To Cope with Extreme Heat, Paris Will Swap Parking Spaces for Trees
November 19th, 2024

Via Yale e360, a report on Paris’s plan to swap parking spaces for trees:

Paris aims to replace 60,000 parking spaces across the city with trees by the end of this decade, according to its newly released climate plan.

The plan, which must still be approved by the Council of Paris, lays out steps to help the city prepare for more extreme heat. The goal of ripping up parking spaces is part of a larger aim to create more than 700 acres of green space by 2030.

“Trees and nature are natural air conditioners,” officials note. “Their development makes the city more pleasant to live in during periods of high heat.” The plan also calls for setting up more cooling centers, creating more car-free zones, and installing reflective roofs on 1,000 public buildings.

Elsewhere in Europe, Danish lawmakers have agreed to a plan to rewild 10 percent of the country’s farmland and plant 1 billion trees. The government said the plan would bring “the biggest change to the Danish landscape in over 100 years.”


This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 19th, 2024 at 4:05 pm and is filed under Extreme Heat, Green Design.  You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.  Both comments and pings are currently closed. 

Comments are closed.


ABOUT
BLACK SWANS GREEN SHOOTS
Black Swans / Green Shoots examines the collision between urbanization and resource scarcity in a world affected by climate change, identifying opportunities to build sustainable cities and resilient infrastructure through the use of revolutionary capital, increased awareness, innovative technologies, and smart design to make a difference in the face of global and local climate perils.

'Black Swans' are highly improbable events that come as a surprise, have major disruptive effects, and that are often rationalized after the fact as if they had been predictable to begin with. In our rapidly warming world, such events are occurring ever more frequently and include wildfires, floods, extreme heat, and drought.

'Green Shoots' is a term used to describe signs of economic recovery or positive data during a downturn. It references a period of growth and recovery, when plants start to show signs of health and life, and, therefore, has been employed as a metaphor for a recovering economy.

It is my hope that Black Swans / Green Shoots will help readers understand both climate-activated risk and opportunity so that you may invest in, advise, or lead organizations in the context of increasing pressures of global urbanization, resource scarcity, and perils relating to climate change. I believe that the tools of business and finance can help individuals, businesses, and global society make informed choices about who and what to protect, and I hope that this blog provides some insight into the policy and private sector tools used to assess investments in resilient reinforcement, response, or recovery.