Yu is founder of the Peking University College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture and founder and principal designer of Turenscape. His firm, which has a staff of more than 400, plans and designs landscapes that “combat flooding while repairing ecological damage.”
“The award means that no matter our differences among peoples and nations, there is one common ground we have to hold together: taking care of planet Earth. We have to get together to heal this ill planet,” Yu said.
He also sees the award as a win for developing countries like China. “It is a huge encouragement for those who are working hard to establish themselves from the grassroots; for those who made their career in underdeveloped regions, in the most difficult parts of the world.”
In an interview, Yu offered his thoughts on future opportunities and challenges for landscape architects. He outlined his design philosophy and how it can serve as a roadmap for leadership on nature-based solutions and climate and biodiversity action.
Yu foresees an explosion in demand for landscape architects in China and other developing countries. “I am expecting revolutionary development of the profession of landscape architecture in the developing world where landscape architects are badly needed.”
ASLA 2014 Professional General Design Honor Award. Slow Down: Liupanshui Minghu Wetland Park. Liupanshui, Guizhou Province, China. TURENSCAPE
“I believe landscape architects are coming into a golden era. We are positioning ourselves at the forefront in the battle for climate adaptation and planetary healing, particularly in China, India, Southeast Asia, South America, and Africa, where climate change is mingled with issues of urbanization, industrialization, and food security.”
“But there are also many obstacles that landscape architects need to overcome,” he added.
“The top obstacle is our lack of capacity. We need to breakthrough the boundaries of professional and disciplinary stratification. This will involve restructuring institutions, changing school programs, and redefining landscape architecture at a much larger scope, toward the art of survival.”
Yu founded his China-based firm Turenscape in 1998 with an ambitious goal — “nature, man, and spirits as one.”
“Tu-Ren is two characters in Chinese. Tu means dirt, earth, or the land, while Ren means people, man, or human being. Once these two characters come together, Tu-ren, it means ‘Earth Man,’ a relationship between land and people. The firm’s philosophy is to recreate the harmony between land and people and create sustainable environments for the future. We act in the name of the Heaven (Nature) and as messengers of the spirits of our native forebears,” he explained.
ASLA 2010 Professional General Design Award of Excellence. Shanghai Houtan Park: Landscape as a Living System. Shanghai, China. TURENSCAPE
Yu brings that philosophy to his work planning and designing nature-based solutions that integrate wetlands, mangroves, and forests.
“Any sustainable landscape is nature-based. Landscape is a synonym for nature when one discusses landscape architecture in the context of its sister professions such as architecture and urban planning. Landscape architecture is about using knowledge and skills related to adaptation, transformation, and the management of nature to harness ecosystem services — such as provision, regulation, life support, beauty, and spiritual benefit — for humanity’s long-term and short-term needs. This is the essential core of nature-based solutions.”
ASLA 2020 Professional General Design Honor Award. Deep Form of Designed Nature: Sanya Mangrove Park. Sanya City, Hainan Province, China. TURENSCAPE
And he also shared some news about how his combined practice and academic work are advancing these goals. “The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has recently signed a memorandum of understanding with Peking University to establish a joint research program at our campus focusing on nature-based solution best practices. This is largely the landscape planning, design, and management work of Turenscape.”
Yu believes landscape architects’ ability to bring together multiple disciplines and leverage science and engineering will help solve the climate crisis.
“Landscape architects play a key role in addressing climate change, both in terms of mitigation and adaptation, particularly the latter. Landscape architecture is the cornerstone of the intellectual mansion of arts, sciences, and engineering that jointly stand together to address climate change. That is why I am so glad to see landscape architecture recently listed as a STEM discipline in the U.S.”
He envisions landscape architects leading the way, pulling together a range of professions to form enduring solutions.
“Ian McHarg defined a landscape architect as a conductor, who orchestrates disciplines and professionals and integrates all abiotic and biotic processes into a harmoniously performing ecosystem through the skill of designing in the physical medium of landscape.”
ASLA 2010 Professional General Design Honor Award. The Red Ribbon – Tanghe River Park, Qinhuangdao City, Hebei Province, China. TURENSCAPE and Peking University Graduate School of Landscape Architecture
ASLA 2021 Professional General Design Honor Award. Ferrous Foundry Park, Lawrence, Massachusetts. STIMSON / Ngoc Doan
Landscape architects see need for new product data and tools to better measure and reduce impacts from their projects
ASLA has released its first national survey on the role of landscape architecture products in achieving decarbonization and biodiversity goals. A cross-section of landscape architects, designers, and landscape architecture educators in the U.S. responded to the survey in June 2023.
According to the survey results, landscape architects seek:
Increased collaboration with product manufacturers, universities, and allied organizations to research, analyze, and reduce climate and biodiversity impacts of products.
