Here are 5 practical ways trees can help us survive climate change

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Gregory Moore, University of Melbourne

As the brutal reality of climate change dawned this summer, you may have asked yourself a hard question: am I well-prepared to live in a warmer world?

There are many ways we can ready ourselves for climate change. I’m an urban forestry scientist, and since the 1980s I’ve been preparing students to work with trees as the planet warms.

In Australia, trees and urban ecosystems must be at the heart of our climate change response.

Governments have a big role to play – but here are five actions everyday Australians can take as well.

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Read more:
Go native: why we need ‘wildlife allotments’ to bring species back to the ‘burbs

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1. Plant trees to cool your home

At the current rate of warming, the number of days above 40℃ in cities including Melbourne and Brisbane, will double by 2050 – even if we manage to limit future temperature rises to 2℃.

Trees can help cool your home. Two medium-sized trees (8-10m tall) to the north or northwest of a house can lower the temperature inside by several degrees, saving you hundreds of dollars in power costs each year.

Trees can cool your home by several degrees.
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Green roofs and walls can reduce urban temperatures, but are costly to install and maintain. Climbing plants, such as vines on a pergola, can provide great shade, too.

Trees also suck up carbon dioxide and extend the life of the paint on your external walls.

2. Keep your street trees alive

Climate change poses a real threat to many street trees. But it’s in everyone’s interests to keep trees on your nature strip alive.

Adequate tree canopy cover is the least costly, most sustainable way of cooling our cities. Trees cool the surrounding air when their leaves transpire and the water evaporates. Shade from trees can also triple the lifespan of bitumen, which can save governments millions each year in road resurfacing.

Tree roots also soak up water after storms, which will become more extreme in a warming climate. In fact, estimates suggest trees can hold up to 40% of the rainwater that hits them.

But tree canopy cover is declining in Australia. In Melbourne, for instance, it falls by 1-1.5% annually, mainly due to tree removals on private land.

Governments are removing trees from public and private land at the time we need them most.
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This shows state laws fail to recognise the value of trees, and we’re losing them when we need them most.

Infrastructure works such as level crossing removals have removed trees in places such as the Gandolfo Gardens in Melbourne’s inner north, despite community and political opposition. Some of these trees were more than a century old.

So what can you do to help? Ask your local council if they keep a register of important trees of your suburb, and whether those trees are protected by local planning schemes. Depending on the council, you can even nominate a tree for protection and significant status.

But once a development has been approved, it’s usually too late to save even special trees.

3. Green our rural areas

Outside cities, we must preserve remnant vegetation and revegetate less productive agricultural land. This will provide shade and moderate increasingly strong winds, caused by climate change.

Planting along creeks can lower water temperatures, which keeps sensitive native fish healthy and reduces riverbank erosion.

Strategically planting windbreaks and preserving roadside vegetation are good ways to improve rural canopy cover. This can also increase farm production, reduce stock losses and prevent erosion.

To help, work with groups like Landcare and Greening Australia to vegetate roadsides and river banks.

4. Make plants part of your bushfire plan

Climate change is bringing earlier fire seasons and more intense, frequent fires. Fires will occur where they hadn’t in the past, such as suburban areas. We saw this in the Melbourne suburbs of Bundoora, Mill Park, Plenty and Greensborough in December last year.

It’s important to have a fire-smart garden. It might seem counter-intuitive to plant trees around the house to fortify your fire defences, but some plants actually help reduce the spread of fire – through their less flammable leaves and summer green foliage – and screen your house from embers.

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Read more:
Low flammability plants could help our homes survive bushfires

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Depending on where you live, suitable trees to plant include crepe myrtle, the hybrid flame tree, Persian ironwood, some fruit trees and even some native eucalypts.

Gardens play a role in mitigating fire risk to your home.
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If you’re in a bushfire-prone area, landscape your garden by strategically planting trees, making sure their canopies don’t overhang the house. Also ensure shrubs do not grow under trees, as they might feed fire up into the canopy.

