By Catherine Reynolds
China is deploying permaculture “at scale” to redesign ecological systems and infrastructure for adaptive resilience.
Being flat, highly productive, with deposited soils and many canals, the world’s deltas will be challenged by global warming. Preparatory work has been done for the Yangtze Delta.
Three serious threats
- Water invasion
- Coastal erosion
- Saltwater intrusion
The Yangtze Delta may only be viable for about the next 100 years because the estimated rise in the ocean by that time would cover it. It has a short-term but no long-term future. How to make the best permaculture design decisions under these conditions is challenging. About 127 million people live there, and the delta also produces huge amounts of food for China.
Originally, deltas around the world would have been enormous buffering wetlands that have been cleared and drained over millennia. Nature constantly tries to return them to their original state, which was better for climate and wildlife. In fact, although impractical, allowing and assisting the region to return to wetlands would be the most protective and sustainable response to global warming and coastal inundation. Wetlands protect and buffer big flows of water.
Working in a huge delta is a disturbing experience and a challenge for permaculture designers. Its flat land and waters are threatened by rising seas and global warming, incursions of brackish water and pollution of canals. Altogether, it presents a new landscape for permaculture designers considering water management and hydration. How to catch and store water in what is virtually a wetland presents enormous challenges.
Delta communities and agriculture comprise a multitude of canals that were once used for most transport, yet their condition shows a lack of understanding of how nature cleans water. The canals are full of rubbish and very polluted. Developing a fringe of plants known as macrophytes along the canals, to extract pollutants as water moves from land to canal, would assist enormously. There is work to be done here.
Delta ecological protection
Environmental protection design in the Yangtze River Delta focuses on integrating regional ecological security patterns, sustainable urban-rural development and high-tech monitoring. Key features include constructing ecological corridors, using “sponge city” techniques, restoring water networks through polders (dykes and berms), implementing strict ecological red lines, and advancing zero-carbon, climate-responsive architectural designs to support sustainable development.
Shanghai
The Shanghai Centre of Creativity and Innovation under Wei Min is part of a team working on this challenge in Shanghai and the greater delta region. Valuable short-term work has been done on wetlands in the region, with a remarkable increase in bird numbers and other wetland species. Wetlands are one of the region’s original ecosystems, protecting and buffering big flows of water.
In Shanghai, renewable energy is visible everywhere. Streets are cleaner, quieter and greener than I have seen in Australia, and people are proud of their progress. China jumped from bicycles to electric bicycles in a wide range of types and styles—it seems there is the right one for each person. Parking is easy. In this way, much of the city has avoided the challenging impacts of noise and pollution caused by fossil fuels. By moving from bicycles to electric bicycles, they omitted the stage in transport innovation of every citizen owning a petrol- or diesel-powered car.
As one of the world’s great cities, Shanghai has many huge modern buildings, and the question arises of what is to be done with the fill from excavating underground areas used for parking and air conditioning. This is a problem city designers are working with.
Town planning in Shanghai, centred in the Centre of Creativity and Innovation, is outstanding. Among other activities, the team has listed and mapped community gardens in Shanghai and across China, as well as their progress and changes. The local gardens in Shanghai are a result of reclaiming part of a formerly wide street. Gardens along the road edges give pedestrians a sense of enclosure, while double planting of street trees provides protection through an overhead canopy. A public noise monitor records and displays street noise in decibels.