Curtin University Awarded $500,000 to Research Green Innovation in the Built Environment:

Western Australia’s Curtin University has been awarded $500,000 by the Cooperative Research Centre for Low Carbon Living for research into green innovation in the built environment. The grant will fund five PhD research scholarships focused on the university’s Master Plan – which was awarded Australia’s first 5 Star Green Star – Communities rating earlier this year.

Curtin’s Vice Chancellor, Deborah Terry, said, “The Greater Curtin Master Plan aims to rebuild the Curtin campus as a city of innovation. Central to this is the notion of it being a model of low carbon development as well as enabling research and development into every feature of the building process.”

The project will be led by Curtin’s Sustainability Policy Institute’s Professor, Peter Newman, in partnership with Curtin’s planners, the private sector, local and state government, the local community, and staff and students. Mr Newman said, “The vision of the node is to extend Curtin’s work in low carbon living through a focus on regenerative cities and regions. The application of these tools will help other precinct-scale developments to use the latest innovations in low carbon, high-performance buildings, infrastructure, and land development processes.”

The Cooperative Research Centre for Low Carbon Living (CRCLC), which has awarded the grant, is a, ‘national research and innovation hub that seeks to enable a globally competitive low carbon build environment sector.” The Centre brings together, “property, planning, engineering and policy organisations with leading Australian researchers”, to develop, “…new social, technological and policy tools for facilitating the development of low carbon products and services to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the built environment.”

For more information on Curtin University’s Master Plan, watch this video.

image curteousy of Curtin University.

Raising The Roof on Urban Landscape Design: Greenroof Future

As humans, we focus on what we see every day. It stands to reason that much of the discussion of urban canopy and landscape projects and developments take place at ground and subterranean level.

With each passing year for approximately the past 15 years, however, more and more design visionaries and their taskforces are raising their eyes upward…to our rooftops. With the massive amount of square miles taken up by buildings, re-purposing their roofs help us reclaim some of the lost land and create a whole other kind of landscape.

Diana Balmori of Balmori Associates, NY couldn’t agree more. “We need to create a different balance between the inert surfaces and the living surfaces,” Balmori said. With the exception of pockets of urban parks, cities have the sky, the earth, and stories of glass, metal, cement and rock between them. Watching how city dwellers flock to those park spaces, Balmori realizes that there’s a wealth of untapped, unutilized potential not only for the human city dwellers, but the flora and fauna grasping for a foothold in a gray world.

A robust example of the success a rooftop landscape is Balmori’s own 667 acre Public Administration complex in Sejong, Korea. Balmori Associates says, “We proposed a new approach to city-making, one that starts with landscape architecture. The master plan consists of a continuous linear park on a continuous roof joining all the ministries.” In conjunction to providing a reprieve for persons, the task of building a green roof with wildlife in mind requires a whole other set of considerations. “Creating biodiversity on a green roof or green wall is significantly different than restoring it on ground level. On a rooftop there is no preexisting ecology to enhance; everything is from scratch,” states the Green Roof Service webpage of Jörg Breuning, owner.

Given this, the plants, animals and insects are essentially living under an altered set of circumstances, which could affect their continuing habitation and ability to thrive under the new conditions, even with a perfect replication of a landscape indigenous to any particular area.

From an infrastructural standpoint, the installation of green roofs presents vast benefits, including prolonging the life spans of rooftop materials, decreased use and energy consumption of HVAC units, stormwater management, and significant moderation of the Urban Heat Island effect.

Green Roofs for Healthy Cities Community webpage states, “Through the daily dew and evaporation cycle, plants on vertical and horizontal surfaces are able to cool cities during hot summer months and reduce the UHI effect. The light absorbed by vegetation would otherwise be converted into heat energy.” With such evidence of benefits being discovered and explored from several standpoints: the human element, ecology, and infrastructure, a future with more green roof designs should be just on the horizon for landscape design experts, scientists, engineers, and others.

photo credit: Green Roof Gardner, CC

Forests Key to Solving the Global Hunger Crisis

Dr. Bhaskar Vira is Chair of the Global Forest Expert Panel on Forests and Food Security, convened by the International Union of Forest Research Organisations. In a recent article, Dr Vira wrote, “About one in nine people globally still suffer from hunger, with the majority living in Africa and Asia. The world’s forests have great potential to improve their nutrition and ensure their livelihoods. In fact, forests could be essential to global food security, particularly when considering the importance of diverse, nutritionally-balanced diets.”

Whilst it’s well accepted that forests are key to sustaining biodiversity and alleviating the impact of climate change, Dr Vira believes, “their contribution to alleviating hunger and improving nutrition has been somewhat neglected.” A recent study conducted by the Global Forest Expert Panel on Forests and Food Security, which Dr Vira chaired, outlines how forests can complement agricultural production and give an economic boost to some of the world’s most vulnerable regions.

According to the study, there are four ways forests can benefit food security:

1. Trees are rich in vitamins, proteins, and other nutrients, and are essential to a diverse diet
2. Wild meat, fish, and insects are also important forest food sources. Particularly in South-East Asia, many forests and agroforests (tree-based farms) are managed specifically to enhance edible insect supply
3. Forests are essential for firewood and charcoal, facilitating cooking and heating
4. Trees offer a multitude of ecological services – for example, pollinators which are essential for crop production

So, what more can be done to leverage forests for food production? Dr Vira writes, “Novel initiatives are attempting to develop new tree commodities to supply the poor with sustainable incomes. For example, poor producers in Tanzania are engaged in a global effort to produce the seeds of the Allanblackia crop, which yield an edible oil. A private–public partnership known as Novella Africa is developing a sustainable Allanblackia oil business that could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually for local farmers.”

For more information, read Dr Vira’s article in full.

photo credit: Erik Hersman, CC BY