Archive for the 'Environment' Category
The Climate Scoreboard is a new, easily accessible tool for understanding and tracking the global climate change negotiations in real time.
This new online resource — an embeddable widget, a short video, and a set of graphs and a table — reports, on a daily basis, the long-term climate implications of proposals to the United Nations [...]
Researchers of the Sustainable Energy Research Group have developed a tool to generate world-wide climate change weather files for use with standard building performance simulation programs. The tool (CCWorldWeatherGen) is free of charge and can be downloaded from the SERG website.
The climate change world weather file generator (CCWorldWeatherGen) allows you to generate climate change weather [...]
Hot on the heels of the SketchUp 7.1 launch a couple of weeks ago, we’re pleased to announce the release of the latest addition to our 3D family: Google Building Maker is a super-specialized, online tool for creating buildings specifically for Google Earth.
Building Maker lets you choose a building to model by looking at aerial [...]
Learn about climate change in this Google Earth introductory tour narrated by Al Gore, the first in a series of Google Earth tours leading up to the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen in December. For more climate change tours, visit http://www.google.com/cop15
In order to understand more about what the human impact of [...]
When does a Prius have the same environmental impact as a Hummer? The 95 percent of the time it’s parked.
Most people don’t spend time thinking about parking spaces unless they’re looking for one. But these 9′ by 18′ rectangles of urban real estate have a vast impact on North American communities. They affect the economy, [...]
You may have used carbon footprint calculators or ecological footprint calculators; now there is one for calculating your water footprint, too.
The Calculator gives you an estimate of the total amount of water you use, what is called your water footprint. The Calculator takes into account not only the water used in your home, but also [...]
How could a butterfly inspire your next design? Opening keynote Janine Benyus presented the Biomimicry Institute’s new initiative www.AskNature.org at Living Future 09. AskNature is a searchable database of thousands of Nature’s best strategies and ideas–a valuable resource for applying biomimicry to building designs and strategies.
The City has developed and approved two passive design toolkits detailing ways to reduce energy use in new buildings, which are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions in Vancouver. The tookits provide best practices for homes and larger buildings for passive design elements such as layout, orientation, insulation, landscaping and ventilation. They are targeted [...]
