Climate Positive Design receives 2020 ASLA Professional Award – Honor, Research Category
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Climate Positive Design is a research initiative that launched in 2019 to improve the carbon impact of the built environment through collective action. Its mission is to help projects become Climate Positive solutions that sequester more carbon than they emit.
The benefits of landscape architecture to air quality have long been touted, but ways of quantifying how a design can be carbon-positive have eluded the profession. Through analysis of 20 case studies, a team of landscape architects has developed a design toolkit illustrating more than 80 carbon positive landscape intervention strategies. A companion application allows instant calculation of carbon impact based on quantity and variety of plants input in users’ designs, to enable better understanding of efforts toward reducing emissions and increasing sequestration across a project. These kinds of real-time feedback will be crucial for the profession, and for the world, to avoid the irreversible climate damage we will encounter without meaningful reductions in emissions.
