Fourth Annual Urban Soils Symposium and the Urban Soils Fest Weekend

The Fourth Annual Urban Soils Symposium and Urban Soils Fest Weekend will be October 11-14, 2019 in Brooklyn, NY. Registration information for the symposium and the festival are available online.

Biodiversity to BiodiverCITY

Fifty percent of the world’s population lives in cities. Even though cities make up just a small 2% of the earth’s land use, their impact is far greater than their boundaries. Nature and climate change don’t conform to these boundaries. Cities are tightly interconnected to the rest of the world, and therefore have a proportionately large influence on our resources and environment through population density, consumerism, and waste. Scientists hypothesize that cities use 75% of the resources we take from the Earth.

Much of the urban development causes soil sealing, alteration of soil properties, and fragmented landscapes, leading to a loss of connectivity between habitats. These changes have marked effects on multiple ecosystem services linked to air and water quality, biodiversity, and human well-being. Climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, heat island effect, are some of the effects and changes cities have on the global and local environment.

But if we find solutions to these problems, these problems become opportunities for cities to make a positive change in our world’s food system, environmental health, and to reconnect the urban with the non-urban.

How?

Cities have urban soils.  We live with them, on them, but do we know everything about them? No. What we do know is that urban soils…are soils. Like all soils, they have a high capacity for influencing the environment because they support life through various functions, providing ecosystem services, like cleaning our air and water, and providing the nutrients and structure to support our vegetation and our food.  

Biodiversity is supported by soils, and supports life. Its Earth’s dynamic balance, of which each piece is essential. Urban soils are diverse. Their potential is diverse. Herein lies the choice: stay as we are or learn from the soils and optimize their greatest potential and capacity to support life, biodiversity and optimize ecological productivity to develop sustainable cities. 

What does it mean to develop sustainable cities? Within their boundaries? What is biodiversity? Do our cities have biodiversity? Is it in our goals to implement nature-based solutions and green cities in order to fulfill what we call sustainability? How important is it? When is it important? Who decides? How do we play a role; in how we value nature in the city; in how we engineer it; through what we eat, through our daily lifestyle choices?

This is the subject of our Fourth Annual Urban Soils Symposium and the Urban Soils Fest Weekend.

Join us to discuss, deliberate, and find solutions.