Zero carbon

It's so disappointing to see how governments don't get involved in relevant matters that implicitly can have a big impact, such as the heat island effect. As i mentioned in one of my previous reflections, governance is a relevant element of ESD, and this example shows why. But i think it is not all lost, as long as there is a strong stakeholders engagement which can demonstrate by empirical data the effects of this phenomenon to create general community awareness, sooner or later the federal authority will have get involved. In the following link, i discussed in my personal journal about the difficulties and challenges for achieving sustainable development: Sustainable Development: an everlasting race? On my opinion, the existence of organizations like CRC for Low Carbon Living is critical due they can ease the sometimes kind of "David versus Goliath" fight against governments when talking about policy-making., like for example, the Low Carbon Built Environment Knowledge Hub. Such a great initiative which when launched next year will definitely become a useful tool for industry, policy makers, researchers and the public. Are we ready for zero carbon buildings? It's a hard question to answert, but at least there is a guy called Harry Tarband who says the first carbon neutral house of Latin America is in Curicó, Chile. Resilient cities is the main idea in the Design for Adaptation: Living in a Climate-Changing World article. Andrea Ward and Alex Wilson provide several practical solutions of adaptive design to make cities resist better climate change effects. I was not familiarised with the concept of passive survivability so i must say it is totally new for me. However, i could say that this type of design criterion is applied in some way in Chile, where due to the high prevalence of strong earthquakes, buildings are designed and constructed to maintain livable conditions after these destructive events. As the authors state, adapting the built environment to a world that we'll be greatly different from nowadays is not a simple challenge. The good news is that there are several organizations that are concerned about resilience. The following are some organizations, their approaches and initiatives: DFID: The Infrastructure Resilience programme ICLEI: Resilient Cities The Rockefeller Foundation: 100 Resilient cities UN-HABITAT: City Resilience Profiling Programme (CRPP) The World Bank: Resilient Cities Program The following video, by the World Bank Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR), clearly explains why we need to invest in urban resilience, to what I think there is no chance rather than doing it. But, will it be possible to raise the US$400 billion per year needed?