S3, E19: The Nature of Our Cities with Dr. Nadina Galle, Part 2

Digitally generated transcript (may include some errors)

Good afternoon or good morning to you. This is Jackie De Burca and I am with Nadina Galle. Again, this is the second episode for Constructive Voices that Nadina is taking part in. Nadina has been featured in the likes of BBC Earth, Nat Geo. She has quite recently launched her first book which is an amazing read, very accessible, packed full of her own story, interspersed with lots of fantastic tools and techniques to work with nature and to make our world much better for ourselves and fight against climate change. Nadina, just a quick introduction because of course episode one was an in depth dive into your work to date.

[00:00:57] Nadina Galle: Yeah. So thanks again Jackie, so much for having me. I’m Nadina Khala. I am a Dutch Canadian ecological engineer, National Geographic explorer, also a podcaster and most recently the author of the Nature of Our Cities.

[00:01:12] Jackie De Burca: Now we’re going to jump right in because we’ve a lot of ground to cover in this particular episode. As something I studied in the past myself, Traditional Chinese medicine dictates or states, if you like, that the five elements which are wood, air, metal, water and earth, if they’re in balance, that we should feel good. And I’m wondering when I, you know, digest your book and other things that I’ve been reading recently, I wonder, could this be applied to some extent to the world around us? What do you think yourself, Nadina?

[00:01:47] Nadina Galle: Yeah, I think it’s an interesting take. As I was saying before in our pre recording, no one’s ever quite made that connection, but I think it makes a lot of sense and I think the most beautiful thing of it is of course what I believe, you know, traditional Chinese medicine was trying to do with these five elements, this idea that we should be striving towards some kind of balance. And I think that’s exactly what’s been lost, the balance in our cities. We have gone too far towards the asphalt, the concrete, the built environment and we’ve strayed too far away from the natural environment. And I think I can relate a lot to this idea of the five elements and this bringing of new balance to exactly that challenge that now faces us. How do we bring a balance to how we conserve and preserve our nature, but also deal with the rising housing crisis and the need for human development? How can we have harmony between those two?

[00:02:50] Jackie De Burca: Yes, it’s challenging but exciting time now in the Nature of Our Cities you do tell your own story. As I mentioned, whilst interspersing lots of great techniques and tools. If we start with the element of wood medina, which corresponds to trees and plant life. I’d like to say to you, you know, as a novice in the area that you write about, I was amazed just by the tree inventories at the beginning that they even existed, and then even more so by the tree sensors. Can you describe these and their relevant case studies?

[00:03:22] Nadina Galle: Yeah, tree inventories specifically are an interesting one because I think it’s something, as we see even in departments of parks and recreation, departments of forestry, quite often a misunderstood thing. A tree inventory is exactly what it sounds like. It is an inventory, a census of all of the trees, or at least those on public land in a city. So of your, of your entire urban forest that includes trees in parks, on our streets, on woodlands. And ideally, for a holistic tree inventory, you would also include the trees on private land. So those in backyards or 4 yards, or on those on corporate campuses, college campuses, any land that might not belong to the city. Only then do you have a full idea of what’s going on within the urban forest. And that database, that inventory includes information about each individual tree, like their location, their condition, their species, their size, their canopy volume, their crown, their diameter at breast height, all of these different metrics about each individual tree. And of course, most importantly, how they’re doing, their condition, their health, are they showing any signs of stress or disease or pests?

And when I explain this, you would think, well, that seems like a pretty good idea to have. And as I describe in the book, it’s actually quite shocking to read just how many cities actually do not have a tree inventory or they don’t have a functioning tree inventory, meaning that they might have one that they, you know, they did 10 or 15 years ago. But that data of course is now long out of date, making it pretty much unusable.

