Cabot Institute for the Environment blog

History offers up many grand ideas for how urban planning and design can be used to improve cities and society to be more sustainable and liveable. These ideas include early urban reforms by David Dale, Robert Owen, and Titus Salt, Benjamin Ward Richardson’s City of Health, Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City and Le Corbusier’s Contemporary City, amongst others. The eco-city, as an idea that initially developed out of the 1960s grassroots environmental movement, should be considered within this long tradition of ideas for the betterment of cities. The construction of ‘eco-cities’ in the recent decade has also been controversial. The aim of this article is to introduce the ideas and practices of contemporary eco-cities and to discuss the extent to which they can be regarded as an improvement on the work of previous urban reformers. Eco-city concept and development stages of eco-cities The term ‘eco-city’ was first coined in 1987 by US-based eco-city pioneer Richard Register as ‘an urban e...

We live in an increasingly uncertain world.  Therefore, when we model environmental processes of interest, it is vital to account for the inherent uncertainties in our analyses and ensure that this information is communicated to relevant parties.  Whilst the use of complex statistical models to estimate quantities of interest is becoming increasingly common in environmental sciences, one aspect of uncertainty that is frequently overlooked is that of model uncertainty.  Much of the research I conduct considers this additional aspect of uncertainty quantification; that is not just uncertainty in the quantities of interest, but also in the models that we use to estimate them. An example of this is in a paper recently published in Ecology and Evolution (Swallow et al., 2016), which looks at how different species of birds that we commonly see in our gardens respond to the same environmental factors (or covariates).  Some of the species have declined rapidly over the pas...

My name is Jack Atkinson-Willes and I am a recent graduate from the University of Bristol’s Engineering Design course. In 2016 I was given the unique opportunity to work in Chile with the renewable energy consultancy 350renewables on a Solar PV research project. In this blog I am going to discuss how this came about and share some of the experiences I have had since arriving! First of all, how did this come about? Due to the uniquely flexible nature of the Engineering Design course I was able to develop my understanding of the renewable energy industry, a sector I had always had a keen interest in, by selecting modules that related to this topic and furthering this through industry work experience. In 2013, the university helped me secure a 12 month placement with Atkins Energy based near Filton, and while this largely centred around the nuclear industry it was an excellent introduction into how an engineering consultancy works and what goes into development of a utility-scale energy...

The 95th percentile is a way of describing, in a single value, a surprisingly large outcome for any quantity which can vary.  As in ‘surprisingly large, but not astonishingly large’. For example, heights vary across people.  Consider adult UK women, who have a mean height of about 5’4’’ with a standard deviation of about 3’’. A woman who is 5’7’’ inches would be tall, and one who is 5’9’’ would be surprisingly tall.  5’9’’ is the 95th percentile for adult UK women.  The thought experiment involves lining every adult UK woman up by height, from shortest to tallest, and walking along the line until you have passed 95% of all women, and then stopping.  The height of the woman you are standing in front of is the 95th percentile of heights for adult UK women. The formal definition of the 95th percentile is in terms of a probability distribution.  Probabilities describe beliefs about uncertain quantities.  It is a very deep question about what they rep...