New product data to better measure carbon in projects, including:
Embodied carbon factors for materials
Projected carbon sequestration of tree species
Greenhouse gas emissions of products’ entire lifecycle
New local options for 14 product categories to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from transporting products.
A new open-source landscape architecture product data library and carbon factor dataset.
And to address potential biodiversity impacts, they seek new research and knowledge sharing.
“Our ambitious Climate Action Plan, released last year, called for all landscape architecture projects to achieve zero embodied and operational emissions and increase carbon sequestration by 2040. It also called for all projects to restore ecosystems and increase and protect biodiversity. The products used in projects are absolutely central to landscape architects achieving these goals,” said ASLA CEO Torey Carter-Conneen.
“The survey clearly shows that landscape architects and product manufacturers must deepen their collaboration to reduce the climate and biodiversity impacts of materials in built landscapes. We can only achieve our goals by working together, being more transparent about materials, and increasing our collective performance,” said ASLA National Climate Action Committee Chair April Phillips, FASLA.
ASLA 2021 Professional Residential Honor Award. Quarry Garden. Minneapolis, Minnesota. TEN x TEN / Gaffer Photography
Reducing Climate Impacts
According to Climate Positive Design, some 75 percent of landscape architecture projects’ greenhouse gas emissions result from embodied carbon. These are the emissions released from the manufacturing, transport, installation, and construction of products used in landscape projects. The other 25 percent is associated with operational emissions, which are released by powering and maintaining landscapes.
In landscape architecture projects, there is a need to:
Reduce the use of products with high embodied carbon
Increase green space that sequesters carbon
Use more locally sourced products, which means lower transportation emissions.
Third-party verification of the greenhouse gas emissions from products is another key action because it enables landscape architects to accurately measure the carbon footprint of their projects.
The survey finds that some landscape architects are decarbonizing their projects through the products they specify, but the approach is not yet widespread.
Key survey findings
24% of landscape architects surveyed state that clients are setting greenhouse gas emission budgets for one or more of their projects. 2% stated an emissions budget is in place for all their projects.
56% of landscape architects surveyed ask for third party-verified environmental product data, including Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs), at some stage in the design process.
There is significant demand for specifying local products to reduce transportation emissions. A majority of landscape architects would specify local products from a range of categories if they were available, including:
Trees
Aggregates and aggregate stabilization
Plants
Concrete and concrete products
Soils and soil amendments
Natural stone
Brick, tile, and fired masonry products
Erosion and sediment control products
Bituminous paving
Fencing or metal fabrications
Wood or wood products
Drainage or piping
Furnishings
Irrigation
To reduce embodied carbon from products and also increase the use of products that sequester carbon, landscape architects see the need for additional industry-wide product data.
The product data most in demand:
Embodied carbon factors of materials, which measures the embodied greenhouse gas emissions per mass of a given material
Projected carbon sequestration by species of trees
Greenhouse gas emissions of products’ entire lifecycle
Greenhouse gas emissions for transporting products to project sites
Greenhouse gas emissions savings from the use of innovative materials
To move forward, landscape architects called for:
Additional education
Creation of a shared, curated product data library
Best practices for landscape architects, product manufacturers, and the construction communities.
Creation of a shared, curated carbon factor dataset for materials
Reducing Biodiversity Impacts
Products used in landscape architecture projects can have adverse impacts on biodiversity and ecosystems.
Products that include mined, extracted, or harvested materials or certain chemicals can potentially negatively affect species and ecosystems. The construction and installation of products can also impact ecosystems in and surrounding project sites.
There is currently no standard way to measure the biodiversity impacts of products used in landscape architecture projects, with the exception of wood products, which can be certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and tracked through chain of custody approaches. Other tools evaluate the chemical content of products.
To reduce potential adverse biodiversity impacts from products, landscape architects called for:
Additional education
Knowledge sharing between product manufacturers and landscape architects at the ASLA Conference on Landscape Architecture
Funding an industry-wide biodiversity protection product protocol
Trend analysis on current approaches to reducing biodiversity impacts from construction
Product Manufacturers’ Perspective
In June 2023, ASLA also polled product manufacturers that represent more than 30 product areas and industries. 48 product manufacturers responded. Given there are an estimated 6,000 manufacturers marketing products to landscape architects, this poll doesn’t constitute a representative sample.
34% of product manufacturers polled stated they have plans in place to further decarbonize their products or manufacturing process and are making investments to achieve these plans.
30% stated they have measured greenhouse gas emissions from their product manufacturing process. 26% have measured the emissions from sourcing materials.
The ASLA Climate Action Committee and ASLA Corporate Member Committee, which includes product manufacturers, are developing a series of free webinars to support landscape architects and product manufacturers in decarbonizing projects and processes and improving biodiversity outcomes.
