Philip Stone and Robert Luchetti predicted in 1985 that Your office is where you are, anticipating that portable phones would disrupt office planning and design. Three years ago I worried about the future of companies like Herman Miller, who made “gorgeous and expensive stuff that people sit on and work at”.

Now, with the release of the Public Office Landscape by Fuseproject for Herman Miller, one can see where the office is going. It isn’t about standing or sitting, it’s about moving.

© Herman Miller/ Fuseproject

The more people connect, the better they work.

Yves Behar of Fuseproject describes the thinking behind the system:

…. as a workforce, we’re less anchored than ever, craving an unprecedented MOBILITY. COLLABORATION is the new normal, and TECHNOLOGY is pervasive and ever–changing. People today work in flexible and fluid ways that defy traditional cubicles and conference rooms. We wanted to design a system that catches our space up to how we really wanted to work.

© Herman Miller/ Fuseproject

Variety is not a luxury

We believe having a variety of workspaces is not a luxury—it’s essential to productivity and engagement. We know that collaborative moments are more productive when they’re complimented by spaces to focus, and most traditional spaces go unused because they’re inconvenient.

© Herman Miller/ Fuseproject

A few months back I asked Mark Schurman of Herman Miller about the future of office furniture in the framework of the standing desk craze. His response backs up Behar:

As a trend the sit/stand issue has obviously picked up momentum in recent years, but in some ways it’s ironic as the primary concern (sedentary work styles) has also been shifting, with the miniaturization and mobility of technology, coupled with flatter organizations and more emphasis on collaboration, increasingly leading knowledge workers to spend less time at a personal workstation….. This doesn’t mean standing work/desks are inappropriate, but it does suggest that at least for many it is perhaps less of an issue than it might have been 5+ years ago when most people were tethered to individual workstations by their technology needs.

© Herman Miller/ Fuseproject

As computers get lighter and smartphones smarter, we are getting a lot closer to a world where your office is where you are.

TreeHugger has been following the development of autonomous cars like the the Google Self-driving car, but what are the urban planning and design implications of it? At NRDC Switchboard, Kaid Benfield and Lee Epstein wonder if automating the car will make life (and the environment) better. They are not convinced.

Fully automating highways may make traffic move more quickly and safely (if everything works as planned, right?) for a while, but what will they mean over time for the human and natural environment? Won’t the new types of roads eventually fill up just as the old ones have? Would such beautifully flowing, electronically choreographed, completely automated cars and intersections be compatible with fully and adequately accommodating pedestrians and bicyclists in a well designed, walkable urban environment? If so, how, exactly?

Could this be a step not forward but back, to an era when the emphasis was all about moving as many cars as possible as quickly as possible, rather than on creating better environments for humans that don’t rely so much on cars? What set of ethics should accompany this bold new technology?

So many questions! And not many answers. In the end, Kaid and Lee wish all the geniuses would concentrate on making our cities better.

Just because it’s high tech doesn’t make it better. Indeed, there are lots of “old fashioned” things we need to get right about our cities, urban regions, and transportation systems before we play with expensive new technology that still doesn’t solve those basic problems: we would place a higher priority on ensuring that cities are safe, hospitable to all, walkable, a pleasure to be in, and green.

I rarely disagree with Kaid Benfield, but I wish he and Lee had looked at some of the larger, longer term implications. Last year the Institute Without Boundaries put a lot of smart people in a room to think about the issue. They concluded that the autonomous car is going to evolve into a very different vehicle .

Institute Without Boundaries/via

• Imagine a city without parked cars or garages. Since the car doesn’t need a driver, it can go and move somebody or someone else. That’s why they will mostly be shared.
• Imagine a city with perhaps 90% fewer cars; that’s the percentage of time most of us park our cars, but the autonomous ones are always on the move so we don’t need as many.
• Imagine a city without traffic lights or stop signs. They are not needed anymore since cars just flow through each other’s streams of traffic at intersections.
• Imagine a re-greened city with boulevards and trees where there used to be multilane roads, parks instead of parking lots.

Institute without Boundaries/Screen capture

Henry Ford is purported to have said “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” The autonomous car is at that “faster horse” stage, where we think of it as being pretty much what we have now, driven by robots. I suspect it is going to be as different a mode of transportation from what we are driving now as the car is from the horse.

The autonomous car will likely be shared, smaller, lighter, slower, and there will likely be about a tenth as many of them. Urban planners and theorists have to start thinking about this or we will screw it up again.

