Posts Tagged ‘city planning’
Nine of the World’s Most Promising Carbon-Neutral Communities
In the global race to reduce carbon emissions, these eco-minded communities, from Kansas to the Maldives, lead the pack. Here’s how they’re making their carbon footprints disappear
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Ever since, we’ve been digging up carbon in the form of fossil fuels and sending it skyward. Today the fraction of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is about 385 parts per million, roughly 30 ppm above the level deemed environmentally sustainable by many scientists and climate experts. If we continue emitting at our current rate, that number will climb to 450 ppm by 2050, putting the planet at serious risk of runaway climate change, with heat-trapping gases causing unprecedented warming. After that, things get pretty scary: Coastlines flood, species disappear, droughts get longer, crops become harder to grow, and people in general become hungrier, thirstier and angrier.
But it’s not too late to reverse course. Fortunately, thousands of communities, cities and even whole countries are pursuing real carbon neutrality, enacting legitimate plans to mitigate their greenhouse emissions and, eventually, bring atmospheric CO2 concentrations back to safe levels. Here, we’ve spotlighted some of the most inspiring. Denmark’s Samsø Island, for example, is no mere engineering fantasy. It’s already balanced its carbon footprint by adopting wind and solar power and is now working toward offsetting more carbon than it emits. Masdar City in arid Abu Dhabi, meanwhile, is proving that even oil-rich regions with outsize carbon footprints can wean themselves off the black gold. More important, each of these projects is employing energy and conservation strategies well within the reach of any developed nation that really wants to implement them.
These impressive efforts, though, reveal just how far we have to go. The average Maldivian uses so little fossil fuel that the global benefits of a carbon-free Maldives can be undone by just five days of average population growth in the U.S.
Ultimately, carbon neutrality demands a global effort. That means communities from New York to New Delhi must transform—in effect, becoming perfectly balanced biomes: lots of activity, lots of creation and destruction, but without all the CO2 emissions that typically go with it. In other words, carbon neutrality requires a complete rethinking of how we have lived since the Bronze Age. Impossible? There are at least .
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IBM’s City Simulation Trains Planners to Tackle Future Problems for Growing Urban Centers
OK, mayor, 40 percent of your water supply is leaking out ... what do you do?
The company unveiled its "serious game" this week at the IMPACT 2010 conference in Las Vegas, as a training tool for city leaders and planners. The free game would require players to guide their city through sector-specific missions focused on energy, water, banking, and retail.
One mission involves the water usage increasing at twice the population growth. The city is also losing as much as 40 percent of its water supply through leaky infrastructure, and energy costs are rising. Players would need to put a water management system in place that draws on "accurate real-time data" to make their decisions.
IBM pointed to expert predictions that the world's urban populations will double by 2050, with an estimated one million people moving into cities each week. Today's cities already consume 75 percent of the world's energy, emit more than 80 percent of greenhouse gases, and lose as much as 20 percent of their precious water because of infrastructure leaks.
Simulations are already used as tools for real-world planning among financial analysts and the . But games such as CityOne could represent a stepping stone to the far more ambitious projects such as Europe's proposed which would incorporate reams of real-time data about the world.
Either way, we're just waiting for the Hollywood story where the young genius with knack for urban planning suddenly realizes that he's been "playing" not just a game, but real life all along.