There’s different ways to kind of go about getting a tree inventory because as I describe in the book, these are really critical for a number of reasons. One, they offer a sound basis to any urban forestry management plan. I mean, it’s like the age old saying, you cannot manage what you don’t measure if you don’t know what it is you’re managing. How could you possibly know what to do on a day to day basis? And I describe the challenge with that through an anecdote of me visiting the head tree warden of the city of Boston, going into his office, seeing piles of paper, post it notes everywhere, scribbles all over his hands, trying to keep track of all these tre trees because he doesn’t have an operational tree inventory and talking a little bit about why that is. And of course, a tree inventory. The way that we used to go about getting a tree inventory have become incredibly old fashioned. You know, the way that we do it in many cities still in this day and age is sending someone out to each individual tree with a measuring tape and a clipboard and a pen and paper, and recording all of this information that is simply not possible at the scale that we need this information at. So I talk about many of the new technologies that we have in our arsenal now in this day and age to use. And that’s not only fantastic tree inventory software that is making the work of the person that might be sent around each individual tree easier. You know, filling in this information on a tablet with software that’s going to give you a really good idea of, you know, which trees have you been to, which trees have you not, which information you need to be collecting. That in itself has already, you know, taken huge steps. But what if there was a way to actually replace that person with something called lidar technology? And lidar is essentially this 3D scanner that you put on top of a backpack or on a car and you walk or drive around an area. And it takes, in essence, a digital twin, a 3D model of everything that it sees, a digital twin of your surroundings and what a couple of different companies have done. Now, I talk about Tree Tracker, a company in the book. They have developed algorithms where they basically masked out everything in that digital twin except for the trees. So you’re left with this digital twin of all of the trees in your city. This way you’re able to get up to date information in a process that takes days rather than years to map. And immediately, I know, you know, alarm bells are going off, but you’ve just, you know, you’ve replaced a person. Well, you haven’t completely, because you still need, you know, unless you’re using an autonomous vehicle, you still need someone to drive the car or to walk around with the backpack. But most importantly, what you’ve done is you’ve freed up capacity for that individual or individuals that previously spent literally months and years going around to each individual tree and recording this information. You’ve now freed up that individual’s time to be able to analyze the information collected and most importantly, visit the trees that need help in a way, hopefully preventatively, that we can save more trees before they’re forced to be felled because of improper care. Because these departments are so strapped for resources, any way that we can make their Job more efficient and more optimized is really exciting. And one of the things I’ve heard time and time again by arboriculturalists, urban foresters, is that they’re so in love with the fact that they have more time. Because actually their favorite part of their job is educating the public about the importance of trees and doing in getting their tree inventory in this way frees up a lot more time to be able to do the work that they love. The reason why they got into this field environment first place. So that’s a treat inventory.

[00:08:57] Jackie De Burca: I know, and it’s absolutely amazing because of course people are worried with AI and all, you know, everything technological taking away from, you know, human, human need for having a job. But you know what it’s doing, it’s doing this amazing admin job that as you say, it enables those experts to do more important work.

[00:09:15] Nadina Galle: Exactly. And if, if we want more trees in our cities, if we’re going to recognize how important that is and if we’re going to invest resources into making that happen, you can’t just go and plant as we see in cities all around the world. Million tree trillion tree planting campaigns. You can’t do that without a proper management and aftercare program in operation.

It’s dangerous. As we’ve seen in the city of Singapore, that has dealt with a lot of people, tree incidents as they’re called. There’s, you know, huge liability to having more trees in our city. And that’s something that we need to be realistic about. And these tools offer us a way to green our cities in a way that feels safe, both for the municipality that often holds the liability and the responsibility for these trees, but also for all the citizens that, you know, live next to them next to their property, next to their cars, next to their families, feeling like, okay, you know, these trees are properly and well managed and taken care of. So I know I’m safe living amongst these gentle giants so that they can offer the benefits that we need.

[00:10:25] Jackie De Burca: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It does indeed. Now, one thing that, well, there was many things that impressed me throughout the book, but one thing that was, I was impressed about was Bette Midler’s collaboration in New York. But on the other hand, Nadina, like yourself, I found in this day and age that the lack of investment in heat fighting green infrastructure, it’s pretty hard to understand, isn’t it?

[00:10:49] Nadina Galle: I think we’re seeing this like time and time again. You know, I think we’re now in this, I would say like a five year six year period now, since 2018, that we’ve just seen every summer break record after record after record. And yes, part of that is driven by climate change, but it’s also just driven with how we build and develop our cities. Right. Like anyone who lives in the middle of the forest is not complaining of extreme heat in these areas because they have the infrastructure, these trees around them to keep them cool versus people, as many, many people do live in these, you know, gray deserts, these, you know, network, these city landscapes that have so much asphalt and concrete, which creates something called the heat island effect, where you have so much heat being captured in this area because it simply has nowhere to go. The asphalt, the dark black asphalt absorbs the heat, it radiates it back out. It simply has nowhere to go. And we see more and more people struggling with extreme heat every single summer. And of course trees grow slowly and it’s a slow solution and all the more reason why we should have started yesterday. And hopefully a lot of these tools and techniques are showing, as we have with new mapping technologies, that areas where we have more trees and more greenery are having less extreme heat related health challenges than those without it.

[00:12:21] Jackie De Burca: That really brings us nicely into the next question, Adina, because somebody that you’ve collaborated with, Dr. Vivek Chandas in Portland, had absolutely astounding found findings from different areas in Portland, some much better off areas and some obviously with, with poverty stricken areas, which led to the creation of heat Watch. Can, can you talk us through this please?

