02/04/2021

(AU) Designing Liveable Cities For Our Future Climate

Pursuit: University of Melbourne - Leire Asensio Villoria | David Mah

The Climate Imaginary exhibit explores works from architects and urban designers, pushing the boundaries of our imagination to envision better and more creative climate futures for our cities

Monarch sanctuary. Terreform ONE
Imagine looking up from your office computer and onto a mini sanctuary for monarch butterflies.

You walk through the building’s corridors where a fresh breeze is being drawn in from the outdoors and stroll through the lush green park built on the rooftop of your metro station to take the train home.

An office sanctuary for monarch butterflies and rooftop parks are some of the ideas from urban designers for future cities. Picture: Getty Images
These are the new scenarios urban designers are starting to envision for a future which addresses the climate emergency.

Although there has been a long-standing emphasis on sustainability and resilience in architecture, landscape, urban planning and design, the general thrust has been towards problem-solving using technical and technological solutions.

How our cities should respond to the biodiversity extinction crisis.  Read more

With the tangible effects of the climate emergency dominating our collective consciousness, there is now an emerging mandate within the design field to combine creative approaches with technological solutions to address climate change urgently.

Part of this emerging work has involved a more speculative approach, while including explicitly cultural, political and aesthetic emphases.

The Climate Imaginary exhibit, part of Melbourne Design Week, explores works from different architects and urban designers with an aim to push the boundaries of our imagination to envision better and more creative climate futures for our cities and public spaces.

For example, a non-profit architecture and urban design research group called Terreform ONE proposes innovative infrastructures to create synthetic urban habitats for threatened species such monarch butterflies.

And how about we start eating crickets? A radical idea for sure, but one of that addresses carbon emissions of the meat industry.

The Logrono intermodal station station offers a public park where an open rail line would have divided the city. Picture: Abalos+Sentkiewicz
Terraform One’s designs show the possibility of creating compact cricket shelters, offering a solution that vastly reduces the carbon footprint of protein-based food production.

Its novelty also helps to start a conversation on the significant consequences of our food choices and a possible transformation of our most long-standing cultural norms.

One million urban trees.  Read more
Another project from Madrid architectsAbalos+Sentkiewicz envisions moving away from hermetically sealed climate-controlled buildings and creating ‘thermodynamic beauties’ .

Through their work, the architects have developed an expertise in the formal, material and organisational aspects of a building which support a more thoughtful approach to the thermodynamic behaviour of a building.

Their projects for the Logrono train station and Sorigue Foundation offer elegant and novel built forms, where the aesthetics of the projects are combined with a highly sophisticated understanding of achieving thermal comfort instead of the more conventional emphasis on visual attributes.

The Sorigue project encompasses both a museum space and an observation platform. Here, the designers use the heavy mass of the concrete walls, its cubic volume, its site location within an excavated quarry as well as its saw-tooth roofline to achieve both the desired formal appearance and choosing an effective material for achieving thermal comfort.

For example, during the day, the saw tooth roof allows for sunlight to enter the volume of the building while also providing a good orientation for solar panels.

The Sorigue project combines an understanding of achieving thermal comfort as well as the more conventional emphasis on visual attributes. Picture: Abalos+Sentkiewicz
However, these roof openings also enable heat release at night, allowing the building to reset for the next day. The thermal mass of the exterior walls offers exceptional insulation while, together with the roofline, achieving a graceful monumentality which reflects the site’s history as a quarry.

Protecting our thirsty urban trees from more harsh summers.  Read more

On the other hand, the interior walls and floors are designed for lightness and to house water conduits which use these surfaces to disseminate radiant heating and cooling while also achieving an overall sense of openness in the building’s interior.

By burying the rail tracks, their Logrono intermodal station offers a public park where an open rail line would have divided the city.

By using the station roof as a public park, the architects generate a gift to the citizens of Logrono while also introducing landscape spaces rather than the conventional industrial spaces of such infrastructures.

They also plan for a cluster of residential towers adjacent to the station which will be formed in a way that they act as solar collectors, gathering energy for water heating and lighting the public park so that it may be used safely at night.

The project offers us an exemplary image of how large infrastructure projects could also provide valuable public green spaces in our cities.
A design to better adapt Melbourne’s shorelines for a climate changed future with possible flooding and sea level rises. Picture: Melbourne School of Design studio: hydrosphere
The Office for Urbanization at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design is looking at building cities that are dedicated to solving climate change issues.

Their proposal for 50 new agricultural towns in China is critical of large scale industrialisation in contemporary agriculture. Instead, these constellation of towns are planned around ecological cultivation aimed at sustaining traditional culinary practices and supporting biodiversity.

What could sustainable Australian cities look like in 2040?  Read more

At another scale, Ecosistema Urbano, focuses on public spaces as micro-climates and designing accordingly. For example, placing cooling mists in parks and bus shelters for hotter regions, or creating underground pathways for colder climates where walking in the open can be problematic.

