Viewpoint: Making a difference through climate-positive design

“This century is the golden age of landscape architecture. The world really needs you. It needs what you know and what you believe in. Now is the time.” – Martha Schwartz, New Landscape Declaration Summit, 10 June 2016

Landscape architects are uniquely placed to lead and deliver climate-positive design solutions for our planet. We have the ability to sequester more greenhouse gases than our projects emit. AILA’s Climate Positive Design Working Group is developing a clear roadmap so Australian landscape architects can deliver climate-positive design outcomes.

If you are a landscape architect wanting to address climate issues, the Climate Positive Pathfinder application is a great starting point. This free web-based tool can help you to calculate your project’s greenhouse gas budget and climate-positive date. To make the app even easier to use, AILA has produced a webinar explaining how it works, along with a step-by-step demonstration of how to enter your project data into the application. We have also developed our “top five things” a landscape architect can do to be climate positive, along with questions and answers, and an Australian “cheat sheet” to the Climate Positive Pathfinder application.

View gallery

Image: AILA

The working group is currently developing three documents to launch at the 2021 International Festival of Landscape Architecture. The first is the Climate Positive Design AILA Roadmap. This will provide AILA with the targets, time frames and actions to help roll out climate-positive design to members. The roadmap has been informed by an international benchmarking review of the climate policies and strategies of other landscape architecture organizations. Following the review, we framed the roadmap around three key ideas:

• Providing support for AILA members to understand and deliver Climate Positive Design;

• Providing leadership within the profession by engaging AILA with other institutes, businesses and professional bodies to promote and enable Climate Positive Design across disciplines;

• Developing policy that positions AILA and its members as leaders and advocates in the climate-positive space.

The second document is the Climate Positive Design Member Action Plan. This aims to provide clear, simple advice on what you, as a landscape architect, can do to understand and deliver climate-positive design through your projects and practice.

And thirdly, we are preparing a Climate Positive Design Business Guide to Becoming Climate Positive for landscape architecture organizations and practices. This will set out the steps your organization or practice will need to take to achieve carbon neutral certification, and beyond, to become climate positive.

In addition to the working group activities, a number of the team have been working with three agencies: the Australian Sustainable Built Environment Council’s (ASBEC) collaborative Resilience Task Group, the Material and Embodied Carbon Leaders’ Alliance (MECLA) and the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA).

Upfront embodied carbon in construction materials forms a large proportion of emissions for landscape architecture projects. To help drive industry solutions for low carbon materials, AILA has joined the MECLA as a founding member. Our role in their working group focuses on developing a common language and specifications to make it easy for designers to specify low-carbon materials.

We are also working with a small team from IFLA to craft a one-page declaration for the United Nations Climate Conference (COP 26) to be held in November this year. The declaration is a call to action on behalf of the 77 nation states represented by IFLA to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees. It aims to show that landscape architects are accelerating climate action at scales that matter.

David Attenborough has called climate change “the defining issue of our time.” The science is very clear. We must act decisively to protect our planet for thousands of future generations. There are 70,000 landscape architects worldwide ready to deliver cool green cities, climate-resilient landscapes and beautiful places that foster health and mental wellbeing.

Our time is now.

– Martin O’Dea, AILA Climate Positive Design Working Group chair

The AILA CPDWG group comprises Abi Kearney and Adam McEllister (QLD), Martin O’Dea, Simon Bond and Sarah Morgan (NSW), Verity Campbell, Brendon Burke and Lakshmanan Madhu (VIC), Kate James (SA), and Madeleine McEwen (WA). Jasmine Ong is the AILA National Board representative.