green infrastructure

Living in a warming world

June 13, 2025 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

As global temperatures rise due to increased greenhouse gas emissions, communities around the world face more frequent and intense heatwaves, droughts, and extreme weather events. These growing climate pressures not only strain infrastructure and natural resources, but also play a critical role in shaping where people live.

Recent projections from the First Street Foundation, which analyzes climate risks across the United States, highlight just how significant these shifts could be. In Sacramento County, California, rising flood risks, declining air quality, and soaring insurance costs could lead to a population decline of up to 28% by 2055. The risk assessment also projects that Monmouth and Ocean counties in New Jersey could each lose more than 30% of their populations. And Fresno County, California, could see nearly half of its residents relocate due to mounting climate-related pressures.

Urban areas like cities, towns, and suburbs are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Cities become significantly hotter due to the abundance of heat-absorbing surfaces and lack of green spaces, which intensifies heatwaves, worsens conditions for vulnerable populations, and may ultimately force some people to move.

Addressing these challenges requires a combination of climate solutions focused on both mitigation and adaptation. Solutions like expanding green infrastructure with urban parks and green roofs, and promoting sustainable development through energy-efficient buildings and transit-friendly design could all play a vital role in strengthening climate resilience.

As the planet warms, where we live – and how we live there – is rapidly being redefined.

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The 12th National Risk Assessment

Solar on farmland

Photo, posted May 15, 2013, courtesy of Germán Poo-Caamaño via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Native plants and road salt pollution

February 12, 2025 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Applying salt to roadways lowers the freezing point of water and prevents slippery surfaces, which makes it safer for people to drive in wintry conditions. In the U.S., more than 22 million tons of road salt is spread every year.

But road salt harms infrastructure and the environment. In fact, road salt damages cars and metal infrastructure by accelerating rust and corrosion. Road salt can also leach into soil and waterways, disrupting ecosystems, degrading soil, contaminating water, and damaging vegetation.

In cities and towns, road salts often wash into stormwater systems, posing health concerns and challenges for infrastructure.

A new study led by researchers from Virginia Tech looked at how salt affects plants and whether certain plants could mitigate salt pollution. The research team studied stormwater detention basins in Northern Virginia, examining the impacts of road salt on plants, soils, and water quality in green infrastructure systems.

The findings, which were recently published in the journal Science of the Total Environment, found that the amount of salt present in green infrastructure systems does reach levels that threaten plant communities. However, the researchers found that relying on salt-tolerant plants for mitigation is unlikely to be effective because they simply don’t take in enough salt.

Certain plants, particularly cattails, absorbed substantial amounts of salt. But even in a basin densely planted with salt-tolerant cattails, only up to 6% of the road salt applied during winter could be removed.

Plants alone cannot solve our salt pollution problem.

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Researcher studies the power of native plants to combat road salt pollution

Photo, posted January 22, 2025, courtesy of the City of Greenville, North Carolina via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Cities and rainwater

September 24, 2024 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Cities across the country are grappling with the problem that bigger, more frequent rainstorms occurring as a result of climate change are overtaxing the systems put in place to handle stormwater. Cities use a combination of so-called green infrastructure – such as rain gardens and porous pavements – and traditional gray infrastructure, such as pipes, tunnels, and pump stations.

In 2011, Philadelphia drew national attention for its Green City, Clean Waters program that was designed to manage the increasing amount of storm water using mostly green infrastructure. Thirteen years later, the city is experiencing billions of gallons of polluted stormwater overflowing its sewage outfall pipes each year. Green infrastructure is cheaper and faster to build, but it is not coping with increasing rainfall.

About 700 U.S. municipalities, mostly in the Northeast and around the Great Lakes, rely on these combined sewer systems. Based on updated climate projections, many are having to greatly increase gray infrastructure projects that include concrete holding tanks, tunnels, and pipes that can divert and hold onto flows until the rain stops, and water treatment plants can recover. These projects can take decades to implement and cost billions of dollars.

All across the country, cities are going to need to bite the bullet and make large-scale investments in conventional sewage infrastructure and repairs to stop billions of gallons of raw sewage from running into rivers. The increased storms present a daunting challenge for America’s cities.

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Faced With Heavier Rains, Cities Scramble to Control Polluted Runoff

Photo, posted August 29, 2011, courtesy of Reggie via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Living Walls | Earth Wise

December 28, 2021 By EarthWise 1 Comment

Green roofs are popular in many European countries. A green roof is a layer of vegetation planted over a waterproofing system installed on a flat or slightly sloped roof. Such roofs provide shade, remove heat from the air, and reduce temperatures of the roof surface, reducing energy use in the building and diminishing the urban heat-island effect.

A recent study by the University of Plymouth in the UK looked at the effectiveness of living walls – essentially the equivalent of a green roof located on the wall of a building.

The study looked at the effect of retrofitting an existing masonry wall with an exterior living wall façade consisting of a flexible felt fabric sheet system with pockets holding soil in which plants could grow.

Five weeks of measurements demonstrated that the amount of heat lost through the retrofitted wall was 31.4% lower than that of the original structure. They also found that daytime temperatures within the newly covered section remained more stable than the area with exposed masonry, so that less energy was required to heat that area.

The concept of living walls is fairly new but could be valuable in temperate climates such as Great Britain. Buildings in the UK account for 17% of greenhouse gas emissions and space heating accounts for 60% of all the energy used in buildings. So, improving the thermal performance of buildings would have a significant effect on reducing energy use and therefore emissions.

So-called green infrastructure, including green roofs and living walls, provides a nature-based solution that can help tackle climate change, air pollution, and other modern urban problems.

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Living walls can reduce heat lost from buildings by over 30%, study shows

Photo, posted June 19, 2011, courtesy of Linda Hartley via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.