Climate change - opportunities and challenges

My contract team were due to start on site at a Nursery School in Kent today. They spent 21 hours on the roads yesterday, trying to get to site to set up. They got within 5 miles before making the call to turn back and then spent the next 18 hours getting home. As always, challenges bring opportunities - team building on the side of the road at 3am, skidding along on the ice like kids is not your usual manager-led activity, but it was effective!

The current 'extreme weather event' is another example of the need to take responsibility for the part we can all play in combating climate change. The design brief in Kent called for natural green play space in what was a fairly typical barren setting. We have taken the brief and developed it into green coastal planting on the roof, edible vines up the walls, food growing of species appropriate to the local community in every available nook and cranny, playable planting, and lots of trees. It could be a maintenace nightmare. The challenge is in training school staff in basic horticulture techniques so they can prune, trim, dead head and weed with confidence. Maintenance done badly wrecks bio-diversity as well as aesthetics. From the challenge comes the opportunity - some of us also trained as horticulture teachers, so we areable to train the staff how, when and why to maintain their new green
space.

Trees are one of the most effective things at absorbing large amounts of carbon, providing shade, sucking up atmospheric pollutants, excess ground water. To combat climate change's irreversible tipping point requires us to plant as many trees as we can in the next few years. As always, careful attention must be made to 'right tree, right place'. Sustainable landscape designers, like Greenstone Design UK, can recommend and design in trees to almost any setting.

Climate change is a real threat in our lifetimes. However, we have an opportunity to design, build and plant our way into a sustainable future. If you are interested in partnering with our design team, please do get in touch.

another Nursery school garden project we worked on

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