Greater New Orleans is surrounded by wetlands, the Mississippi River and two lakes. Excess rain can only be drained off with pumping systems or by evaporation due to the bowl-like shape of a large part of the city. As part of the solution to make New Orleans climate adaptive, green infrastructure has been implemented that enable rainfall infiltration and evapotranspiration of stored water after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The long-term efficiency of infiltrating water under sea level with low permeable soils and high groundwater tables is often questioned. Therefore, research was conducted with the full-scale testing method measuring the infiltration capacity of 15 raingardens and 6 permeable pavements installed in the period 2011–2022. The results show a high variation of empty times for raingardens and swales: 0.7 to 54 m/d. The infiltration capacity decreased after saturation (ca 30% decrease in empty time after refilling storage volume) but all the tested green infrastructure met the guideline to be drained within 48 h. This is in contrast with the permeable pavement: only two of the six tested locations had an infiltration capacity higher than the guideline 10 inch/h (254 mm/h). The results are discussed with multiple stakeholders that participated in ClimateCafe New Orleans. Whether the results are considered unacceptable depends on a number of factors, including its intended purpose, site specific characteristics and most of all stakeholder expectations and perceptions. The designing, planning and scheduling of maintenance requirements for green infrastructure by stormwater managers can be carried out with more confidence so that green infrastructure will continue to perform satisfactorily over the intended design life and can mitigate the effects of heavy rainfall and droughts in the future.
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Almere is a green city where the greenery extends into the centre through a framework of nature, forests, parks and canals. With this green environment, Almere fulfils an important condition for a liveable city, where it is pleasant to live and work. An important goal for the municipality is to challenge its residents to develop a healthy lifestyle by using that green framework.But what really motivates Almeerders to go outside to exercise, enjoy the surroundings and meet each other? Are there sufficient green meeting or sports facilities nearby? Could the routes that connect the living and working environment with the larger parks or forests be better designed? And can those routes simultaneously contribute to climate adaptation?With the Green Escape Challenge, we invited students and young professionals to work on these assignments together.
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Cities worldwide are growing at unprecedented rates, compromising their surrounding landscapes, and consuming many scarce resources. As a consequence, this will increase the compactness of cities and will also decrease the availability of urban green space. In recent years, many Dutch municipalities have cut back on municipal green space and itsmaintenance. To offer a liveable environment in 30 to 50 years, cities must face challenges head-on and strive to create green urban areas that build on liveable and coherent sustainable circular subsystems.
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Swales are widely used Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SuDS) that can reduce peak flow, collect and retain water and improve groundwater recharge. Most previous research has focused on the unsaturated infiltration rates of swales without considering the variation in infiltration rates under extreme climate events, such as multiple stormwater events after a long drought period. Therefore, fieldwork was carried out to collect hydraulic data of three swales under drought conditions followed by high precipitation. For this simulation, a new full-scale infiltration method was used to simulate five rainfall events filling up the total storage volume of the swales under drought conditions. The results were then compared to earlier research under regular circumstances. The results of this study show that three swales situated in the same street show a variation in initial infiltration capacity of 1.6 to 11.9 m/d and show higher infiltration rates under drought conditions. The saturated infiltration rate is up to a factor 4 lower than the initial unsaturated rate with a minimal rate of 0.5 m/d, close to the minimum required infiltration rate. Significant spatial and time variable infiltration rates are also found at similar research locations with multiple green infrastructures in close range. If the unsaturated infiltration capacity is used as the design input for computer models, the infiltration capacity may be significantly overestimated. The innovative method and the results of this study should help stormwater managers to test, model, plan and schedule maintenance requirements with more confidence, so that they will continue to perform satisfactorily over their intended design lifespan.
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Communities worldwide are critically re-examining their seasonal cultures and calendars. As cultural frameworks, seasons have long patterned community life and provided repertoires for living by annual rhythms. In a chaotic world, the seasons - winter, the monsoon and so on - can feel like stable cultural landmarks for reckoning time and orienting our communities. Seasons are rooted in our pasts and reproduced in our present. They act as schemes for synchronising community activities and professional practices, and as symbol systems for interpreting what happens in the world. But on closer inspection, seasons can be unstable and unreliable. Their meanings can change over time. Seasonal cultures evolve with environments and communities’ worldviews, values, technologies and practices, affecting how people perceive seasonal patterns and behave accordingly. Calendars are contested, especially now. Communities today find themselves in a moment of accelerated and intersecting changes - from climate to social, political, and technological - that are destabilizing seasonal cultures. How they reorient themselves to shifting patterns may affect whether seasonal rhythms serve as resources, or lead people down maladaptive pathways. A focus on seasonal cultures builds on multi-disciplinary work. The social sciences, from anthropology to sociology, have long studied how seasons order people’s sense of time, social life, relationship to the environment, and politics. In the humanities, seasons play an important role in literature, art, archaeology and history. This book advances scholarship in these fields, and enriches it with extrascientific insights from practice, to open up exiting new directions in climate adaptation. Critically questions traditional, often-static notions of seasons; re-interpreting them as more flexible, cultural frameworks adapting to changes to our societies and environments.
