How ancient 'skywells' are keeping Chinese homes cool

Artists, architects, and urban designers in India are reimagining the ancient practice of cooling water in terracotta pots to create terracotta structures that cool the air nearby during extreme heat.

An architect in Chennai, India, is retrofitting private residences and public buildings to be more sustainable. They make changes like installing energy-efficient upgrades, solar panels, improved ventilation, and low-flow plumbing fixtures to reduce water and energy consumption.

Architects in Vietnam are creating climate-resilient buildings with nature-based designs and materials that adapt to the local weather to reduce the building’s emissions throughout its lifespan by naturally regulating the temperature.

Instead of demolishing a campus building in need of many renovations Rockhurst University repurposed it. The focus on sustainability during the rebuild made it the most energy-efficient building on campus and prevented the release of the carbon embedded in its concrete.

Prescribed Burn Associations (PBAs) in Oklahoma bring together landowners to share equipment, labor, and expertise needed to conduct prescribed burns. Early evidence of efficacy include restored native plants and improved land health, suggesting the model can help reverse woody encroachment and improve grassland and wildlife habitat on participating properties.

Cal Poly Humboldt's Native American Studies Department created an Indigenous food sovereignty research lab through a student-led, community-driven process that now supports Indigenous students' cultural connections, advances traditional ecological knowledge research, and demonstrates how Indigenous knowledge can be valued in higher education.

The creation of forest gardens—the modern term for an ancient agroforestry model that mixes shrubs, herbs, vines, fruit and nut trees, and perennial vegetables—are helping supply communities in sub-Saharan Africa with food, medicine, and animal feed. The U.S.-based NGO TREES claims to have created 38,000 active forest gardens in five countries, each comprising about 4,000 trees. This has restored 99,743 acres of degraded land, having reached 56,273 farmers and their families across 174 community projects.

Energy developers and Indigenous communities are coming together to share ownership of renewable energy projects to promote equity and inclusion within the projects directly impacting Indigenous land. Co-ownership is on the rise globally and offers benefits like insights from Indigenous knowledge of the land and less risk of the project being canceled or protested in court.

The Coeur d’Alene Tribe is in the middle of a multi-decade effort to restore an important wetland that will make the local environment more resilient to climate change. Using tribal knowledge and expertise, they’re encouraging beavers to return, reintroducing salmon, planting trees, and building connections between people and the land.

Menominee tribal members are practicing methods of forest management that blend both conservation and Indigenous culture to preserve the viability of the forest long-term. In 2018, it was found that after a century of logging on the reservation, the forest had higher tree volume, higher rates of regeneration, more plant diversity and fewer invasive species than other, nontribal forests.