What is our project about?

Due to today’s progress and the comfort of mankind, we produce more and more CO₂, which results in global warming. The world is warming up, the climate is changing and various living beings such as animals and plants are dying because they no longer have a habitat.
Today, the problems of “global warming” and “CO₂ emissions” are part of everyday life. Politicians are passing treaties to reduce exhaust emissions and scientists are working on new ways to protect the environment.

The aim of this work is to show a way to slow down climate change and ways to make a city or country climate neutral.
In recent years, new environmental trends have emerged and alternatives have been developed. These will be discussed in this paper and their feasibility will be examined

Results from the survey:

A total of 60 questionnaires were sent out for this survey, 56 of which were answered. The high number of responses provides a good basis for evaluating this topic.
It was important to us not only to take into account the opinions of colleagues, but also to include those from other age groups as well as experts in our survey.

We were also able to achieve a good mix in the age categories:

• Under 30 years  –> 27 answers       = 44 %
• 30 – 50 years      –>  16 answers      = 26 %
• Over 50 years     –> 17 answers       = 30 %

Interestingly, respondents under 30 are the most concerned about our environment.
The situation is different for older people. 65% of respondents over 50 care little or not at all about the environment.
The survey shows that many want to change something but do not know what. This lack of clarity is preventing us from making progress. The trouble with do-gooders is that they don’t start with themselves.

The main focus of the survey is on the advantages and disadvantages of this form of slowing down climate change. From this, it can be deduced in which direction future trends towards environmental protection as well as alternative forms are developing.

It is evident that the links between greening, environmental protection and leisure are particularly important. Excitingly, many respondents also see greening as providing new opportunities to create a new habitat for animals and to generate new shaded areas to enjoy time in nature even on hot days.

Another benefit often mentioned is the filtering of CO₂. This has not only financial but also ecological reasons. In addition to the costs for expensive CO₂ filters, maintenance costs are also eliminated. However, this is to the chagrin of the industry.

Where there are advantages, there are also numerous disadvantages. On the one hand, the large amount of space required and the high costs for the care and maintenance of a tree. Another disadvantage is that this way of filtering CO₂ cannot be optimised.

Interview

To strengthen our result, we wanted to conduct 2 interviews. One with a colleague from Dubai and one with a climate scientist named Mr. Saluz. Our colleague from Dubai gave us an insight into the implementation of a climate-neutral city and was able to reveal its types. Unfortunately, the second interview failed because we did not get an answer despite emails and phone calls.

The information from the interview helped us enormously in our calculation and our survey.

Calculation

We spent 2 weeks intensively researching and calculating a plausible result. According to our research and calculation, the city of Zurich would need about 20 million trees to compensate for its CO₂ consumption. With 13 million trees in the whole canton of Zurich, the goal is very far away. The steadily growing CO₂ emissions of mankind make the feasibility of the project difficult. The calculations were made with the help of a comprehensive data analysis, sources can be found below. CO2-Statistik gemäss CO2-Gesetz (stadt-zuerich.ch)

End result

A climate-neutral city with trees would be possible, but the costs are very high and difficult to implement due to space constraints. Nevertheless, you can achieve a lot with just a few trees.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all participants of the survey and our interview partner.

On topic posts

Cool city-climate

 

Laurice / Michael

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