[00:12:49] Nadina Galle: Yeah, so, so Dr. Vivek Chandiz is a professor of climate adaptation at Portland State University and he has been studying the disproportionate impacts of extreme heat on different population dynamics for years. So essentially what he’s, what he’s been seeing is homes that are in areas with less greenery are dealing disproportionately with more impacts of extreme heat. And he’s become absolutely, you could say infatuated, obsessed with that research. And he wanted to do more than just research. So I actually went on sabbatical from his professorship at Portland State and he founded what is now a company called Capa Strategies. And essentially their main product, their main service offering is a campaign called heatwatch. So what they do is they outfit, it’s completely volunteer driven campaign. They outfit volunteers with sensors that they put on either their bikes or on their cars and they drive or ride a predetermined route through their city. And this mapping campaign has been done, I believe it’s now 600 cities around the world. And every year they add more. And these sensors, they measure the ambient temperature, the relative humidity. And what they do is they offer hyper local measurements. And the issue that Vivek was facing in his research, he was using, as many do, mainly satellite measurements. So basically what you’re doing is from a satellite kilometers up in orbit, you can also measure heat on the street. But of course it’s going to be a much more coarse measurement. And we are seeing that there’s huge, huge differences. You know, even as I explain in my interview with Vivek, as we’re walking around Portland, the difference even between one side of the street versus the other, simply because there is ivy on the wall or because there’s more trees on that side of the street, is a huge, huge. I mean we’re talking sometimes like double digit centigrade degree differences. This is, this is literally a matter of life and death. And if we do not have good data to back it up, it’s absolutely, you know, we’re, it’s so hard to make that case for why greenery, and not just trees, other kinds of greenery as well is so important. Like there was like the example of the city of Raleigh in Durham, in North Carolina, these twin cities, they had originally thought in their heat preparedness plans that they just had a couple of degree differences in between different city areas. What they found after doing the heat Watch campaign that this was nearly 10 degrees difference between certain areas. So again, this is a life, a matter of life and death in terms of where is the highest priority to be able to do these greening interventions. And this kind of hyper local measurements gives us that data that I feel both citizens desperately need to be able to have the right arguments, you could say, to bring to other stakeholders to make these investments.

[00:16:02] Jackie De Burca: It’s absolutely shocking to hear those differences in different places that obviously you do include in the book. And one of the other things that struck me, Nadina, that coming from the place of a novice reading this information was in the uk, the University of Reading had a study that showed that ivy and vertical wall plants can actually result in 30% less heat loss.

And as you just mentioned yourself a few minutes ago, you know, bushes and shrubbery, they’re also really important in all of this. But they, I suppose they seem to be less talked about really, aren’t they?

[00:16:36] Nadina Galle: Yeah, I think maybe people have less of a connection with bushes and shrubbery than they do have trees, which is understandable, I think when it comes to the challenge of greening or our cities and our urban areas is we need to be realistic about what’s possible. You know, I think the vast majority of us say, will say, if you have room for a tree, put a tree. But I think we also need to be, we need to be really realistic because any good arboriculturalist will say to you, I will only plant the right tree in the right place at the right time. And that kind of thinking, I believe, is absolutely critical. I would much rather see and invest the resources in one tree that can become 100 years old on one street than that. You know, I plant 10 trees that can only become 10 years old because they simply do not have the space underground and will not get the care and the resources they need to thrive. We are much better off having a handful of much larger trees on the street then we are having a whole bunch of them that have to be chopped down when they’re 10 or 12 or 15 years old. That is just so not worth our time and our resources. So I think we need to be really, really critical of that as well. And I definitely, in this book, do not plight for just wild urban greening everywhere that you can see. We need to be realistic about what’s possible. And in many places, for example, in this Extreme Heat chapter, I talk about the city of Paris, which came out with extremely ambit greening plants. But in those, they were also really realistic about the limitations of trees. And in many Parisian streets, you know, Paris might call them streets, we might call them, you know, small, dense alleyways, they are very, very, very realistic about the fact that trees are not going to work there. So instead of planting trees there, they talked about this concept of creating quote unquote oasis streets and using vertical greenery. So, you know, greenery that you might plant along the facade of a wall, rooftop greenery. And also what’s becoming more and more popular is something called mobile greenery, where you’re actually putting greenery. There could even be small, small trees, but often it’s shrubs and other bushes. You’re putting them in a raised bed, but you’re actually putting that, that raised bed on wheels so you can actually move it around the city where you need it most. Which sounds quite odd, but it can actually be really quite effective both at tempering extreme heat temperatures, but also adding a much needed dose of green to an area where you wouldn’t have that.

[00:19:14] Jackie De Burca: Fascinating, fascinating. Now, you mentioned Singapore, Nadine earlier and the use of LIDAR technology, which has had exciting results, but of course there were issues. Can you, can you tell us a little bit about that.

