resource library
ArrayClimate Positive Design Website
08/09/2019
The Climate Positive Design site is an international collaboration created to empower landscape architects, property owners, municipalities, and related disciplines to take climate action. The free digital web-based design tool, launch in 2019, can help reduce the carbon footprint of a site to support climate-friendly landscape architecture.
In 2021 Australian Institute of Landscape Architects (AILA) Vic Environment Committee organised a webinar on the use of the Climate Positive Design website. This is a useful localised resource to further understand the tool.
The Climate Postive Design website provides tools, guidance, and resources as 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.
