Global Warming
Georgia Tech researcher and Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning, Brian Stone, has recently suggested that poor land use law can help explain the global warming effect. He cites information such as the fact that developed land often is created from cleared forest land, thus reducing the amount of absorbed carbon dioxide and replacing it with concrete that not only does not absorb carbon dioxide, but encourages greenhouse gas emissions (such as in the placement of parking lots, encouraging more cars in an area). Furthermore, tree canopies work to decrease the surface temperature of the planet, while the concrete used in many highways and buildings actually works to reflect heat back into the atmosphere, further raising temperatures.
Moreover, covering the land in concrete and asphalt significantly reduces the amount of open soil to absorb rainwater, leading to high amounts of runoff that both take water away from urban areas, but cause high amounts of runoff and, thus, soil erosion when the rainwater finally encounters soil again. All of these factors contribute to changing the land and in some ways encourage climate change, due to a reduction in natural processes of the earth. Though it’s unlikely that all of these problems can be fixed, Stone suggests in his report that better city planning and land use law can certainly reduce the impact of replacing the natural world with our human-made one.
