sustainability

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Biophilic Design healing our earth - interview with Jojo Mehta co-founder of Stop Ecocide International

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Biophilic Design healing our earth - interview with Jojo Mehta co-founder of Stop Ecocide International

"I love this term biophilia, because it's this, in a sense, it's a love of nature in a word, isn't it? And I had this beautiful description recently of what it actually means to love something or to love someone. In very plain terms, it means to include that person or that thing's interests as one's own." Jojo Mehta, Co-founder, Stop Ecocide International.

 

For me Biophilic Design has the potential to heal more than just physical and mental health of people, it has the potential to help heal our earth too. If we implemented Biophilic Design in cities for instance, we can help mitigate climate change, even just by planting more trees which is a Biophilic Design solution, we increase tree canopy cover, increase biodiversity, mitigate flooding. There are many more, from creating Blue cities with cleaner rivers and waterways to planting on roofs and sides of buildings helping reduce the need to switch on air conditioning units in the summer and heating in the winter, which in turn reduces energy consumption. Also, as interior designers we specify more natural materials, reducing plastic, are more considerate of what textiles are made of and originate from.

With our global temperature reaching a danger point, we need to do all we can as designers, architects, fit out managers and anyone who works in the built environment at any point.

Today we have got the amazing Jojo Mehta with us on the podcast. Jojo is CEO and co-founder of Stop Ecocide International (SEI), the hub of the global movement to create a new international crime of ecocide to protect the Earth from the worst acts of environmental damage, a movement that is gaining significant political traction.  She co-founded SEI with the visionary lawyer, Polly Higgins, who died in 2019, having devoted the final decade of her life to the cause.

 

We explore and put into context just WHY we need to do more as designers, seize every opportunity we can to create better environments, not just for people, but for planet too and also how Biophilic Design is an essential part of the solution.....

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Rebalance Earth - Enabling a world worth living in. Creating a Nature Positive Economy

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Rebalance Earth - Enabling a world worth living in. Creating a Nature Positive Economy

Robert Gardner is CEO and Co-Founder of Rebalance Earth. With over 20 years of experience in the financial industry, he has a unique expertise in sustainability, pensions, and wealth management and believes that money can be a force for good.

Rebalance Earth, is a fund manager that redirects the flow of private capital to protect and restore Nature.  Their mission is to drive the transition to a nature-based economy by enabling the flow of private capital to protect and restore nature. Rebalance Earth achieves this by creating opportunities for investors to achieve sustainable financial returns from projects to restore Nature.

Robert is passionate about the idea of “natural capital”.  He believes that investment in the environment shouldn’t simply be about climate change but should take a broader approach.  He sees a future in which biophilia is prominent and discussion of environment-conscious investment should include reduced biodiversity loss, rewilding, and all aspects of being in tune with nature.

Robert sees nature as the most valuable asset class on the planet. It provides everything from clean air to carbon capture and biodiversity; not forgetting that a balanced ecosystem is essential to create pollination and soil fertility for our food.

The investment community currently operates an extractive financial model that has been using all of nature's resources for free, not valuing them and, worse than that, destroying them.  Rebalance Earth is taking steps to build and propagate a more sustainable, biophilic approach.

In this podcast, Robert talks about how… READ ON and LISTEN to the PODCAST

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A task force for nature – where sustainability matters

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A task force for nature – where sustainability matters

Morgan Taylor leads the biodiversity side of Greengage, a multidisciplinary environmental consultancy who cover everything from energy and carbon assessments, sustainability, health, wellbeing, socio-economic assessment, and EIA management as well as the whole gamut of biodiversity assessment through to planning.

As designers, architects, or planners, we all need to be mindful of the impact our ideas, advice and decisions have on the world around us. We recorded this interview in the summer last year* Their work is focused outside of the legislative and planning policy sphere in the world of natural capital and ecosystem service value assessment. So rather than working with developers where they are only brought in because there is a potential impact on biodiversity in the first place, they're working with a lot of people with regards to asset management, land management, informing how financial capital is put towards recovery of natural capital across managed assets.

 We’ve got hundreds, maybe thousands of years of degradation and we need to take measures and understanding to address the impacts of our actions, and account for the significant loss of biodiversity particularly since the Industrial Revolution.