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This booklet reports on experiments carried out by Van Hall Larenstein University of Applied Sciences in the context of the VALUE project. It consists of three parts. The first two chapters describe some experiments carried out in the Dutch town of Amersfoort and the students’ input and approach. This is followed by an intermezzo on sources of inspiration outside the Netherlands and examples of the way urban green spaces and elements can provide an impulse for towns and cities. The final two chapters concern the way such a green strategy can be designed in Dutch urban settings. Chapter 5 discusses how local governments can use the added value provided by urban green spaces for new investments:value capturing. Chapter 6 focuses on a new type of planning: Planning by Surprise, which combines dreams and pragmatism. The photo essay at the centre of the book tells the story of the many sides of green spaces in towns and cities. Unintentional, intentional, planned, dreamed of, drawn,remembered, pictured, developed: Planning by Surprise.
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Author supplied: Within the Netherlands the interest for sustainability is slowly growing. However, most organizations are still lagging behind in implementing sustainability as part of their strategy and in developing performance indicators to track their progress; not only in profit organizations but in higher education as well, even though sustainability has been on the agenda of the higher educational sector since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, progress is slow. Currently most initiatives in higher education in the Netherlands have been made in the greening of IT (e.g. more energy efficient hardware) and in implementing sustainability as a competence in curricula. However if we look at the operations (the day to day processes and activities) of Dutch institutions for higher education we just see minor advances. In order to determine what the best practices are in implementing sustainable processes, We have done research in the Netherlands and based on the results we have developed a framework for the smart campus of tomorrow. The research approach consisted of a literature study, interviews with experts on sustainability (both in higher education and in other sectors), and in an expert workshop. Based on our research we propose the concept of a Smart Green Campus that integrates new models of learning, smart sharing of resources and the use of buildings and transport (in relation to different forms of education and energy efficiency). Flipping‐the‐classroom, blended learning, e‐learning and web lectures are part of the new models of learning that should enable a more time and place independent form of education. With regard to smart sharing of resources we have found best practices on sharing IT‐storage capacity among universities, making educational resources freely available, sharing of information on classroom availability and possibilities of traveling together. A Smart Green Campus is (or at least is trying to be) energy neutral and therefore has an energy building management system that continuously monitors the energy performance of buildings on the campus. And the design of the interior of the buildings is better suited to the new forms of education and learning described above. The integrated concept of Smart Green Campus enables less travel to and from the campus. This is important as in the Netherlands about 60% of the CO2 footprint of a higher educational institute is related to mobility. Furthermore we advise that the campus is in itself an object for study by students and researchers and sustainability should be made an integral part of the attitude of all stakeholders related to the Smart Green Campus. The Smart Green Campus concept provides a blueprint that Dutch institutions in higher education can use in developing their own sustainability strategy. Best practices are shared and can be implemented across different institutions thereby realizing not only a more sustainable environment but also changing the attitude that students (the professionals of tomorrow) and staff have towards sustainability.
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Green data centres are the talk of the day. But who in fact is involved in developing green data centres? What is their contribution? And what does this contribution constitute in practical terms? This article states which stakeholders are involved in green data centres in the Netherlands, what their involvement is and what effect their involvement has. The article starts by giving the definitions for sustainability and by determining the stakeholders and their possibilities in this field. Next, we examine the actual impact of each stakeholder for arriving at greener data centres. This leads to a number of conclusions for achieving a larger degree of sustainability.
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This paper describes a project to explore the possibilities of virtual worlds in educating Green IT. In the project a virtual world has been created with various assignments which are meant to create awareness on sustainability aspects of IT. The world (and the assignments) will be incorporated in a course for first-year IT students. In order to measure the effects of the course, a questionnaire has been developed which can be used before and after the course to measure the attitude towards green IT.
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SMEs within the rural Dutch municipality of Utrechtse Heuvelrug (UHG) are becoming increasingly aware of the need for sustainable ‘green’ business. Their sense of sustainability is strongly defined by the ‘green’ environment in which they live and work. They were seeking an entrepreneurial approach to sustainability that is reflective of the area and fits their ecosystem. This approach was to be aimed at innovation and branding. We assumed that the role and function of a location-based brand differs from that of product or corporate brands because it has more complexity. Taking place-branding theory as our starting point, we set out to construe a brand that is a) based on local identity and b) has the power to motivate and mobilize SME entrepreneurs to form cooperative sustainable networks. This paper presents our analysis for a brand framework and demonstrates how it has been applied to imbue sustainable ‘green’ impact.
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