[00:19:28] Nadina Galle: Yeah. So Singapore, I would say, is definitely leading the charge when it comes to using LIDAR mapping technology to have a really robust tree inventory. And in Singapore that is definitely needed because the majority of the land is owned by the city state, that is Singapore. It is run by an organization called N Parks and they collectively, I believe, they manage 7 million trees. This is because they have so much land that is owned by the city state and because it’s incredibly green city, you know. And for decades now, at this point, Singapore has put forward the ambition to become a. First it was a garden, having lots of gardens in the city, and then they actually switched that to become a city in a garden. So they want to, you know, and they very much have this, this vision for the entire city that it definitely feels like you are walking around in a tropical rainforest when you’re, you know, going up on your urban errand. And having lived there for six months a number of years back, I can absolutely attest to this. And that is definitely what it feels like. But Singapore is also unlike, you know, the Amsterdams and London’s and Paris’s and New Yorks of the world. It is a subtropical climate, so greenery grows incredibly fast. They are also deeply susceptible to monsoons, tropical rainstorms, lots of wind, which can make for a pretty dangerous, dangerous conflict, if you will, between people and the trees that they rely on. So NParks in Singapore has invested heavily in creating that digital twin model, but in addition to that, also installing things like tilt sensors on certain trees which actually measure how much a tree is moving in extreme wind events to get an idea of the structural integrity of that tree. They also do things like SAP flow sensors to get an idea of how healthy that tree is and how well it’s growing. They have robots that climb trees and prune them if necessary in especially high dangerous situations. They have robotic lawnmowers for areas of parks that might need mowing. It’s pretty incredible, the technological advancements that they’ve done. Not all of it is directly copy paste available to, you know, many of the other big cities around the world, but I think it’s definitely something that we can look up to as a way to preserve the, I think trust is the right word, trust in the municipality that they are taking good care of our trees because there was a catastrophic incident that happened in a botanical garden in Singapore where a very old Tembuso tree actually fell down during a concert and it sadly injured family. It actually even killed the mother. Her one year old twin survived as did her husband. But that was huge news in Singapore, as you can imagine. And it immediately, you know, it immediately brings up these very real fears which I feel a lot of people in my discipline forget. You know, some people suffer from dendrophobia, a real fear of trees. And understandably so when situations like this happen and what Singapore has done, they’ve actually, you know, I think it was the year 2000, they reported something like 3100 tree people, tree incidents. So those are incidents of trees falling down, injuring people, branches falling down, you know, injuring, injuring, bringing damage to cars, you know, things like that.

They’ve actually been able to reduce that by 90% because of all of these technological investments that they’ve made. And I’m not saying it’s perfect, but I think it’s gone a long way to help restore the faith and the trust that trees and humans can live side by side even in the most densest rainforest, like cities that we have in the world.

[00:23:38] Jackie De Burca: Sure. And I think that the more educated people become around these topics, Nadina, you know, the more people will realize that without them, you know, deaths will be occurring far quicker for, for other reasons, don’t you think?

[00:23:52] Nadina Galle: Well, and that’s the thing. It’s like, yes, having a tree in a city can pose risks to people that travel or live underneath them. Absolutely. But the risks of not having that tree, the risks of what that can do to your health or in extreme flooding, which Singapore also struggles from, with extreme heat, with biodiversity loss, all these things that also have an impact on our health and our well being and our safety, those things are brought at an even greater risk if that tree were not there. And I think that’s where we have still a lot of work to do to together, you know, hand in hand with technology, offer an ecosystem of trust and of faith that these trees that are being put in an unnatural surrounding do, are getting the care and the resources they need to be able to thrive and be able to provide those benefits without it being not a danger to the citizens that live there too.

[00:24:52] Jackie De Burca: Yeah, that’s obviously highly important. And I guess that unfortunately there’s more and more tragedies happening because of climate change. And you know, people are, I suppose, more and more worried and suffering from anxiety depending on the age group and circumstances. You know, it’s a huge and complex subject.

Not really helped by the fact that moving on to the element of fire, there has been, as you mentioned, really since 2018, but really even before that, so many horrific tragedies around the world. Some of which you do include in the book regarding wildfires. Now, one of these led to the creation of burn bot. What is this? And how did that come about?

[00:25:39] Nadina Galle: Yeah, that is a.

The chapter on wildfires was one of the most difficult ones to write. It was also one of the ones I was most nervous to write because it was one of the issues that I had the least personal experience. Experience with and also the least academic research experience with. So I traveled to California and to Oregon and did many other interviews to help kind of get a grasp on this incredibly complex and multifaceted issue. And what I learned, speaking to people really at the front lines of this crisis, is understanding that, yes, climate change has played a role in making conditions drier and hotter, obviously creating the cond for fire to spread. But what I really learned when I was there is that this is very much a vegetation management problem. And that especially a state like California, which has suffered most heavily from, you know, wildfire crises in the last decade or so, is that this is an issue that is. That is deeply linked to how we’ve gone about managing the landscape. So in a very, very quick overview, when, you know, before the European settlers came, fire was very much part of the landscape. So fire was actually set by indigenous people, was set when they felt like a forest needed to clear, and it cleared the way for fertile ground species. Both the tree species and the fauna species were used to having fire in this landscape. It was very much part of the management, loosely said of this, of this, of this landscape.

