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CRCL Faculty Director Kate Orff discusses rewilding as one tool among many for restoring ecological infrastructure, oysters as engineering assistants in preventing coastal flooding, and other out-of-the-box solutions local and federal authorities should be considering before the next hurricane hits.
The Department of Biodiversity, Conservation, and Attractions at Ningaloo and the CRCL designed and implemented a workshop with Ningaloo Traditional Owners and Joint Management Board to uncover aspirations for healing sea country and discuss how TO’s want to be involved in future potential coral reef restoration piloting projects. This workshop was an important starting point for a longer discussion around how restoration activities fit within a broader framework of Joint Management between the DBCA and Traditional Owners. The workshop began a process of defining aspirations for healing of Sea Country, the role of restoration in joint management of the reef between Traditional Owners and the DBCA, and opportunities for TO’s to engage in restoration trialling.
This workshop served as an important starting point for ongoing conversations and efforts. It created space for Traditional Owners to talk about their perspectives and values, and discuss opportunities for meaningful Traditional Owner engagement during restoration experiment planning and implementation. Findings from this workshop are synthesized in this report and are intended to help inform future engagement around restoration activities within the broader context of Joint Management between DBCA and the TO Joint Management Body (JMB), as well as researchers and TO communities in Ningaloo.
This workshop was designed and delivered through the Resilient Reefs Initiative and the Resilience Accelerator program, a partnership with between the Great Barrier Reef Foundation and the Center for Resilient Cities and Landscapes at Columbia University.
Kate Orff speaks on CNN to Christiane Amanpour on the need to decarbonize, invest in nature based solutions, and to imagine expansive and inclusive climate adaptation projects in the built environment.
“It’s time for a broad investment in the natural systems and landscapes that can sustain us and anticipate these climate risks of the future.”
https://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2021/08/09/amanpour-climate-change-landscape-architect-kate-orff.cnn
In the August 9 print issue of The New Yorker, sociologist Eric Klinenberg profiled Kate Orff, faculty director of the Center for Resilient Cities and Landscapes. Kate talks about designing nature-based solutions to the climate crisis.
“Climate compassion must be globalized now.”
The Center for Resilient Cities and Landscapes partnered with the National Wildlife Foundation to host the “Mississippi as Living River” workshop which brought together scientists, policymakers and NGOs across the Mississippi River Basin.
Environmental injustices leading to poor health and quality of life for people of color and low income communities are rife everywhere, with long legacies. Environmental injustices are well documented within our cities and metropolitan regions, provoking community-based activism and creativity around alternative, more just futures. CRCL is proud to partner with the Goddard Space Flight Center Environmental Health Group, Barnard College, Riverkeeper, Mailman School of Public Health, Lamont Doherty, the Center for Sustainable and Urban Development at the Earth Institute, and the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law to organize efforts around the realization of a just future and the role of Columbia in supporting communities and this aspiration. Over a three-year project funded by the Earth Institute, the network will review existing EJ and CJ work at CU and within the community and begin a directory of online resources for students and community members in order to inform the climate justice track at The Climate School as well as expand the network of community-based organizations involved in the network. Then, the network will focus on collaborative research project development and workshops that directly support climate justice projects with EJ communities and seed creative curriculum development.
We start with a recognition that Columbia University is not only an important global academic institution but also a local community partner in Northern Manhattan, New York City and New York State. However, understanding how to actually implement and monitor these goals concretely and support the move towards climate justice is a pressing matter. We will aim to address a number of core questions:
- How do we assess and implement climate justice policies, programs and planning efforts in cities and communities?
- How might Columbia University with The Climate School better engage, research and teach about environmental justice and climate, and be part of building climate just cities? How can our institutions center applied research, pedagogy, and engagement around EJ as a primary and underlying value system that cross cuts the effort of the school?
- How can Columbia University become an accountable and trusted partner in the communities such that our research, teaching and engagement efforts support the most pressing needs of our neighbors?
- How could the climate crisis be leveraged to envision alternative climate just futures that support healing from past environmental injustices and race-based traumas while ensuring equity, justice, and inclusion for the underserved?
This EI Earth Network will reach out to environmental justice advocates, organizations and networks and create a forum that allows mutual learning and collaboration with its first year focused on a speaker series around climate justice. This series would allow for listening and building authentic partnerships. In such partnerships, community challenges and concerns are as important (in planning, implementation, and evaluation) as student learning/development and faculty research. Taking the time to develop communication channels and common agendas with new partners requires a change in behavior and an upfront investment of time. However, as time goes by, partners reap the benefits of long-term relationships built on mutual trust and respect. Out of such relationships, we expect to understand research gaps, develop better methods of assessment and monitoring climate justice goals and produce cutting edge co-created research, enhanced learning and strong connection between university and community, city and state on building climate just cities and societies.
