Buildings, landscapes, and infrastructure are responsible for more than 40 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions each year. Reducing the use of materials with high embodied carbon, like concrete, metals, and plastics, is key to bringing down those emissions.
Landscape architects who have used Climate Positive Design‘s Pathfinder know it’s a tool for calculating the carbon footprint of a landscape design. It then helps designers figure out ways to reduce emissions from materials and increase carbon sequestration faster.
The new version Pathfinder improves on those capabilities but also enables landscape architects and planners to do much more.
“We decided it’s time to deepen our carbon accounting and evaluate other factors — biodiversity, equity, cooling, and water conservation — with the same rigor,” said Pamela Conrad, ASLA, founder of Climate Positive Design and ASLA’s inaugural Biodiversity and Climate Action Fellow.
The new updates will help landscape architects achieve more of the resilience, equity, and biodiversity goals of the ASLA Climate Action Plan.
In terms of carbon, Pathfinder 3.0 “makes it easier to cut ‘business-as-usual’ emissions in half by 2040 and double sequestration,” Conrad said. This is because it now offers “more insights on lower-carbon materials and specific suggestions on how to improve your project’s impact.”
For biodiversity, the tool helps landscape architects track how well their design helps achieve the global 30 x 30 target. This refers to the target set by world leaders at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity COP last year that calls for all countries to protect 30 percent of land, coastal, and ocean ecosystems by 2030.
Pathfinder 3.0 helps landscape architects:
- Identify the biome and eco-region of their project site
- Determine how to best protect and enhance native species
- Create designs that increase biodiversity by at least 10 percent
“Pathfinder is not just helping users visualize their options. It’s also supporting innovation and creativity in transformative design,” said Colleen Mercer Clarke, an interdisciplinary scientist and landscape architect, who is special envoy to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) at the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA).
Landscape architects can also now see how well their designs increase equitable outcomes by providing greater benefits to Justice 40 communities.
Pathfinder 3.0 aligns with the U.S. government’s Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST), which determines whether a project is in an underserved area. If the site is outside the U.S., a landscape architect can also identify the site as being in an underserved area based on CEJST criteria.
Curious to learn how much a design can cool a community? Pathfinder 3.0 shows how well a design reduces severe heat areas, which have been defined by the Trust for Public Land. It enables designers to see how much shade is created through different design strategies.
In terms of water conservation, the tool now shows how to reduce water use through projects by 30 percent. It uses baseline data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s WaterSense.
Climate Positive Design undertook such an ambitious expansion because they see landscapes increasingly serving as critical infrastructure. With climate change and biodiversity loss, landscapes must do more for communities.
“Landscape architects are uniquely qualified to drawdown carbon, create healthier communities, and protect ecosystems through our projects,” Conrad said.
“We have an opportunity and responsibility to address all of these through our work. But we also need to be able to measure those strategies and impacts.”
To better measure impacts from a wider range of materials and their transportation to sites, the new Pathfinder aligns with the datasets of Carbon Conscience, a tool that can be used to cut emissions in the early concept phase. It also aligns with new industry standards being developed through the Embodied Carbon Harmonization and Optimization (ECHO) project.
Learn more about Pathfinder 3.0 and explore an updated user guide and methodology. Check out their design toolkit, which is based on the ASLA Climate Action Field Guide.
With Architecture 3030, Climate Positive Design also updated the 2030 Palette, a “visual database of sustainable design principles, strategies, tools and resources.”
There are new resources on:
- Coastal seaforestration
- Drawdown
- Afforestation
- Urban gardens
- The 15-minute city
- Regenerative peri-urban agriculture
- Water-smart landscapes and systems
Also worth exploring: a comprehensive new guide to climate action planning and a decarbonization framework, which were also developed with Architecture 2030.
