Within the environment of the Climate Design Project, we delve into an array of topics that are interconnected and crucial for achieving our shared vision. These topics span a wide range of disciplines and offer unique perspectives on building a sustainable and regenerative world. Each of these topics contributes to our holistic approach, and together they form a powerful framework for transformative change. The Institute, School, and Funding areas work in synergy, providing mutual support and ensuring that our efforts remain aligned with our overarching mission. These publications intend to generate seismic systemic outliers by organizing experiential events, and engaging with key stakeholders to drive positive impact and create a sustainable future.
Water treatment
An indispensable part of the entire ecological restoration and regeneration possibility in the Mediterranean Climate is the amount of water offered during the dry season, the summer, which is also the hottest. Reports says that a variable but important amount of the used water is wasted in scarcely efficient sewage systems, that specially in small towns and villages, rarely have secondary stage and almost never tertiary or quaternary stages, which means the quality of the offspring water is biologically bad and chemically questionable. In the other hand, low cost and high efficiency systems can be used in small scale, systems that include tertiary and quaternary stages and are fit to populations from 50 to 5000 people without the need for long and extensive pumped sewerage. The organic matter and the water resultant from these systems are reusable and, due to the proximity from the source, investments in distributed irrigation are much more economic, with the benefit of the reuse of the water, the most important natural resource in dry lands.
Soil building
Following the previous topic, soil and water together creates the basic physical conditions for restoration and regeneration of forests and climate. But without soil, without organic matter, shade, evapotranspiration, roots systems, trophic networks, without functional ecosystems and healthy populations, the bond between forests and climate cannot thrive, and for this, soil building is the second step. To build soils we need summers with shaded zones to prevent evaporation and droughts on rivers and creeks; we need to keep the capacity of store water in the soil to provide life to trees, bushes and all the combined strata.
Forests and Climate
The entire Climate Design Project is based on this simple scientific principle: differences of temperature engender differences of pressure, that are required to turn still air into winds. The winds carries humidity, either in a form of water vapor or condensed, i.e. clouds. Clouds are necessary to produce rain, and moist and cool nights are necessary to produce dew. Forests are a source of particles for turning water vapor into clouds, as well as turning the moist wind into dew. Biodiverse forests are also known for multiple other ecological services and products. Since 2015 the COPs are increasingly more interested in biodiverse forests as key to deal with climate changes in a beneficial way, and there lies the peoples, the caregivers who lives in the forests and territories.
Territorial clustering
Territorial clustering is a composite strategy to enhance potential from services, commerce, small and medium scale industrial production, consumption, and all other urban, rural and protected areas needs. It is based on networking existing initiatives, finding gaps and fissures that blocks empowerment and sustainability in local and territorial level, and by the usage of participatory tools for diagnostic and sociocultural engagement, repair those gaps and bond the fissures by meshing the initiatives together through an accorded platform, by business, sharing, planning, living and co-creating territorial prospectives. Territorial Clustering is here defined as the act of mesh needs, weaknesses, potentials and wills by the peoples who live in a territory.
Housing and Construction
In Europe, Middle East and Northern Africa, zones of affectation of the Climate Design Project, the countryside has hundreds of thousands of villages, most of them with centuries of existence, creating livelihoods, learning to adapt in permanent changing landscapes. But in the past two hundred years, and specially in the past seventy years, those villages are being abandoned by the dwellers, seeking for other ways to live, fleeing from unemployment, laws changing, wars, depletion of basic conditions for life. Today it is known that tens of thousands of these villages are abandoned, creating situations where the houses are there, mostly in ruins, the lands are uncultivated, disperse and careless forests are growing and exposed to fire hazard. Convert this situation in sustainable restorative livelihoods is one of the aims of Climate Design Project: to rebuild and restore houses and facilites in the tens of thousands abandoned villages in mediterranean basin, incorporating attractiveness and vibrancy for young families and fair choice for migrants, deploying strong economical and sociocultural ecosystems for diversity in basics and specialties.
Public policies on ecological based technologies
Ecological based technologies have good acceptance and good publicity both by private sectors and institutional actors. There is, yet, a lapse between the availability of ecological based technologies and the construction of public policies to use, massify, improve and diminish costs for them.
Evolution of International Environmental Protocols
As mentioned before, research is one of the bases for the advocacy part of Ecotopias. Together with the other six topics mentioned above, the international environmental protocols are a firm and clear path to bring awareness and partnering to consolidate the project, and by undertaking continuous research on the narratives about the history and evolution of the international environmental protocols, we engage the framing of a positive narrative about are we missing and whare we are doing well and should continue.
Reviews on climate applied AI
This research program is directed to keep updated a state of the art about Artificial Intelligence applied to climate studies, climate developments and climate actions, including reviews of smart generative tools for report criticising and crossing reports assessment.
Reviews on cross-territorial and continental networking
This research program is directed to keep an awareness and engagement with other projects, efforts, networks and initiatives that are also doing cross-territorial and continental networking, not only about climate changes, climate actions or climate design, but in areas that are well connected with the main or satellite projects and that could provide knowledge and information.