2020VISION FOR A SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY

MELBOURNE SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY INSTITUTE

The Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute (MSSI) at the University of Melbourne, Australia, brings together researchers from different disciplines to help create a more sustainable society. It acts as an information portal for research at the University of Melbourne, and as a collaborative platform where researchers and communities can work together to affect positive change. This book can be freely accessed from MSSI’s website: www.sustainable.unimelb.edu.au.

Cite as: Pearson, C.J. (editor) (2012). 2020: Vision for a Sustainable Society. Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, University of Melbourne

Published by Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute in 2012 Ground Floor Alice Hoy Building (Blg 162) Monash Road The University of Melbourne, Parkville Victoria 3010, Australia

Text and copyright © Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without prior permission of the publisher.

A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the catalogue of the National Library of Australia at www.nla.gov.au 2020: Vision for a Sustainable Society, ISBN: 978-0-7340-4773-1 (pbk)

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Cover and text design by Anne-Marie Reeves www.annemariereeves.com Illustrations on pages 228–231 by Michael Weldon www.michaelweldon.com Cover image © Brad Calkins | Dreamstime.com

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The last two centuries have seen extra-ordinary improvements in the quality of

human lives. Most people on earth today enjoy access to the necessities of life that was once available only to the elites. Most people enjoy longevity, health, education, information and opportunities to experience the variety of life on earth that was denied even to the rulers of yesteryear. The proportion of humanity living in absolute poverty remains daunting, but continues to fall decade by decade. The early 21st century has delivered an acceleration of the growth in living standards in the most populous developing countries and an historic lift in the trend of economic growth in the regions that had lagged behind, notably in Africa.

These beneficent developments are accom-panied by another reality. The improvements are not sustainable unless we make qualitative changes in the content of economic growth. The continuation of the current relationship between growth in the material standard of living and pressures on the natural environment will undermine economic growth, political

stability and the foundations of human achievement.

The good news is that humanity has already discovered and begun to apply the knowledge that can reconcile continued improvements in the standard of living with reduction of pressures on the natural environment.

The bad news is that the changes that are necessary to make high and rising standards of living sustainable are hard to achieve within our current political cultures and systems.

Hard, but not impossible. That is a central message from this book, drawn out in Craig Pearson’s concluding chapter.

This book introduces the reader to the many dimesions of sustainability, through well-qualified authors.

Climate change is only one mechanism through which current patterns of economic growth threaten the natural systems on which our prosperity depend. It is simply the most urgent of the existential threats.

Climate change is a special challenge for Australians. We are the most vulnerable of the

Foreword

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developed countries to climate change. And we are the developed country with the highest level of greenhouse gas emissions per person.

There are roles for private ethical decisions as well as public policy choices in dealing with the climate change challenge.

This book is released at the time of ‘Rio+20’, a conference in Brazil to review the relatively poor progress we have made towards sustainability in the past 20 years, and soon after the introduction of Australia’s first comprehensive policy response to the global challenge of climate change. Australia’s emissions trading scheme with an initially fixed price for emissions permits comes into effect on 1 July 2012. The new policy discourages activities that generate greenhouse gases by putting a price on emissions. The revenue raised by carbon pricing will be returned to households and businesses in ways that retain incentives to reduce emissions. Part of the revenue will be used to encourage production and use of goods and services that embody low emissions.

The policy has been launched in controversy. Interests that stand to gain from the discrediting of the policy argue that it is unnecessary either because the case for global action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the associated climate change has not been proven, or that the new policy places a disproportionate burden on Australians.

The health of our civilisation requires us to bring scientific knowledge to account in public policy. Everyone who shares the knowledge that is the common heritage of humanity has

a responsibility to explain the realities to others wherever and whenever they can.

The argument that the new policy places a disproportionate burden on Australians can be answered by seeking honestly to understand what others are doing.

The critics of Australian policy argue that the world’s two largest national emitters of greenhouse gases, China and the United States, are doing little or nothing to reduce emissions, so that it is either pointless or unnecessary for us to do so.