© A material sample is tested mechanically for strength and toughness. Image courtesy G. Bratzel (MIT).

By Margo Farnsworth

What happens when an innovative designer seeks to build an industrial park to reduce flooding by using the water onsite? Designer Richard MacCowan and Biomimicry 3.8 Fellow Margo Farnsworth explore this question at the upcoming 7th Annual Biomimicry Education Summit and first Global Conference, keynoted by scientist, author, and Institute co-founder Janine Benyus.

MacCowan, a PhD candidate at Leeds Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom, began applying biomimicry – looking to and emulating nature for solutions – to a flood-prone project near Leeds, England. By combining strategies of plants and animals from different parts of the globe as a system, this “eco-industrial park” will benefit from the genius of the Elephant Foot plant, European Water Vole and Giraffe to capture, store and distribute excess volumes of stormwater.

“Nature is always optimizing – whether food gathering, regulating temperature or managing water. None of this happens without systems and yet, companies many times look only at individual organisms as they solve problems,” says Farnsworth, who also serves as advisor to MacCowan. “When using systems, one can look at a single organism, organisms in close proximity to each other or, as Richard has, unrelated systems with compatible functions.”

“Utilizing biomimicry at a systems-level can provide an interrelated series of solutions much like an ecosystem does with the potential for increased levels of resilience,” says MacCowan.

© Biomimicry 3.8
“Stormwater managers increasingly understand we can no longer treat stormwater as waste. With increasing water scarcity, millions of wasted gallons in unmanaged stormwater could be used to offset scarcity,” says Farnsworth.

The trans-Atlantic partnership formed to address shared challenges. The Construction Industry Research and Information Association notes 20 million UK customers experienced water bans and flooding costs of £3.2 trillion in the last decade.

In the US, new EPA figures estimate water storage costs between now and 2030 at over $35 billion with distribution costs surpassing $240 billion.

Fortunately, biomimicry is no longer an outlier as a solution. Biomimicry 3.8, the global leader in biomimicry innovation, has worked with Affiliate Universities such as Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee, where Farnsworth teaches as well as companies such as Interface and Nike. At the conference, HOK’s Design Principal Thomas Knittel will describe how they have used biomimicry locally and globally in India, China and post-quake Haiti.

The Summit will host an international cohort of scientists, educators, innovators, and architects June 21-23, 2013 at the University of Massachusetts Boston, Campus Center. For more information, visit their site.

About Margo Farnsworth
Margo Farnsworth is a Biomimicry 3.8 Fellow and teaches Applied Natural Resources and Biomimicry Lipscomb University’s Institute of Sustainable Practices in Nashville, Tennessee.

© Breuer and Swartz labs/Brown University

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/ Patrick Foto

A new report says that the world will need to more than double food production over the next 40 years to feed an expanding global population. But as the world’s food needs are rapidly increasing, the planet’s capacity to produce food confronts increasing constraints from overlapping crises that, if left unchecked, could lead to billions facing hunger.

The UN projects that global population will grow from today’s 7 billion to 9.3 billion by mid-century. According to the report released last week by the World Resources Institute (WRI), “available worldwide food calories will need to increase by about 60 percent from 2006 levels” to ensure an adequate diet for this larger population. At current rates of food loss and waste, by 2050 the gap between average daily dietary requirements and available food would approximate “more than 900 calories (kcal) per person per day.”

The report identifies a complex, interconnected web of environmental factors at the root of this challenge – many of them generated by industrial agriculture itself. About 24% of greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture, encompassing methane from livestock, nitrous oxide from fertilisers, carbon dioxide from onsite machinery and fertiliser production, and land use change.

Industrial agriculture, the report finds, is a major contributor to climate change which, in turn is triggering more intense “heat waves, flooding and shifting precipitation patterns”, with “adverse consequences for global crop yields.”

Indeed, global agriculture is heavily water intensive, accounting for 70 per cent of all freshwater use. The nutrient run off from farm fields can create “dead zones” and “degrade coastal waters around the world”, and as climate change contributes to increased water stress in crop-growing regions, food production will suffer further.

Other related factors will also kick in, warns the report: deforestation from regional drying and warming, the effect of rising sea levels on cropland productivity in coastal regions, and growing water demand from larger populations.

Yet the report points out that a fundamental problem is the impact of human activities on the land itself, estimating that:

“… land degradation affects approximately 20% of the world’s cultivated areas”.

