CSLA Resource Library

Case studies serve as educational tools, bolster advocacy efforts, and empower CSLA members to make the business case for adaptation measures to their clients and/or target audiences.  

AILA’s Climate Positive Design Series will help guide your climate positive journey, we have three separate documents, targeting three specific areas of our work and practice. Volume 1 provides clear, simple advice on what Australian landscape architects can do to understand and deliver climate positive design through good planning, design, documentation, construction and renewal.  

AILA’s Climate Positive Design Series will help guide your climate positive journey, we have three separate documents, targeting three specific areas of our work and practice.  Volume 2 outlines the steps your practice, business or organisation can take to achieve carbon neutral certification and beyond to become climate positive.  

AILA’s Climate Positive Design Series will help guide your climate positive journey, we have three separate documents, targeting three specific areas of our work and practice.  Volume 3 sets the framework, guidance and time frames for the AILA Executive and State groups to roll out climate positive design to members, and provide engagement and policy direction.   

"AILA’s Climate Positive Design Video Series will help guide your climate positive journey. Watch the climate positive design short explainers, on: 

• What does climate positive design mean?
• How to measure your projects carbon.
• One big tree is worth a thousand small trees.
• Understanding carbon drawdown
• Understanding greenhouse emissions
• Advocacy
• Top Six Things you can do
• Mitigation toolkit
• Calculating your greenhouse emissions (custom elements)"

"The ASLA Climate Action Plan is rooted in three key goals and six key initiatives of IFLA Climate Action Commitment. 

Our Vision for 2040: All landscape architecture projects will simultaneously:  Achieve zero embodied and operational emissions and increase carbon sequestration; Provide significant economic  benefits in the form of measurable ecosystem services, health co-benefits, sequestration, and green jobs; Address climate injustices, empower communities, and increase equitable distribution of climate investments; and Restore ecosystems and increase and protect biodiversity. 

Goals Include: Practice: Scale Up Climate Positive Approaches; Equity: Empower Communities to Achieve Climate Justice; Advocacy: Build Coalitions for Climate Action"

The purpose of this Field Guide is to help landscape architecture professionals and students become better climate advocates individually, as well as through firms, public institutions, nonprofit organizations, community groups, and ASLA’s chapters. For each of the plan’s six key initiatives, you can explore key climate actions to take: On your own, With your firm / organization, And with your community

With ecological collapse looming large—potentially surpassing the threat of climate change—it’s clear that humanity’s alteration and exploitation of landscapes pose the greatest danger to global biodiversity. Landscape architects play a vital role in reversing this trend by planning and designing places that promote ecological resilience.

In this webinar, landscape architect Alexandra Steed will explore Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG), a framework for enhancing biodiversity through development. Drawing from her 20 years of experience in the UK and internationally, she will discuss practical approaches for scaling BNG, offering real-world examples. This session will provide tools for creating landscapes that restore and support biodiversity while contributing to global regeneration and climate adaptation.

Thursday, June 19, 2025 at 2:00 ET

How do we halve the emissions of the built environment this decade?  How can landscape architects, architects, planners and engineers be agents of mitigation and systems change?  Kelly Alvarez Doran speaks to the unique agency and advocacy landscape architects and designers have to address the challenges we face, sharing recent work focused on low-carbon, climate adaptive design approaches to landscape and public infrastructure.

Building on a year-long internal research project, Sasaki has developed the Carbon Conscience App, a free tool to help designers assess carbon impact from the early stages of planning. In urban design projects, many decisions that lead to high carbon emissions are made early in the planning process, and so that stage offers the greatest opportunities for impacting the ultimate outcomes. How can we measure embodied carbon of our designs from the earliest concept design phase?

Designing with a Carbon Conscience v2: A web-based application to informplanning and urban design projects on potential carbon impacts. Sasaki Associates. 

Landscape architects can advance climate action on multiple fronts at once. Local climate advocacy, rooted in local climate issues, can plant the seeds for broader change. Climate action starts with making an individual commitment. You‚ as a landscape architect, designer, researcher, and educator‚ have a large sphere of inf luence. You can take action through your workplace, at your children’s school, at your local town hall or city council meeting, with non-profit organizations, and at the state and federal levels. The purpose of this guide is to help landscape architecture professionals become better climate advocates individually, as well as through firms, public institutions, non-profit organizations and community groups, and ASLA’s chapters and national organization.