Their innovative public spaces leverage new technologies and networks to build novel public environments, widening the ways in which urban design is practiced.

Finally, a university design studio can also be a fertile forum for cultivating the climate imaginary. At MSD, a number of Masters-level studios have been structured around a design-led engagement with the challenges of the climate emergency.

One series of studios focuses on re-defining Melbourne’s hydrosphere, that is all of the water in our environment. How can we better adapt Melbourne’s shorelines for a climate changed future with possible flooding and sea level rises?

Students have come up with ideas like having more green spaces around Melbourne’s shores, flood-resistant structures and keeping buildings further away from the waterline.

Design students have come up with ideas like having more green spaces around Melbourne’s shores. Picture: Melbourne School of Design studio: hydrosphere
This emerging body of work and novel design knowledge helps to expand the focus on the climate emergency to the complex and multi-level challenge that it is.

It also helps us to reframe the engagement with this global and wicked crisis as a creative act, one that may require us to transform conventions and imagine other possible futures.

Note: Melbourne School of Design’s online Climate Imaginary exhibit is on until 5 April as part of National Gallery of Victoria’s Melbourne Design Week 2021.

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(AU) Black Summer Bushfires Could Be Yearly Event Due To Climate Change: Report

Canberra Times - 

Black Summer bushfire seasons could occur every year if temperatures continue to rise at current levels. Picture: Sitthixay Ditthavong

Bushfire seasons as severe as Black Summer could happen as often as every year if global temperatures continue to rise at their current levels, according to a new report.

A landmark report, released on Wednesday by the Australian Academy of Science, found Australia's ecological systems would be "unrecognisable" if temperatures remained on track to increase to 3 degrees above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century.

A 3-degree increase in temperatures would lead to as much as a 300 per cent increase in the number of extreme fire days each year.

The report said the increased temperatures would also cause severe heatwaves to take place at least seven times per year, lasting an average of 16 days each.

An increase of 1.5 degrees would lead to severe heatwaves happening three times per year, averaging 7.5 days each.

As many as 250,000 additional properties would be at risk of coastal flooding due to climate change impacts.

Even with an increase of 2 degrees, the report found 99 per cent of the coral along the Great Barrier Reef would be wiped out.

By 2030, it's estimated one in 19 property owners in the country would have unaffordable insurance premiums due to the climate risk, with that number expected to soar with a 3-degree increase.

Report co-author Lesley Hughes said Australia had already experienced extreme climate change following just a 1 degree increase in temperatures.

"The frequency and severity of these threats will continue to increase over the next few decades, regardless of emissions reductions, because they are already baked into the system," Professor Hughes said.

"Emissions reduction over the next decade is the critical time period because they determine what happens in the second half of the century and determine the nature of climate change as an existential threat."

Alarmingly, the report said it was "virtually impossible" to limit climate change to under 1.5 degrees, even if Australia met all of its current commitments to the Paris Climate Agreement.

The Paris Agreement, which was signed in 2015, called for countries to reduce temperatures to under 2 degrees.

"The total emissions reductions currently pledged by the Australian and international governments ... even if implemented on time, will translate as average global surface temperatures of 3 degrees or more above the pre-industrial period by 2100," the report said.

"The planet is well on the path to devastating climate change."

The report said Australia would need to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 in order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

Among the 10 recommendations made by the academy were to scale up the development of low to zero-emissions technology and continue to build adaptation strategies to deal with the effects of change already in the climate system.

"Australia is well-positioned to meet this challenge .. .Australia has the potential to be a clean industrial powerhouse," the report said.

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(AU) Australia’s ‘Catastrophic’ Future Laid Bare

 NEWS.com.au - Benedict Brook

A new report has set out a picture of Australia’s “grim future” if the government doesn’t take action now. Doing nothing will lead to “collapse”.

The dire consequences to Australia of global warming.

Regular 50C days in Sydney and Melbourne; once in a century floods ever year; mass deaths of livestock; tropical diseases invading our major cities and a quarter of a million homes underwater.

Climate scientists have laid out a “catastrophic” future for Australia with the weather “flipping on its head”.

It now looks “virtually impossible” the world will meet a goal of keeping average temperatures to 1.5 per cent above pre-industrial levels, say the authors of a new report.

A far more likely scenario is that global temperatures will soar by up to 3C.

“If we continue on our merry way in terms of substantial greenhouse emissions then we go into a 3C future which looks grim for Australia,” said the director of Australian National University’s Institute for Climate Energy and Disaster Solutions Professor Mark Howden.

He is one of the co-authors of the new report from the Australian Academy of Science (AAS) looking at what that 3C rise could mean for Australia.

Released today, the paper has called on the government to fast track Australia’s move to become a net zero greenhouse gas emitter within the next two decades.