Of course, when the European settlers came, fire was seen as something to be deeply afraid of, something you wanted to suppress, definitely not something you wanted to run rampant in your landscape. So there were years and years where it was suppressed. And that worked pretty well because at the same time, logging became huge, right? There was immense logging that was happening in the 1800s and the early 1900s until all of that was put to a stop almost overnight by a lot of environmental, ironically, environmental laws that came in to protect certain species, most notably the spotted owl, from the effects of the logging industry. So overnight, the logging industry was halted and it was moved elsewhere in the world, Amazon, of course, being one of them. And what this created was an ecosystem, a forest ecosystem that in a number of years became rapidly overgrown. Right. A lot of the understory, a lot of the brush was no longer removed and recreated. And I use the stat in the. In the book. I don’t have it off the top of my head, but the idea roughly is that we used to have something like you know, a dozen stems, as in trees per acre, in a time where logging was really prevalent and that we’ve now moved to a situation where we have 17, 18, 2000 stems per acre. So what we’ve created, ironically, again, to protect, you know, an environmental cause, you could say in the owl, we have now gotten to a situation where these forests have become tinder boxes of so much brush that is desperately needing a fire to clear it. But in this time, we’ve had massive immigration to these areas, right? People have moved and people have, you know, urban sprawl has seen people move into what was once known to be really wildfire prone counties and areas. So we’ve seen suburbs and towns and villages pop up in areas that were actually, you know, once seemed to be, you don’t really want to live here because this is an area that’s very prone to wildfire. We now have people living there in this area with dense brush, in this society that sees fire as something inherently very dangerous.

So all of these parties are, you know, whether that be Cal fire, whether that be the USDA Forest Service, whether that be local municipalities, are at a crossroads with this complex conjunction of a affordable housing crisis, people living in wildfire prone areas, a forest that is, you know, on the, you know, on the edge of its seat, about to erupt into flames, and the growing crisis of climate change and having its increasingly more frequent, drier summer periods.

How Burnbot comes into this story is that it’s been increasingly seen as really the only way out of this crisis is to do more controlled vegetation management. And one of the best ways to do this is to learn from the indigenous people and do something called a prescribed burn. The prescribed burn is kind of, not kind of. It is a controlled fire. And essentially what you’re doing is you are setting fire to a certain area. But in order to do that safely, you need to use these cutoff lines, these burn lines, if you will, so that the fire doesn’t escape. As we’ve seen in many areas, which actually some of the most dangerous wildfires have actually been escaped prescribed burns. So it is an incredibly dangerous activity. The problem with prescribed burns is that you can only do it at certain times a year. You don’t want to do this in the middle of summer because the risk of escape is too big. But if you do it too early or too late, the ground is too wet and it’s not going to burn properly. What the burn bot does is this technology from Silicon Valley, very much inspired by indigenous wisdom, but with this super Modern twist. It is essentially this artificial, artificial intelligence powered robot, this masticator which essentially eats vegetation and at the same time burns it, but in this highly controlled environment, so that it barely releases any, any smoke. And this has become really important because, because there have been so many different wildfires, even the smell of smoke can send people into a panic, and understandably so. And this burn bot has a way of doing these prescribed burns at multiple times in the year. So the season for doing prescribed burns is much bigger at scale because you’re not needing all of this prescribed burn. Burned crews is a very specialized skill set. There’s only so many of them, and of course you’re limited with how many resources and manpower you have per day. So it’s a way to do these prescribed burns safely at scale and in a way where you, where you come very, very close to people’s houses and neighborhoods. And that’s incredibly important because that’s where these burn lines need to be created so that not, not if, but when a wildfire comes through, those houses are going to be protected. And that the burn bot helps in still a small way and hopefully a much bigger role in the years to come, helps solve at least one part of the wildfire crisis that we’re seeing in California and surrounding states and elsewhere in the world as well, in Australia and parts of Europe as well.

[00:32:51] Jackie De Burca: It’s absolutely amazing to hear you describe it. Obviously I’ve read about it in the book, but to hear you describe it and to think about the fact that this is a wonderful example of how indigenous knowledge is being married with technology, isn’t it?

[00:33:09] Nadina Galle: It really is. And it’s. What I love most about it is that it’s a nod to the way that we used to manage landscapes, but offering a way to do that in 2024, and I think that’s something that landscape ecologists, urban ecologists, often get wrong, is that we can simply go back to the way that things used to be, that we can go back to the methods we used to, that we used to use, and that worked fantastic in that period. But the fact of the matter is things have changed. People are living in areas where they didn’t used to be. There’s, there’s. And it’s not just people, right? It’s, it’s property. It’s other kinds of investments that have been made. We need to figure out modern approaches and figuring this out in a modern way. And I believe, as you say, Jack Burnbot is the epitome of that kind of solution.

[00:34:02] Jackie De Burca: Absolutely, absolutely. Now, another tool that’s also important that you mention is Overstory. Can you tell us the story of overstory, Nadina?