Morgan outlines all the different levels of legislation and planning policy that impact biodiversity in the built environment. He highlights three aspects of legislation and regulation that particularly drive positive change...

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Greening the Streets of Nairobi

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Greening the Streets of Nairobi

Nature is home. Nature is where you can think, rejuvenate, it constantly gives to you. There is nothing man made that can replace the benefits of nature. Edna Odhiambo, is a Climate Change Lawyer based in Nairobi Kenya. Edna was speaking at the brilliant 8th Annual Sustainability Week conference, run by The Economist. As an undergraduate law student, she witnessed one of worst droughts in the Horn of East Africa, and she asked herself “what can the law do about this?” She realised then that one of the main keys to unlocking the solution is through a focus on policy and regulatory frameworks across different sectors.

In terms of sustainability, Kenya leads in Africa. For example, more than 85% of their electricity comes from clean energy sources like solar, wind, hydro and geo thermal. But there are many challenges. For example, there are millions of Kenyans who lack access to clean energy sources, some are still using firewood and charcoal, dirty cooking fuels, which also increase respiratory illnesses and people are cutting down forests. 87% of Kenya is arid and semi-arid. If you consider then there is very little arable land and then couple this with climate change impacts, water scarcity we should be looking at opportunities to find solutions locally while we wait for access to innovative and affordable technology. Edna explains there are many basic low-cost solutions which can be done by local communities. We need to make a difference as fast as we can.

One of the main themes of this podcast is how we need to bring in an integrated approach to transport, we need a multi-modal approach which seamlessly connects walking, bus and public transport, dock-less bikes, cycling lanes and walking pathways. Globally transport is the cause of 15% of emissions. The time has come to stop putting highways before people, building cities around transport, we should be putting people first. Traffic is a major cause of outdoor air pollution, which causes asthma in children, and there are even studies looking at there being an increased risk of dementia event early studies.

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Designing Climate Change Resilience

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Designing Climate Change Resilience

Nature is our key to solving the climate crisis, if we reconnect people with nature, bring nature and natural elements closer to people then everything is more joined up. Better decisions will be made. Dom Higgins, head of Health and Education for the Wildlife Trusts. We speak about Nature connectedness, biodiversity, purpose, people, place, Cone Snails and the new Natural History GCSE… among other things. We need to give nature a chance, we might be too late to prevent climate change, but we can mitigate against the challenges such as cooling cities, carbon sinks, cleaning our air, and ecosystems that can mitigate the issues. We need people to take action, so we need to hear it on the Stock Exchange, Factories, taxis, it should be the business of everybody.

We talk about how we need active environments, and how it goes back to when we were hunter-gatherers. If you remove people inside and then we remain stationary, then we stress. We should be outside, away from artificial lights and all the accoutrements of the modern-day office (unless it has biophilic design woven into its very fabric). Take anyone away from connecting with nature and we get chronic stress. The disconnection detrimentally affects us physically and mentally.

We discuss this nature-connectedness, that feeling of understanding what is going on in the world, that we are part of something bigger than ourselves. We need that daily thought, that sense of knowing that everything has a place, and is connected back to everything else. This is our life-support system essentially. If we don’t design with that sense at our core, then our planet and our health are doomed. If you don’t have that feeling, that sense of connectedness with nature innate within you, then the decisions being made around the world are skewed, everything from creating fair and sustainable employment to the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe. It has consequences. And not good ones.

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Wood - Our Connection to the Forest through Biophilic Design

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Wood - Our Connection to the Forest through Biophilic Design

We often advocate that we should be incorporating wood, views of trees, wood grain, wood textures and wood veneers into our built environment as part of a Biophilic Design solution and we might also understand why from a psychological point of view and have discussed that elsewhere, but the question is HOW should we be selecting woods to incorporate, what woods should we use for instance for flooring, are they different to those used for outside timbers, are they sustainable? This is a definitive podcast on all things wood and trees. We were lucky to speak with Criswell Davis, TED speaker and internationally recognised expert on American Hardwood. He is also co-founder of the Timber and Forestry Foundation, President of Mighty Oaks Consulting and lectures all over the world on Biophilic Design and how we should be incorporating wood into our built environment. In this podcast, he shares with us, his very personal journey, and how a healthcare issue led him first-hand to experience the very big difference Biophilia made to his recovery.

