In an area of Singapore once home to a brickworks and military training facilities, a vision of the future of urban living is taking shape.
The country is building what it calls its first smart and sustainable town, promising 42,000 homes in an environment where people can be “at home with nature”.
The Tengah project will consist of five residential districts on the 700-hectare site in Singapore’s Western region. Named Garden, Park, Brickland, Forest Hill and Plantation, the areas are designed to improve residents’ health and wellbeing and give them a better quality of life.
How? With smart buildings, greenery everywhere and a prioritization of walking and cycling that routes motor vehicle traffic underground. Read more (WeForum)
Older people will have to make sacrifices in the fight against climate change or today’s children will face a future of fighting wars for water and food, the EU’s deputy chief has warned.
Frans Timmermans, vice-president of the EU commission, said that if social policy and climate policy are not combined, to share fairly the costs and benefits of creating a low-carbon economy, the world will face a backlash from people who fear losing jobs or income, stoked by populist politicians and fossil fuel interests. Read more (Guardian)
What makes the difference between a sustainability program that produces business value and one that doesn’t? A new survey identifies practices that distinguish value-creating companies from others. Read more (McKinsey & Co.)
The laundry capsules, available through the brand Omo and launching in China April 22, result from a partnership between Unilever, biotech company LanzaTech, and green chemical company India Glycols. LanzaTech, which has a commercial plant running in China that turns carbon emissions from a steel mill into ethanol, has already used its carbon recycling process to turn those emissions into jet fuel and alcohol for fragrances. Read more (Fast Company)
In hindsight, we were lucky. Many creatures of this Earth didn’t live to see 2030. Humans could not save the animals we’d damned, but at least you and I are still here, right? Some people, though, couldn’t live with the destruction and chaos around them. Others had little choice when death came knocking. I remember the last time I saw you; we sat on your new deck, thinking of the world your sweet, curly haired boy was entering. A world plagued with death—deaths that lie at the feet of elected officials who ignored and denied the many crises we faced, and who took every penny the fossil fuel industry gave them. Read more (Patagonia)
Nevada’s legislature is considering banning decorative grass. But really we should be banning most lawns in the country. The movement to ban unnatural turf lawns, particularly in America’s arid regions, has been around for a while, and for good reason. The Nevada policy would not actually affect most private yards, but many environmentalists would argue that it should. Read more (TSB)
For decades, the idea that climate change touches everything has grown behind the scenes. Leaders from small island countries have pleaded with the rest of the world to notice how climate change has begun to uproot their lives, in areas from health care to schooling. Social scientists have crunched the data, illuminating how climate change will ripple across society, contributing to a surge in migration, reduced productivity and a spike in crime. And advocates and thinkers have proposed everything from a conscious move to economic degrowth to eco-capitalism to make climate the government’s driving force. Read more (Time)
Within the design discipline, calls for sustainability and social responsibility have become some of the most common rallying cries of the past decade, generating countless new products, materials and technologies―all designed to change the course of our future. Adjectives like “sustainable,” “green” and “eco” describe this new wave of socially committed design. But though today’s conditions are urgent and particular, the ideologies behind these new products are often not totally new, but rather a part of design history. Contemporary sustainable design is just the newest chapter of a story that stretches back throughout the previous centuries. The Responsible Object presents a selected history of socially committed design strategies within the Western design tradition of roughly the last 150 years, from William Morris to Victor Papanek, and from VKhUTEMAS to FabLab. It includes about 20 interstitial mini-posters with slogans from the text, printed on different colored papers. Learn more (Amazon.com)
Investing in development without putting pressure on the outcomes is key, adds Lebanese-Canadian systems designer Céline Semaan-Vernon, co-founder of Slow Factory Foundation. Over the past year, Slow Factory has run an incubator programme called One x One with Swarovski and the United Nations, pairing three New York-based designers with scientists working on sustainable materials. Read more (Vogue Business)
Sustainability linked securities and loans are an emerging form of sustainable finance, with attributes including interest payments tied to an issuer’s achievement of key performance indicators (KPIs) and associated sustainability performance targets. Read more (ESG)
