Describe the critical need your solution addresses.

The Kyoto Protocol set parameters for trading carbon credits; the Clean Development Mechanism supports ‘sustainable’ agriculture/agro-forestry development of “lands having low potential to support biomass”. The Mechanism abets a global agricultural economy, and dislocates sites of amelioration from the populace responsible for excessive consumption.

Explain your initiative in more depth and its stage of development.

A network of sink apparatus – structures activating multivalent processes – is delineated. Apparatus amplify urban carbon stocks, fuel sustainable energy production, loop with storm-water management and integrate into the daily life of citizens.
selected apparatus:
Phyto-Labs – dispersed in vacant-lots and public parkland, phyto-remediation plots as formal gardens merge visual and experimental criteria.
Verge grasslands – optimize easily accessible, underutilized areas of infrastructure right-of-ways as biomass/soil sinks.
Metastatic maritime plant dispersal – vital, yet vanishing ecologies are preserved in urban land-use through linking extremities of condition between degraded city land and maritime edge.
Max-bio parkland – recalibrates the ratio of recreational to ecologically optimized territory.
Highway sound bio-barriers – soil-building bio-sound walls utilize solar power to irrigate with highway runoff.
Sidewalk and street bio-strips – an infiltrating network of planted strips managed for cycling biomass production (such as bio-fuel) and urban soil building.
Leach fields/pyrolytic biochar production – integrating waste management and clean energy, wetland parklands clean water, produce fuel and maximize public awareness of productive terrain as a systemic condition.
Deadwood – a management strategy embodied in a structure inhibiting release of atmospheric carbon from dead trees that simultaneously instigates successional forest growth.

How does your strategy and approach respond creatively and comprehensively to key issues?

Plants sequester carbon in their tissue and by transferring it through their root systems into soil. 75% of terrestrial carbon is sequestered in soil, and carbon storage is more stable in soil than biomass. NYC’s plant-soil organic content indicates disruption of plant-soil concurrence typical of urban land-use. Low organic soils sustain a field dominated by tree-canopy. CITY SINK asserts the power of civic policy and community practice to engage global ecologies by integrating plant-soil systems in the public realm with immediately implementable apparatus synced to municipal resources.

The carbon cycle – movement of carbon between atmosphere, oceans and geo-sphere – is a web of processes in a closed system. Conceptualizing balance in the cycle is a complex calculation of quantitative relationships of reactants and products actualized in processes that unfold over multiple time-scales. CITY SINK apparatus are commensal urban infrastructure – the sink is a dynamic condition that accounts for life-cycle carbon emissions in material sourcing, installation and management. Strategic retrofit, design to instigate transformation rather than construction of a finite condition, and prioritizing maximal biotic activity with the least inert material input, articulate the sink landscape. Ungrounded substrate (roofs and walls) is activated as productive biotic terrain.

CITY SINK pervasively disperses analog types of forest, meadow, and wetland adapted to unique local cultural requirements across the city. Expanding the urban-plant typology to encompass evolving plant communities and productive plantations activates terrestrial soil sequestration across a spectrum of effective time-frames. Variability in the typology of CITY SINK apparatus offers long- term resilience. If one type of sink declines due to changes in air quality or climate regime, the loss is not complete across the system. The capacity to latch-onto existing physical structures, policy and funding mechanisms, enables CITY SINK to be inherently more robust than stand-alone projects.