SWA unveils ambitious plan targeting 50% emissions reduction by 2030
As the largest landscape architecture firm in the U.S.—and the first to develop a Climate Action Plan of this kind—SWA has outlined a strategy to tackle both project and operational emissions in alignment with ASLA and IPCC goals.
Today, SWA released a far-reaching Climate Action Plan (CAP) outlining strategies targeting a 50% reduction in project emissions by 2030, in alignment with goals set out by the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and other AEC industry standards.
“The climate crisis is among the greatest challenges of the next century. It’s time for landscape architects to fully confront this, not just in rhetoric, but in tangible actions,” said Gerdo Aquino and David Thompson, Co-CEOs of SWA. “As a discipline, we need bold, science-based action to reduce the worst effects of climate change in our cities and landscapes—and we can have tremendous impact by collectively acting today through our design work and our decisions as a united industry.”
Founded in 1957, SWA specializes in landscape architecture, urban design, and planning, with seven domestic offices in California, Texas, and New York, and one abroad in Shanghai. Since the firm’s establishment, the amount of atmospheric carbon has increased by over 450% annually, contributing to a suite of impacts building in frequency and intensity—sea-level rise, ocean acidification, mass species extinction, severe storms, drought, extreme heat, and the collapse of entire ecosystems and food chains.
“As the closest discipline in AEC to the environmental sciences, landscape architects have an alarmingly close view of the climate crisis. In 2024, sea-level rise, extreme heat, drought, and intensifying storms aren’t ‘design problems’ to be solved—they’re the baseline conditions of a new reality,” said Sarah Fitzgerald, CAP Co-Author. “As landscape architects, the world demands more of us, and we have the tools to act. This plan may focus on one firm, but what we’re really saying is that a broad-front reorientation toward decarbonization and climate justice can be the norm, not the exception.”
The AEC sector currently accounts for a staggering 40% of annual global emissions. While landscapes and open spaces account for a proportionally smaller amount of these emissions than buildings, landscape architects bring a unique toolkit for climate action that has gone under-recognized, bringing decarbonization goals to bear at an extraordinary range of scales, from 4,000-acre parks to quarter-acre terraces. With a deep understanding of ecological systems and environmental principles, landscape architects can design projects that sequester carbon, mitigate heat islands, support biodiversity, buffer the effects of sea-level rise, stormwater, and groundwater flooding, and center climate justice through participatory design—enhancing the physical, social, and economic resilience of communities.
Targeting a 50% reduction in emissions by 2030, SWA plans on incorporating decarbonization design strategies and carbon accounting workflows throughout the firm’s project work. Through a benchmarking analysis, SWA’s growing Climate and Sustainability team is setting up a process to measure embodied and sequestered carbon across four project typologies, using retroactive and active project data to guide decision-making and track emissions reduction by category. Leveraging the SWA Guide to Decarbonize Design—a phase-by-phase toolkit developed by CAP Co-Author Mariana Ricker for her 2023 Patrick T. Curran Fellowship—design teams can incorporate a range of decarbonization best practices from the earliest stages of a project forward, including a critical focus on right-sizing spaces, prioritizing low-carbon materials, and greenlining details and specifications.
While AEC firms have consistently reported that project emissions far outweigh the impact of operational emissions, SWA has additionally committed to measuring the impacts of our business practices. The Plan outlines important categories for reducing these emissions, including office-by-office strategies focused on enhancing energy efficiency, business travel, and commuting. The overarching aim is to build a “culture of practice” that empowers design teams to advance decarbonization goals and champion climate solutions within and outside the firm.
The broader industry is undergoing a fundamental shift as decarbonization is increasingly recognized as a top priority by leading professional organizations and policymakers. The Urban Land Institute (ULI) highlights the path to net zero as one of its top mission priorities, a growing list of Architecture firms are signed on to Architecture 2030, and engineers have established similar targets with MEP 2040 and SE 2050. CAP Co-Author Mariana Ricker emphasizes that “collaboration with all of these entities and partners is key to addressing the challenge of decarbonizing our built environment.”
While many architecture, engineering, and construction firms have developed Climate Action Plans, landscape architects joined the coalition with ASLA’s public release of a Climate Action Plan in 2022, co-authored by Sarah Fitzgerald. Additional resources followed, including a 2023 report on Decarbonizing Business Operations, which Fitzgerald and Anya Domlesky, SWA’s Director of Research, contributed to; and a recent 2024 guide on Decarbonizing the Design Process co-authored by Mariana Ricker. XL Lab, SWA’s dedicated research and innovation arm, has led several other projects related to climate adaptation and mitigation, including Playbook for the Pyrocene, a guide to wildfire-adaptive design authored by Jonah Susskind, Senior Research Associate at SWA.
As the first CAP conceived by a major landscape architecture firm, SWA aims to lead by example and clearly demonstrate the place for landscape architects on the path to decarbonization.