The cumulative effects of agriculture, industrialization, and urbanization are unequivocally changing our climate and producing globally unprecedented challenges related to food production, building materials, and human and ecosystem health, and exacerbating conditions that promote the spread of pandemic diseases, and these challenges are disproportionately affecting low-income communities and communities of color. This is not new. Our built environments create impacts on all of the above forces, and play a critical role in the creation of, and potential dismantling of, inequitable conditions of living and human and ecosystem health. How do we as designers of buildings and cities contribute to climate change and its deeply-rooted, systemic impacts, and what can we do now to turn our impact positive? How do we recognize, through our planning and building processes, the links between human health in our communities, particularly in communities of color, and the health of the planet and its ecosystems? How do we designing for climate justice, carbon neutrality, and equitable impact of positive change? And how do we reform our pedagogical approaches in our academies to ensure equitable climate considerations “go without saying”?