CRCL teams up with McHarg Center at Penn Design, Landscape Architecture Foundation, American Society of Landscape Architects and Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture.
Students from the Washington Heights Expeditionary Learning School (WHEELS) have conceived a plan to turn the street in front of their school, 182nd Street, into a “Clean Air Green Corridor.” This project would create a new park and public space that would connect the many schools in the community and Highbridge Park. Under the guidance of their teachers and partners at WeACT for Environmental Justice, students have already taken their plan to the Community Board, Councilmember, and began further public engagement and pilot greening projects on their block.
To support their efforts, CRCL partnered with Friends of Wheels and WeACT on the delivery of the WHEELS Summer Environmental Justice Institute, a 2-week intensive workshop for students to refine and evolve the project idea. With support from our partners at NASA GISS, we conducted field work with the students to document the urban design conditions of the street as well as take thermal images of the site and survey various materials and conditions that influence urban heat island. At the end of the two weeks, students presented their project for public comment over zoom, and received feedback from practitioners, including faculty from GSAPP and City officials..
In the fall of 2020, we continued this work with a GSAPP Urban Planning Practicum: Resilience, Reparations and the Green New Deal: Climate Justice in Our Own Backyard. In addition to case study research and reading around environmental justice, graduate students worked with WHEELS students to consider the implementation of the project. The students co-developed research around community design, public health benefits of the project, how to avoid “green gentrification,” how to coordinate with ongoing transit improvements like a busway on 182nd street. Through this work, we developed peer-to-peer learning relationships about environmental justice and resilience. In 2021 we will be continuing this work with our partners at WHEELS and WeACT, launching a pilot closing of the street in the summer.
Tel Aviv, Addis Ababa and Beira face challenges caused by climate change, rapid expansion and economic disparity.
Following a workshop with the Southern California Resilience Initiative (SCRI), funded by the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, CRCL partnered with LA County to prepare “Heat Vulnerability in Los Angeles County Resource and Methodology Assessment.” In support research and planning that advances resilience and climate adaptation planning around extreme heat. In the development of the County’s OurCounty Sustainability Plan, the County established ambitious targets around converting heat trapping surfaces to cool or green surface, reducing the number of heat stress emergency department visits, and increasing the urban tree canopy cover. In addition, the County is pursuing a holistic climate vulnerability assessment. In service of these efforts, the Center for Resilient Cities and Landscapes assessed existing climate studies in the region and global best practices in order to inform the methodology used by the County in their broader climate adaptation planning effort.
In support of this work, CRCL looked across nine studies and tools that define and illustrate heat vulnerability in Los Angeles and Southern California - from State-wide climate projections prepared as a part of the Fourth Climate Assessment and Cal Adapt platform to visualization and mapping tools like the California Healthy Places Index and the California Heat Assessment Tool. Then, we evaluated them for their limitations and strengths in view of the targets set by the County in the OurCounty plan. CRCL also prepared case studies of global best practices in defining and studying heat vulnerability and prepared recommendations for the methodologies that the County might pursue in confirming, refining, and meeting the targets and actions identified in their planning efforts.
Columbia University students found consensus among Appalachian locals around the post-carbon economy and the need for riverfront rehabilitation.
CRCL is excited to share the final Tel Aviv-Yafo Resilience Accelerator report. Working with Resilient and Social Equality Authority, the City Architect, Environmental Authority, and scientists from Columbia, NASA, and Tel Aviv University, the Accelerator pioneered a new method of prioritizing areas of the city most exposed and vulnerable to heat.
On January 13, 2020 the Israeli National Ministry of Energy, in partnership with CRCL and Resilient Cities Catalyst, convened a working group of ministries across the national government of Israel, a selection of local municipalities, and non-government stakeholders and experts. By bringing together expertise across energy, science, environment, finance, planning, and health, the workshop aimed to increase awareness of future climate projections, impacts, and vulnerability on the national scale and begin the process of defining a nationally coordinated strategy to address urban heat. The learnings of this workshop will also help to inform the specific research and engagement needs that can support the work ahead in advancing the governmental agenda for urban heat.
The workshop built off of the Resilience Accelerator implemented in Tel Aviv-Yafo, where the CRCL and RCC partnered with the municipality and Tel Aviv University to define a wholistic research program across agencies and institutions, deliver an intensive interdisciplinary design workshop, and prepare design concepts for adaptation projects in the public realm.
In January, CRCL traveled to Tel Aviv-Yafo with the GSAPP Urban Design Studio students and faculty to support research and continuity between the Tel Aviv Resilience Accelerator and the Spring 2020 Urban Design Studio: Great Rift Valley.