Over the past 40 years, about 2 billion hectares of soil - equivalent to 15% of the Earth’s land area (an area larger than the United States and Mexico combined) – have been degraded through human activities, and about 30% of the world’s cropland have become unproductive. But it takes on average a whole century just to generate a single millimetre of topsoil lost to erosion.

Soil is therefore, effectively, a non-renewable but rapidly depleting resource.

We are running out of time. Within just 12 years, the report says, conservative estimates suggest that high water stress will afflict all the main food basket regions in North and South America, west and east Africa, central Europe and Russia, as well as the Middle East, south and south-east Asia.

Unfortunately, though, the report overlooks another critical factor – the inextricable link between oil and food. Over the last decade, food and fuel prices have been heavily correlated. This is no accident.

Last week, a new World Bank report examining five different food commodities – corn, wheat, rice, soybean, and palm oil – confirmed that oil prices are the biggest contributor to rising food prices. The report, based on a logarithm designed to determine the impact of any given factor through regression analysis, concluded that oil prices were even more significant than the ratio of available world food stocks relative to consumption levels, or commodity speculation. The Bank thus recommends controlling oil price movements as a key to tempering food price inflation.

The oil-food price link comes as no surprise. A University of Michigan study points out that every major point in the industrial food system – chemical fertilisers, pesticides, farm machinery, food processing, packaging and transportation – is dependent on high oil and gas inputs. Indeed, 19% of the fossil fuels that prop up the American economy go to the food system, second only to cars.

Back in 1940, for every calorie of fossil fuel energy used, 2.3 calories of food energy were produced. Now, the situation has reversed: it takes 10 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce just one calorie of food energy. As food writer and campaigner Michael Pollan remarked in the New York Times:

“Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases.”

But high oil prices are here to stay – and according to a UK Ministry of Defence assessment this year, could rise as high as $500 per barrelover the next 30 years.

All this points to a rapidly approaching convergence point between an increasingly self-defeating industrial food system, and an inexorably expanding global population.

But the point of convergence could come far sooner due to the wild card that is the catastrophic decline in honeybees.

Over the last 10 years, US and European beekeepers have reported annual hive losses of 30% or higher. Last winter, however, saw many US beekeepers experiencing losses of 40 to 50% more – with some reporting losses as high as 80 to 90%. Given that a third of food eaten worldwide depends on pollinators, particularly bees, the impact on global agriculture could be catastrophic. Studies have blamed factors integral to industrial methods – pesticides, parasitic mites, disease, nutrition, intensive farming, and urban development.

But the evidence specifically fingering widely used pesticides has long been overwhelming. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), for instance, has highlighted the role of neonicotinoids - much to the British government’s chagrin - justifying the EU’s partial ban of three common pesticides.

Now in its latest scientific warning put out last week, the EFSA highlights how another pesticide, fipronil, poses a “high acute risk” for honeybees. The study also noted large information gaps in scientific studies preventing a comprehensive assessment of risks to pollinators.

In short, the global food predicament faces a perfect storm of intimately related crises that are already hitting us now, and will worsen over coming years without urgent action.

It is not that we lack answers. Last year, the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change chaired by former chief government scientist Prof Sir John Beddington – who previously warned of a perfect storm of food, water and energy shortages within 17 years – set out seven concrete, evidence-based recommendations to generate a shift toward more sustainable agriculture.

So far, however, governments have largely ignored such warnings even as new evidence has emerged that Beddington’s timeline is too optimistic. A recent University of Leeds-led study found that severe climate-driven droughts in Asia – especially in China, India, Pakistan and Turkey - within the next 10 years would dramatically undermine maize and wheat production, triggering a global food crisis.

When we factor into this picture soil erosion, land degradation, oil prices, bee colony collapse, and population growth, the implications are stark: industrial civilisation is on the verge of eating itself – if we don’t change course, this decade will go down in history as the beginning of the global food apocalypse.

• Dr Nafeez Ahmed is executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development and author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilisation: And How to Save It among other books. Follow him on Twitter @nafeezahmed

Near-record temperatures in Pakistan have claimed hundreds of lives and devastated crops in the third major heatwave in four years. But as temperatures on Friday dipped to under 38C (100F), signalling the end of nearly four weeks of blistering heat, leading meteorologists warned that the country could expect longer, more intense and more frequent events in future.