That’s a big ask. Coal – one of Australia’s biggest carbon emitters – makes up 56 per cent of all domestic energy generation.

Yet, the scientists have insisted that Australia can meet its climate goals without seeing a dire economic impact. Better “a planned transition” to a low carbon Australia, they say, than a “disorderly collapse”.

If we do nothing, average global temperatures could rise by 4C or more. Picture: Australian Academy of Science

Australia already seeing near 1.5C temperature rise

Australia has a target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 26–28 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030 and Prime Minister Scott Morrison has said a goal is to achieve net zero emissions “preferably by 2050”.

But the country has been consistently criticised for not having enough ambition or taking the necessary steps towards a low carbon future.

The Paris Agreement, signed by Australia, aims to limit global warming to “well below 2C” compared to pre-industrial levels with 1.5C a more ambitious goal.

Neither aim is being achieved. Australia’s average surface temperatures have actually gone up by 1.44C since records began in 1910, and there’s little sign of that rise stopping.

“Limiting greenhouse gases to 1.5C is now virtually impossible and a rapid transition to net zero emission is required of the international community to limit warming to well below 2C,” said University of Queensland Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, also one of the report’s authors.

One-in-100-year floods could become an annual event. Picture: Lukas Coch/Getty Images

Grim outlook for Australia’s future

The report states that just sticking to current climate commitments by governments worldwide would see temperatures rise by 3C by 2090.

Letting that happen “could have potentially catastrophic impacts,” say the authors who have laid out depressing lists of outcomes of a 3C future.

Australia would be, “warmer and drier with more frequent and violent extremes (of weather)”.

One-in-100 year floods, like the ones just experienced, would be annual events. Huge bushfires would be frequent occurrences.

“The whole understanding of Australia’s climate will flip on its head,” said Prof Howden.

“What used to be thought of as extremely hot years will be cool years in the future.”

Already, there has been an increase in extreme weather across Australia. Picture: BOM 

The average number of days each year above 35C in Sydney could quadruple by 2090. In Melbourne, 24 days could be above 35C compared to 11 now, and in Perth hot days could leap from 28 to 63.

But it’s Darwin that could cop it the worst. It generally sees 11 days above 35C annually. With 2C of climate change, that could go up by 10 times to 111 days or as many as 265 days under a 3C scenario.

Heatwaves in Queensland – that being under 1.5C of warming occuring three times a year and lasting for around seven days – would happen seven times annually and last 10 days under a 3C scenario.

The report suggests Melbourne and Sydney could regularly see 50C days. Already, Sydney’s west has seen the mercury nearly touch that figure, leading it to be called out by the United Nations.

In northern Australia, “every day in the future may be a heat stress day,” said Prof Howden.

That in turn could lead to “challenging” conditions for livestock with many perishing in the stifling heat. The humans tending them wouldn’t be much better off.

Yields of key crops such as oil seeds, wheat, fruit and vegetables could plummet as they wilt in the sun or get wiped out by floods.

Infectious disease could flourish. The Ross Rover virus which can lead to flu-like symptoms and linger for months could find its way further south carried by mosquitoes.

The Ross River virus could spread further south. Source: News Regional Media

The Great Barrier Reef, which is already suffering, will bleach further in a 3C Australia. Rainforests such as the Kakadu could be “unrecognisable”.

An estimated 160,000 to 250,000 Australian properties might be at risk of coastal flooding with a sea level rise of 1 metre by the end of the century. Some homes would become uninsurable and one in 19 property owners will face the prospect of insurance premiums that will be effectively unaffordable by 2030.

“It’s not too late to avoid 3C,” said Prof Hoegh-Guldberg.

“We should still be aiming for a stable global temperature below 2C but to get that point we must reduce emissions very rapidly.”

Temperatures have been continuously diverging from the mean average in the last 30 years. Picture: AAS

What researchers say should be done

There are 10 actions the report recommends Australia knuckle down on. One of the main ones is a big swerve away from coal and investment in renewables and battery technology to store energy.

Retraining people working in the fossil fuel energy industry, scaling up technologies that have less of an impact on emissions – such as electric vehicles – and preparing food production and supply chains for climate extremes are other recommendations.
Download Report (pdf)

Some of the worst aspects of a 3C warmer Australia might also be mitigated. Simply planting trees on suburban streets, for example can bring surface temperatures down.

And the researchers insists it’s not all global warming gloom.

Australia could become a “clean energy exporter and a global renewable energy superpower,” adding to the country’s coffers.

Indeed, the biggest cost would be to do nothing, stated the report, given much of the world is already reducing its reliance on carbon.

“This is the most critical, transformational decade the human race has probably ever faced,” said Professor Lesley Hughes of Sydney’s Macquarie University.

“We must emphasize to government that delay is as damaging as denial. Just doing things slowly is just as bad as not doing them at all.”

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