Designing For A Warming World / Revisited
Image: © StudioFYNN
By Lew Epstein
“Designing for a Warming World” was an apt title for the Fall 2021 issue of Design Museum Magazine. Within its covers, experienced practitioners probed aspects of sustainability to help us understand our roles, responsibilities, and opportunities in an ever-warming world. But who knew in 2021 that climate change would rapidly accelerate within a few brief years and the world would set new records for warming temperatures, extensive damages, and far wider-scale loss?
Knowing this now, however, our response to climate change still has not kept pace with its velocity. That’s why designing for a warming world remains the work we need to do. Fortunately, a growing portfolio of established and emerging solutions can help us restore our climate.
Where Forestry & Technology Meet
Trees are an ancient resource that remains relevant today. They are like the Earth’s lungs, and act as natural air conditioners for urban neighborhoods. More than this, trees are found in most countries along waterways and at all elevations; they are regenerative and a generous source of food, shelter, and biodiversity. We’ve come to rely on wood for our home goods, hand tools, furniture, and construction materials, including cross-laminated timber (CLT) used for mass timber structures. For all these reasons, trees are essential to life on Earth.
When it comes to climate change, trees play a crucial role as a carbon sink. They can effectively absorb excess carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere through photosynthesis, wherein trees take in CO2, store it within their biomass (roots, trunk, and branches), and release oxygen as a byproduct.
Trees can help restore our climate affordably in most parts of the world. And thanks to new digital tools that utilize high-resolution satellite imagery, visual data can help us to monitor changing conditions across urban and rural areas in real time. For example, Global Forest Watch provides free data and spatial imaging technology, empowering people to manage and protect forest landscapes. With ease, anyone can see when and where trees are disappearing, ushering in a new era of transparency for the world’s forests.
Other digital forestry tools help us see and compare tree cover conditions in urban communities. The coverage is often inequitably distributed, and tools that can guide users toward generating greater tree equity are needed. Leading this effort is American Forests, a non-profit that champions sustainable forestry management practices. Its free digital tool, Tree Equity Score, provides a social-equity-focused narrative, goals, and guide for fostering assessment, understanding, commitment, and action for Tree Equity in urban settings.
Both organizations invite us to participate in their tree-planting projects where we live and where businesses are based or expanding. Effective forest carbon practices assisted by data-driven tools can enable a more equitable approach to regenerating forests and designing resilient cities.
Rangers with the Uganda Wildlife Authority use the Forest Watcher app to identify illegal deforestation in Kibale National Park, which has one of the highest concentration of primates in Africa. Photo by Jane Goodall Institute.
Chemistry & Technology Creating New Categories
While modern forestry practices offer effective methods for carbon dioxide removal (CDR), there simply isn’t enough land to plant enough trees to remove all of the excess CO2 that is trapped in our atmosphere and warming our planet. Scientists worldwide agree that we need a diverse set of CDR approaches to address the alarming rise in CO2 levels. In addition to the natural solutions available today, technological solutions in varying stages of development and deployment keep growing. Among them is Direct Air Capture (DAC), which refers to technologies designed for removing excess CO2 from the atmosphere and safely storing it deep underground, where it becomes mineralized. It is being explored by myriad start-ups and has been gaining considerable attention, greater private and public funding, and both proponents and skeptics along the way.
DAC development is rapidly evolving new carbon filtering technologies that increase both energy efficiency and removal capacity. Although costly today – think solar panels two decades ago – we can anticipate DAC scaling up more rapidly in the decades ahead. From new R&D funding and government policy support to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) affirming DAC’s vital role in reaching net-zero emission goals by 2050, DAC is expected to become an integral part of the built environment.
Carbon Waste & Value & Jobs
Many of the world’s products are made of materials with high embodied greenhouse gas emissions. These cause varying degrees of damage to the natural environment. Carbontech refers to the wide variety of commercial products made with CO2 emissions captured from power plants, biomass, or DAC methods. This rapidly growing field produces an ever-expanding set of goods and services, including global commodities such as fuel, plastics, and building materials, valuable niche applications such as cosmetics and food supplements, and emerging technologies such as carbon nanotubes. According to Carbon180.org, carbontech is driving a new market worth over $1 trillion USD.
Some carbontech products, such as carbonated beverages, soaps, and perfumes quickly re-release CO2 back into the air. Other products, such as concrete, bricks, nanotubes, and lab-grown diamonds, are longer lasting, locking away CO2 for 100 years or more. Both types are valuable because they aid the transition away from the world’s dependence on fossil fuels. Carbontech is attracting significant investment and generating jobs across consumer, commercial, and industrial market sectors, which seeds new growth opportunities for the design community.
