Climate adaptability in the UK and Middle-East
Last year some interesting work emerged over the use of green walls for mitigation of air pollution; in particular the ability (or otherwise) of plants to remove particulate matter from the air, with pm10 being the size range focussed upon. This is the particle size most emitted from diesel exhaust, and this does a lot
I was chatting to the local farm manager the other day, out on the snow-lined track. “There’s nothing in the hedgerows for the birds” he told me. It made me glad that there was in my garden, which borders the track and fields. It also brought home such a startling truth: the birds need us
I’ve been doing a lot of research since writing my blog post on trans-migrational landscapes, my theory on how we have to adapt our natural environments – or rather, help them adapt – to combat the rapidly increasing effects of climate change. It’s not going to be easy; right now I’m not sure if we
With the climate shifting now so rapidly that we cannot foresee what the future may bring – or rather, with an ever increasing certainty of life as we know it struggling to survive – do we need a new approach to our understanding and management of our natural landscapes? I think this will become inevitable
I gave a talk last week on Internal Bio-Systems for buildings, to eFIG, the European Federation of Interiors Group (http://www.efig.eu.com/) which was reported on swiftly by Horticulture Week . They picked up on my use of the phrase “war-footing” for the kind of response levels needed to deal with the issues at hand. Why? Well,
Here in the UK, we may not be following the US presidential election campaigns, but if you use twitter and follow any environmentalists, you can hardly fail to read the comments about the deafening silence coming from all parties. It’s as if they’re in absolute denial about it; or perhaps they think it’s game over
I have this concept going on in my mind (first wrote about it in 2007) about the exterior surface of buildings being like a living membrane or “biomembrane” (a term for the exterior surface of a cell), and having direct interactions between the internal and external building space, regulating such things as temperature, humidity, air