Building Exteriors Enhance Resilience Against Extreme Weather

For communities prone to severe weather, sustainable building strategies serve as the cornerstone for enhancing resilience. Building owners are becoming more attuned to resilience strategies as a way to improve their assets and address climate risks that have potentially costly repercussions. Momentum is building not just for strategies that tackle emissions, but also for measures that build resilience. Green building provides solutions to support building owners and facility managers, but more awareness of these strategies and solutions is needed…

There are no resilient families in a locust plague

In recent weeks, sitting in the comfort of my Sydney home bemoaning the lockdown and inaccessibility of toilet paper, I have often obsessively scrolled through my social media news feed.

There, among the relentless spread of COVID-19 – case increases, death rates, overwhelmed hospitals and stories of unspeakable sadness – a constant drip of locust-related news has punctuated my feed. And I have tried to ignore it, subconsciously protecting myself from more bad news.

You see, what I know about locusts is that it is never just about locusts. Instead, this “once in a generation” locust plague is what the World Bank is calling a “crisis within a crisis”.

Locusts are the oldest migratory pest in the world. The swarm in East Africa in late January is estimated to have eaten 1.8 million metric tons of green vegetation every day. Or, in more relatable terms, enough food to feed 81 million people…