The scientists at Made of Air, as one example, are developing compounds to substitute traditional high-emission materials to address the climate emergency; research conducted by their Carbon Lab is at the intersection of material science and carbon sequestration.
Smaller & Cheaper & Open-Source
Gaining scale is often associated with ‘getting bigger’, e.g., a bigger DAC plant with greater capacity. But it can also mean creating something smaller in greater numbers. Open Air Collective sponsors The Carbon Removal Challenge, an annual competition for university students worldwide to develop DAC devices using inexpensive off-the-shelf components. Some concepts are room-sized devices, not unlike a typical consumer appliance for heating or cooling an apartment. Some are rooftop devices with more capacity, while others focus on utilizing the captured carbon in value-added products. All are functional; none are refined. All are inventive, low-cost, and built upon an open-source model that encourages others to iterate toward better versions.
Waterloo Atmosphere-land Interactions Research (WatAir) has developed a carbon dioxide removal device that captures CO2 from ambient air. Carbonated water is a process byproduct that can be used to grow microalgae, which can be sustainably and safely produced for use in cosmetics and high-protein food supplements.
Initiatives like these offer another glimpse of the new carbontech quietly percolating in the background, striving to solve a universal problem, engineered with a combination of new and time-tested methods, envisioned in different scales and form factors, and built for different environments by innovators eager to prove the viability of these new ideas.
Designing For A Warming World / Now
Designing for a warming world will be our vocation throughout this century, in response to the relentless forces of climate change at work. Fortunately, the design community has become a powerful counterforce with equitable outcomes in its sights and technology as its partner. Carbon technology is cultivating new business categories and job opportunities that continually widen the design community’s prospects.
Spending just a few minutes a week reading, listening to, or watching credible sources of climate information can help us see our place within this context and articulate our choices more clearly. Greater awareness can give way to greater advocacy and uncover more ways to participate. That alone—multiplied by all of us—is among the most powerful and consequential choices we can collectively make now.
From Unfold Magazine Issue 01
Additional Resources:
The Tree Equity Score
The Tree Equity Score indicates whether there are enough trees in a neighborhood for everyone to experience the health, economic, and climate benefits they provide. The scores are calculated based on tree canopy, surface temperature, income, employment, race, age, language, and health. American Forests works locally with city mayors, municipal agencies, corporations, nonprofits, and religious organizations to increase urban tree coverage and promote urban forests as a natural climate solution, thereby catalyzing the Tree Equity Movement.
These statistics highlight the importance of tree equity and why it is so crucial:
- The lowest-income neighborhoods in America have 26% less tree cover and are 6℉ hotter than higher-income areas.
- Neighborhoods with the highest concentration of people of color, regardless of income levels, have 38% less tree cover and are 13℉ hotter than neighborhoods with the lowest concentration.
- Urban heat islands store and radiate heat, particularly affecting homes without air conditioning and putting people at risk for heat-related illness and death, especially vulnerable communities with limited resources and the elderly.
- Globally, heat-related deaths average nearly 489,000 per year, and these numbers are expected to rise exponentially by 2050 due to climate change.
Source: © World Resources Institute
Direct Air Capture (DAC)
In a relatively short time, DAC has become a new building typology and growing market category. While both large-scale and small-scale DAC methods keep evolving, their deployment costs are anticipated to fall like the costs of solar and wind power. This results from ‘learning by doing’, gaining efficiencies and lowering costs with each technology iteration, design improvement, and supporting governmental policy. Locating DAC facilities next to excess energy sources from waste heat streams, such as power generators or renewable wind and solar, can help curtail DAC’s energy footprint. The history of innovation, its timescales, and potential impacts offer good reasons to be optimistic about DAC’s future trajectory.
Orca from Climeworks is among the first commercial DAC plants to showcase a scalable proof of concept. Mammoth is Climeworks’ newest version, with a far greater capacity to remove and store CO2. Today, Stratos is the world’s largest DAC plant, now under construction in Texas and planned to be operational in 2025. As DAC evolves, it will benefit from thoughtful integration in the built environment. Some design firms already imagine a future where carbon removal is integrated from the outset. Among the most exciting is SOM’s carbon-absorbing building design, UrbanSequoiaNow.
As the design and implementation of DAC continue to evolve, it’s important that it is integrated equitably among communities. Project developers are encouraged to collaborate closely with stakeholders in local and at-risk communities to build short- and long-term value. Educating affected community members about the potential benefits, burdens, trade-offs, and safeguards can help protect against unforeseen circumstances or unjust outcomes. Equitable deployment of DAC can be achieved by prioritizing projects that benefit these communities through job creation, reducing air pollutants, or allocating a portion of the profits to support the community.
Lot21
Lot21 is a content platform and resource that makes it easier for designers to advance climate action. Visit their website: lot21.org.