GILA word of the week: Edible Riparian Buffer

I haven't encountered this phrase before: Edible Riparian Buffer. It's a kind of green infrastructure,
meant to combat climate change and boost community resilience. If you're going to put a vegetated buffer around a river, why not focus on having edible plants? Kudos Iowa City!
This edible riparian buffer may not be everyone's cup of tea and that's why it's important to have, argues this landscape architect, small, incremental actions which result in an immediate, local effect.

-Forceful words from the UK Green Building Council (UK-GBC), calling on developers 'to stop downplaying green infrastructure as "a fluffy optional extra".

-A massive luxury Cairo green infrastructure project, complete with green roofs, green walls and gardens now has over half a billion dollars in investment! Construction is expected to be completed in 2018. Talk about over the top, it has limo services as well.

-A government minister praised the Nigerian section of the green wall being built to combat desertification. Not a few hours later planting was stopped due to insurgent forces. I had never thought about the role insurgents could play in environmental degradation and climate change.

-And lastly for today, he's a nifty five acre farm in Australia, which includes an outdoor aquaponics system as part of it's permaculture orientation.

Ice cream trucks, so why not carrots?

The Permaculture Activist,  the 30 year old permaculture journal, has a new Kickstarter campaign to raise their online profile. If you are moved to contribute, check out their page.

-New York's Department of Environmental Protection announced their 2015 green infrastructure winners, over $3 million dollars will be disbursed. What do the winners have in common? Very ambitious (and big) projects, which will be atop everything from parking garages to auto-body shops turned halal slaughterhouses.   

-“It’s kind of strange - we’ll let ice cream trucks roll down the street and sell all kinds of sugary things, but you can’t sell a carrot.” This kind of quote, one would guess, would be attributed to a local, urban agriculture activist. But this is actually Dallas' sustainability coordinator talking and you can bet the Big D is up for some changes.
Hmmm...but what if you combined those two...carrot ice cream? Would everyone be happy???

-Patented in Lebanon and debuted in Cairo, have a gander at this very artistic green wall, inside Cairo’s Galleria mall. That's two big GILA projects for Cairo, in the last 3 months!

Amazing green complex planned for Cairo

Slated to begin construction in 2015, if this development ends up being half as good as it looks, it will be top 10 in the living architecture world for the green options (indigenous plants, green roofs, green walls, urban agriculture, solar panels and more!) it provides.