In May, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling in Sackett vs EPA that ended federal protections of some kinds of wetlands and tributaries under the U.S. Clean Water Act.
Like many organizations, ASLA released a statement condemning the decision. ASLA found the ruling “short-sighted” because it “ignores science and the well-documented hydrological understanding of the interconnection of water sources.”
This statement was rooted in ASLA’s long-held, science-based policy positions on the waters of the United States and wetlands, and a legacy of comments sent to administrations, including the Biden-Harris administration during its last rule making process in 2022. ASLA’s positions were crafted from feedback from members who found recent definitions of waters of the U.S. and policies unclear and not grounded in hydrological or climate science.
According to a national poll issued by The New York Times, 72 percent of Americans also disagreed with the recent Supreme Court decision and believe the “Clean Water Act should be read broadly and include things like wetlands.”
And as landscape architects and ecologists know, “what is a wetland isn’t as black and white as the Supreme Court defined,” said Steven Spears, FASLA, project principal with Momark Development and GroundWork.
“The Supreme Court decision was wrong for a number of reasons,” said Keith Bowers, FASLA, president and founder of Biohabitats and a professional wetland scientist. “The decision was not based on science.”
According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the recent Supreme Court ruling defines waters of the U.S. as “relatively permanent bodies of water connected to traditional navigable waters.”
It defined some wetlands as waters of the U.S. if they have a “continuous surface connection to other jurisdictional waters, so that there is no clear demarcation between the bodies.” But the decision excludes other wetlands that are “neighboring waters but are separated by natural or artificial barriers.”
“The ruling interpreted wetland adjacency differently. The Supreme Court said a wetland needs to have a surface nexus with a stream, river, or navigable water to be federally protected. But we know wetlands are connected to other water bodies through both groundwater and surface flows, which may be continuous or not,” Bowers said.
“There is a lot to unpack with the Supreme Court ruling and more clarity will come in time,” Spears said. But the Supreme Court decision “just sees wetlands on a black and white basis. It also fails to account for wetland quality.”
The Sacketts sued the EPA in 2008 because it classified wetlands on their property in Idaho as waters of the U.S. The wetlands were near a ditch that fed into a creek, which then fed into Priest Lake, a navigable, intrastate lake.
In its recent decision, the Supreme Court essentially found that “the wetlands were not waters of the U.S. because they were separated from the lake by a road – even though they were connected to the lake under that road by a culvert,” Spears said.
Spears thinks it’s possible the wetlands in question were low-quality and that filling them in had little impact on the broader water quality of the lake. But it’s hard to tell because the ecosystem services of the particular wetlands weren’t measured.
“The Supreme Court decision is frustrating because it just states a wetland is either a wetland or not, regardless of the performance of the wetland and what ecosystem services it provides.”
At Austin Green in Austin, Texas, Spears and his firm, GroundWork, led a redevelopment of a former sandy gravel mine that was created before the Clean Water Act went into effect in 1972.
The brownfield site included both high-quality wetlands and other low-quality wetlands that happened to form out of the dredging process. The 2,100-acre redevelopment preserves and enhances more than 850 acres of high-performing wetlands and other ecological assets as part of a public park along the Colorado River.
Austin Green development / Lionheart Places, courtesy of GroundWork
The team – which included landscape architects at Lionheart Places and ecologists at ACI Consulting – used the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Ft. Worth District’s Texas Rapid Assessment Model (TRAM) to score the ecological service quality of the wetlands on the site and win approval of the project.
“We used the tool to conduct a land suitability analysis and planning process.This process informed the landscape architecture-led planning and design team as to which environmental systems were most desirable for protection and enhancement.”
“The model was used to identify high-quality wetlands that scored a 70 out of 100. We focused on how to raise their quality level to an 80 or 90. The redevelopment plan and park and open space network were curated around these ecological assets. There were also low-quality wetlands that scored a 1 out of 100, and some of those were filled in. What’s important to figure out is how a wetland performs, what is their worth. And if you need to fill in a wetland, mitigate or offset that elsewhere.”
While he doesn’t support the Supreme Court ruling, “now that it is the law of the land, how do we move forward?”
Spears wants to see a tool like the Army Corps’ TRAM as a national approach, with adjustments for important regional wetland and geomorphological differences. He noted that some Army Corps districts have wetland scoring tools and some don’t.
“Landscape architects can lean in and help establish the criteria for a new wetland scoring system. That will help us get away from ‘this is a wetland and that is not.’ We need to influence and help create a new wetland modeling process.”
Bowers thinks the ruling will open up lots of land and wetlands that were historically regulated to new development that will not be subject to federal approvals.
He thinks this is bad news for watersheds overall. “If you impact a river at its mouth, it won’t impact the system. But if you impact the wetlands – the headwaters – the water system can collapse. Wetlands are where you establish the ecological processes and then they migrate down the ecosystem.”
