The well-being of human communities depends on the resources nature provides. These include raw materials, food, water, fuel, and fertile soils that help clean and recycle waste from human activity. Nature also offers vital “ecosystem services,” such as forests absorbing carbon dioxide, converting it into biomass, and helping combat climate change.

However, nature’s ability to supply resources or absorb waste isn’t limitless—this capacity is known as biocapacity. Some regions, like the Amazon, have high biocapacity and relatively low human demand. Others, like cities, demand far more resources than their ecosystems can provide. Cities rely on vast surrounding areas to supply food, water, and materials, as well as to absorb waste, including carbon emissions.

In the past, cities could only grow as much as local ecosystems allowed. But with the rise of fossil fuels and advanced transportation, urban areas began importing resources from farther away, enabling rapid growth and higher living standards. Unfortunately, this also created global environmental problems. Over the past 150 years, the overuse of natural resources and reliance on fossil fuels have improved living conditions but at the cost of rising global temperatures and declining ecosystem health.

Nature-Based Solutions (NBS)
One way to design these hybrid landscapes is through Nature-Based Solutions (NBS). These strategies use natural processes and elements to solve human challenges like climate change, food security, and biodiversity loss. For example, planting a forest can absorb CO2, boost biodiversity, regulate water, and provide shaded areas for recreation.

Unlike traditional land use, which often focuses on a single purpose (like farming), NBS aim to deliver multiple benefits from the same area—such as food production, water management, and pollinator support. For these solutions to work, they must enhance biodiversity, ensuring ecosystems are robust enough to adapt to changes over time.

When combined, NBS can create green infrastructure—a network of natural and semi-natural spaces designed to provide a variety of benefits, from cleaner air and water to more livable cities. By focusing on sustainable, multifunctional landscapes, NBS allow communities and the environment to thrive together.

Biodiversity and Hybrid Landscapes
Biodiversity—essentially the variety of life in an area—is a key indicator of ecosystem health. It supports the services that ecosystems provide, from carbon storage to food production, and makes systems more resilient to changes. Sadly, climate change and biodiversity loss are interconnected: rising temperatures and altered water cycles harm biodiversity, and this loss, in turn, weakens ecosystems’ ability to mitigate climate change.

Modern development has fragmented natural landscapes into isolated patches, making it harder for plants and animals to adapt to environmental changes. Without connected habitats, species face limited chances of survival. Even small disruptions can threaten the survival of isolated populations.

To counter this, we need to reconnect and expand natural spaces. Parks, green corridors, urban gardens, and even green roofs can help. These interconnected “hybrid landscapes” support both nature and human life, offering a balance between urban development and ecological preservation. By creating such spaces, we can foster biodiversity, adapt to environmental changes, and improve life for both people and wildlife.

The challenges we face—climate change, biodiversity loss, and the overuse of natural resources—are daunting, but they also present an opportunity to rethink how we live and build. By working with nature rather than against it, we can design spaces that sustain both people and the planet.

Nature isn’t just a resource to be exploited; it’s a partner in creating a healthier, more resilient future. Whether it’s reconnecting habitats, supporting biodiversity, or embracing Nature-Based Solutions, the choices we make today can shape a better tomorrow.

It’s time to demand greener cities, protect our wild spaces, and champion innovative solutions that put life—human and non-human—at the center of our designs. Because when nature thrives, so do we. Let’s build a world where sustainability isn’t just a buzzword but a way of life.

Plants should be considered the link between the sun and the Earth. Without plants, the sun’s energy would not be transformed into the chemical energy that sustains life. But that’s not all. Every living being needs to obtain the energy required for survival from some source.

The energy present on planet Earth comes from three main sources: the sun, the primordial heat from the Earth’s formation, and the heat generated by the radioactive decay of certain materials in the Earth’s crust and core. For practical purposes, we can disregard the contributions from geothermal energy and focus on solar energy, the true life-sustaining source on Earth.

