In crowded Milan’s central business district, two plant-covered skyscrapers provide the same amount of greenery as 30,000 square meters of forest, according to architect Stefano Boeri. The Bosco Verticale complex comprises two towers, 80 and 112 meters (260 and 367 feet) tall, 800 trees, 15,000 ground-covering plants and 5,000 shrubs, which sit in large bathtubs on large hanging balconies. Ecologists worked to make sure the plants were suitable for the location and now attract 1,600 species of birds and butterflies, according to Boers. The towers were opened in 2014 and the vegetation is trimmed so that it does not obstruct the view of the residents. Since then, the architect has created designs to build the first Forest city in Liuzhou, China.
Readers noticed wildflowers thriving in urban areas as city councils decide to let grass grow wild. These colourful little patches may seem like window dressing in the face of vast decline, but across the world people are welcoming wildlife into cities, where more than half of us live. Here is a look at 10 of the most exciting and innovative urban biodiversity projects popping up.
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In Milan’s central business district, two plant-covered skyscrapers provide the same amount of vegetation as 30,000 sq metres of woodland, according to the architect, Stefano Boeri. The Bosco Verticale complex comprises two towers, 80 and 112 metres (260 and 367ft) tall, 800 trees, 15,000 ground-cover plants and 5,000 shrubs, which sit in big tubs on large overhanging balconies. Ecologists worked to make sure the plants were suitable for the location and they now attract 1,600 species of bird and butterfly, according to Boeri. The towers opened in 2014 and vegetation is trimmed so it doesn’t obstruct the view for residents. The architect has since created designs to build the world’s first Forest City in Liuzhou, China.
More than a dozen wildlife bridges and passages have been built in the Canadian city of Edmonton to maintain habitat connectivity and reduce human wildlife conflict. One of the largest is a 30-metre bridge near Big Lake in the north-west of the city, designed to be a corridor for moose and other ungulates. Trees on the bridge provide shelter for animals as they cross. Smaller bridges include special passes for salamanders and frogs so they can avoid the road as they move between the wetlands and forest. Similar passages have since been built all over world, including in Los Angeles, where the world’s largest wildlife bridge will extend over the 10-lane Highway 101 in a bid to protect mountain lion habitat.
The now notorious city of Wuhan was declared China’s first “sponge city” based on its nature-based approach to flood defences. Permeable pavements, rain gardens, artificial ponds and wetlands were created throughout the city as ecologically friendly alternatives to traditional hard flood defences. The initiative, which has included 390 separate projects, started after more than a dozen people died because of flooding in Wuhan in 2016. It is believed to have cost $600m (£435m) less than upgrading the city’s drainage system. Wuhan was once known as “the city of a hundred lakes”, but most were paved over as the population grew. There are now more than 30 “sponge cities” in China.
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Gangsta garden’ in Los Angeles. Photograph: Courtesy of Ron Finley Project
The Los Angeles Community Garden Council manages 42 community gardens and provides counseling and workshops to another 125 people, serving more than 6,000 families. the objective of the project is to connect people of different backgrounds, create sustainable communities and encourage people to eat fresh and healthy food. In traditional gardens, people rent a plot to grow their own food; in educational gardens, the council teaches people about gardening and healthy eating; and on urban farms, volunteers grow vegetables to sell at the market or give to people in need. A key leader of this movement is South Central Los Angeles “gangsta gardener” Ron Finley, who has traveled extensively to speak about his work and is featured in a 2015 documentary on community gardens called Can you dig this?. “If you are not a gardener, you are not gangsta,” he says.
Nature, in the broadest sense, is the natural, physical, material world or universe. 'Nature' can refer to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. Although humans are part of nature, human activity is often understood as a separate category from other natural phenomena.
The word nature is borrowed from the Old French nature and is derived from the Latin word natura, or 'essential qualities, innate disposition', and in ancient times, literally meant 'birth'. In ancient philosophy, natura is mostly used as the Latin translation of the Greek word physis , which originally related to the intrinsic characteristics that plants, animals, and other features of the world develop of their own accord. The concept of nature as a whole, the physical universe, is one of several expansions of the original notion; it began with certain core applications of the word f?s?? by pre-Socratic philosophers , and has steadily gained currency ever since. During the advent of modern scientific method in the last several centuries, nature became the passive reality, organized and moved by divine laws. With the Industrial revolution, nature increasingly became seen as the part of reality deprived from intentional intervention: it was hence considered as sacred by some traditions or a mere decorum for divine providence or human history . However, a vitalist vision of nature, closer to the presocratic one, got reborn at the same time, especially after Charles Darwin.
