Continuing Education: High-Performance Landscapes

By now, most architects are aware that buildings are responsible for a huge chunk of humanity’s contribution to global warming. They have probably heard that the built environment contributes more than 40 percent of CO₂ emitted into the atmosphere every year. However, they may not have considered the role of that part of the built environment outside buildings. Landscapes, like buildings, can generate emissions: operational ones, including those from maintenance equipment and use of chemical fertilizers, as well as embodied emissions, from the extraction, transport, and manufacture of materials.

Landscapes, however, also represent an immense opportunity, since their trees, plantings, and soils extract carbon from the atmosphere, sinking it into their biomass. And those who design these landscapes are uniquely positioned to capitalize on this capability. “We are the only design profession that works with living systems,” says Sarah Fitzgerald, climate and sustainability lead at landscape architecture firm SWA. She is one of the coauthors of the Climate Action Plan put forward by the American Society of Landscape Architects. The plan is a multipronged set of goals and initiatives, with the first on the list being to attain zero emissions and double carbon sequestration by 2040.