And in bad fire conditions, rake your garden to put distance between fuel and your home.

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Read more:
Keeping the city cool isn’t just about tree cover – it calls for a commons-based climate response

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5. What if my trees fall during storms?

The fear of a whole tree falling over during storms, or shedding large limbs, is understandable. Human injury or death from trees is extremely rare, but tragedies do occur.

Make sure your trees are healthy, and their root systems are not disturbed when utility services such as plumbing, gas supplies and communication cables are installed.

Coping with a warming world

Urban trees are not just ornaments, but vital infrastructure. They make cities liveable and sustainable and they allow citizens to live healthier and longer lives.

For centuries these silent witnesses to urban development have been helping our environment. Urban ecosystems depend on a healthy urban forest for their survival, and so do we.

Gregory Moore, Doctor of Botany, University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Five ways to reduce waste (and save money) on your home renovation

Sensible design can dramatically reduce waste of a renovation.
Photo by Nolan Issac on Unsplash, CC BY-SA

Deepika Mathur, Charles Darwin University

On average, renovating a home generates far more waste than building a new one from scratch.

This waste goes straight to landfill, damaging the environment. It also hurts your budget: first you have to pay for demolition, then the new materials, and then disposal of leftover building products.

By keeping waste in mind from the start and following some simple guidelines, you can reduce the waste created by your home renovation.

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Read more:
Thinking about a sustainable retrofit? Here are three things to consider

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1. It starts with the design

Waste is often treated as inevitable, factored into a building budget with no serious attempt to reduce it.

By raising the issue early with your architect, designer or builder, they can make decisions at the design stage that reduce waste later. Often the designers and architects don’t see their decisions contributing to waste – or rather, they don’t really think about it.

During my research on reducing construction waste, I asked one architect what he thought happens to the waste generated. He laughed with a glint in his eyes and said, “I think it disappears into pixie dust!”

One simple early decision that dramatically reduces waste is designing with material sizes in mind. If you have a ceiling height that does not match the plasterboard sheet, you end up with a tiny little strip that has to be cut out of a full sheet. In the case of bricks, not matching the ceiling height is even more wasteful.

Obviously not all materials will work together at their standard sizes (and you need to fit your renovation to the existing house). But sensitive design can make intelligent trade-offs, reducing overall waste.

When I asked architects why they don’t design zero-waste buildings more often, they said clients don’t ask for it. Make it part of your brief, and ask the architect how they can save money by using the materials efficiently.

2. Get your builder involved early

If you’re using an architect for your renovation, it’s common to have very little collaboration between them and the builder. Any errors or issues are usually spotted after construction has begun, requiring expensive and wasteful rework.

Instead, ask your architect and builder to collaborate on a waste management plan. Such integrated approaches have worked well in Australia and the United States.

This means clients, engineers and builders are collaborating, rather than taking adversarial roles. For such contracts to work, it’s important to involve all parties early in the project, and to encourage cooperation.

The briefing stage is an opportunity for architects, quantity surveyors and builders to work together to identify a waste minimisation target.

3. Whatever you do, don’t change your mind

One the biggest contributions to waste on sites is late design changes. Client-led design changes are identified in all literature as having far-reaching implications on waste.

These are mostly due to owners changing their mind once something is built. Reworking any part of a building due to design changes can account for as much as 50% of the cost overrun, as well as causing delays and generating waste.

The early work with your design and construction team outlined in the first steps gives you the chance to make sure you’re committed to your original design. Skimping in the planning stage can end up costing you far more in the long run.

4. Deconstruction, not demolition

Ask your builder not to demolish the building, but to deconstruct it. Deconstruction means taking a building apart and recovering materials for recycling and reuse. This provides opportunities for sorting materials on site.

