In an era when cities are ravaged by drought, flooding, wildfires, and more, infrastructure projects tend to get most of the attention when it comes to resiliency. But good landscape design can be powerful, too. This week, the American Society of Landscape Architects, or ASLA, published an an online guide designed to help its members plan for, and even prevent, the worst.

“We actually tried to do this a couple years ago, but found there wasn’t a wealth of cases to point to,” says Jared Green, ASLA’s senior communications manager who produced the guide. “Sadly with so many disasters recently–seeing [Hurricane] Sandy and all the money put into rebuilding parts of New York–we went back to look at it again.”

ASLA 2016 Honor Award, General Design Category. Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park by Ramoll Studio Dreiseitl. [Photo: Lim Shiang Han]

This time around, they found plenty of material to work with–in the form of landscape projects that successfully mitigated extreme weather purely by necessity. The projects worked in tandem with nature rather than against it. In Medellin, Colombia, for example, planners turned the areas around the outskirts of town, which are most susceptible to landslides, into a 46-mile park that circumvents the city and ensures that no one builds on unsafe land. Meanwhile, in a park in Bishan, Singapore, located in a floodplain, designers managed flooding by letting the park’s river run free of the concrete canal put in decades earlier. When the city floods, the park acts as a conveyance system carrying the water downstream.

ASLA 2016 Honor Award, General Design Category. Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park by Ramoll Studio Dreiseitl. [Photo: Ramboll Studio Dreiseitl]

Green points out that the idea of working with nature to design resilient public spaces is not a new idea. In fact, the famed 19th century architect Frederick Law Olmsted pioneered the concept of using urban vegetation for heat and storm water management, even if he wasn’t talking about it in those terms. But in the face of climate change, these are things all landscape architects should be thinking about with every project they take on. “Any good designer designs for many things at once,” says Green. “Designing for resilience is now something they need to factor in.”

If mitigating natural disasters is to become an inextricable part of a landscape designer’s job, the ASLA’s Resilient Design Guide is meant to be a guiding resource for those designers, as well as a tool for advocacy. Below, Green explains a few key ideas.

ASLA 2016 Honor Award, General Design Category. Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park by Ramoll Studio Dreiseitl. [Photo: Public Utilities Board]

According to NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2015 was the warmest year on record, continuing a long-term trend of global warming that has seen earth’s temperature rise 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit since the late 19th century. The effects of this temperature rise is exacerbated in cities, where pavement absorbs and traps heat.

“We can now use multilayered systems of protection, with diverse, scalable elements, any one of which can fail safely in the event of a catastrophe.”

Yet, as Green describes, “When you walk off the hot streets of New York in the summer and into Central Park, there’s a noticeable temperature difference.” It’s an example of one of the guide’s core tenets–that trees, parks, green roofs, and other green spaces create natural cooling by providing shade and releasing moisture. But these forms of vegetation don’t just provide their own cooled-down microclimates–they also have the potential to actually decrease a city’s temperatures if done in a comprehensive, systematic way.