Planning August/September 2018
Et Cetera
Podcasts: Planners Playlist
ClimateX, a collaborative online community from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for "people who care about climate change," offers a podcast alongside its message boards and courses. Season two wrapped this past spring with 13 episodes focusing on environmental justice and equity; catch up at http://bit.ly/ClimateX.
The Energy Gang is one of two weekly podcasts on clean energy from GTM, the market analysis and advisory arm of Greentech Media. Recent episodes explore carbon tax revenue, California's rooftop solar mandate, and floating offshore wind. Listen at http://bit.ly/TheEnergyGang.
The Interchange, GTM's other sustainable energy podcast, provides insight into new technology, policy changes, and market data, often with a humorous bent. A May episode tackles Google's most asked energy questions, including, "Would electricity work in a zombie apocalypse?" Find out at http://bit.ly/GTMInterchange.
Climate Connections investigates the impacts of climate change on energy, weather, health, the economy, and art — and how people are making their own environments a little more resilient. Hosted by Anthony Leiserowitz, PhD, of the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, segments come fast and frequent in 90-second updates Monday through Friday. Listeners are encouraged to submit their own climate stories at http://bit.ly/ClimateCxns.
What have you been listening to? Share your podcast picks! Email Lindsay R. Nieman, Planning's assistant editor, at lnieman@planning.org.
Mapped: Worldview
Photo courtesy NASA.
NASA's interactive database has been updated with photos of Earth taken during two decades of extraterrestrial surveillance. The images come from Terra and Aqua, satellites that were launched into orbit around the new millennium and have been continuously recording data ever since. Worldview, which originally debuted in 2012 with a year's worth of photos, now offers nearly all of those images, which can be animated and searched by date and events like hurricanes and fires. The photos provide stark evidence of the changes the last 20 years have brought on the planet, including loss of ice coverage, increased drought, and urban expansion. See the view from above at worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov.
Ranked: Carbon Footprints
"Harborfreeway2.jpg" by Coolcaesar, Wikimedia (CC 3.0).
A new study led by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology compares the carbon footprints of 13,000 cities; explore the study's interactive results at citycarbonfootprints.info. In the U.S. — which tied China with three cities in the top 10 — the worst offenders are:
- New York
- Los Angeles
- Chicago
- Miami
- Dallas
Toolkit: Healthy Places Framework
Gehl Institute, in collaboration with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, has developed a new tool to address health equity. The Inclusive Healthy Places Framework leverages the connection between health and public spaces to improve community health, evaluate the impacts of public space interventions on the social determinants of health, and create places that restore advantage to overlooked and excluded populations. The framework encourages practitioners to look beyond physical designs and placemaking to consider context, process, sustainability, and social resilience.
To download the full report, go to gehlinstitute.org/work/inclusive-healthy-places.
Et Cetera is a curated collection of planning odds and ends. Please send information to Lindsay R. Nieman, Planning's assistant editor, at lnieman@planning.org.