Salvaged materials can be resold to the community or reused in the renovations. It greatly reduces the tip fees which are usually higher for mixed waste (typical from demolition process) and lower for sorted waste.

Of course this takes more time and has an additional cost. Therefore you do have to balance the cost of deconstruction against the savings.

Denmark, which recycles 86% of its construction waste, has made it mandatory for all government buildings to undergo selective demolition and sorting of construction waste. A good place to start in Australia is your state environment department, which may have guidelines on what is involved.

5. Choose materials carefully

Good-quality materials last longer, reducing maintenance later. Choosing manufacturers that use minimal packaging also reduces waste (be careful here to check the difference between “minimal” and “inadequate” packaging, as the latter can mean your material breaks).

Reusing materials from your renovation may also be an option (you will need to discuss this with architect and builder at the beginning of the project). Finally, using materials with recycled content is a great option, and boosts our recycling industry.

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The return of the breeze block

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In March 2017 the Housing Industry Association released data suggesting the Australian residential building industry will increasingly become more dependent on renovation work rather than new construction,

If you’re renovating your home, making efficiency and low waste a priority helps cut costs and reduce landfill.

Deepika Mathur, Researcher in sustainable architecture, Charles Darwin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Birds: Feeding Birds not a Good Thing?

Many people love to have native birds visit their gardens. To achieve this we feed birds in a variety of ways. Feeding wild birds does have consequences for the long term survival of the birds being fed. The following link is to an article with more on this subject.

For more visit:
http://www.nwf.org/News-and-Magazines/National-Wildlife/Birds/Archives/2011/Effects-of-Bird-Feeding.aspx

 

Storing Your Articles, Clippings, etc … Evernote

If you are anything like me and love to travel, you will have loads of articles, magazines, newspaper clippings, brochures – you name it – relating to places you want visit, etc. Over time (and generally a short time for me) a collection of these resources becomes quite the stockpile and there is then a major storage issue. Where do I keep all these things? How do I store them? Should I keep them?

Let me offer you a solution that works for me – or rather, I should say, will work for me (I have only just started to do this after all). Let me introduce you to Evernote:

http://www.evernote.com/

Evernote is a place that allows you to remember everything (they say that), simply by storing every note at Evernote.

Evernote is a web application that allows the user to store just about every type of note you can think of on their site – for free. There is a Premium account option (which I have) which considerably widens the usefulness of Evernote, but the free version is also very valuable.

How do I use Evernote? I use Evernote in a number of ways – but for the purpose of this posting I’ll limit the description of how I use Evernote to just the one simple way.

At Evernote you can use a ‘notebook’,’ which is really just Evernote’s way of saying a folder, to store various ‘notes’ in. These notes can be anything from a photo, to an article, to a clipping, to a receipt, to a … well it just goes on.

So I have a notebook devoted to ‘wilderness and travels.’ In this notebook I keep articles, brochures, leaflets, clippings, etc, of all pieces of information relating to destinations and places of interest. I no longer need to store them around the house, as I have them neatly stored away at Evernote, which is fully searchable and easily accessed. So now all of the clutter, boxes of articles and magazines, etc, will become a thing of the past as I store them all away at Evernote for future reference. I may never use all of them, but they will be there should I ever need them.

Check out Evernote and I’m sure you’ll find a 101 uses for this great application and site.

Updating the Website

I am constantly looking at ways to improve the kevinswilderness.com website and add new content to it. With the success of the Google Map that was added to the page dealing with my recent road trip, I have decided to add Google Maps wherever they would prove useful – such as for locations, track routes, etc.

The first part of the site getting an overhaul with Google Maps in mind, is the Barrington Tops page. I am also adding new content to the page as I go. The Barrington Tops page is one of the biggest pages on my site, so the process is taking a bit of time. You will also find the planned itinerary for my backpacking camping holiday here as well as I move along with it.

Visit the page at:

http://www.kevinswilderness.com/NSW/tops.html