
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio spoke today at the opening session of the UN Climate Summit, welcoming world leaders to his city and urging action on climate change, which he called an "existential threat."
This comes on the heels of his just-announced plan to address the threat of climate change in his own backyard.
"With our significant public infrastructure, a world-class mass transit system, dense living patterns and a capacity for civic innovation, we are uniquely positioned to become the most sustainable big city in the world," it said.
The plan, "One City Built To Last: Transforming New York City's Buildings for a Low-Carbon Future," set a goal for the city to decrease greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent from 2005 levels by 2050, the equivalent of taking 700,000 vehicles off the road. It would make New York the largest city to commit to this goal. It's the target set by the U.N. for developed countries.
"In New York City, our buildings are responsible for the overwhelming share of our emissions," said de Blasio. "The energy we use in our homes, schools, workplaces, stores and public facilities accounts for nearly three-quarters of our contribution to climate change. But we can upgrade our buildings to make them more energy efficient and reduce these emissions. With this work, we can make our homes more affordable, improve the quality of our air and create a thriving market for energy efficiency and renewable energy–with new jobs and new businesses."
He announced that New York will upgrade the energy efficiency of all public buildings by 2025 at a projected cost of $1 billion. But the plan projects an annual savings to taxpayers in energy costs of $1.4 billion. The city will also provide incentives for private property owners to do the same. The 100-page plan detailed the many areas in which the city's buildings could be made less polluting.
According to The New York Times, "Building on programs adopted by the state—which in 2009 set its own goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050 from 1990 levels—city officials will also offer grants and other incentives to owners. As part of a 'green grant program' for affordable housing, officials said, the city will pay for efficiency upgrades if owners agree to preserve lower-cost units in a given building."
The paper also said that while some landlords might be expected to resist new energy efficiency requirements, Rob Speyer, chairman of the city's Real Estate Board, reacted favorably and said the move would “help solidify New York’s standing as the world’s model of sustainability.”
In announcing the plan, de Blasio talked about how Hurricane Sandy two years ago drove home the reality of climate change for New Yorkers.
"New Yorkers are facing the risks of rising sea levels, increased temperatures and heat waves, and increasing frequency of intense storms," he said. "The damage caused by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 provided tragic evidence of these risks. Almost two years later, we are still recovering. Globally, rising sea levels will flood coastlines, droughts will disrupt livelihoods, and storms and other extreme weather will threaten lives and economic development. We are faced with an existential threat, and inaction is not an option."
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By Katherine Kornei
Clear-cutting a forest is relatively easy—just pick a tree and start chopping. But there are benefits to more sophisticated forest management. One technique—which involves repeatedly harvesting smaller trees every 30 or so years but leaving an upper story of larger trees for longer periods (60, 90, or 120 years)—ensures a steady supply of both firewood and construction timber.
A Pattern in the Rings
<p>The <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/coppice-standards-0" target="_blank">coppice-with-standards</a> management practice produces a two-story forest, said <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bernhard_Muigg" target="_blank">Bernhard Muigg</a>, a dendrochronologist at the University of Freiburg in Germany. "You have an upper story of single trees that are allowed to grow for several understory generations."</p><p>That arrangement imprints a characteristic tree ring pattern in a forest's upper story trees (the "standards"): thick rings indicative of heavy growth, which show up at regular intervals as the surrounding smaller trees are cut down. "The trees are growing faster," said Muigg. "You can really see it with your naked eye."</p><p>Muigg and his collaborators characterized that <a href="https://ltrr.arizona.edu/about/treerings" target="_blank">dendrochronological pattern</a> in 161 oak trees growing in central Germany, one of the few remaining sites in Europe with actively managed coppice-with-standards forests. They found up to nine cycles of heavy growth in the trees, the oldest of which was planted in 1761. The researchers then turned to a historical data set — more than 2,000 oak <a href="https://eos.org/articles/podcast-discovering-europes-history-through-its-timbers" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">timbers from buildings and archaeological sites</a> in Germany and France dating from between 300 and 2015 — to look for a similar pattern.</p>A Gap of 500 Years
<p>The team found wood with the characteristic coppice-with-standards tree ring pattern dating to as early as the 6th century. That was a surprise, Muigg and his colleagues concluded, because the first mention of this forest management practice in historical documents occurred only roughly 500 years later, in the 13th century.</p><p>It's probable that forest management practices were not well documented prior to the High Middle Ages (1000–1250), the researchers suggested. "Forests are mainly mentioned in the context of royal hunting interests or donations," said Muigg. Dendrochronological studies are particularly important because they can reveal information not captured by a sparse historical record, he added.</p><p>These results were <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-78933-8" target="_blank">published in December in <em>Scientific Reports</em></a>.</p><p>"It's nice to see the longevity and the history of coppice-with-standards," said <a href="https://www.teagasc.ie/contact/staff-directory/s/ian-short/" target="_blank">Ian Short</a>, a forestry researcher at Teagasc, the Agriculture and Food Development Authority in Ireland, not involved in the research. This technique is valuable because it promotes conservation and habitat biodiversity, Short said. "In the next 10 or 20 years, I think we'll see more coppice-with-standards coming back into production."</p><p>In the future, Muigg and his collaborators hope to analyze a larger sample of historic timbers to trace how the coppice-with-standards practice spread throughout Europe. It will be interesting to understand where this technique originated and how it propagated, said Muigg, and there are plenty of old pieces of wood waiting to be analyzed. "There [are] tons of dendrochronological data."</p><p><em><a href="mailto:katherine.kornei@gmail.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Katherine Kornei</a> is a freelance science journalist covering Earth and space science. Her bylines frequently appear in Eos, Science, and The New York Times. Katherine holds a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of California, Los Angeles.</em></p><p><em>This story originally appeared in <a href="https://eos.org/articles/tree-rings-reveal-how-ancient-forests-were-managed" target="_blank">Eos</a></em> <em>and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.</em></p>Earth's ice is melting 57 percent faster than in the 1990s and the world has lost more than 28 trillion tons of ice since 1994, research published Monday in The Cryosphere shows.
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