“I think all wetlands should be protected, as some wetlands that are low-quality today may not have been historically. As landscape architects, we should not impact any wetland if it’s in our power. With the climate and biodiversity crises, we need wetlands to sequester carbon and provide habitat. We need to do everything to minimize or mitigate impacts.”
For him, tools like TRAM can be useful in prioritizing which wetlands to save and restore. But he thinks the evaluation of any particular wetland’s quality should be rooted in a broader understanding of the watershed in which the wetland exists. He said the Supreme Court decision will increase the importance of watershed planning and the role of landscape architects in comprehensive planning for water resources.
The ruling also muddies the waters, so to speak, about how ephemeral waters will be considered in the future, potentially opening up future litigation.
According to CRS, “the majority opinion does not explicitly address ephemeral waters, which flow only in response to precipitation, or intermittent waters, which flow continuously during certain times of year, such as when snow pack melts. At a minimum, the majority’s interpretation would appear to exclude ephemeral waters.”
But a majority of Supreme Court justices also recognized that “‘temporary interruptions in surface connection’ – such as from low tides or dry spells” – happen in wetlands. “It is not clear how temporary such an interruption must be in order to preserve a wetland’s jurisdictional status.”
Hearing this, Spears seemed exasperated. In Texas, this lack of clarity on seasonal waters may impact how ephemeral streams and agricultural stock tanks are considered. “The Supreme Court seemed to create more problems than they solved.”
As regulations are rewritten, he sees opportunities for landscape architects to offer their deep expertise in designing with water and creating innovative approaches. He wants landscape architects to shape the next generation of water policy. “The reaction to Sackett vs EPA that is coming can help solve our water problems over the long-term.”
For Bowers, it’s important for landscape architects to be strong advocates for the preservation and restoration of wetlands through their projects and in their communities. “Try to insert policy standards and push for updates to zoning regulations.” And landscape architects can reach out to their Congressional representatives. “Legislators need to further clarify the definition of waters of the U.S.”
Since 1972, the Clean Water Act has protected the country’s aquatic environments from pollution. It was created by Congress to keep water bodies safe for wildlife and fishing and swimming. It has also protected communities’ drinking water supplies.
After the Act established federal jurisdiction over navigable waters, there have been a number of rulings by the Supreme Court. This is because the Clean Water Act never clearly defined what waters of the U.S. meant and instead authorized the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and EPA to create that definition through regulations.
Legislators understood that it comprised “all the relevant parts of an aquatic ecosystem, including streams, wetlands, and small ponds—things that aren’t necessarily connected to the tributary system on the surface, but that still bear all kinds of ecological relationships to that system and to one another.”
And up until the 2000s, NRDC says, that inclusive definition of the waters of the U.S. was largely upheld through court cases.
The Supreme Court ruling in May came after multiple lawsuits filed in opposition to the Biden-Harris administration waters of the U.S. definition, which went into effect March 20, 2023. Those lawsuits halted implementation of the use of the definition in 27 states.
After the Sackett vs EPA decision, new guidance on the waters of the U.S. is being developed by the EPA and will be released in September.
The EPA and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will also need to revise or amend a slew of regulations to be compliant with the Supreme Court decision.
To be specific, the ruling impacts many EPA regulations and programs that rely on a definition of waters of the U.S., including:
Water quality standards and total maximum daily loads
Oil spill prevention and preparedness programs
State and tribal certification under Section 401 of the Clean Water Act
Pollutant discharge permits
Dredged and fill material permits
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which operates in close collaboration with the EPA, will also need to update or revise its approach to military and civil engineering projects and permits that involve non-tidal and tidal wetlands.
Changes to these federal regulations and programs will also lead to cascading revisions of state regulations.
The Clean Water Act requires that state regulations adhere to its minimum requirements. It also allows states to go beyond the Clean Water Act and issue more stringent regulations. Some states have surpassed the federal level of water protection, while others have passed laws stating that only the bare federal minimum will be followed.
ASLA 2022 Professional General Design Honor Award. Riverfront Spokane. Spokane, Washington. Berger Partnership / Miles Bergsma
Each year, the Trust for Public Land (TPL) issues its ParkScore, which ranks the park systems of the 100 most populous cities in the U.S. This year, the organization also explored the positive health outcomes of top-scoring cities, looking at more than 800 innovative programs and practices that integrate park and healthcare systems.
Their findings are collected in a new report, The Power of Parks to Promote Health, which offers smart strategies for making parks a more formal part of community health programs. Their inclusive, equitable approaches can help ensure more communities experience the physical and mental health benefits of public green spaces.
