate change could damage global GDP by 20%, whilst curbing it would have then cost around 1% (18). In terms of the economic value of building flood resilience, every single pound invested safeguards against £9 of property damage and wider impacts (19) – just imagine the accumulative positive impacts if every such defence had additional ecological purpose, like habitat creation or rainwater retention. Promisingly, another recently published report calculates that reaching net zero by 2050 would cost 0.5% of global GDP, and further builds the case for urgent, transformative action (20).
Individual, personal actions – in aggregate – are important, but what we urgently need is systemic change and high-level intervention. The time for not challenging clients and government on ecologically irresponsible projects has ended. This could be as diplomatic as strategically suggesting which scheme to visit, or as provocative as using your professional platform as a landscape architect, or as an Institute, to publicly support campaigns, such as the Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill – a proposed upgrade to 2008’s Climate Change Act.
Alternatively, the landscape profession could be incredibly impactful by strategically placing practitioners within local authorities, in similar capacities to Public Practice Associates. This creates opportunity to imbue Planning Policy with ecological awareness, and champion the potential of landscape as a climate solution and public health strategy. Climate Emergency Action Plans, Decarbonisation Road Maps, Green New Deals and planning departments would all benefit immensely from landscape architects’ environmental expertise and wisdom.
Tackling a problem as complex as the Climate Crisis requires nothing short of a societal transformation of an at least comparable magnitude. So, we must urgently challenge all legislation and policy that impede such a transition. We can start by calling upon government to redirect hydrocarbon subsidies into regenerative agricultural practices, renewable energy infrastructure, and mass retrofit exercises; to intervene within existing systems to transform how the built environment impacts the Earth – specifically its hydrological cycle, landscapes, and the non-human species we share our home with. Cultivating capacities for resilience and reimagining our relationship with water will be one small.
Toni Cade Bambara famously said: “the role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible”. It is now clear that to build sufficient political will to decarbonise and protect nature as fast as science demands will require nothing less. As the IPCC stressed in 2018, all pathways that limit us to a 1.5ºC temperature rise “begin now” and require “unprecedented societal transformation”.
IPCC Special Report
© IPCC
A key role the landscape profession can play in catalysing this transformation is by educating and empowering clients, communities, design teams and governments with the environmental experience and professional knowledge necessary to radically redefine our built environments’ relationship with the Earth’s natural systems. Individually, the role of the landscape architect is to ensure that nature – designed or wild – plays a role in any decarbonisation strategy or economic recovery plan they have the capacity to influence, through advocacy, campaigning, education, political engagement, practice and – when necessary – through taking direct, transformative and urgent action.
References
1 https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/
2 Figuerres, C and Rivett-Carnac, T (2020). The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis.
3 Hickel, J (2020). Less Is More: How degrowth will save the world.
4https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/ PIIS2542-5196(20)30196-0/fulltext
5https://www.oxfam.org/en/research/confrontingcarbon-inequality
6 https://www.cdp.net/en/articles/media/new-reportshows-just-100-companies-are-source-of-over-70-ofemissions
7 https://education.resilience.org/product/self-directedcourse/
8 https://www.worldgbc.org/
9 Holthaus, E (2020). Future Earth – A Radical Vision for What’s Possible in the Age of Warming.
10https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/environmentand-conservation/2020/01/weather-shows-evidenceclimate-change-every-single-day-2012
11 https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/carbon-dioxide/
12 Grossman, E (2020) https://extinctionrebellion.uk/ the-truth/the-emergency/
13 https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2019/11/15/ flooding-uk-boris-johnson-sheffield-yorkshire/
14 Barsley, E (2019). Retrofitting for Flood Resilience: A Guide to Building & Community Design.
15 https://www.cat.org.uk/info-resources/zero-carbonbritain/research-reports/zero-carbon-britain-rising-tothe-climate-emergency/
16https://www.sgr.org.uk/sites/default/files/201911/Scientists_Behaving_Responsibly_SGRreport.pdf
17 https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/ beis-public-attitudes-tracker-wave-33
18https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ j.1728-4457.2006.00153.x
19https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/adifferent-philosophy-why-our-thinking-on-floodingneeds-to-change-faster-than-the-climate
20 https://www.energy-transitions.org/publications/ making-mission-possible/
