Climate Solutions: Chapter 6

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Published: June 16, 2010, 6:56 pm
Updated: July 9, 2012, 8:08 pm
Author: David Blockstein
Contributing Author: Leo Wiegman
Topic Editor: Peter Saundry
Topics:

Smart Growth at the Community Scale: If You Build It, They Will Come

(or Live Where You Work and Shop Where You Play: Dead Malls and Smart Growth)

Messages about the seriousness of global warming have a poor track record of producing measurable behavioral change by themselves. —Gerald Gardner and Paul Stern, 2008 [7]
The carbon Footprint measures the demand on biocapacity that results from burning fossil fuels in terms of the amount of forest area required to sequester these carbon dioxide emissions. Note that this does not suggest planting forests is the “solution” to climate change; on the contrary, it shows that the biosphere does not have sufficient capacity to sequester all the carbon we are currently emitting. —Mathis Wackernagel, Global Footprint Network [18]

More Americans now live in suburbs than in cities or in rural settings. We are wedded to our cars. Type smart growth into your Web browser search engine, and you will find thousands of uses of the phrase. What does it really mean? At its simplest, smart growth is the development of living, shopping, and work environments that are as efficient with natural resources as possible and as healthy for residents as possible. In addition to efficiency and health benefits, a third asset of smart growth is financial. Such development often produces economic returns as high as or higher than more resource-intense, older development patterns. The economic benefits derive from lower transit costs, higher use per parcel, and more dollars kept circulating locally.

Smart growth is also known as “location efficient development,” “the New Urbanism,” “the New Localism,” or “transit oriented development.” Kaid Benfield, director of NRDC’s Smart Growth Program, writes a very informative blog column in which he shows that such highly efficient and healthier development can be undertaken in rural hamlets, like Starksboro, Vermont, as well as in traditional suburbs, like Glenview, Illinois, or within neighborhoods in some of our largest cities, like the Project Row Houses of Houston, Texas. [1]

As we reorganize our communities so we drive less, walk more, live closer to conveniences, and retain open space for recreation, the sprawling shopping mall may be nearing the end of its life. Clusters of stores surrounded by acres of parked cars dominate the suburban landscape now. But abandoned “dead malls” number in the hundreds, if not thousands, as communities change. Many mall owners and developers are undertaking a retrofit of existing single-use shopping centers. They are bringing mixed-use buildings to the area, in which housing, transportation, and office space are commingled with retail spaces. Live where you work, and shop where you play.

The United States Green Building Council (USGBC) is collaborating with NRDC and the Congress for the New Urbanism to extend green practices from individual buildings to entire neighborhoods. The USGBC is the driving force behind the LEED rating standards for green buildings. But unless the communities in which such buildings are located are also redesigned, the benefits will not be maximized. [5] The new initiative, called the LEED for Neighborhood Development Rating System, is under development.

Bibliography

  1. Benfield K (2008) Smart Growth Program. Natural Resouces Defense Council, Washington, DC (read December 28, 2008). http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/kbenfield/
  2. Dietz T (2008) Human Action and Climate Change. Climate Change: Science and Solutions: 8th National Conference on Science, Policy and the Environment. http://ncseonline.org/2008conference/cms.cfm?id=1716
  3. Dietz T, Stern PC (2008) Public Participation in Environmental Assessment and Decision Making. (National Research Council, Washington, DC). http://www.nap.edu/catalog/12434.html
  4. Ehrlich PR, Pringle RM (2008) Where does biodiversity go from here? A grim business-as-usual forecast and a hopeful portfolio of partial solutions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/105/Supplement_1/11579
  5. Ewing R, Kreutzer R (2006) Understanding the Relationship between Public Health and the Built Environment. US Green Building Council. New York. http://www.usgbc.org
  6. FAO (2006) Livestock’s Long Shadow. http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.htm
  7. Gardner GT, Stern PC (2008) “The Short List: The Most Effective Actions US Households Can Take to Curb Climate Change.” Environment, September?– October:12?– 24. http://www.environmentmagazine.org
  8. Jones V (2008) The Green Collar Economy. (HarperCollins Publishers, New York). http://www.greenforall.org
  9. Keohane NO, Olmstead SM (2007) Markets and the Environment, 141?– 142. (Island Press, Washington, DC). http://islandpress.org
  10. Lovins A (1989) The Negawatt Revolution: Solving the CO2 Problem. Green Energy Conference. CCNR Montreal (read August 21, 2008). http://www.ccnr.org/amory.html
  11. NOAA (2005) Greenhouse Gases: Frequently Asked Questions. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Washington, DC (read November 1, 2008). http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov
  12. NRDC (2008) Smart Growth. Natural Resources Defense Council. New York (read December 28, 2008). http://www.nrdc.org/smartgrowth/
  13. Socolow R, Pacala S (2004) Stabilization wedges: solving the climate problem for the next 50 years with current technologies. Science 304(5686):968?– 972. http://www.sciencemag.org
  14. Stern N (2007) The Stern Review Report on the Economics of Climate Change. HM Treasury London. http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/sternreview_index.htm
  15. Stern PC (2000) New environmental theories: toward a coherent theory of environmentally significant behavior. Promoting Environmentalism 56(3):407?– 424. http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/0022-4537.00175
  16. UNEP/GRID-Arendal (2005) National Carbon Dioxide (CO2) Emissions per Capita. Vital Climate Change Graphics Update. Oslo. http://maps.grida.no/go/graphic/national_carbon_dioxide_co2_emissions_per_capita as published in http://www.vitalgraphics.net/climate2.cfm?pageID=8
  17. Vandenbergh M, Barkenbus J, Gilligan J (2008) Individual carbon emissions: low hanging fruit . UCLA Law Review. http://ssrn.com/abstract=1161143
  18. Wackernagel M (2008) Ecological Footprint.Global Footprint Network (read August 20, 2008). http://www.footprintstandards.org
  19. Walser M, et al. (2008) “Carbon Footprint,” (topic ed) Nodvin S, et al., in Encyclopedia of Earth, (ed) Cleveland CJ. (Environmental Information Coalition, National Council for Science and the Environment, Washington, DC). [[1]]
  20. Wolfson R (2008) Energy, Environment, and Climate, chap 13 (W. W. Norton & Company, New York). http://www.wwnorton.com/college/physics

Online resources

Action items

  • Action 1: Green Buildings and Building Design
  • Action 2: Moving Forward?— Transportation and Emissions Reduction
  • Action 5: Mitigating Greenhouse Gases Other Than CO2
  • Action 6: Energy Efficiency and Conservation
  • Action 11: Economics?— Setting the Price for Carbon

Instructor resources

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This is a chapter from Climate Solutions Consensus.
Previous: Chapter 5: The Five Horsemen of Extinction (Climate Solutions: Chapter 6)|Table of Contents (Climate Solutions: Chapter 6)|Next: Chapter 7: No Silver Bullet, Many Silver Wedges (Climate Solutions: Chapter 6)

Citation

Blockstein, D. (2012). Climate Solutions: Chapter 6. Retrieved from http://editors.eol.org/eoearth/wiki/Climate_Solutions:_Chapter_6
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