Roanoke shrinks carbon footprint, exceeds tree canopy goal of growing from 32% to 48%; Roanoke, VA

OPINION: Shrinking Roanoke's footprint:
Roanoke City Council members got one of their first looks at the city's progress in its efforts to decrease the size of its carbon footprint.
Sean McGinnis, director of Virginia Tech's Green Engineering program, presented a report recently assessing the city's carbon emissions in 2008 and comparing those emissions to 2005's baseline.
The upshot of the technical report: Emissions in 2008 were down very slightly from 2005. That's good news tempered by a couple of unknowns: how much of the reduction was due to that year's mild winter and the then-deepening recession.
The reduction, a tiny 0.7 percent dip, is better than an increase, of course. But McGinnis noted in his report that council has set a goal of dropping emissions by 2 percent a year.

Sorsogon vice gov recommends forest farming vs climate change; Sorsogon, Phillipines

Sorsogon vice gov recommends forest farming vs climate change « SORSOGON UNITED:
The vice governor of Sorsogon province where the vast forest areas are confronted with rapid deterioration due to natural and man-made destruction is pushing forest farming as an effective measure to avert the negative impacts of climate change in the locality.
“Through forest farming, we would be able to have economic gains from the forest we nourish while contributing to the global effort of solving the problem on global warming,” Vice Governor Renato Laurinaria told the Philippines News Agency at his mini-forest farm here over the weekend.
“The signs of global warming that indicate we are now in the midst of it are already ominous as we feel the immediate effects of global warming through the climatic changes that make our summers hotter while the typhoons during the rainy season are increasingly getting to be fewer, but more furious,” he said.

Cambridge Climate Congress - are plans aspirational abstractions or actual? Cambridge, MA

Guest commentary: Defining green in Cambridge - Cambridge, Massachusetts - Cambridge Chronicle:
Here are a few items pulled from the 2002 report that seem to lack follow-through.
Optimize building design and the use of vegetation to shade buildings and reduce the urban heat island effect. Use geographic information systems to map the city’s tree canopy coverage and assess the environmental services provided by the urban forest; maximize the tree canopy cover, particularly over parking lots and air-conditioning units; install roofs with high reflectance or “green” landscaped roofs; incorporate reflectance and shading standards in designs for parking lots and building construction.
I know of no green roofs that have been created in response to this plan, and the city seems not to do a good job or maintaining or replacing its trees.
Promote Transit Improvements. Support extension of the Green Line, acquisition of alternative fuel buses, and plans for the Urban Ring.
To date, I have only seen one Green Line Extension meeting at which our city had official representation.

USDA/NSF grant helps researchers develop city carbon budget including UTC goal; Boston, MA

Sizing Up Carbon Emissions BU Today:
Calculating your carbon footprint online involves nothing more than a couple of mouse clicks. Measuring the carbon footprint of a city? That takes more detective work.
Boston University researchers are on the case. Nathan Phillips, a College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of geography and environment and director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, and his colleagues received a $300,000 grant in September from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Forest Service to study the flow of carbon in and out of Boston. Beyond learning how to quantify and predict carbon levels, they want to inform policy decisions on carbon emissions and urban sustainability.One goal is to create a high-resolution map of Boston. Red spots would indicate carbon emission zones, Phillips explains, and green spots would reveal carbon uptake zones. Color intensity might show ongoing carbon hot spots. The graphic could predict how human activity or policy changes affect carbon concentrations.


Boston officials have pledged to reduce carbon emissions to 7 percent below 1990 levels by 2012 and to increase tree canopy cover from 29 percent to 35 percent by 2030; trees reduce carbon and add oxygen. BU-led research could define where best to focus to achieve those goals and could measure success.

Closing America's Climate Gap Between Rich and Poor; USA

Closing America's Climate Gap Between Rich and Poor SolveClimate.com:
The gap between rich and poor as a result of mitigating climate change could become overwhelming if policymakers aren’t careful to evaluate the steps needed to ensure both effectiveness and social justice, a new report from the University of Southern California warns.
The analysis by USC’s Program for Environmental and Regional Equality (PERE) essentially tries to identify the impact that climate change — and its remedies — will have on people at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale.
Think of it as seeing trees in an attempt to define a forest.
The Climate Gap report focuses on human rights, public health and social justice from a climate change and climate change amelioration perspective, defining those areas most likely to impact the poor, beginning with extreme heat and ending with biofuel production.
PERE Director Manuel Pastor, a professor in USC's Geography and American Studies and Ethnicity Department, defines it as a vital domestic component of climate legislation.

City flunking climate change report card; Hamilton, Ontario, Canada; 3/12/09

City Flunking Climate Change Report Card Raise the Hammer - Hamilton,Ontario,Canada
What struck me about the report card is that the measures the city has more or less adopted - sponsoring a conference, taking an inventory of city GHG emissions, setting a tree canopy timetable, and establishing an after-hours lights-out program - are relatively trivial and don't require a significant transformation of the city's priorities.
They're mostly window dressing on a municipal system of land use and transportation that is still largely antithetical to real GHG reductions.