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From the smallest organism to the largest, all living things play unique roles that keep the earth in balance. With numerous functions spanning insects and birds that pollinate flowers to bear fruits, plants absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and producing oxygen to purify the air and ...
Did you know that urban biodiversity makes you happier, increases sales at local businesses, and makes children develop their cognitive skills better, among other benefits? Urban restoration aims to renaturalize cities to make them compatible with lost nature, which is part of humanity. Why is i ...
Urban beautification campaigns are usually sold to local residents as a way to improve their daily lives. Design elements—from lighting systems to signs, benches, bollards, fountains and planters, and sometimes even surveillance equipment—are used to refurbish and embellish public spaces.
Tadpoling is a thing of the past in many suburban creeks, as humans encroach on frogs’ territory. But there is a way to lure them back – frog hotels.
Cities are increasingly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, and put at risk many of the life-sustaining ecosystems on which communities and livelihoods depend.
Within their Nature in the City Strategy, Hamilton City Council set themselves the ambitious target of moving from 1.8% to 10% native vegetation cover in Kirikiriroa by 2050. Across the city there are hundreds of patches of green that they could target for native regeneration. So where should th ...
Brumunddal, a small municipality on the northeastern shore of Lake Mjøsa, in Norway, has for most of its history had little to recommend it to the passing visitor. There are no picturesque streets with cafés and boutiques, as there are in the ski resort of Lillehammer, some thirty miles to the n ...
Setting ordinances to build more green roofs, planting trees and native plants, and designing community green spaces are just a few ways that many cities are investing in green infrastructure to solve climate-related problems and promote the health of residents.
In urban environments, trees are threatened by heatwaves and lack of rain, both predicted to increase in coming decades. Towns and cities are often home to a great diversity of trees, including those with a high tolerance of climate extremes, but species' selection criteria and climate-risk asse ...
"I view urban agriculture as a wonderful Trojan horse," says Nicolas Brassier, owner of Peas&Love, an urban farm that has expanded to seven sites across France and Belgium in the past two years
Humanity's relationship with insects is ancient and complex. While they can spread disease and wipe out crops, they are also vital to our survival on Planet Earth, as pollinators and recyclers. Edward Osborne Wilson, a leading American biologist, stated in one of his articles that “If insects we ...
On a warm evening in the spring of 2020, Jeremy Feinberg stood at the edge of a moonlit pond. He was on the Delmarva Peninsula, on the east side of Chesapeake Bay, an estuary in the eastern United States. “Chuck!” Feinberg called across the water. “Chuck! Chuck!” He cupped his hands behind his e ...
Faced with worsening floods and a shortage of housing, the Netherlands is seeing growing interest in floating homes. These floating communities are inspiring more ambitious Dutch-led projects in flood-prone nations, from French Polynesia to the Maldives.
Last February, the Danish Minister of the Environment, Lea Wermelin, invited all of Denmark’s 98 municipalities to participate in the national competition, “Denmark’s Wildest Municipality”. 92 municipalities accepted the invitation and ramped up their efforts to promote biodiversity in their cities.
Biological metaphors for the city abound in daily use. You may live close to an "arterial" road or in the "heart" of a metropolis. You may work in one of the city's "nerve centers" or exercise in a park described as the city's "lungs."
We live in an urban era, by 2050 cities will host nearly 70% of humanity. If cities don’t heal their relationship with nature, our species will face increasing threats. In this foreseeable future we might forget that cities are living systems where the positive relationship between the natural a ...
“Sun’s out, snakes out!” exclaimed Shuayb Ahmed, and Yatin Kalki as they jumped to action. Ahmed, an independent snake rescuer, had received a frantic call from a woman who spotted a snake – claimed to be a juvenile spectacled cobra – in her house in Bengaluru.
Cities around the world face numerous environmental hazards, such as extreme heat events, landslides, pollution, and flooding. Cities must monitor and address these hazards to reduce risks to, and enhance resilience of, their residents to climate change impacts.
My home town of New Delhi is battling with air pollution, contaminated water supplies and heatwaves. Just last November, schools were shut for more than a week because of untenable air quality.
For two years now, residents and experts have been fighting to preserve the Taldykol natural lakes system in the new city centre of Nur-Sultan, the capital of Kazakhstan, that city authorities are filling up to build urban housing estates.
San Jose's trees are slowly vanishing. Despite boasting, the nation's 10th largest city is in the midst of an environmental crisis as the tree canopy that shades it has dwindled by 1.82% between 2012 and 2018.
Biodiversity has become ubiquitous in project descriptions as yet another mark of the design's environmental accomplishments. The increasing focus on sustainability, the standard inspired by the UN Sustainable Development Goals, prompts a deeper understanding of what biodiversity in urban enviro ...
It has been four months since rain from Hurricane Ida flooded the streets and homes of New York. The subway stations and basements in all boroughs that were flash flooded made the news for a couple of weeks, but may soon be forgotten.
