Code Red for the Climate: IPCC report
The NZILA is welcoming the Sixth Assessment report by the IPCC despite the stark picture it paints in terms of the present threat of climate change.
Matthew Bradbury is the Institute’s Advocacy Panel’s spokesperson on Climate Change. He says the findings of the report once again demonstrate the need for a clear, comprehensive and specific strategy for climate action.
He says landscape architects clearly understand their crucial role in developing innovations and new solutions to combat and mitigate global warming as well as in designing, building and ensuring the safety of the infrastructure and technologies for a decarbonised Aotearoa.
According to the IPCC, the report addresses the “most up-to-date physical understanding of the climate system and climate change, bringing together the latest advances in climate science, and combining multiple lines of evidence from paleoclimate, observations, process understanding, and global and regional climate simulations.”
‘Changing ‘by the artist Alisa Singer. Source IPCC website.
Matthew Bradbury says he and other NZILA landscape architects have been clear about how profound the specific effects of climate change on our cities, in particular will be, “especially for our four major cities that are located on the coast.”
“These are the most vulnerable places in New Zealand because they will be directly affected by coastal flooding. The water’s edge of our cities is particularly vulnerable, this is often the location of the our cities most important public spaces and the location of the most valuable real estate.”
You can see specific details from the report about our region here in the Australasia Fact Sheet.
From the Australasian Regional Fact Sheet in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report.
Landscape architects, he says, have been working, through research and practice, to help us build resilience to the effects of climate change
“All these effects of climate change on our cities can seem a bit apocalyptical, beyond our control so that we just throw up our hands. However, landscape architects have been working on thinking and building solutions to these problems and will of course continue to do so.”
You can see the IPCC media conference in the video below.