Qamar-uz-Zaman Chaudhry, a vice-president of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and former director of Pakistan’s Met Office, said the recent extreme summer temperatures that are commonly followed by massive floods could largely be attributed to climatic warming. “If we look at the frequency and the trend of the extreme weather events impacting Pakistan then it is easy to find its link with climate change,” he said.

Chaudhry, who wrote Pakistan’s climate change policy, authored a report in 2013 that showed the number of heatwaves in Pakistan had increased from 1980 to 2009 and that average temperature in the Indus delta was steadily rising.

In 2010, the May temperature in Mohenjo-daro, a semi-ruined city in Sindh province, reached 53.5C (128F), the fourth highest temperature ever recorded in the world and the highest ever in Asia.

Babar Hussain, who runs the Pakistan Weather Portal, said: “In 2013 the maximum was 51C/52C. The heatwave started on 12 May in Sindh province and gripped the entire country by 15 May. It lasted, with only a minor break, until 10 June. In that time, it reached 51/52C in Larkana, [a city of 2 million people in southern Sindh province] while Lahore, Punjab province’s capital of about 15 million population, recorded 47C on 23 May, its hottest temperature since 1954.”

The effect of the heatwaves on human life has been devastating. Newspapers in Pakistan have reported hundreds of deaths because of the heat since early May, but no official numbers have been released.

“With the coming of the monsoon rains this year, we have already begun to see an increase in cases of diarrhoea. This is because of contaminated drinking water,” said Isaac Chikwanha, medical co-ordinator for Médecins Sans Frontières in Pakistan. “Heat strokes and dehydration are common among children and adults before the monsoon season when the temperature rises.”

“The rise in vector-borne diseases including diarrhoea, cholera, gastroenteritis, typhoid and hepatitis is due to environmental factors and the effects of climate change,” said Iqbal Memon, president of thePakistan Paediatric Association. “The Indus River used to flow at full strength prior to the monsoon season and freshwater was abundantly available. Now there is no water in the Indus River. Ponds and riverines in Sindh have become contaminated, but people have no other option but to use that water for drinking and cooking. This lack of freshwater is purely due to environmental reasons,” Memon told Dawn newspaper.

Farming has been badly affected, with cows giving less milk and not enough water for some crops. “The heat actually helped the cotton crop because it came when it was flowering and it quickly turned into fruit,” said Mustafa Talpur of Oxfam in Islamabad. “But it badly hit the sugarcane, rice and chilli crops. The lack of irrigation water has affected the yield, but the exact impact wont be known until the harvest is over.”

The heatwave may have affected people in cities more than in rural areas, partly because of the “heat island effect” which sees temperatures in urban areas 5-8C higher than in the countryside. Urban conditions were particularly bad because the heatwave led to power cuts which in turn led to violent protests. Many families were unable to pump water or run air conditioners. Officials at one point turned off the air conditioning in government offices.

Pakistan is, along with Bangladesh, highly vulnerable to natural disasters, and has experienced massive floods in the last three years, droughts and heatwaves.

When it comes to the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, the only way is Essex. Bradwell-on-Sea has been identified as a possible site to dump radioactive waste.

“Everybody was aghast when a local representative from the NDA stated that the possibility was being looked into,” Brian Beale, a district councillor for Maldon, told the Essex Chronicle. “To say this could happen when it had always been understood that Bradwell was not intended to be a site for waste, created uproar.”

Nuclear materials are already being stored at Bradwell, a former nuclear power station that closed in 2002 and is being decommissioned. The operating company, Magnox Electric, was fined £250,000 in 2009 for presiding over a radioactive leak that had gone undetected for 14 years.

An NDA report has proposed that around 280 yellow boxes of intermediate level waste could be brought from other sites to be stored there until 2040 when a permanent repository should be built. The report also mentions Berkeley, in Gloucestershire, Trawsfynydd, in Gwynedd, and Hinkley Point, in Somerset, for possible storage.

The government has long promised that the thorny question of how to store existing waste from Britain’s old nuclear plants must be settled before new power plants such as the one proposed by EDF for Hinkley are constructed.

The only location for waste is at Drigg, near Sellafield, in Cumbria, but that is only for low-level waste.

Cumbria county council rejected a permanent dump for high-level waste near the Lake District. Attempts to start a debate about a waste repositary in Shepway, Kent ,were dropped after local opposition. Most waste is kept at nuclear plants around the country.