[00:34:13] Nadina Galle: Definitely. Overstory helps to resolve yet another piece of this wildfire puzzle, and that is the fact that the majority of catastrophic wildfires were actually started by humans. And specifically conflicts between power lines and dry brush and dry trees. What utility companies are responsible for clearing what’s known as the right of way? So the area, I believe it’s like a 50 foot area around the power lines. And what they’ve done in the past is they’ll either send crews on foot or with helicopters to try and scope out areas that are most at risk. Well, if you’re a utility company like the PGNE Pacific Gas and Energy in California, or if you are the big utility company for the state of Hawaii or for Oregon, you have massive, like, we cannot even fathom how many kilometers, miles of right away these utility companies need to manage. It is an incredibly daunting job. I mean, estimates are, is that they only get to like 10% of what they need to be, what they need to be clearing every year to prevent the next destructive wildfire. These utility companies are constantly running behind the facts. They simply cannot catch up. What overstory has done is it’s taken the incredible opportunity that very high resolution satellite imagery offers and are using that to look at these areas of the right of way and not only identify areas that need to be cut right now, so knowing where to send crews, cutting crews right now, they also have developed models to actually project the growth of those specific species of trees that are growing around those areas and planned in advance when they will likely need to be cut. And more than that, they’ve actually done analysis that shows that not every kind of vegetation or tree or dry brush around a right of way needs to be cut. There are actually species of trees that are known to be quite fire resistant. These are actually trees that you want close to your right of way. So they’ve actually been able to identify, again using only very high resolution satellite imagery, where those species, species of trees are and knowing, okay, that is an area that we do not need to prioritize. And in this way, being able to efficiently and optimally use again, their limited resources to send their crews to the most high impact places. And I think that’s that idea is kind of a thoroughfare throughout all of these Internet of nature technologies you’re going to see in the book, especially when it comes from a management standpoint, is how can we use these technologies to our advantage? To ensure that the crews that we do have at our disposal are being sent to the areas where we absolutely need the most.

[00:37:16] Jackie De Burca: Absolutely. Now, last but certainly not least, Nadina, for the fire element is Watch Duty by John Mills. Can you also talk about this tool?

[00:37:25] Nadina Galle: Yeah. So Watch Duty has really, you know, we focused quite heavily on some of the management tools that can be used. Watch Duty is on the consumer end of things, the people side of things, the human beings that are really at the heart of this wildfire crisis, that most of them have not been able to sleep through the night soundly since a wildfire happened. You know, the littlest bit of smoke or the littlest, you know, even the sound of what they may be imagining of the thumping of a hui helicopter that’s coming with flame retardant, those kinds of things. I mean, we’re talking about post traumatic stress disorder survivors. I mean, these people have been through hell and back. If they haven’t had their property burned down, perhaps they’ve lost a loved one, perhaps they’ve considered moving away several times and rebuilding elsewhere. Some people have been victim to several wildfires in a row. Like it is, they’ve become homeless because of it. Like, this is, this is an issue that, you know, fire knows no bounds in the sense of if you’re rich or poor, your house is at threat of being burnt down. These people have really been through hell and back. What Watch Duty has done is it’s. It’s essentially an app. It’s free. Anyone can download it and it gives you real time, up to date information of both wildfires and most importantly, prescribed burns, controlled fires that are happening in your environment to educate the public so that they know what’s going on, so that they can make decisions and choices.

The government, of course, also offers updates on what’s going on. But these updates are, you could say in politically correct terms, filtered for what they deem the public should know. And of course, they do this under the credence of public safety. But John Mills, the founder of Watch Duty, sees it more as a way to control the population. And that is seen as, as one person that I talked to in the book describes it as it was, it was an older woman, a grandmother, who’d survived multiple different wildfires. And she says Watch Duty and having that information to her, she said, I would rather know a lot more than I would a lot less and be able, you know, I’d rather know a lot more by myself and make decisions based on that, then a lot less from the government and have to Wonder what is the information that they’re not telling me? And John Mills had experienced this firsthand when him and his house nearly survived two wildfires in a row, and not one of them did he get an official warning for. That’s really what instigated him to do this. I mean, he was a retired Silicon Valley entrepreneur. He was only 40. He could have just gone and enjoyed his retired life in Sonoma Valley, but instead, he’s been thrust back into the startup world, developing watch duty, because he believes that people should have the right and access to this information so that they can make their own decisions. And for people that have been at the cusp of not wanting to rebuild, it has given them hope to stay in California, and it’s quickly branching out to other states and the surrounding areas as well to offer a way to make decisions that they themselves have made. And, of course, as you can imagine, the state and Cal Fire have not been particularly impressed with John’s app. And he has tried to work with the government many, many times, and they have. Those requests have gone repeatedly denied, to the chagrin of John, of course. But he still stands by what he’s made because he’s seen also the damage that it’s been able to avert and the evacuations that it’s launched into action before the official warnings came. And that’s ultimately what he does it for.

[00:41:24] Jackie De Burca: Such amazing, amazing work. Nadina. Moving out of fire and coming into the water element, there’s a close link that I wasn’t aware of at all between heat domes, wildfires, and floods that has yet to be commonly known. And in your birth country, the Netherlands, there’s been a lot of work done in this area. Can you talk to us about that?

[00:41:47] Nadina Galle: Yeah.