Even the energy we obtain from burning coal or oil is merely solar energy originally captured by plants (broadly defined to include all photosynthetic organisms). Likewise, the energy that drives the wind, ocean currents, or waves also originates from solar energy. In short, we can approximate that, with negligible exceptions, all the energy on the planet comes from the sun.

Having simplified the issue to its fundamental terms, we can return to plants and the central role they play in ensuring the survival of species. Through photosynthesis, and with the help of solar energy, plants capture atmospheric carbon dioxide, forming sugars—highly energetic molecules—while producing oxygen as a byproduct.

The average amount of energy produced by photosynthesis on a planetary scale is about 130 terawatts, approximately six times greater than the current energy consumption of human civilization. As Primo Levi writes about the carbon cycle in The Periodic Table, “if the organic conversion of carbon did not take place daily around us, on the scale of billions of tons per week, wherever the green of a leaf appears, it would fully deserve the name of miracle.”

Thanks to this miraculous process, life has been able to spread and thrive. Photosynthesis is essentially the sole driver of the entire production of organic matter through biochemical means, the so-called primary production.

Once produced by plants, this chemical energy—whether we think of it as food, coal, or oil—is used as fuel by the rest of the animal kingdom to sustain survival. Humans, however, use it excessively, relying on it as the primary source of energy for their development. When this fuel burns, it inevitably produces byproducts that disrupt the environment’s balance and cause pollution. CO2, for instance, is emitted whenever combustion occurs—whether it’s the burning of sugars and fats to power our bodies or the burning of oil, gas, coal, wood, or any other fuel originally produced through photosynthesis.

Human activities emit approximately 29 billion tons of CO2 annually. By comparison, volcanoes release 100 times less—only 200 to 300 million tons. The CO2 that accumulates in the atmosphere is the primary driver of the greenhouse effect and the resulting increase in global temperatures. Through activities like fossil fuel combustion and deforestation, humans have raised the average annual atmospheric CO2 concentration from 280 ppm (parts per million), where it had remained stable for around 10,000 years before the Industrial Revolution, to 421 ppm as of 2022.

The last time Earth experienced such high atmospheric CO2 concentrations was during the Pliocene epoch, around three million years ago. At that time, the planet’s average temperature was 4°C higher, large parts of the Antarctic continent were covered by forests, and sea levels were 20 to 25 meters higher than today due to melting ice.

Of course, the carbon cycle is far more complex than outlined here and involves numerous variables tied to life on Earth. For instance, not all CO2 emitted by human activities ends up in the atmosphere; about 30% dissolves into the oceans, forming carbonic acid, bicarbonate, and carbonate. While this oceanic absorption is vital because it prevents even more CO2 from entering the atmosphere, it also causes ocean acidification. This phenomenon is responsible for the destruction of coral reefs and profoundly affects the lives of calcifying organisms such as coccolithophores, corals, echinoderms, foraminifera, crustaceans, and mollusks, ultimately impacting the entire food chain.

In essence, the core issue is that, until recently, the carbon cycle functioned effectively. CO2 was released into the atmosphere through processes like combustion, digestion, and fermentation, and then reabsorbed by plants via photosynthesis—a balanced cycle capable of handling significant fluctuations in carbon dioxide levels without disrupting equilibrium. For millions of years, this system worked like clockwork. However, with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the sheer volume of CO2 released into the atmosphere through fossil fuel use has become so immense that plants can no longer fully reabsorb it.

Today, everyone is called to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions as much as possible. This is not something we can delay: from individuals to businesses to nations, the time to act is now. Solutions exist and are effective. If adopted by significant portions of the global population, they could ensure a sustainable future. Many of these solutions are brought together in the concept of an Energy Park.

What I find most fascinating about this idea is that, whether through solar panels powered by human technology or through plants developed by evolution, the ultimate goal is the same: transforming the sun’s light energy into a form usable by humans. Whether the end result is the sugars in plants or electricity from solar panels, designing a park where humanity collaborates—for once—with nature to minimize its planetary impact is heartwarming and instills hope for a better future.