Doug Parr, chief scientist at Greenpeace, said: “The fact is that no one wants this stuff. Neither Essex, Kent, Cumbria or anywhere and yet the government wants to create more. Crazy.”

I’m saving the planet on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Monday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday can go to hell in a carbonated handcart.

Lights, telly, water, beware: you’re history. I’ve lived the life of an ecological vampire, but not any more.

Mike Berners-Lee, author of How Bad Are Bananas? and co-author of The Burning Question, is my father confessor. I ring him on my mobile.

“Hello, Simon, could you ring me back on my landline?”

Bloody hell. Can’t even get that right. Mobiles: relatively high carbon footprint. Speak on your mobile for a minute, that’s fine: 57g of carbon footprint, or the equivalent of eating most of a banana. Speak for an hour a day, as I often do, and it’s not fine: over a year, that will add up to 18,000 bananas, or one tonne of carbon dioxide, or a trip from London to New York, or a 15th of the average UK person’s total carbon consumption.

I phone Berners-Lee back. “You’ve phoned me on my mobile again.”

“Sorry,” I say, “I think I’m beyond help.”

Berners-Lee is not having any of it. He laughs when I mention the Guardian’s 10:10 project, which asked people to reduce their carbon footprint by 10% in 2010, and says the reason I failed is simple: it was no fun. “And the trouble with all that stuff is, supposing you succeed in swallowing your nasty medicine, everybody else will look at you doing it and think, ‘God, I’m not doing that.’”

He says the trick is to transform your life in a way that makes others jealous and want to follow suit. So, for instance, he started cycling to work (getting himself super-fit) and car-sharing (getting himself super-socialised). He gave up flying for family holidays, bought his wife and kids rucksacks, hopped on a train and went camping across the Lake District. Marvellous. “The kids are always saying, ‘Why can’t we do that again?’” (I make a note to tell my girls we’ll be camping on Hackney Marshes this summer.)

That’s all well and good, I say, but it’s the lights I’m worried about. And the water. I admit that often I run my bath so deep that I have to wait an hour until it’s cool enough to take out the plug and reduce the water to a safe level. I expect him to berate me. But he doesn’t.

“OK, what I want to get to the bottom of is whether you should be fretting about all those tiny things, or whether you should be picking one or two big things that matter. You can nag yourself all day long about the little things, that’s one way of doing it – but you’re going to have to turn off a lot of lightbulbs to make up for one flight a year.”

Ah.

“How many long-distance flights do you make a year?”

I change the subject. Back to the carbon footprint of lightbulbs. “All your year’s worth of lighting is likely to be about 3% of your total carbon footprint.” And the figures are similar for water and phones.

So it’s all small fry? “It’s quite small fry, but I wouldn’t say it’s nothing fry. For a few days a week, you could go on a campaign for that.”

So I do. The great thing about turning off lights and not running water while you’re brushing your teeth is that it feels active, and you can tut at those who aren’t doing it.

“How much meat do you eat?” he asks.

“Love my meat,” I say.

“Right, cut down.” The carbon footprint of beef is horrific and lamb not much better. So Tuesdays and Wednesdays become non-beef/lamb days. And stop chucking away edible food, he adds.

On Sunday I go to the theatre and buy a box of Maltesers. It’s hot and they melt into a sculpture. My partner puts them in the bin. I extract them, and take them into work to share. Come late afternoon, the mutant Malteser is pulled apart by my colleagues and eaten. A good day’s planet-saving.

There is a little issue that remains unresolved, and Berners-Lee is not going to let me off the hook. “I don’t really feel we’ve dealt with one of your big hitters.”

“Mmmm,” I say.

“Planes,” he says.

“Mmmmm,” I say.

“How many long-haul flights have you made this year?”

Last month I went to LA for work. “If you’d not done that, you’d have saved about 30% of the average UK person’s footprint for a year.”

Oh, and I went to New York two weeks ago, for an interview. He tells me it’s time to forget about lightbulbs and water, and radically reassess my work. “What’s wrong with video conferencing?”

The thought of having to sacrifice the job to lower my footprint is depressing – especially after putting in so much work turning off lights and tutting. Even if I did the 5:2 experiment for the rest of my life, it wouldn’t make that much difference. I feel down, and don’t get up in the morning. I tell Berners-Lee this is my radical solution to reduce my carbon footprint – hide under the duvet. He’s not impressed. “Well, that’s true, but why not kill yourself? That would be even better for your carbon footprint.”