It’s this crazy connection between what we were describing before. When you have very dry, hot conditions, of course, your soil dries out with that, and it’s easier inflamed. It’s easier to have wildfire. And when wildfire happens, the soil actually becomes so dry that it becomes hydrophobic, which means that water which falls on it, which normally would be penetrated deep into the soil, is actually the water just runs right off of these areas. So even if you have a lot of natural areas with a lot of open soil, those actually aren’t preventing you from a lot of flood damage that they would otherwise do.

The wildfire issue is less of an issue in the Netherlands, but this is definitely been an issue in other areas of the world. But what the Netherlands does know a lot about is the fact that Half of the country is under sea level and always has been. I mean, that that is the reason the Netherlands is called the Netherlands, because they’ve always been below sea level. And they have had to, from day one, really come to grips with how they deal with their water. And of course, a big, big catalyst for that history were the devastating floods in 1953, which took the lives of some 1800 people in the Netherlands. I think it is still the deadliest disaster both in UK and in Dutch history still to this day in our history. And that essentially was the catalyst to build what the American Civil Engineer Society has called one of the seven engineering wonders of the world, which is the Dutch water management system, which is a series of dikes and dams, all of them with a technological role to them, whether that be sensors that tell when there is breaks in the dams or whether there’s water overflowing in a certain area, or whether there is damage to any of the dikes that need to be fixed. You know, much of this is happening underwater, so they have become incredibly useful tools. But I think one of the most exciting parts about what the Dutch have done with their water management is the recognition that one of the best things you can do is to provide room. And one of their programs called Room for the river actually saved many, many lives in July of 2021, when Europe, mainly the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, saw tons, tons and tons of rainfall within a very, very short amount of time. And this program that the Netherlands had just winded down several years before that is this idea that many of the large rivers that the Netherlands houses, giving them room, giving them buffers, which provide these beautiful natural spaces for people to enjoy on the sunny days and provide room for them to be a reservoir in times of extreme, extreme water. And that’s kind of one of the many kind of lessons throughout this flooding chapter is that one of the best things that we can do when it comes to attacking flooding in our cities is creating these natural reservoirs where water has a home in times when it needs it and when it doesn’t, we have this beautiful extra public space that we can use for our enjoyment.

[00:45:11] Jackie De Burca: How wonderful, how wonderful and how clever. Isn’t it? In the eu there’s also the digital water city. Nadina, what is this?

[00:45:20] Nadina Galle: Yeah, so this is a European sponsored, European Commission sponsored project that has really trying to take a lot of the lessons, many of them from the Netherlands, but from other areas of Europe as well, where they’re trying to establish what technologies specifically work best at understanding where water is flowing and at what time. So these things could be like flow sensors, water quality, basically giving much like how lidar does that for your tree inventory, basically having a network of sensors which offer the same kind of information about how water is flowing through a city and when. And this is really critical because we, again, so many times when I feel like, whether that be trees or extreme heat or water or our biodiversity, so many of these issues that we’re dealing with in cities is I often feel like we’re operating in the dark, right. People are making these, you know, doing these interventions. Okay, we’re planting trees, we’re going to create a water reservoir, we’re going to do this. But it’s like, how do we know that those resources are best spent in that particular area? Because we need to be really, really careful and considerate about where we’re doing these interventions. Right. Because we need money for them and we need to make sure that we can prove that they work both to the stakeholders and to the investors, but also for the citizens that live around them. And Digital Water City is a research project that is trying to decide, or trying to show really which technologies and which sensors in which locations work best to try and have a real time vision, if you will, a real time dashboard of how water is flowing the city and the best ways we can manage it.

[00:47:04] Jackie De Burca: Fantastic. So I hate to use this pun, but go on heading back over the pond, there’s been really important work that’s led by a Chicago urban planner guy called David Leopold. Can you share this with to the audience?

[00:47:21] Nadina Galle: Yeah, I was kind of alluding to that just previously. This idea that investments that we made, that we make, we need to be sure that they’re working. And David Leopold got US$50 million to make Chicago more of a sponge city, more resilient to the effects of extreme water and extreme precipitation. And instead of spending all of this money in wastewater treatment plants, where this money is traditionally going, David decided to spend this money in a series of different green infrastructure projects. So these could be things like drainage ponds, these could be things like water reservoirs, these could be things like bioswales and little rain gardens alongside streets, basically creating more of a natural buffer, basically creating space and places for water to go in times of extreme water, but doing this all with a little bit of a technological twist. So adding sensors to show how well these spaces are being used so that he could prove that the money that was being invested was actually having impacts in terms of how much water it was able to divert away from the sewer system for Example, because one thing that cities are dealing with all around the world when cities have a combined sewer system, is something called a combined sewer overflow. So essentially, when there’s too much rainwater all at once, all of that extra stormwater goes into the sewer system, causing combined sewer overflow, which is exactly the kind of natural, nasty thing that it sounds like, which is a deep threat to our water quality, because essentially you’re having raw sewage then be mixed in with water that otherwise is being dispersed back to the natural environment. So, you know, we see this in water bodies around cities like Chicago, which is on a lake around New York, which is, obviously has its rivers and the ocean right there. You know, we’re seeing really, really bad water quality issues because the rainwater, the stormwater has nowhere to go. And in a world where we’re seeing more frequent and more ferocious storms, we need to really get a handle on this. And David Leopold has not only used green infrastructure, but using this sensor network to really show which green infrastructure is most effective, so that he can not only prove that the 50 million went to a really good cause, but hopefully he can open up pathways for another 50 million.

