Pamela Conrad on carbon sequestration and why neutral is not enough

Design the Future

Landscape architect Pamela Conrad is a principal at CMG Landscape Architecture and founder of Climate Positive Design. She grew up in rural Missouri, has a background in plant science and regenerative design, and today is focused on climate mitigation and resilient design in the public realm.

The role of landscape architects in carbon sequestration is something she explored as a Landscape Architecture Foundation Fellow, which led to Climate Positive Design’s challenge and Pathfinder tool. “I wanted to understand the impacts of my projects, so I built a landscape carbon calculator. But the the real challenge is to reach positive,” she says, “to offset footprint as soon as possible and then shift to taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.” The way she sees it, if landscape architects worldwide shifted to using the targets that the Climate Positive Design defines, “we could sequester more than we emit by 2030 and remove even more by 2050. We can begin to reverse global warming.”