The city is as quiet as possible and without many vehicles. So that the CO2 emissions can be reduced very much. I hope that the city will become car-free. This would be ideal not only for the climate but also for the well-being of the residents. With this measure, climate change could be drastically slowed down.
My vision: The city is quiet, only electric trams and buses drive through the streets. The electricity that is needed is obtained from sustainable sources. In other words, from solar panels mounted on the roofs of houses. People who come into the city by car have to park their cars in large car parks outside the city. These should be covered. Everything on the roof should be covered with solar panels. The public transport network is well developed so that there are no restrictions if you take public transport into account.
The problem that accompanies this measure is the high financial effort that has to be made.
Our imagined city park
We thought about city parks and how we think a city park should be and what it should contain.
In our opinion city parks should allow enough space for people. That means that there should be fields but aswell ways and trees. So you can do some sportive activities, but also hang around with friends or play something with other people. Maybe even have a picknick or have a little walk in the forest. All in all, the park should be a place of retreat from your daily business and shouldn't contain a city atmosphere.
If there is enough space, the park will automatically allow some little wild animals to live there. Maybe some ponds with ducks and fishes or even small lakes can also be a part. So it can create a small eco system and help the biodiversity.
When a city park is big and offers much to do and to see, it can be seen as a landmark of the city which would help the popularity of city parks.
'Food lab Brugge' is a project that started in 2015, fully supported by the city Brugge. Since 2018 is it a completely independent organization that works on sustainable food strategy in Brugge. They take a lot of actions to accomplish what they stand for. The problems they work with are local markets, city gardens, no food waste, Fairtrade products, sustainable fish and biological food. I wanted to know more about their solution for the food waste and if their solution is sustainable.
Our idea is to calculate how many trees the city of Zurich would need in order to be able to call itself climate-neutral. With an interview and a survey, we would like to clarify this
Imagination
We hope that with this project, that there will be some kind of change in the near future and that we all think about more economical transport options like using our bikes more often.
Hello everyone,
For my project I am going to find out if there is a difference between the waste from shopping in a supermarket or in a local shop.
Hello to anyone who reads this,
Even in a first world country such as Belgium poverty is still present, though not as prevalent as it may be in other countries. Because of this, there are many food banks present, all under one larger organization. I'm going to be looking into the fact if this is a sustainable organization. The first question is of course: where does this food come from? Most of the products gathered are products that could have been both imported or made here in Belgium. This already doesn't seem good.
There is however a large twist to this. These products aren't explicitly imported for the food banks, instead, they are products that would've been thrown into the trash otherwise. Thanks to this, they reduce waste by a large amount. However, they don't solely rely on wasted food, no. A large part, about a third, of their donations, are from the European food bank federation. This may cause some emissions due to it having to be transported to Belgium, but it's not nearly as far as it would be if it came from another continent.
Food for the Future is a unique project in which the Province of Flemish Brabant, Rikolto (Vredeseilanden), Colruyt Group, University College UCLL and KU Leuven together with young people, experts, farmers, etc. look for ways to feed the growing global population in a sustainable way. Food for the Future wishes to fuel the debate by bringing together people from the business community, governments, consumers and civil society organizations. They have chosen 3 products: Andean crops, pulses and seaweed.
I'm going to investigate why they have chosen their products and if they are sustainable or not. So my research question is: Why did the project food for the future chose the products: Andean crops, pulses and seaweed? Are these sustainable?
Improve city climate
To improve our city climate we have to start with ourselves. We have to be willing to change our habits and get used to new surroundings. Our imagination consists of a climate friendly city which is filled up with a lot of trees and solar panels. We think that these two methods would be the most effective and probably the easiest to improve our city climates significantly.
First of all, we would have to plan the locations and the financing of our city trees, parks and solar panels. The second step would be to actually install them and get people used to it. Then we would like to make some calculations to exactly define by how much we improved the actual climate of the city and how much energy we saved.
Petar and Leandro
With this project we would like to make the population, especially large companies, aware of the need to change the climate and that big cities make a large part of it. One way to change this is to have green roofs. Since there is not much room to plant trees in cities anyway, this can be done on large roofs.
We imagine that our project will motivate some to implement it. Furthermore, the project should fulfill our imagination to have a positive influence on the climatic conditions. With this procedure the quality of living should be increased and the rainwater can also be evaporated better.
We are aware of the fact that this implementation could be expensive and that the investment costs are higher than for a conventional roof. Furthermore, such roofs need to be maintained. But if you take a closer look, there are many more advantages. A green roof serves as a habitat for plants and animals!
To get more information about this topic, we might do an interview or create surveys.
Who knows, maybe in 20 years big cities all over the world will already change to green cities...
Karishma & Kamanya