China has advanced a long way towards achieving its target of reducing emissions as a proportion of economic output by 40 to 45 per cent between 2005 and 2020. It has done this by forcing the closure of emissions-intensive plants and processes that have exceptionally high levels of emissions per unit of output, by imposing high emissions standards on new plants and processes, by charging emissions-intensive activities higher electricity prices, by subsidising the introduction of low-emissions activities, and by new and higher taxes on fossil fuels. China has introduced trials of an emissions trading system in five major cities and two provinces. This adds up to a cost on business and the community that exceeds any burden placed on Australians by the new policies – bearing in mind that the revenue from Australian carbon pricing is returned to households and businesses.

The US Government has advised the inter-national community of its domestic policy target to reduce 2005 emissions by 17 per cent by 2020. President Barack Obama said

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to the Australian Parliament that all countries should take seriously the targets that they had reported to the international community, and made it clear that the United States did so. United States efforts to reduce emissions are diffuse but far-reaching. They now include controls on emissions from electricity generators, announced in March 2012, effectively excluding any new coal-based power generation after the end of this year unless it embodies carbon capture and storage. From the beginning of next year they will include an emissions trading system in the most populous and economically largest state, California.

The United States is making reasonable progress towards reaching its emissions reduc-tion goals, with some actions imposing high costs on domestic households and businesses.

Australia has now taken steps through which we can do our fair share in the international effort, at reasonable cost. It would be much harder and more costly to do our fair share without the policies that are soon to take effect.

What Australians do over the next few years will have a significant influence on humanity’s prospects for handing on the benefits of modern civilisation to future generations. This book will help Australians to understand their part in the global effort for sustainability.

Ross GarnautUniversity of Melbourne

15 April 2012

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ContentsForeword by Ross Garnaut v

Table of Contents viii

Author Biographies x

Drivers 1

1 2

2 10

3 17

4 27

5 37

People 47

6 48

7 57

8 64

9 70

10 79

11 86

12 94

13 104

14 114

PopulationRebecca Kippen and Peter McDonald

Equity Helen Sykes

ConsumptionCraig Pearson

GreenhouseGasEmissionsandClimateChangeDavid Karoly

EnergyPeter Seligman

EthicsCraig Prebble

CultureAudrey Yue and Rimi Khan

AwarenessandBehaviourAngela Paladino

LocalMattersMatterKate Auty

PublicWisdomTim van Gelder

MentalHealthGrant Blashki

DiseasePeter Doherty

CorporateSustainabilityLiza Maimone

GovernanceJohn Brumby

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NaturalResources 123

15 124

16 132

17 141

18 150

Cities 161

19 162

20 170

21 177

22 184

23 192

24 200

25 210

Outcomes 221

26 222

Further Reading 234

Index 241

Ecosystem-BasedAdaptationRodney Keenan

WaterHector Malano and Brian Davidson

FoodSunday McKay and Rebecca Ford

ZeroCarbonLand-UseChris Taylor and Adrian Whitehead

ChangingCitiesPeter Newman and Carolyn Ingvarson

AffordableLivingThomas Kvan and Justyna Karakiewicz

BuiltEnvironmentPru Sanderson

InfrastructureColin Duffield

TransportMonique Conheady

AdaptiveDesignRay Green

HandlingDisastersAlan March

TwentyActionsCraig Pearson

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Adaptive DesignRay Green

We live in a highly carbon consumptive society; just heating, cooling and

lighting our homes, cooking food, going to work, shopping or going away on holiday releases greenhouse gases (GHG), principally carbon dioxide. These gases have accumulated in the atmosphere, warming the planet, and in turn changing the climate.

Adapting human settlements to the spectrum of impacts expected to come with climate change, and working to mitigate the causes by reducing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, will require innovative design thinking at all scales of the built environment, from household appliances to the construction of cities.

We need a radical re-think of how best to use and manage the resources we depend on for our daily survival – energy, water, food, biodiversity – and this will require entirely new approaches for designing buildings, open-space networks, infrastructure and transportation systems in an effort to make cities of the future more resilient to face the predicted impacts from climate change. This chapter addresses some of these design challenges.

ResilienceLow-carbon cities will need to be planned, designed, constructed and maintained in ways that reduce their vulnerability to a myriad risks, such as extreme weather events, and to ensure that people will be provided with secure and diverse sources of energy, water, food and the other resources necessary for their daily survival.

