By To understand how federal policies that support the woefully unsustainable cotton farming in the Arizona desert, take a look at this ProPublica article, Holy Crop: How Federal Dollars are Financing the Water Crisis in the West, by Abrahm Lustgarten and Naveena Sadasivam. Four years ago, when I took a sabbatical
Municipal Governments Working to Make Their Cities More Resilient
I came away optimistic that the attendees in the room weren’t going to simply sit by and wait for action; they were going to make it happen.
How California Can Model Dramatic Change
America will watch California respond to the drought, and I’m hoping that that can be a model for response to the even bigger—far bigger—challenge we all face with climate change.
Proposing a Resilient America Service Corps
Along with outdoors-focused initiatives, a Resilient America Service Corps could provide the labor needed for weatherization, installing window treatments, and carrying out deep-energy retrofits.
California’s Continuing Water Woes Call for Creative Solutions
“Right now the state has only about one year of water supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup supply, groundwater, is rapidly disappearing.” -Jay Famiglietti, Ph.D., NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Engineering Our Way Out of Global Warming: Is Climate Intervention a Global Warming Solution That Republicans Will Get Behind?
I am all for carbon-capture—both the research needed to better understand it and the implementation of strategies that employ it. But albedo modification (enhanced solar reflectivity) is a different story.
Searching for Optimism in an Age of Climate Change
What inspired me to launch an organization to promote these and other aspects of resilient design, was the recognition that the safety aspects of these strategies might be a stronger motivation to get mainstream America on-board in achieving more sustainable, lower-carbon buildings and communities than simply “doing the right thing.”
How Beavers Are Coming to the Rescue in an Age of Climate Change
“In 2002 we had the worst drought on record. The only places where we had water in natural areas was where we had beaver. Beavers were mitigating the effects of drought and keeping water on the landscape.” Biologist Dr. Glynnis Hood near Edmonton, Alberta
A Dramatic Resiliency Plan to Transform New York City: The BIG U Moves Forward
The first portion of the project was approved by HUD in mid-October, 2014 for $335 million.
How the California Drought Will Affect All of Us
The most important thing we can do to strengthen the resilience of our food systems is to diversity agricultural production.
RDI’s role in two recent reports
There’s a new blog from Urban Green on the reach that the NYC Buildings Resiliency Task Force report has had beyond New York City. RDI was involved with one of these new reports–for the City of Boston. You can access the Urban Green blog here, or download a PDF of
Making Los Angeles Resilient
Lisa Novick has a very good blog on what Los Angeles should do to boost it’s resilience on the Huff Post Los Angeles. The blog includes a nice definition of resilience: “Resilience is defined as the capacity of a system to absorb shock and still maintain its identity and function.
Facing extended drought, Texas policy makers focus on water planning
Stunted corn due to extended drought. Photo: Tim McCabe, National Resources Conservation Service An article in today’s New York Times paints a surprising picture of bipartisan support for planning in Texas–a state known for neither planning nor bipartisanship. With a two-year drought continuing and being called the third-worst in the
2012 Temperatures – One For the Record Books
For those who have made a habit of following temperature records over the past few decades, what’s most surprising with today’s news isn’t that 2012 set a record for U.S. temperatures (that had been expected for months), but rather the extent of that record. If you go back to the
Vulnerabilities to Climate Change and the Need For Resilience in the Western U.S.
The January, 2013 issue of Land Lines, a publication of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, has an excellent article on climate change impacts in the Intermountain West and the need for resilience. “Uncertainty and Risk: Building a Resilient West” addresses drought, growing incidence of wildfire, population growth, and factors