How to make it work

• “Make it fun,” Berners-Lee says. Use 5:2 to improve your quality of life. If it’s a chore, you’re not going to stick with it.

• Don’t obsess about the tiny things – switching off lights, not running water. Go for the big-hitters – food and transport.

• Look at what you can eradicate from your life that doesn’t contribute in a positive way. Do you really enjoy driving on your own and stuffing yourself with burgers?

• Make sure your substitutes are really good – if you’re on a vegetarian day, don’t make yourself a rubbish meal. Make yourself the best, so that you look forward to the next.

• The Burning Question, by Mike Berners-Lee and Duncan Clark, is published by Profile Books at £9.99. To order a copy for £7.99 (including UK mainland p&p), call 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop.

In Fall 2014, the David H Koch Plaza at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City will be revealed, the entire $65m project paid for by David H Koch.

In the spirit of repurposing, recycling, and synergy, might the Met acknowledge Koch’s further contributions by moving the ever-growing black mound of tar-like petroleum coke, owned by Koch and his brother Charles through their company Koch Carbon and currently dumped inDetroit‘s Assumption Park, to the Met’s new Plaza? What more fitting tribute to the Brothers Koch than the gooey byproducts of their billion-dollar industry? What a stunning salute to the American supply chain; another Koch Brother, William, owns Oxbow Corporation, which deals in … petrocoke, a long-lasting reminder that Koch family values have real value.

New York Times report on the growing pile of petrocoke in DetroitLooking to extend their legacy into perpetuity (such by-products requiring a very long time to break down), the brothers could, when their time comes, be laid to rest in this coke-catafalque, retitled the “PetroKoch”. Their tomb will be reliably waterproof, important for the preservation of this park during the rapid rise of sea levels, mixed with catastrophic weather changes caused by our Pleistocene-era carbon levels, which might well be flooding Manhattan’s Upper East Side in the future. The Kochs will be coated, covered, protected, by the very substance that has enriched them, while bringing added warmth to our environment.

Local artists could be shoveled an allotment of the goo, the better to make fashionably dark, severe works of art. Politically focused photographers who document environmental disasters in remote third-world countries, to which this stuff is shipped as the cheapest and dirtiest fuel known to man, can take their snaps here in the neighborhood. Such a plaza would also clarify the Met’s awareness of political art and political theatre, a brash contemporary gesture to show concern for the world outside our island.

While we carbon-neutralize via our bikes and subways, we acknowledge the dark forces accumulating elsewhere. Thus Koch Plaza would be a metaphor (the art world loves metaphor) of first world environmentalism trumped by first world capitalism; this fuel is too filthy for us, so we export it to other, poorer countries who can’t afford our bespoke environmentalism.

Such a monument looks to the future, as much more petrocoke will be coming our way if the Keystone XL pipeline brings us western Canada’s oilsands petroleum, liberating us from the shame of middle east oil. Canada currently has a mere 79.8m tons of “the dirtiest residue from the dirtiest oil on earth … a waste by-product that is costly and inconvenient to store, but effectively costs nothing to produce”, in the words of scientists following such things.

The Met’s new ‘environmentally sustainable’ Koch Plaza frontage. Photograph: PRFrom the Met’s press release for the plaza:

“The renovated plaza will also feature tree-shaded allées (in place of the current trees that have limited lifespans and low environmental benefits due to their inadequate planting conditions), permanent and temporary seating areas, and entirely new, energy-efficient and diffused nighttime lighting.”

The PetroKoch will certainly not have a limited lifespan, though it might ironically contribute to the shortened lifespans of quite a few in the neighborhood. The art world loves irony.

The federal government insists it is striving to avoid the Great Barrier Reef being listed “in danger” ahead of a crunch UN meeting, after rejecting a Senate recommendation to block new port developments near the World Heritage ecosystem.

The world heritage committee begins an 11-day conference in Cambodia this week, where the UNESCO body will review the status of various prized ecological areas.

The committee is expected to recommend that the Great Barrier Reef, which has been listed as a World Heritage site since 1981, be placed on the “in danger” list next year due to concerns over coal and gas expansion, increased shipping and water quality.

A draft World Heritage report produced in May noted “concern” over water quality monitoring and the lack of a “a clear commitment toward limiting port development to existing port areas”. Unless “urgent and decisive action” was taken, the reef should be considered in danger, it said.

The federal environment minister, Tony Burke, told Guardian Australia improvements made since May showed the government was committed to safeguarding the Reef.