TPL finds that in the 25 cities with the top ParkScore rankings, “people are on average 9 percent less likely to suffer from poor mental health, and 21 percent less likely to be physically inactive than those in lower- ranked cities. These patterns hold even after controlling for race/ethnicity, income, age, and population density.”
And in 26 cities, efforts are underway to deepen connections between parks and healthcare systems. In these cities, “a healthcare institution is funding, staffing, or referring patients to health programs in parks as part of efforts to improve patient and community health.”
TPL wants to see even more cities make these connections. “Park administrators and health professionals should think of parks as part of a holistic public health strategy,” said Dr. Howard Frumkin, senior vice president at Trust for Public Land (TPL), co-editor of Making Healthy Places, and one of the co-authors of the report.
Free bike rides in the park. ASLA 2022 Professional Urban Design Honor Award. Shirley Chisholm State Park. Brooklyn, New York. Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates / Etienne Frossard
Numerous studies by landscape architecture researchers and other scientists have demonstrated the health benefits of spending time in green spaces, even if it’s just 20 minutes. Dr. MaryCarol Hunter, ASLA, and William Sullivan, ASLA, and others have done much to quantify those benefits.
Studies have found that exposure to nature in cities can improve “hormone levels, heart rate, mood, the ability to concentrate, and other physiological and psychological measures,” TPL writes.
Specific benefits include: “lower blood pressure, improved birth outcomes, reduced cardiovascular risk, less anxiety and depression, better mental concentration, healthier child development, enhanced sleep quality, and more.”
Other research has demonstrated the long-term benefits of spending time in nature on “body weight, cardiovascular disease risk, and life expectancy.”
ASLA 2022 Professional General Design Award of Excellence. Palm Springs Downtown Park. Palm Springs, California. RIOS / Millicent Harvey
“If we had a medicine that delivered as many benefits as parks, we would all be taking it,” Frumkin said. “And they do those things without adverse side effects and at minimal cost.”
But park inequities, and therefore health inequities, are also real. TPL states that “neighborhoods where most residents identified as Black, Hispanic and Latinx, American Indian/Alaska Native, or Asian American and Pacific Islander had access to an average of 43 percent less park acreage than predominantly white neighborhoods. Similar park-space inequities existed in low-income neighborhoods across cities.”
“Over 100 million people across the country, including 28 million kids, don’t have a park within a 10-minute walk of their home. In California, 42 percent of low-income parents report that their children have never participated in outdoor activities.”
The report brings together a range of scientific findings that clearly show why all communities need nearby access to high-quality parks. With inclusive parks spread more equitably throughout cities, health programs can better reach historically underserved communities.
These findings can help landscape architects, planners, policymakers, developers, and community advocates make the case for more parks and the new public health programs that can amplify their benefits:
“Close-to-home parks are associated with lower obesity rates and improved health in both young people and adults.”
“Staffed programming, such as fitness classes, dramatically increased physical activity. Each additional supervised activity increased park use by 48 percent and moderate to vigorous physical activity time by 37 percent.”
A 2014 study in the journal Preventive Medicine, which relied on five years of data on individuals’ body mass index (BMI) and characteristics of nearby parks in New York City, found that “greater neighborhood park access and greater park cleanliness were associated with lower BMI among adults.”
A study in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, which examined children ages 6 to 12 in Valencia, Spain, found that “park and playground access was ‘significantly associated’ with increased physical activity, especially on weekdays, and contributed to lower BMIs overall.”
A 2022 study in the journal Health & Place explored the rates of depression and anxiety among older people during the pandemic. “It found that those with access to neighborhood parks were much less likely to report symptoms of depression or to screen positive for anxiety than those without.”
“A 2023 study conducted in Philadelphia and published in the journal PLOS ONE found that those who lived closest to green space reported better physical health and less stress than those who lived farther. Actually visiting green spaces during the pandemic was linked to better mental and physical health and less loneliness.”
In their report, TPL also outlined the climate benefits of parks and how they can reduce the dangerous health impacts of extreme heat. Assembling the “highest-resolution heat data” available in the U.S., they found a “stark difference in temperature between neighborhoods that have parks nearby and those that do not.”
Analyzing “thermal satellite imagery for 14,000 cities and towns,” TPL researchers found that areas within a “10-minute walk of a park can be as much as 6 degrees cooler than neighborhoods outside that range.”
The report offers examples from leading park and health coalitions in cities, outlining how public agencies, non-profit community organizations, and healthcare providers came together to leverage public park space to improve health outcomes.
“In New York City, for example, a program called Shape Up NYC offers free classes in everything from yoga to Zumba to Pilates in easy-to-access locations: libraries, public-housing complexes, recreation centers, and, of course, parks. In Columbus, Ohio, doctors at a local hospital prescribe 11-week fitness programs, provided for free by the city’s parks department, to patients struggling with obesity and high blood pressure,” TPL writes.
