Transcriber: Hoàng Trung Lê Reviewer: David DeRuwe
In 2019, Australia sweltered through its hottest and driest year on record.
That year I set out to build a climate-cooling microforest in Canberra.
And today I’d like to tell my story,
but before I do,
I need to give you a couple of facts,
and these facts might make you feel uncomfortable.
Did you know heatwaves kill more people in Australia
than any other natural disaster?
Doctors for the Environment, a group of medical professionals,
say heatwaves are a silent killer, and those most at risk are the elderly,
pregnant and breastfeeding women,
and people who can’t afford to cool their housing, and the homeless.
And it’s not only humans that are impacted by heatwaves; it’s wildlife, too.
In 2019, baby flying foxes were falling en masse from trees.
At 38 degrees, they started to suffer from heat exhaustion,
and at 42 degrees, they died.
And you might be thinking: “Oh, flying foxes, they’re not that cute.
Don’t they carry deadly diseases like lyssavirus?”
But in fact, flying foxes provide us with essential ecosystems
like pollinating eucalypts on which we depend for hardwood.
Everything is interlinked,
and seven out of 10 Australians live in cities and towns,
and when we build those cities and towns,
we cut down trees and pave over waterways.
On hot days, those paved surfaces, the concrete and asphalt absorb heat,
and in the evening, they release that heat very slowly.
A CSIRO 2017 report showed Canberra’s urban areas
were up to eight degrees hotter than the surrounding countryside.
In 2019, Canberra received only 358 millimetres of rain.
That’s 58% of the average annual.
As a landscape architect working in the “garden city,” I was alarmed.
This is what I saw:
Our lungs of our city were dying.
By 2050, Canberra’s climate is likely to be two degrees hotter,
with 20% less rainfall,
and remember these are averages only and not the extremes.
By 2090, and I don’t think any of us will be here then,
the temperatures are meant to be on average four-and-a-half degrees hotter
with 25% less rainfall.
That's a future that I don't want to see.
But in 2019, two events occurred that were to give me hope.
The first was a visit to the Australian National Botanic Gardens.
I took along with me three thermometers -
three thermometers because I wanted to make sure none of them was faulty.
So it was a hot January afternoon.
I got out of the car in the bitumen car park at the Botanic Gardens,
and the heat was sweltering.
It was 37 degrees.
I walked up to the nearby concrete concourse that was overhung by vegetation
with a water cascade nearby with its water dragons and tadpoles.
And there, the temperature was 34 degrees.
I then walked to my final destination, the rainforest gully.
The rainforest gully was conceived of in the 1960s,
and sceptics said it couldn't be done.
They said you could not transform
a dry sclerophyll creek bed into a lush rainforest.
Well, the founding fathers and mothers went ahead,
and they planted a hardy overstory of eucalypts and wattles
to protect the more delicate plant species underneath.
So they created layers of vegetation,
and as I descended down into the rainforest gully,
I was enveloped by the greenery.
I brushed past palms and ferns and vines,
and as I got down to the very bottom,
it was much cooler.
I pulled the thermometers out of my backpack and it was 26 degrees.
A whole 11 degrees cooler than the car park.
I realized that the rainforest gully
was acting like nature’s evaporative cooler.
It was cooling down the landscape,
and that was because it used
a combination of vegetation layers, water, and great soil.
The second event that occurred
was I was on holiday with my partner, Peter, and like many modern couples,
we were lying together in bed, side by side, scrolling through our phones.
He was looking at what Elon Musk was doing in space,
and I stumbled across the work of Shubhangi Sharma.
Sharma is a former industrial engineer with Toyota,
and he went from designing vehicle components to making forests.
He makes forests based on the Miyawaki method,
which is a dense planting up to 30 times denser than a natural forest,
which results in a growth rate of 10 times faster.
I was sold.
I knew this is what I wanted to do;
I wanted to build community climate-cooling microforests.
But I need to explain to you what is a microforest.
Well, I describe it as a dense pocket of climate-ready urban vegetation
that cools the landscape, provides habitat,
enhances community well-being, and gives hope for the future.
And it's unique in a number of ways.
We engage the community at every step of the way,
and we have a community leader leading each microforest,
and we include water harvesting to get water into the soil
at a plant’s roots where it’s needed most.
We also include climate-ready species from hotter and drier climates
trying to ensure that our landscapes will survive in the future.
But before I could build a microforest, I needed a plot of land.
Downer resident, Mike Smith, contacted me and he said,
“Why don’t you come and have a look at my nearby park?”
It was barren, weedy, and dry; it was perfect.
In October 2019, I started a crowdfunding campaign.
The goal was to reach 20,000 dollars -
if I reached one dollar less, that I would receive nothing.
The campaign started off well,
with thousands of dollars rolling in from community and business,
slowed down in the middle, and with a few days to go,
we reached our goal and eventually received over $23,000 from 189 donors.
In September of that year, the earthworks began.
Machinery moved in.
It dug 26 lineal metres of trenches,
created six square metres of bog, and created great soil.
And at our first working bee with the community
after the earthworks were completed, we started to plant.
Our goal was to plant 1,800 plants over four working bees.
At the conclusion of the working bees,
we’d gotten those 1,800 plants in the ground,
and I’d like to introduce Amit.
Amit is the leader of the volunteer group
who helped plant and maintain the microforest.
I asked Amit at the end of the last working day,
I said “Amit, what do you like about the microforest?”
and he turned to me and he said,
“I like the fact that it’s brought the community together
more than I envisaged - young, old, kids, all coming out to help -
and the fact that it’s changed so much in the last six months
to the point that two weeks ago, a couple came along with a table,
glasses and a bottle of wine, and they sat on that bench over there and cuddled.
It was absolutely lovely.”
After I’d finished the microforest at Downer,
I created an eight-step handbook that could be used by other groups
who wanted to create a microforest.
I’d like to introduce you to Liz and Purdy.
They are parents, workers, and leaders of the Watson Microforest.
Purdy is on the right, and when she saw what we’d achieved at Downer,
she wanted to run a crowdfunding campaign at the adjacent suburb of Watson.
Purdy and Liz got together in the evenings when their children were asleep,
and they organized their crowdfunding campaign.
They launched it in December last year, and it ran for 40 days.
In 40 days, they made a little bit under 53,000 dollars.
They are my crowdfunding superstars.
So what I want to point out to you
is Liz and Purdy as leaders of that microforest.
They’re not experts in plants or revegetation or water harvesting.
They’re just passionate about making a difference in their community.
Since then, Jennifer Bardsley from Holt has been successful in running
a crowdfunding campaign, and work will start on that project, too.
And we’ve also got Liesl Codrington, who started up a microforest in Casey.
So I'd like you to picture a map of Canberra.
Lake Burley Griffin’s in the center,
the suburbs in the inner north above and in the south below.
That central core is well-vegetated and cool,
but if we consider the surrounding suburbs,
there’s a whole ring around Canberra, there are 86 suburbs there.
Imagine if we created a 1,500 microforest
in every one of those 86 suburbs.
We’d create 129,000 more trees, shrubs,
ground covers climbing climate throughout Canberra that would cool the environment,
but also provide stepping stones for wildlife
from our parks to our gardens, from the bush to the waterways.
I’d like you to do me a favor.
Just close your eyes for a minute,
and I’d like you to picture a barren, dry, weedy space near you.
Imagine how it could be different.
Dare to dream.
Our vision is to build a community microforest
in every urban hot spot in Australia.
But we need passionate people like you who are willing to stand up
and create a neighborhood microforest near you
because together, we can make a difference.
Together, we can cool the heat and create a brighter future.
(Applause)