One aspect making this task more challenging is the significant amount of uncertainly with regard to predictions about climate change, its expected magnitude and timing. For example, the most credible report on climate change, produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), predicts that sea levels will rise by 0.6 of a metre by 2100. Yet many scientists, such as Jim Hansen who heads up NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in the United States, believe this to be a gross underestimation and suggests sea levels could rise much higher,

particularly if global temperatures increase more radically than what is predicted in the IPCC report, which many scientists believe will be the case, and if certain tipping points are reached (eg, if the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets were to melt).

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Strategies for adapting vulnerable coastal settlements to sea level rises.

Because of this uncertainty it is vitally important we build a high degree of resilience into the design of future cities. The Canadian ecologist C.S. Holling wrote a seminal article in 1973 entitled ‘Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems’, which appeared in the Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics. In it he pointed out that ecological systems typically process high levels of resilience, meaning they have ‘…the capacity…to absorb and utilise or even benefit from perturbations and changes that attain them, and so persist without a

qualitative change in the system’s structure’. When this notion of resilience is applied to the planning and design of human settlements, it suggests that they too will have to ‘absorb, utilise or even benefit’ from anticipated and unanticipated changes – long-term, incremental changes such as sea level rises and sudden, short-term events, such as flooding – without passing critical threshold limits. This way, they will avoid more radical changes that could severely impinge on the environmental quality, lifestyles, property and lives of inhabitants.

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Cities of Short DistancesHigh-density cities such as New York, where people typically live in apartments as opposed to detached homes, and typically get around by means other than private automobiles, use much less energy per capita than people living in suburban and rural areas. Such high-density cities often have more opportunities for people to walk, ride bikes or take public transportation than do suburban and rural areas, resulting in much reduced use of fossil fuels.

Cities can be made more sustainable simply by providing people with more and better ways of acquiring the things they need in their daily lives without having to travel far from their homes. An important consideration in making this transition will be finding ways to provide urban dwellers with secure access to water and food produced and/or sourced locally. Our current practice of importing food from distant places, often from others parts of the world, is unsustainable. Achieving this re-localisation of cities will require engagement of local communities, government and industry in developing and maintaining low-carbon neighbourhoods where services, and the production and distribution of goods, are managed as much as possible at the neighbourhood and urban precinct levels.

Urban settlements of the future will require not only food but all the other essentials of daily living to be produced and/or available to people within a short walk, bicycle ride or via public transport from their home, necessitating a shift in modes of transportation and particularly a

reliance on pedestrian mobility with the aim of limiting the overall distance people have to travel in the course of their daily lives (see chapter 17).

To realise this vision, better ways of producing food where people live and where the food is consumed will have to be found. This, in turn, will require a complete re-thinking of how urban settlements and their open spaces are designed. Many cities are already promoting, in small ways, this notion of urban agriculture in the form of community gardens, which in addition to producing food can provide a new social focus for neighbours.

To realise the benefits associated with this ‘city of short distances’ concept, greater reliance on production and distribution of food, water and energy at the neighbourhood and urban precinct levels will be needed, as will supplying a diversity of alternative, low-carbon transportation options and accompanying mixes of land-uses. Changes in tourism behaviour to encourage less reliance on travel to distant holiday destinations will likewise be needed and this will necessitate providing high-quality attractions near to where people live, which in turn will require people’s ‘holiday’ expectations to change accordingly. Perhaps most importantly, climate-adapted neighbourhoods of the future will have to provide attractive lifestyle options aligned with these land-use changes so people will be more likely to accept changes to their local surroundings.

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Adapted BuildingsBuildings are a large contributor of GHG emissions, representing approximately half of all emissions produced by Australian capital cities. Reducing the operational energy consumption of buildings, along with measures to ensure building construction materials have as low embodied energy as possible, are key design considerations.

Locating buildings to maximise efficiencies in public transport options, and creating accompanying mixed-use development patterns, will also be vitally important. Careful consideration of the building envelope is particularly important as façade design can impact directly on the building’s heating and cooling requirements due to ingress of solar radiation and its effect on air temperature, which directly relates to the amount of electricity needed to power the building. The need for artificial light, and hence power, is dependent on the amount of natural light penetration through the façade – the more natural light that penetrates the less need for artificial lighting. Façades of buildings can be designed to automatically adjust to changing outdoor and indoor environmental conditions, providing more natural light, energy efficiencies, better indoor comfort and greater flexibility of the use of spaces within buildings.