Green infrastructure has been embraced as a tool to help cities achieve sustainability and resilience goals while improving the lives of urban residents. How green infrastructure is defined guides the types of projects that cities implement, with enduring impacts to people and the urban environment.
Smart cities are developing all over the world, marketing themselves as helping us innovate and become more technologically advanced as a mostly-urban species.
London mayor releases £600,000 funding to help create green rooftops and reintroduce lost species
Concerned about the environmental impacts of the paving of the highway that crosses the region, residents of a city on the agricultural frontier pressured the city hall to create an integral conservation unit 45% of the municipality’s territory, including the most fertile land.
Institution jumps 66 places on People and Planet’s annual university sustainability league.
More than five years ago, HIDCO had set up the Pakhibitan at Eco Park with the help of an NGO. Now, the park, which has two water bodies and mature indigenous trees of several species, has developed a beautiful ecosystem and turned into a safe haven for several species of birds, insects, mammals ...
A Long Island couple says fighting climate change and protecting biodiversity starts at home. Or rather, right outside their suburban house.
New York City has become the 200th city to join CitiesWithNature, a global partnership initiative that strengthens collective action and impact to protect biodiversity and reconnect urban communities with nature. New York is taking up this leading position alongside London, Los Angeles, São Paul ...
Retrofitting an existing masonry cavity walled building with a green or living wall can reduce the amount of heat lost through its structure by more than 30%, according to new research.
The news that Derby has approved what promises to be Britain’s largest urban rewilding project so far is very welcome. The 320-acre Allestree Park will, subject to detailed consultation, be given over to a range of habitats and perhaps even see the reintroduction of species such as dormice and r ...
Thousands of acres of undersea reefs once protected the city’s shoreline. Now an army of volunteers is bringing the bivalves back, one shell at a time.
Summary for city-level decision makers It is clear from the analysis provided in this second edition of GEO for Cities that cities have the potential to drive progress towards the 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals. To achieve this, cities must be designed or redesigned to use re ...
Over half of the globe’s population currently lives in urban areas, a figure which will increase to 68 percent by 2050. According to scientists, increased urbanization drives changes in climate, land use, biodiversity, and human diet. A new study published in the journal One Earth has found that ...
Last weekend, international negotiators approved the United Nations Glasgow Climate Pact at the 26th Conference of the Parties. Ashish Sharma, the Illinois research climatologist at the Illinois State Water Survey, spoke with News Bureau physical sciences editor Lois Yoksoulian about the takeawa ...
After the Cop26 conference ended in Glasgow, many activists and climate scientists felt the agreement didn’t go far enough and that the US government was among those who had not backed strong words with enough actual deeds.
At the COP26 climate summit, world politicians patted themselves on their backs for coming to a last-minute agreement. Humanity now waits with bated breath to see if countries implement the commitments they made, and if those commitments help the planet.
Despite living in a concrete jungle, London’s urban bees fly shorter distances to feast on nectar-rich flowers than their neighbors in the countryside—a counterintuitive discovery explained by the many lush gardens in the city, researchers reported recently in the Journal of Applied Ecology.
Deep in the northeastern Honduran rainforest, according to local lore, hides an ancient metropolis known as "La Ciudad Blanca," or "The White City." Its name alludes to imposing pillars of white stone that were allegedly glimpsed by Spanish colonizers and, later, Western explorers; the city is r ...
Environmentalism is often experienced as a desire to return to rural nature: from the pastoral sunlit uplands to the ancient forest. Yet more than half of the world human population lives in cities today.
In a neighborhood of right-angled stone, stucco and brick buildings not far from Milan’s central train station, two thin towers stand out. Green and shaggy-edged, they look like they’re made of trees. In fact, they’re merely covered in trees — hundreds of them, growing up from the towers’ stagge ...
With living walls on skyscrapers and offices sprouting rooftop forests, green buildings have never been so popular. Will Ing examines whether this is the future of sustainable design or just PR greenwash
Butterflies flit among flowers and excited kids run trying to catch the elusive, gorgeously clad beauties in a garden located on the outskirts of Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka.
Artificial structures have replaced more than half of the coastline of 30 cities around the world, according to new research suggesting coastal infrastructure will have a significant ecological impact if not well managed.
The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) report on global warming reaffirms that accelerated efforts to fight the climate emergency are vital. We must leverage this momentum to address the intertwined crises of climate change, biodiversity loss and land degradation. This threa ...
Today's cities don't have walls for protection like ancient ones, but they are separate from less urban and rural land. Most goods that city-dwellers purchase are brought in from rural farms and manufacturers. There is an active community of urban gardeners and landscape architects who are tryin ...
When Fred Schoeps bought a 150-year-old building in downtown Ithaca, New York, a decade ago, he was one of only a handful of building owners dedicated to ending their reliance on fossil fuels and reducing their carbon footprint.
Every time we build something, another patch of ground that could have been a home to wildlife disappears. But Dusty Gedge argues that, in many cases, we can return that patch of ground to nature – up on the roof.