Within the various uses of the word today, 'nature' often refers to geology and wildlife. Nature can refer to the general realm of living plants and animals, and in some cases to the processes associated with inanimate objects—the way that particular types of things exist and change of their own accord, such as the weather and geology of the Earth. It is often taken to mean the 'natural environment' or wilderness—wild animals, rocks, forest, and in general those things that have not been substantially altered by human intervention, or which persist despite human intervention. For example, manufactured objects and human interaction generally are not considered part of nature, unless qualified as, for example, 'human nature' or 'the whole of nature'. This more traditional concept of natural things that can still be found today implies a distinction between the natural and the artificial, with the artificial being understood as that which has been brought into being by a human consciousness or a human mind. Depending on the particular context, the term 'natural' might also be distinguished from the unnatural or the supernatural.
Earth is the only planet known to support life, and its natural features are the subject of many fields of scientific research. Within the solar system, it is third closest to the sun; it is the largest terrestrial planet and the fifth largest overall. Its most prominent climatic features are its two large polar regions, two relatively narrow temperate zones, and a wide equatorial tropical to subtropical region. Precipitation varies widely with location, from several metres of water per year to less than a millimetre. 71 percent of the Earth's surface is covered by salt-water oceans. The remainder consists of continents and islands, with most of the inhabited land in the Northern Hemisphere.
Earth has evolved through geological and biological processes that have left traces of the original conditions. The outer surface is divided into several gradually migrating tectonic plates. The interior remains active, with a thick layer of plastic mantle and an iron-filled core that generates a magnetic field. This iron core is composed of a solid inner phase, and a fluid outer phase. Convective motion in the core generates electric currents through dynamo action, and these, in turn, generate the geomagnetic field.
The atmospheric conditions have been significantly altered from the original conditions by the presence of life-forms, which create an ecological balance that stabilizes the surface conditions. Despite the wide regional variations in climate by latitude and other geographic factors, the long-term average global climate is quite stable during interglacial periods, and variations of a degree or two of average global temperature have historically had major effects on the ecological balance, and on the actual geography of the Earth.
Geology is the science and study of the solid and liquid matter that constitutes the earth. The field of geology encompasses the study of the composition, structure, physical properties, dynamics, and history of Earth materials, and the processes by which they are formed, moved, and changed. The field is a major academic discipline, and is also important for mineral and hydrocarbon extraction, knowledge about and mitigation of natural hazards, some Geotechnical engineering fields, and understanding past climates and environments.
Although humans comprise only a minuscule proportion of the total living biomass on Earth, the human effect on nature is disproportionately large. Because of the extent of human influence, the boundaries between what humans regard as nature and 'made environments' is not clear cut except at the extremes. Even at the extremes, the amount of natural environment that is free of discernible human influence is diminishing at an increasingly rapid pace. A 2020 study published in Nature found that anthropogenic mass outweighs all living biomass on earth, with plastic alone exceeding the mass of all land and marine animals combined. And according to a 2021 study published in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, only about 3% of the planet's terrestrial surface is ecologically and faunally intact, with a low human footprint and healthy populations of native animal species.
The development of technology by the human race has allowed the greater exploitation of natural resources and has helped to alleviate some of the risk from natural hazards. In spite of this progress, however, the fate of human civilization remains closely linked to changes in the environment. There exists a highly complex feedback loop between the use of advanced technology and changes to the environment that are only slowly becoming understood. Man-made threats to the Earth's natural environment include pollution, deforestation, and disasters such as oil spills. Humans have contributed to the extinction of many plants and animals, with roughly 1 million species threatened with extinction within decades. The loss of biodiversity and ecosystem functions over the last half century have impacted the extent that nature can contribute to human quality of life, and continued declines could pose a major threat to the continued existence of human civilization, unless a rapid course correction is made. The value of natural resources to human society is not reflected in market prices because mostly natural resources are available free of charge. This distorts market pricing of natural resources and at the same time leads to underinvestment in our natural assets. The annual global cost of public subsidies that damage nature is conservatively estimated at $4–$6 trillion . Institutional protections of these natural goods, such as the oceans and rainforests, are lacking. Governments have not prevented these economic externalities.
Humans employ nature for both leisure and economic activities. The acquisition of natural resources for industrial use remains a sizable component of the world's economic system. Some activities, such as hunting and fishing, are used for both sustenance and leisure, often by different people. Agriculture was first adopted around the 9th millennium BCE. Ranging from food production to energy, nature influences economic wealth.
Although early humans gathered uncultivated plant materials for food and employed the medicinal properties of vegetation for healing, most modern human use of plants is through agriculture. The clearance of large tracts of land for crop growth has led to a significant reduction in the amount available of forestation and wetlands, resulting in the loss of habitat for many plant and animal species as well as increased erosion.
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