It has been estimated that energy savings of between 50 and 75 per cent are possible when the building envelope and the heating, cooling and lighting systems are made optimally energy efficient, as can be seen in the example of the Melbourne City Council’s

Council House 2 building. Adaptive building design, with particular attention given to the building envelope, along with improving building operations aimed at reducing energy consumption, are key design considerations that will be needed to create buildings for climate-adapted cities of the future.

If people using buildings were supplied with accurate assessments, in real-time, of how their behaviour relates to the building’s carbon footprint, they may be more conservative in their energy use. Monitoring energy flows and associated GHG emissions, feeding this information directly into places where people live and work, and displaying this information to the building users, is one way of helping people to be more aware of their energy use. As this technology becomes increasingly available, such systems can also be used to measure and relay to building users information about the amounts of solar, wind, geothermal and other alternative energy being used.

In 2004, Melbourne’s City Council constructed a new office building, CH2, which incorporates many innovative sustainable building design features. CH2 was designed to not only conserve energy and water, but to also improve the wellbeing of its occupants. Wind turbines are used to circulate fresh air throughout the building. Water from the roof is piped to the basement for re-cooling and chilled ceiling panels are used to absorb internally produced heat. External ‘shower towers’ are also used for cooling. The facade has been designed to maximise cooling and light penetration through the use of adjustable timber and glass

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CH2 Building in Melbourne.

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shutters. The thermal mass of the concrete slabs between the floors is used to absorb excess heat. Photovoltaic panels and gas-fired co-generation technology are used for both heating water and energy production. Plantings on the walls and the roof provide shading, reduce glare and help to improve internal air quality. Providing increased contact with nature also reduces stress levels for occupants.

Greening the CityCities have been largely divorced from the natural ecological systems upon which they were built, limiting opportunities for people to have contact with nature and making them miss out on the physical and psychological benefits from such contact. Cities of the future, however, can be designed to incorporate high levels of biodiversity and green infrastructures. This results in more aesthetically pleasing and liveable environments, and makes them better equipped to adapt to climate change. Plants can be used to capture and store, or sequester, carbon from the atmosphere, and through their ability to provide shade, they help to ameliorate the heat island effect that many cities experience.

Vegetation can also provide other important ecosystem services. Urban wetlands, for example, may collect and filter stormwater runoff and absorb floodwaters, storing water as

a precaution against drought, support wildlife, and sequester atmospheric carbon. Urban forests can likewise make significant aesthetic contributions to urban environments, sequester carbon, conserve energy-use in buildings through reducing the need for artificial cooling

and ameliorate the heat island effect. Urban forests can even result in better health for urban dwellers merely through their being able to have greater contact with the natural world in their daily lives. Green roofs, vertical gardens and a range of other evolving green technologies can be integrated into even the most highly urbanised places.

Realising this vision will require a cross-disciplinary approach involving design professionals from landscape architecture, architecture, urban planning and engineering, who will base their design decisions on evidence derived from a range of academic disciplines, including the biological sciences (eg, botany, zoology and genetics), social sciences (eg, psychology and sociology) and sciences that deal specifically with relationships between biological and built environments, such as the field of urban ecology.

Successfully integrating natural ecosystems into the design of future cities will require recognition that natural biotic communities are constantly changing. The impacts from climate change on ecosystems are complex, and predicting the nature and extent of possible ecological changes that may result is currently a relatively imprecise undertaking. However, we can no longer assume, as we have in the past, that ecosystems will remain stable, which means urban open space networks need to be configured in ways that will allow plant and animal communities to thrive in their current locations but will also be able to migrate to form new ecological associations as they adapt to changing climatic conditions over time.

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The city of Chicago has embarked on an ambitious program to adapt to climate change. One aspect involves changes that have been made to the city’s public schools. The example shown here is the road in front of Chicago’s Benito Juarez High School, which was widened to encourage more pedestrian traffic and provided with landscaping to offer shade and absorb runoff. The sidewalk was made lower than the street surface to better direct rainwater run-off. Drought-resistant plants, used to soak up excess water and filter out pollutants, were put in. The runoff is directed into underground storage tanks, which is used for watering the plants as well as for decorative fountains. Footpaths and car parks were also redesigned using permeable pavers that allow 80 per cent of the rainwater to filter through to the ground.

