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Our cities need to become part of our agricultural system. In recent decades it has become increasingly clear that the way we live and eat is a big threat to our health and the health of our ecosystem. Climate change is forcing us to rethink our way of life and to reconnect agriculture back into ...
“Pollinators were the key,” says Edgar Mora, reflecting on the decision to recognise every bee, bat, hummingbird and butterfly as a citizen of Curridabat during his 12-year spell as mayor.
“Pollinators were the key,” says Edgar Mora, reflecting on the decision to recognise every bee, bat, hummingbird and butterfly as a citizen of Curridabat during his 12-year spell as mayor.
Empty streets and skies let the birds be heard and leave animals free to roam as well as allowing scientists to examine how humans change urban biodiversity.
Over 90 mayors of the world's biggest cities have signed a Global Green New Deal in Copenhagen this week.
Against the stark concrete skyline of Sydney, Australia, one building’s cascading green gardens unfurl like a vertical oasis. Completed in late 2013, One Central Park (pictured, above) won a suite of high-profile awards in 2014 (including Best Tall Building in the World) thanks to its clever fea ...
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 ...
More than 20 cities, including Abidjan (Côte d’Ivoire), Dakar (Senegal), Helsinki (Finland), Paris (France), La Paz (Bolivia), Melaka (Malaysia) and São Paulo (Brazil), have endorsed a statement on urban development that integrates environmental considerations, including low-emission targets, lo ...
In the midst of a massive, global loss of nature, cities around the world are finding ways to protect and expand open spaces and "rewild" their communities.
With Chandigarh’s growing reputation as nature’s paradise, every aspect of this man-made creation, originally spread over 47 blocks of 246 acres each, vindicates the visionary thinking of the early planners. Surely, Le Corbusier, Dr. M.S. Randhawa and others must be smiling at the evolution of C ...
Trees for Cities recently planted our millionth tree. This of course is a huge achievement - but it also strikes a chord, and reminds us that there is much more to do.
Without dissolved oxygen, fish cannot survive. Healthy water normally contains between 7-8 mg/l of the gas.
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 ...
The name, which is Arabic for “The Shade Park,” is a nod to the park’s use of nature-based design solutions to reduce the area’s warming through trees and shrubs. According to the Abu Dhabi Department of Municipalities and Transport, it’s the first urban park in the UAE to use biodiversity to en ...
With its trees still naked after winter, Lordship Road in the London borough of Hackney is an urban vista of asphalt, brick and concrete. Heading north, a pair of tower blocks loom from the horizon.
Ghana’s capital city, Accra, has been mentioned among the 2019 ‘World's Seven Best Climate Projects’ for its Informal Waste Collection Expansion project. The recognition puts Accra among this year’s seven short-listed cities of the ‘C40 Cities Bloomberg Philanthropies Awards.’
Worldwide, cities produce about 70% of the CO2 present in the atmosphere, while forests and woods are able to absorb 40% of it. Increasing wooded areas within and around cities would multiply the resilience capacities of urban areas and would drastically reduce the production of CO2, thanks to p ...
When 26-year-old Peter Sänger and 34-year-old Liang Wu got together, they realized right away that they had something in common.
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.
Montreal’s parks are a source of pride for this dense, urban metropolis.
An open plaza in Bogota’s northeastern business district has been radically transformed from a place of pure pavement to a vibrant urban wetland. Colombian architecture firm Obraestudio completed the project in 2016 in the Santa Barbara business center to revitalize the outdoor common space shar ...
While rummaging through part of Amsterdam's city park, citizen scientists discovered new insect species. Their aim was to show that even in Earth's busiest places, biodiversity is still underexplored.
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 ...
London's Somerset House, a well-known historical arts center in the middle of the capital, will soon be home to a forest of 400 trees.
As the coronavirus outbreak shutters gyms, malls and swimming pools, residents from Los Angeles to Bangkok are heading to parks and open spaces during lockdowns, highlighting their vital role in protecting health and wellbeing, urban experts said.
The Mexican city of Xalapa is surrounded by ecosystems that not only harbor stunning flora and fauna, but also provide crucial services to the city and its 580,000 people.
Bee hotels, bee stops and a honey highway are some of the components of a national pollinator strategy that the Dutch are crediting with keeping their urban bee population steady in recent years, after a period of worrying decline.
A new study in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution suggests that birds have two alternative strategies for coping with the difficulties of humanity's increasingly chaotic cities - either by having large brains or through more frequent breeding.
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 ...
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 ...
Birds have two alternative strategies for coping with the difficulties of humanity’s increasingly chaotic cities. They need to either have large brains or breed many times over their life in order to thrive in urban environments, according to a new study involving University College London (UCL).
Calgary has been named one of the country's four bird friendly cities by the group, Nature Canada. The designation came into effect in Calgary on May 7 — along with Toronto, Vancouver and London, Ont. — one day ahead of World Migratory Bird Day.
It’s not often that the City of London’s police horses are asked to trample on someone’s garden. But when the request came, it wasn’t made by a spiteful neighbour but a group of community wildlife gardeners who wanted divots in their grass.
After gaining popularity across Asia, small, dense ecosystems are taking root in Europe's urban areas. Advocates say they improve biodiversity, air quality and even our well-being. But do they live up to the hype?
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 ...
Cities and their rising impacts on biodiversity versity. To gain a clearer picture of the situation, an international group of scientists, including Professor Andrew Gonzalez from McGill’s Biology Department, surveyed over 600 studies on the impacts of urban growth on biodiversity. They publishe ...
In Montreal, red-backed salamanders sequestered in parks possess different genetic traits than those outside of the parks. In Tucson, house finches are developing longer and wider beaks to eat sunflower seeds from bird feeders, which are larger and harder to break than those found in nature.
Cities are homes for billions of people. By 2050 around 70% of the global population is predicted to live in urban areas. Yet as our cities grow, most species have an increasingly hard time surviving on this planet. A new report titled Nature in the Urban Century highlights the scale of the cha ...
Life has always been hotter in cities.
“What happens if the water temperature rises by a few degrees?” is the 2018 International Year of the Reef leading question.
Millions of birds travel between their breeding and wintering grounds during spring and autumn migration, creating one of the greatest spectacles of the natural world. These journeys often span incredible distances. For example, the Blackpoll Warbler, which weighs less than half an ounce, may tr ...
The SDGs and the New Urban Agenda remain a challenge for cities. Goal 11 of the SDGs, to build sustainable cities, has proved to be a particularly tough one for urban areas across continents.
It's 2050 You walk out of the house. The day is shiny but not too hot. You know that the mirrors in orbit around the planet that reflect back sunlight keep the climate just perfect. On the way to work, from the window of your self-driving floating solar module, you gaze over a plant installed a ...
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 ...
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.
SALT LAKE CITY, Utah, USA, Sep 9 2019 (IPS) - The United Nations held its first major international conference in one of America’s mountain states, bringing scores of civil society organizations (CSOs) to discuss ways on making “cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustain ...
As the UK enters it fourth week of lockdown, conservationists say they have seen some hidden benefits of the restrictions in the natural world.
A pause has been forced on urban life. Quiet roads, empty skies, deserted high streets and parks, closed cinemas, cafés and museums—a break in the spending and work frenzy so familiar to us all. The reality of lockdown is making ghost towns of the places we once knew. Everything we know about ou ...
Costa Rica’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs informed that the United Nations Organization for Science, Education and Culture (Unesco) has awarded the city of San José the Netexplo Linking Cities 2021 Award, in the category ‘Zero Carbon Objective’.
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 ...