Kiwi to deliver IFLA Congress keynote address

Kiwi landscape architect Craig Pocock will have the rare opportunity to deliver a key note address at the IFLA World Congress which opens in Gwangju, South Korea at the end of the month.

The NZILA Fellow and principal landscape architect at Beca Design Practice will speak on day one of the 58th International Federation of Landscape Architects World Congress with a theme this year of Public Landscape.

Craig Pocock.

This year’s programme includes a focus on climate-sensitive landscape design and planning, cultural diversity and social inclusiveness, public leadership and stewardship of the profession, and resiliency by design.

When LAA spoke to Craig this week he was still working on the presentation and deciding what final messaging he wants to leave the congress audience with.

“This is my best opportunity to deliver the carbon landscape to an international audience and to set up an ongoing digital conversation with the next generation of designers. It is unlikely that I will ever get a second chance at this, very few get more than one IFLA key note invite, so I feel like I only have one chance to get the messaging right and so currently very focused on what those key messages are at the moment.”

Craig’s IFLA Abstract is; We have a problem not easily addressed; the carbon reality is that most urban spaces, public realm, and urban parks, come with a significant carbon debt that is unsustainable to offset or mitigate. This means most of our current urban design projects including green infrastructure projects have a carbon footprint that not only is almost impossible to offset, but has actually increased over the last two decades, in some cases five-fold. Fundamentally, we are currently going the wrong direction from a climate change perspective.

Craig has been presenting carbon landscape issues for 18 years including at this year’s Recreation Aotearoa Dunedin conference.

Craig has featured here on LAA before as the ‘carbon landscape’ pioneer and has already presented this concept at an IFLA congress as a session paper. He challenged the community in 2007 at the Malaysia congress by daylighting the carbon impact of the landscape industry and the challenges mitigating those carbon impacts. He went on to continue to promote low carbon approach at the IFLA congress in Rio de Janeiro and the IFLA AGM in Montreal.

He says deciding what key aspects of the Carbon Landscape concept to deliver at the end of the month is keeping him up at nights but he is confident he will be able to make the most of the opportunity to talk about the carbon landscape and how it has been borne from design leadership here in Aotearoa.

“It has been a journey with more than its share of challenges and setbacks over many years, but the carbon landscape has become an internationally accepted climate design theory. I am proud now to push this carbon kaupapa forward on the global stage, and that its significant international impact came from New Zealand design DNA,” says Craig.

Craig says this keynote address will be a new highlight on his now more than 18-year journey to advocate for the carbon landscape and low carbon design, and challenge the status quo and says he hopes one day to be able to deliver it to the NZILA community.