Rainwater harvesting at MIT’s Stata Center is an example of green infrastructure used for storing and treating rainwater for irrigation and flushing toilets. In most urban situations, rainwater is typically directed to storm drains, piped off-site and discarded in a faraway location. In this example, water from roofs and nearby open space areas is piped to an underground cistern, which is located under a constructed wetland. The water is then treated through a specially designed biofilter wetland, where the action of wetland plants and soils remove pollutants from the collected water. For flushing toilets the water is additionally treated using ultraviolet light. A solar pump, which operates only when the sun is out and when the plants need water, is used to transport the stored water for irrigation purposes.

Constructed wetlands, such as the one pictured on the next page in Melbourne’s Royal Park, are able to collect and filter stormwater runoff; store flood waters when necessary, which can be used to provide water during times of drought; conserve biodiversity and support wildlife; and act as powerful carbon sinks to sequester atmospheric carbon.

Community EngagementThe capacity of people to adapt to a climate-changed world, and the design and planning interventions that will be needed in making this transition, will depend on the social acceptability of those interventions. People need to feel a sense of control over planned changes to their everyday surroundings. Greater engagement of people in understanding the vulnerability of individuals, households and neighbourhoods, and why design modifications are required, will make those changes more likely to be accepted.

One promising approach for involving people in the design process is through the use of digital environmental simulation and visualisation technology, which can be used for presenting alternative design options to both the public and key stakeholders, allowing them to be involved in assessing alternative scenarios. Such integrated simulation-visualisation systems have

the capability of quantifying the carbon use intensity, and other measures of sustainability, of proposed design changes to land-uses, buildings and infrastructures, thereby allowing governing bodies to select proposals based on both measures of sustainability and the degree of community

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Top: Water sensitive design in Chicago. Bottom: Water sensitive design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston.

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Wetlands in Melbourne’s Royal Park.

acceptance for the proposed interventions. The aim would be to implement changes that will result in reduced carbon emissions and other sustainability objectives, such as conserving biodiversity, water and other resources, while creating new urban environments that residents will want to embrace.

This simulation-visualisation technology can even be used in the context of community workshops as a means of conveying to participants, through realistically displayed future design scenarios, what alternative design options might look like, how they might change their local surroundings and how this will result

in reduced carbon emissions. The potential for participants to manipulate design scenarios in real time also makes this technology a valuable tool for engaging the public in actually helping to shape alternative, future climate-adapted environments in which they would want to live.

In 2002, Chicago’s Center for Green Technology became the first rehabilitated municipal building in the US to receive the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum rating. The Center is a comprehensive educational resource that has become a national model for sustainable design, technology and learning about green technology.

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or what has been referred to as bio-mimicry. A priority for 2020, therefore, is to model future cities on natural ecological systems, which are inherently complex and resilient. This will require that the design of new urban environments, and the retrofitting of existing infrastructure where that is possible, incorporates the types of design principles suggested in this chapter. This may only be achieved through better education of environmental design professionals along with the formulation and enforcement of innovative government regulatory mechanisms.

ACTIONS FOR 2020One of the most promising and cost-effective urban design strategies is to provide greater integration of vegetation with urban environments. Integrating plants and natural ecosystems into the design of urban open spaces and buildings can provide a plethora of important ecosystems services, including protection against severe weather events and sequestering of atmospheric carbon.

Promising design solutions for adapting cities to climate change can be realised through mimicking biological organisms and systems,

Chicago’s Center for Green Technology.

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Further Reading

Adaptive Design Hansen, J. (2007). Climate Catastrophe, New Scientist, Vol. 195, Issue 2614, 30-34.Holling, C. (1973). Resilience and stability of ecological systems. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics. 4, 1–23.IPCC - Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007). Climate Change 2007, Impacts, Adaptations and Vulnerability: Summary for Policymakers, IPCC, Geneva.Low, L., Gleeson, B., Green, R. and Radovic, D. (2005). The Green City: Sustainable Homes, Sustainable Suburbs. University of New South Wales Press, Sydney and Routledge, London.UN-Habitat (2011). Global report on human settlements 2011: Cities and Climate Change. United Nations Human Settlements Programme, Earthscan Ltd., London.