[00:49:48] Jackie De Burca: Excellent. Now moving, we’re still in the States, we’re still across the pond in Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. Adrian Benepe, I’m not so sure if that’s the correct way to pronounce it, but he was the champion of the 10 minute walk movement. He’s developed something pretty awesome as well, Nadine, hasn’t he?

[00:50:08] Nadina Galle: Yes. So Adrian Benepe, as he, as he says, is now the President and CEO of the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. And he’s been at the forefront of creating something called the Smart Water Garden, which is a beautiful addition to the, to the Botanic Gardens. It’s Japanese influence. It’s got these beautiful, beautiful species all along this water body.

But what people don’t know as they’re walking around and enjoying the sights of the sounds of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, is that that area is actually absolutely crucial to the health and safety of the gardens, but also to the people enjoying it and the surrounding residents as well. Essentially how it works is it analyzes continuously online weather data and it also has sensors in the pond itself. And when it sees in the forecast that rain is coming, it will actually preventatively release water from the pond into the, into the gardens to be used for watering the gardens. Or if that tank is already full, it will release it preventatively into the sewer system. So it will release of that water so that there is plenty more space in that reservoir for the additional extra precipitation that is expected in the forecast. So this is pretty insane because you are of course there are, you know, manual overrides that can do, but you are essentially the fate of the gardens and the fact that if, if you know, it will or not flood is essentially in the hands of this algorithm. And let’s just say Adrian, as you’ll read in the book, has been on the edge of his seat multiple times clenching his teeth, will it or will it not release water. And every time he’s been absolutely, you know, stupefied to see that the algorithm has made the right decision, even when he almost wanted to do the manual override and release water.

It’s pretty incredible. And what I love so much about this solution is that it is so replicable is, you know, imagine if we were to have something, a smaller version of this at the end of every street, right at the, at the lowest area of that street. What if we were able to create something like this, Something that yeah, is, is a reservoir, is this massive pond when we need it, but it’s also it, it’s creating this beautiful natural space that we can, that we can use on all of the non rainy days.

[00:52:33] Jackie De Burca: Yeah, that would be absolutely fantastic. Now just finishing up for this particular episode. There’s a network of nature based drains back over in Singapore. The Shanghai Airport. Shanghai Airport, excuse me. Which initially didn’t do what we had hoped, but then because of something, a tweak if you like, that was done later. It’s now fondly named Google Drains. And what exactly is this and how does this work?

[00:53:03] Nadina Galle: Yeah, so as we were saying before, Singapore is prone to monsoons and tropical rainstorms that typically lead to a lot of flooding. It’s a big issue in the city. One of the most well read articles is, I talk about this in the book as well. Is this article like the hundred places is to keep your feet dry in times of Singapore rain. You know, so it’s, it’s an issue that is, you know, when rain is in the forecast, people already, you know, grab their most valuable stuff and put it on top of cupboards because they’re so used to floods there.

I heard about a professor that was not from Singapore, he was an expat there, but that he actually slept with a kayak in his bedroom because he was so afraid of flooding. So this is just to sketch the idea that flooding is so inherent to Singaporean culture. But of course it’s not something that they want, they don’t want to have to take these actions. But the airport is also in one of the most low lying areas of Singapore and it’s also incredibly prone to flooding. So they have this whole system of drains and reservoirs set up so the water has places to go. But that was typically all done manually. And essentially, as you were alluding to before, Jackie, it has gone wrong several times because. Because people don’t get the right amount of notice that something is going, that rain is coming or in which you know, in how much. And they don’t have the right amount of time to be able to manually open all of these drains systems. So a number of years back, they digitized this entire ecosystem and now, as you say, dub it Google Drains, because they now, you know, have this room and they have this whole dashboard set up with all the different sensors and all the different ways that water flows. They’ve modeled it out, they’ve simulated everything.

And since then, Changi Airport in Singapore has not had to deal with another flood.

So it’s been an incredibly useful system. And I think what I love so much about the flooding chapter is that it just shows really well how this marriage of green infrastructure and technology can prove to be a really beneficial winning combination when it comes to attacking the flooding crisis in cities all around the world.

[00:55:09] Jackie De Burca: Yes, that’s a wonderful positive note to end this particular episode on Nadine. It’s been amazing.

Obviously we’re going to be chatting again very, very soon for the third episode in this series which will be all about the tools and techniques for better urban nature management and monitoring. Thank you so much, Nadina.

[00:55:30] Nadina Galle: Thanks, Jackie.

[00:55:32] Jackie De Burca: This is constructive voices.