Carbon Emission Research Paper

TENTATIVE TITLE
“GREEN SPACE’S CARBON NEUTRAL DESIGN CHARACTERISTICS: MITIGATION STRATEGY IN REDUCING CO2 EMISSION”
ABSTRACT

Albeit Malaysia is one of the highest carbon emission countries in ASEAN, its initiative however in reducing carbon emission is seeing results with 33% reduction up to 2016. The government had pledged to implement the initiatives to reduce carbon emission up to 45% by 2030. In line with that vision, this research attempt to help mitigate carbon emission issues in landscape architecture field. Due to inevitable urbanization, green fads by using Green Space Projects had become the key selling point phenomenon to promote any development. Large scale carbon footprints were produced during the processes of green space generations.

Scenario example of landscape element that surprisingly contributes to carbon emission is “Turf”. This is because the increased emissions from lawn mowing in the park-like scenario would outweigh the emissions from the removal of dead and thinned trees in the green space project. The best landscape element suggested by Strohbach and Haase (2011) which reduces the carbon emission is “Groundcovers”. Instead of lawn, groundcovers require less maintenance such as mowing, trimming and driving by 87%. However, if lawn is the groundcover of choice, mowing intensity should be reduced to cut emissions around 60%. Lawn that is mowed at low frequency would generate 2.52 MgCO2 ha-1 emissions, lawn mowed at higher frequency would generate 6.54 MgCO2 ha-1 (Strohbach, Arnold, & Haase, 2012). Thus, carbon neutral green space characteristics that should include i) Groundcovers; and ii) Small Bushes as an alternative to grass. Evidently, carbon footprint of a green space is directly influenced by its design, management and maintenance program carried out (Strohbach et al.,

However, in the Landscape Architecture field (see table 1.1) it is reported that there are few literature assessing the carbon footprint of landscaped green spaces

1.4 RESEARCH AIM
The aim of this research is to identify the green space design characteristics that support carbon neutral objective. In other words, this research will identify the factors to offset the carbon emission during the green space conception, construction and maintenance and especially the renewal stage.
Many researches are focusing on the Energy Efficiency used by building (Nofri, Hishamudin, Nor Shahida, and et. al., 2016). Few and rare studies had been done to study how efficient a landscape produced to achieve landscape sustainability. This is to reduce the demolition and transition of a landscape and changed it to new landscape design just to suit the youth or new generations’ needs. Maybe we could allow the old green spaces to be changed over time after allowing it to offset their carbon emitted caused during the landscape processes start from the ideation and conception processes to the implementation and landscape maintenance