A set of 14 recommendations then outline how park and healthcare systems can better integrate. Many of their recommendations can inform the planning and design work of landscape architects.
One recommendation worth highlighting — “ensure that everybody lives within a 10-minute walk (about a half mile) of a park.” TPL states that proximity is important but so are “quality, activation, and safety.” And “creative place-making initiatives that incorporate local character through cultural elements, such as public art and bilingual signage,” are also key.
ASLA 2022 Professional Urban Design Honor Award. Midtown Park. Houston, Texas. Design Workshop, Inc. “Wild Wonderland” mosaic by Dixie Friend Gay / Brandon Huttenlocher – Design Workshop, Inc.
More recommendations:
“Prioritize park investment in historically underserved communities
Develop transit connections and guided tours, like youth programs
Bring parks to the people through pop-ups and mobile offerings
Offer all-ability or ‘try before you buy’ fitness and wellness programs [in parks] explicitly designed for beginners.
Encourage park visitors to try something new with low-commitment offerings such as drop-in sports (e.g., adult recess) or free or low-cost gear rentals.
Make it easy for community groups to use parks and recreation facilities as their primary gathering venues.
Refer, prescribe, or host patients with health programming in parks and recreation facilities.
Sponsor the costs of wellness programs, sports leagues, and other health classes as part of any free fitness membership benefit.
Invest in capital improvements in parks as community health investments.
Work with parks and recreation agencies to map and identify park deficits as part of Community Health Needs Assessments.
Continue to partner with parks and recreation agencies to reach key patient populations with health services and education.
Partner with parks and recreation agencies to evaluate the impact of park initiatives on key patient and community health outcomes.”
Chris Hardy, ASLA, is senior associate at Sasaki and founder of Carbon Conscience. He is Co-chair of the ASLA Climate Action Committee Subcommittee on Carbon Drawdown and Biodiversity. He was a 2022-2023 Landscape Architecture Foundation Innovation and Leadership Fellow.
The purpose of Carbon Conscience is to make it easier to have an intuitive understanding of the climate impacts of design proposals. It’s designed for early-phase design work. It’s for landscape architects, architects, urban planners, and urban designers. It’s even for community advocates who may want to get a better grasp of the carbon potential of what’s being proposed.
For example, if there’s a multi-housing family development with multiple buildings and landscape, the designer of the project could sketch out architecture and landscape land uses and get a high-level understanding of the carbon impacts of building that project, focusing on the embodied carbon in construction.
Embodied carbon is what it takes to build the project; the carbon emitted to produce, ship to site, and install the construction materials. There’s also a way to tally biogenic stored carbon, which is the carbon locked up in things like wood materials, or sequestered carbon, which is the carbon drawn down out of the atmosphere by planting and restored ecosystems. We accounted for the probable carbon sequestered by living systems over a period of 60 years, to correlate with the typical lifecycle study period for buildings.
What we realized using Pathfinder, Tally, and other tools is you usually need detailed quantities of materials in a project before you can get a meaningful estimate of the global warming impacts of a given project. The problem with that is the biggest potential for change is in the earlier design phases, when maybe you’re fundamentally challenging or deciding what the framework of a project is.
What are some of the new features of Carbon Conscience v2 you’re excited about?
In version 2, we created an entirely new landscape baseline materials database. There are now over 140 different landscape materials with carbon factors that include mean values as well as low and high standard deviation. Carbon factors are how much carbon it takes to make a given material. For example, a carbon factor for concrete would be so many kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilogram of concrete. With version 2, we have a much more accurate and defensible tool.
We were also able to get user feedback from the version 1 beta testers. We realized we had two types of users. We have what I like to call the noodlers, who wanted to sketch something simple, test it, and see how things work. The second group were the deep dive users who wanted to gamify the tool. They wanted to use the tool more actively — to test, iterate, and get more sophisticated material options.
In Version 2, we’ve made things a lot easier for the noodlers. We’ve reconstructed the user experience to be more intuitive. We’re going to post new user tutorials. And we also made it more open to planners who might not be in technical drawing tools on a day-to-day basis. For the deep dive folks, we provided the ability to use a lot more materials and land use options, and the ability to edit assumptions for those land uses.
Carbon Conscience is a scale bigger than individual sites that might be put in the Pathfinder. And it’s a phase or two earlier.
In Pathfinder, you need to know how many square meters or square yards of different paving, furnishings, etc, and numbers of trees. You may not know that at a planning phase. You can use Carbon Conscience even before there’s a defined project to bid on, when you have a rough idea of what the project is or could be, and you want to evaluate options. Carbon Conscience is for planning and concept design phases only.
