The Future Is Here: 29 Projects on 6 Continents Are Showing How to Tackle the Climate Crisis

Responding to the climate crisis will require more than solar panels, a modest carbon tax, or another flood barrier. A new book from Billy Fleming demonstrates that the climate policy, planning, and design professions have been looking in all the wrong places for models of sustainability and resilience, instead building projects that raise emissions and drive displacement. With 29 richly illustrated projects across six continents, this book shows readers a promising set of alternatives for building more just, decarbonized futures from the neighborhood to the continental scale. 

Building Postcarbon Futures: Land, Justice, and Energy Transitions, published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, provides a crucial counterpoint to the growing despair around climate action by presenting a series of optimistic solutions that show how various forms of collective ownership, multi-purpose infrastructure, and grassroots power are already tackling the climate crisis at great scale. It is both a celebration of action underway and a clarion call to the planners, designers, policymakers, and activists who are pushing this planet toward a future of collective flourishing.

“Building a just, postcarbon future requires a transformation of our social, political, and economic systems in ways that challenge the status quo,” said Billy Fleming, codirector of the Climate and Community Institute and assistant professor of landscape architecture at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture. “This book explores existing works of climate justice and provides a range of tools, methods, and models of practice and policymaking to demonstrate what is possible if we act now at the scale of the crisis.” 

Organized around energy, land, and urbanism, the core of the book is an atlas featuring original cartography that maps and documents examples—such as the Tu Deh-Kah Geothermal Power Plant in British Columbia and the West Arnhem Land Fire Abatement Project in Australia—of existing and effective grassroots work toward climate justice. Often, these projects are at odds with the status quo and incorporate the work of marginalized people and frontline communities.

“This is an incredible contribution, offering creative models of land stewardship and climate justice that will push design practice in radical new directions,” said Jenny Jones, principle of TERREMOTO and 2025 Smithsonian National Design Award recipient.

“This book puts the earth, the land, and the spaces we all share at the center of the climate crisis, precisely where they belong,” said Julian Brave NoiseCat, author of We Survived the Night and Academy Award–nominated director of Sugarcane.

Building Postcarbon Futures also features more than a dozen contributions from leading scholars and practitioners of planning, design, and climate policy. Their field-based research presents additional studies of the past, present, and future—including social housing experiments in Uruguay and Jakarta, land stewardship and ecosystem restoration initiatives in the Pacific Northwest and American South, and submerged histories of energy democracy and collective ownership of the power grid in the rural United States.

More information about the book can be found here.

Kristina McGeehan is the director of communications at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead image: A team of workers welds and installs a new solar array for a rice mill in Burkina Faso. Credit:Joerg Boethling