His knowledge of trees, wood, veneers, finishes, biophilic design and sustainable aspect of forestry and the lumber business, was wonderful, and Criswell urges designers to add “the beauty of wood to your artist palette”, and especially please avoid all woods which come from around the world and cannot be certified as legally harvested. There is so much more in this podcast, if you use woods in your practice, this is definitely one to listen to.

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Biophilic Design and Net Zero targets in the Workplace

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Biophilic Design and Net Zero targets in the Workplace

So how do we design workplaces and maybe more importantly maintain our workspaces and offices during the course of the building’s life span and use to help create happy, healthy and also sustainable places to be? We speak with Ian Baker, Head of Workplace and Jeremy Campbell, Executive Director Marketing and Business Development for Emcor UK to find out their direct experience as facility managers just what is happening in workplaces, and also how we can improve what we’re doing now to also hit that NetZero target.

We talk about how worried they are about climate change and the IPCC report. We are at a turning point, there is no Planet B, if we carry on as we are doing there aren’t going to be future generations, we have moral obligations as business leaders to solve these problems So how can business owners start to address the issue of trying to reach Net Zero? A recent survey Emcor carried out revealed that 50% of business owners were not ready or not yet on a journey to meet their Net Zero targets.

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Pioneer Nature Method in Architecture

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Pioneer Nature Method in Architecture

How can we work with the landscape more as architects and designers to not only create beautiful spaces but ones that also have a positive impact on our and nature’s wellbeing? We speak with Stephen Melvin, of Atelier Architects who desribes himself as a “landscape facilitator”. How he looks at how the landscape itself is structured and presents itself and then see how to weave the design into the natural space. He has developed the “Pioneer Nature Method” which he tells us about in this podcast.

Steve highlights the need to respect that underlying process of nature that will outlive us, how we need to build in and with the landscape and really consider how our buildings can live with nature. By talking through images shown in the video accompanying this podcast (viewable on YouTube and also on the Journal of Biophilic Design website here), he shows us a project as a case study, so we can follow his thought processes from concept through to render, looking at different aspects from materials, light, air to how people will use the space and also how it represents the client’s aims too.

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Office-based Urban Farming

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Office-based Urban Farming

Being able to grow more food locally has to be an essential key to help improve food security and sustainability. One of the best ways to help reconnect us with food is to help us get closer to it, by encouraging us all to harvest our own. How do we do that? That is where Urban Farming comes in. It is literally just that, growing produce in a city or built-up environment, whether that’s a roof top, vacant walls, basements, indoors even. You can grow produce on any piece of land which is currently not serving a purpose. By providing a simple facility, for instance in existing corporate environments, this can encourage community, fun and even provide mini moments of meditation and zen in a busy office, school, healthcare or any indoor space.

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Sustainable Architecture and Biophilic Design

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Sustainable Architecture and Biophilic Design

What happens when conservation and sustainable design come together? It naturally seems to manifest itself in Biophilic Design. We all know that the benefits of designing with our natural environment in mind, are many: not only in terms of our own physical and mental health, but also to lessen the impact on our beautiful planet. Our built environment has such an important impact on our daily lives that we should be mindful when we are designing urban spaces, civic architecture and homes. ..

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Sustainability meets Design elegance - the LINK Design

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Sustainability meets Design elegance - the LINK Design

Biophilic Design has so many aspects to it, it is not just plants, greenery, light, colour ways, it is also about using natural materials in products, using natural materials to enhance a space and provide happiness and comfort to those using it. I spoke to the design team of AAID, Allen Architecture Interior Design, working together they created an hexagonal modular wall system made out of sustainable local and recycled materials which also employ local artisans and labour. Just as we do, each 'LINK” block relies on the one below, and can be adapted as shelves, planters, like little pods. Obviously the hexagon is an important shape in nature, just look inside a Bee Hive.

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When Sustainability, Nature and Business Meet

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When Sustainability, Nature and Business Meet

With no permanent office space, Transaction Focus has been adopting principles of nature on many different levels to sustain and grow profitable companies. We speak with Charles to find out how we can mimic the change, flexibility and eco-systems of nature into our own businesses which will work for SMEs as well as multi-nationals not just in terms of green visuals but with biomimetic conceptualisation how we can apply nature’s structure onto our own business principles…

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