How green is my city?
A.
- Retrofitting is the best way to clean up urban living
- China had once had plans for a state-of-the-art eco-city called Dongtan
- Energy efficient buildings
- encourage residents to travel on foot
- battery/hydrogen powered cars
- organic farms
- incorporate wetlands
- Eco-cities fizzled out because of cost
- Eco-cities would have a minimal effect on energy use and emissions
- Cities must be sustainable
- We need to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs
- A key priority for cities adapting to a world transformed by global warming is to increase energy efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to reduce climate change
- C40: a meeting where a planning group for 59 major cities engaged in efforts to combat climate change
- C40's focus: equipping old buildings with energy efficient features
- The installation of transportation systems can also benefit
- Cities must diversify their energy supply
- Making sure that sustainable supplies of freshwater are flowing to growing urban populations
- Existing cities need cutting edge technology to help them become a long-term sustainable living environment
B. In our current city that we live in today, we might not be as green as we want to be. For example, my state that I reside in (California) is going through a severe drought. Because of this, researchers are working very hard to try and make our cities more longer lasting as well as becoming self sustainable. The best way to clean up urban living is by retrofitting. Trying to upgrade our current cities with more environmentally friendly features can be a fairly challenging. There are a lot of factors that go into upgrading our entire city to try and make it environmentally friendly as well as becoming self-sustainable. We must take energy consumption into consideration since energy is a big contributor to a various amount of environmental problems including global warming. Some solutions to making cities more energy efficient can be to replace the black-tar roofs with either a white roof or we can install solar thermal hot-water heaters. Another factor that we must take into consideration when we are trying to establish a more environmentally friendly city has to do with water. Now as previously stated, California is going though a major drought at the moment so this relates to us more. Having a sustainable supply of freshwater is extremely important. Not only do we need it because we need water to be able to survive, but we need water to water our crops so we can eat as well. A viable solution to this water issue that we are having is that we can offer incentives to curb water us as well as trying to control leaks in waterworks. With this into consideration we can all start to change our cities to be more sustainable. This is good not just for us but for the earth itself.
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C. After reading this article I am starting to see how much of a difference we are able to make when us as a community come together to try and fix a problem that we made. I completly agree that we should improve the lives in urban areas to make them sustainable. Seeing that we produce about 1.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide from cars was very disturbing to me and I believe that we can do better than this. We can make a difference and we can fix the mistakes we made by just living better healthier lives because by making the environment that we live within better. I believe that there should be more organizations like C40 trying to make the earth a better more sustainable place to live in. All the cities in the world have a possibility of becoming eco-friendly thanks to groups like this. If all major cities converted to becoming more eco-friendly, the carrying capacity of the earth would be raised and our resources would not be pushed to the limit as much as it is currently.
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