“I’m certainly hopeful that we can get some progress on what was in the draft report,” he said. “We committed a further $200 million for Reef Rescue in the budget, which was since the report. That’s one clear example of where they’ve expressed concern over water quality and we’ve acted.

“It’ll be presumptuous to say what the world heritage committee will decide but I’m confident that we have evidence to show that Australia takes management of the reef seriously.”

But Burke said the government would not support a Senate committee recommendation that a temporary halt be placed on new port developments in Queensland until an assessment, conducted by both state and federal governments, is released in 2015.

The committee, which considered a bill introduced by Greens senator Larissa Waters, said in its report that existing regulations “may not be sufficient to protect the Great Barrier Reef’s outstanding values”.

Burke said the move was unnecessary as there were no new developments planned before 2015. He said it was not straightforward to fulfill UNESCO’s key recommendation of banning substantial new infrastructure outside existing port areas.

“I was follow the process properly, under law,” he said. “If I pre-judge applications, it’ll get thrown out in court. [UNESCO] understands the limits we have under Australian law. It’s a nuanced situation.

“But they also understand that nothing has since been approved in pristine areas, and none was more sensitive than the proposed Xstrata development on Balaclava Island, which was cancelled after the draft report.”

Fuel oil leaks from a Chinese bulk coal carrier grounded on the reef in 2010. Photograph: GettyIt is understood that several World Heritage delegates have been dismayed by what they see as a politicisation of the reef, with Burke involved in a series of public ructions with the Queensland government over the management of the vast coral ecosystem.

Last week, Queensland’s deputy premier, Jeff Seeney, said Burke had been “held ransom” by “radical Greens”.

“Mr Burke is beholden to the Greens who feed him dishonest and deceitful assertions about our government’s actions,” Seeney said. “It’s time Mr Burke represented every person in this state, rather than those he believes will keep the Gillard government in power.”

But Burke has also come under fire from the Greens and environmental groups, who accuse him of doing little to safeguard the reef and caving into the demands of the mining industry, with eight ports planned or expanded during his tenure.

Burke told Guardian Australia: “I find some of the political points quite bewildering. Jeff Seeney’s comments were just odd, certainly one of the weirder moments in Australian politics. I can’t understand what was going on in his head when he launched that diatribe.

“Larissa Waters, the Greens and Greenpeace are, in a large part, using the reef as a proxy for an anti-coal campaign. Those groups say the best way to limit emissions is to price carbon and then they ask for a regulatory mechanism too. They can’t have it both ways.”

Waters said it would be a “disaster” if the reef was placed on the “in danger” list, alongside sites predominantly found in developing or war-torn countries.

“Tony Burke isn’t acting like an environment minister,” she said. “He says a lot of strong things and then doesn’t deliver.

“The UNESCO report was clear that there should be no new ports but there are no state or Commonwealth moves to limit these ports. Responsibility lies on both sides so it’s farcical to see them pointing the finger at each other.

“It’s amazing that it had to come down to me, a new member of the Senate, to draft a bill to protect the seventh wonder of the world because the government won’t do it.

“The world heritage committee aren’t idiots. This is their area of expertise. I imagine the Australian delegation will be pressuring other delegates to water down the criticism because it’s embarrassing.”

The reef faces a number of threats, including chemicals that flow onto it from agricultural land, a plague of crown-of-thorns starfish and climate change, which has been blamed for an increase in coral bleaching and severe weather events such as cyclones, which further damage the ecosystem.

Another potential risk is the dredging of the seabed to allow ships access to new ports. The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority recentlywarned MPs that the impact of dumping dredging spoil onto the reef could be worse than previously thought.

The reef has lost half its coral cover in the past 27 years, the Australian Institute of Marine Sciences says. Last week, 150 Australian and international scientists signed a letter warning the reef was in crisis and required urgent action to protect it.

The Queensland environment minister, Andrew Powell, told Guardian Australia the state government’s policy was consistent with UNESCO’s demand for ports to be kept to existing areas.

“The Newman government firmly believes that we can have sustainable economic development and strong environmental protection – the two concepts are not mutually exclusive,” he said.

“The Newman government is aware of the potential impacts of dredging which is one of the many reasons why we scaled back the previous Labor government’s crazy proposals for a massive multi-cargo facility at Abbot Point.”

“We want to ensure any development occurs in a considered and measured way and as such all development applications are subject to a stringent environmental impact assessment process.”

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