Once you go beyond those phases, it would be best, as a workflow, for landscape architects to transfer their project into Pathfinder. We’re working with Pamela to connect our APIs, so projects can graduate from Carbon Conscience into Pathfinder. And Pathfinder is going to refer to our dataset as they move forward with their updated version this coming year. We’re very closely linked with Pathfinder and collaborating with the Climate Positive Design team.
Carbon Conscience also has an architectural dataset sourced from the Carbon Leadership Forum. It’s at a whole building lifecycle analysis approach, averaged out by floor-level of resolution. And we’re going to be moving forward with collaborating with the Epic tool by EHDD in Version 3, which will be coming this fall.
You’ve used the Carbon Conscience platform to make smart planning and design decisions for the 600-acre Ellinikon Metropolitan Park in Athens, Greece, which will transform an abandoned airport into what will be the largest coastal park in Europe. You have stated the top three carbon reduction strategies of the project were: 1) swapping out imported soils for amended soils; 2) reducing the need for new concrete by using other materials; 3) reusing concrete found on site. How did you use the platform to figure this out?
When we started the Ellinikon, we had a high-level master plan for the park and public space authored by Foster Partners and their team. In the beginning of our engagement, we were asked to create a concept plan. We started by mapping out the Foster plan in Carbon Conscience, using that as a benchmark. We quickly realized that it was going to be very difficult, if not impossible, for us to be climate neutral before our restored ecosystems would hit their carbon carrying capacity.
I wanted to define that term, because I think it’s something that we all need to be aware of as landscape architects. The carbon carrying capacity for an ecosystem is how much carbon an ecosystem can reasonably store and sequester by the time it hits maturity. In most ecosystems, as they age and become fully mature, they store less and less carbon. They become relatively static carbon stores. But that’s not true of all ecosystems. Wetlands are different, and I can talk about that for a whole hour. But for Ellinikon, this was critical, as Mediterranean ecosystems generally store and sequester much less carbon than temperate or tropical humid forests.
What we realized in our early sketches of Ellinikon is that we needed to change business as usual. We started looking at different strategies in Carbon Conscience, which gave us a way to include the client in the discussion. We even had the client come into the tool themselves, so they could play with the assumptions and start tweaking them with us in workshops. They became personally invested in the development of the project carbon goals, and that gave our team the social capital to challenge business as usual assumptions in site design as we moved forward into technical documentation phases.
As we used the tool, we decided to hugely reduce the amount of paving and increase the area dedicated to restoration style planting, as opposed to gardenesque planting or lawns. Now in the final design, the only lawns in the project have to work for a living. They’re for active uses, sports events. Ornamental horticulture is almost entirely defined by aromatic gardens that are passively maintained in that climate. And about 70 percent of the site is now restoration-style ecology.
We also used it to challenge our material assumptions. If we were swapping out our concrete hardscapes for resin-bonded aggregate hardscape or a salvaged concrete hardscape, that gave us huge savings.
In the design guidelines released with Carbon Conscience, you outlined seven principles designers can follow to reduce the climate impacts of their projects. One is to prioritize reuse. How can landscape architects reuse materials they find on existing sites they may be redesigning? And what do you think is needed to make reuse more cost effective at smaller scales?
Cost efficiency is totally dependent on the quality and scale of the material. In some cases, it can be a lot cheaper if you’re just resurfacing asphalt pavement and not resetting it. If you’re just re-setting existing cobbles in a particular streetscape, that’s extremely cost effective. It gets trickier when you’re doing substantial amounts of work to the material itself. For example, if you want salvaged concrete — let’s say crushed salvaged concrete for riprap in a very small site — that might not be cost feasible.
If you have a site an acre or more, specialized equipment like concrete crushers can be viable. But in the United States, we’re already diverting over 50 percent of our construction waste to some kind of salvaged facility, and that includes lot of concrete work. There’s already some efficiency where you can salvage aggregates coming from demolition debris in most major metropolitan areas.
A big part of reuse is also thinking about the end-of-life of our designs and materials. It’s a lot easier to crush, salvage, and reuse, or up-cycle or down-cycle concrete if it doesn’t have steel reinforcing in it. Without steel reinforcement, you can start cutting it like stone. If we think about our concrete pavement profiles, maybe we make them a little thicker to avoid having steel in them, so that in the next generation of that concrete pavement, it’ll be a lot easier to salvage it for reuse.
In the guidelines you also call for using natural and locally-sourced materials wherever possible. What are the climate benefits of these approaches? And are there projects that have done this that inspire you?
When we can avoid emissions associated with the making of the material itself — like the emissions that go into making clinker for cement, smelting for metals, or complex hydro-chemical processes to make plastics — that dramatically reduces the carbon factors of the material itself.
When we specify natural materials, the material is there; it just needs to be cut, shaped, and moved. And those emissions can be a lot less. I’m talking about things like stone, aggregate, wood, bamboo, and rammed earth, which are naturally occurring and just need be manipulated to become construction products.
