The UK was hit by some of the worst flooding ever recorded in Cumbria and Wales last week, devastating homes and claiming lives.
As concern grows for flood-hit communities in Cumbria and an urgent inspection of the county’s bridges gets underway as more rain is forecast, environment secretary Hilary Benn gave an emergency statement to the Commons. The government has already pledged a £1m fund to local authorities in flood hit areas.
Benn began his statement by paying tribute to PC Barker. He also announced the death of another man – Michael Streeter a contractor for the Environment Agency who died while repairing flood defences in West Sussex.
But the environment minster chose to end his statement with a warning about global warming:
“Although we cannot attribute this particular event to climate change, we can expect to see more extreme weather in the years ahead. This is a future we must prepare for,” he said.
SUE’s Urban Futures project has announced a significant step forward this week.
Urban Futures set out to ‘future proof ‘ today’s urban regeneration solutions, testing how current sustainability projects will withstand the tests of time.
But first the project needed to decide on what the future might look like, devising four future scenarios from an in-depth literature review:
Policy Reform (UK urban): strong government action achieves social equity and environmental protection.
Market Forces (UK urban): competitive, open and integrated global markets drive world development.
Fortress World (UK urban): in protected enclaves elites safeguard their critical resources and control an impoverished majority.
New Sustainability Paradigm (UK urban): a more humane and equitable global civilisation.
The development of these four markedly different future scenarios was an important process. The future worlds had to be different enough ensure the robustness of today’s sustainability solutions could be assessed with confidence, but not so extreme that today’s solutions did not have any meaning in them.
The scenarios were based largely upon the work of the Global Scenarios Group, which was then tailored to a UK, urban context.
More information and an eight-page narrative description of the scenarios are available on the Urban Futures website: www.urban-futures.org /scenarios.html
Newcastle has transformed itself into the greenest city in Britain, according to the country’s most comprehensive sustainability audit.
The Forum for the Future study’s annual rankings show the Geordies leap-frogging more “apparently green” cities such as Bristol, who topped the chart last year.
Millions of pounds and a communal push for cleaner, brighter surroundings including improvements in air quality, and biodiversity in public parks and open spaces, have all contributed to Tyneside’s triumph.
The audit shows the city performing well on waste collection, extending green space, life expectancy and the local strategy for tackling climate change.
Statement by leaders of world’s two biggest polluters could breathe new life into Copenhagen climate change talks, the Guardian has reported today.
The US and China, the world’s two biggest polluters, today said they aimed to set targets for easing greenhouse gas emissions next month, potentially breathing new life into the flagging Copenhagen climate negotiations.
Days after the US president, Barack Obama, said time to secure a legally binding agreement had run out, he and the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, agreed at a summit that they would continue to press for a comprehensive deal at Copenhagen that would “rally the world”.
Barack Obama acknowledged today that time has run out to secure a binding climate deal at Copenhagen and began moving towards a two-stage process that would delay a legal pact until next year at the earliest, the Guardian has reported today.
During a hastily convened breakfast meeting in Singapore, the US president supported a Danish plan to salvage something from the moribund negotiations by aiming for a broad political agreement and postponing contentious decisions on emissions targets, financing and technology transfer.
UK government plans to make carbon emission cuts of 80% by 2050 are physically impossible to achieve, according to a new analysis by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, the BBC reported today.
The Institution of Mechanical Engineers says there is not enough time or capacity to build the wind turbines and extra nuclear power stations required and that under current plans, the targets will not be met until 2100.
The UK’s Climate Change Act passed into law in 2008, putting a legal imperative on the government to cut emissions by 80% of their 1990 levels by 2050, with a mid-term target of 34% cuts by 2020.
But the report investigates how practical these targets are to reach and concludes that they cannot be met with the current approaches to cutting carbon.
IMeche called for a major investment in geo-engineering and what it is calling a “war” on climate change with a beefed up government department in charge.
New ICE President and ISSUES Principal Investigator Professor Paul Jowitt has been described as the country’s ‘top civil engineer’ by Water UK.
The article, featured on the Water UK website, described President Jowitt’s address as ‘a passionate plea’ for greater understanding of the essential links between infrastructure capacity and global peace and prosperity and that ’such strong advice from such a respected commentator deserves the attention of policy-makers and regulators’.
President Jowitt was joined by 500 friends, colleagues, ICE members and former presidents at the ICE building in Westminster to mark the beginning of his 12 months in office with the traditional presidential address.
In a rousing speech President Jowitt called for an ‘engineering renaissance’ and insisted that ‘now is the time’ for civil engineers to lead the world through the challenges of climate change, natural and man-made disasters, and economic crisis.
Referring directly to SUE research, President Jowitt said that devising the right implementation strategies for sustainable urban environments was the key challenge for engineers to overcome in the next 20 years.
The new president has already put his new vision for change into practice by broadening the President’s Apprentice initiative to reflect an international approach. This year´s scheme focuses on providing the young engineers´ invaluable experience in the role civil engineers play in international development and unlike other years, when most apprentices have been UK-based, four of the apprentices live in ICE international regions and eight of them are not UK nationals.
To find out more about the new President’s plan of action, read President Jowitt’s interview in New Civil Engineer magazine.
Starting this week research group URSULA, part of the second tier of the EPSRC’s SUE programme, has just got bigger.
A new researcher, Laurence Pattacini, has joined Task 4 – ‘Urban Forms Design’, bringing her expertise in landscape planning to the project. As part of her work, Laurence will be working with other members of Task 4 to draw up new, distinctive and high quality designs for urban river corridors that maximise economic, social and environmental benefits. These designs will be visionary, drawing on the innovative river corridor interventions being studied by the URSULA team at the forefront of the latest cross-disciplinary research.
Of course to get a feeling for the practicalities of these designs they need to be grounded in the real world. And what better place then Sheffield, one of the UK’s largest cities, which has large areas of urban river corridor awaiting redevelopment. One such site chosen by URSULA to create designs for is Wicker Riverside in central Sheffield, a rundown and underused area of the city adjacent to the River Don. Ample brownfield land and derelict buildings means there is plenty of scope at the site to apply radical urban design, though within the realistic constraints of an urban setting.
For more information click on the link to URSULA’s homepage in the Blogroll
International Conference on Sustainable Water Management (SWM2010).15-17/09/10.Pakistan. Abstract deadline 15/12/09.www.wedc.com.pk/swm2010/ 4 days ago
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