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Webinar on using Climate Positive Design website
23 March 2021
The Australian Institute of Landscape Architects (AILA) Vic Environment Committee recently organised a webinar on the use of the Climate Positive Design website. The Climate Positive site is an international resource to empower landscape architects, property owners, municipalities, and related disciplines to take climate action. The free digital design tool can help reduce the carbon footprint of a site to support climate-friendly landscape architecture.
By providing tools, guidance, and resources the website provides pathways to positive changes that can be made now and do not require new regulations or policies – merely activism through education.
A web-based app called the Pathfinder is a landscape carbon calculator that guides designers on the path to meeting the goals of the Challenge and becoming Climate Positive. Focus areas:
- approximately eighty different types of materials used in landscape projects such as paving, walls, fences etc. and their associated ‘embodied carbon’ from extraction, manufacturing, transportation, installation.
- Trees, plants, wetlands and certain types of meadows/lawns capture CO2 from the atmosphere and sink carbon into the soil
- Operational emissions associated with machinery for mowing/pruning, fertilizer used on plants, soil disruption, soil import, and impacts to existing trees.
Beyond the Pathfinder, the website provides additional educational resources including a Design Toolkit and Case Studies that assist with making Climate Positive Design decisions.