When we talk about locally-sourced materials, we’re avoiding the transportation carbon cost that regional or more distant materials can have. Unfortunately, in the United States almost all of our transportation for construction materials is generally truck, which can have the highest carbon factor of almost any typical transportation options. Local sourcing becomes a huge factor for landscapes in particular, because most of our materials are massive and come at a high carbon transportation cost.
Right now, I’m focused on our Ellinikon project in Greece where we are trying to locally source most of the materials on site. We have the benefit of having stone quarries less than 20 miles from the site. And we have the benefit of mining material on the site. There’s a wonderful opportunity when you think about sourcing local stone in particular, because usually you’re tapping into a vernacular, a material tradition. There are regional craftsmanship traditions people take pride in.
You also emphasize the value of nature-based solutions and promoting ecological preservation and restoration. How do healthy ecosystems and nature-based solutions create positive climate outcomes? Do biodiverse, ecologically-rich landscapes store more carbon?
Only in living systems do we have economically viable ways to draw carbon out of the atmosphere. Geoengineering solutions are speculative businesses. Trees and plants are very efficient at what they do. And it’s very hard for technology to replicate those processes in an economically viable way.
One of the great benefits of nature-based solutions is the co-benefits. Rain gardens not only contribute to stormwater management but reduce the fundamental need for grey infrastructure. They’re replacing the concrete pipes and catch basins. And in the right context, they’re a high-carbon sequestrating landscape. And when you start layering in biodiversity benefits, it becomes an even richer proposal.
Biodiversity is more of a correlation with carbon sequestration than a causation. For example, a Spartina salt marsh is not the most biodiverse planting design but it is super carbon sequestering. However, when you compare two different landscapes, the more structurally complex an ecosystem is — the more trophic levels, the more physical levels of living organisms, such an overstory, an understory, and rich mycorrhizal horizon in the soils — the more carbon it is going to store. And it will usually be more biodiverse than a structurally simplistic ecosystem. What we want is structural diversity and complexity; we want resilient, complex, adapted ecosystems.
Most kinds of forest have a carbon carrying capacity, but many wetlands and some prairie do not. Wetlands offer a linear rather than sigmoidal sequestration of carbon. Over the long-term, wetlands can be incredibly high performance from a carbon perspective. Maybe the solution isn’t always planting trees to offset a project. Maybe it is protecting or investing in the restoration of a wetland or a prairie.
Do you have an idea that will change how landscape architects approach climate action? It takes big ideas to move a profession forward – ideas from different perspectives, voices, and backgrounds. Those big ideas could come from you. This is a great opportunity to share ideas and concepts under development that will drive innovation on climate action.
During these fast-paced, innovative talks, you will have just seven minutes to share your game changing idea at the ASLA 2023 Conference on Landscape Architecture, October 27-30 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Submissions from first-time presenters, students, emerging professionals, and allied professionals are encouraged.
The ASLA Climate Action Plan seeks to transform the practice of landscape architecture by 2040 through actions taken by ASLA and its members focused on climate mitigation and adaptation, ecological restoration, biodiversity, equity, and economic development. This year, we ask submissions focus on a Climate Action Plan goal:
Practice: Scale Up Climate Positive Approaches
Equity: Empower Communities to Achieve Climate Justice
Advocacy: Build Coalitions for Climate Action
The possibilities for action are endless. You can find many ideas suggested in the Climate Action Field Guide. Sharing new ideas, data, metrics, and tools will help the entire landscape architecture community become better at this work.
The top submissions will be invited to present their game changing idea at Practice Basecamp at the ASLA 2023 Conference. The winning game changer, selected by a jury, will receive a $500 prize to put toward professional development opportunities and 30 percent off registration to the conference.
How to Enter
Your Information: Tell us about yourself. Please include all social media handles so we can tag you!
Game Changer Written Description: Pitch this talk to attendees in two sentences. How will your idea change the field?
Video: Submit a short, cell phone-quality video describing your game changing idea (one-minute, resolution of 1920×1080, with a 16:9 aspect ratio in MP4 format). No fancy production required. Most importantly, have fun with it! The video must be under one-minute to be eligible.
Eligibility
Landscape architecture professionals, who are graduates of a landscape architecture program recognized by ASLA and landscape architecture students wishing to present at the conference, need to be active ASLA members.
Allied professionals are encouraged to both submit and speak, but are not required to be ASLA members.
The top submissions will advance and be chosen to present at the conference by popular vote.
On August 26, presenters of the top submissions will be notified they are moving onto popular vote. Popular voting is August 27-28. Presenters will be notified by early September.
Katie Riddle, ASLA, is director of professional practice at ASLA.
