Providing comprehensive information for closing material loops and reducing carbon impacts of site construction, this ground-breaking book is an essential resource for landscape architects and engineers to meet the environmental challenges of the 21st century.

It provides strategies, tools, and detailed information for the practice of climate positive design. Reduced carbon, resource efficient materials, and material mixes are addressed for both standard and alternative materials including stone, concrete, asphalt pavement, brick, earth-based materials, wood, biobased materials, metals, and plastics. Construction considerations are discussed and illustrated, and strategies to reduce environmental impacts are offered. Emphasis is placed on durable, resource efficient structures, and reduced embodied carbon approaches for pavements, porous pavements, green roofs, bioengineered embankments, retaining walls freestanding walls, decks and boardwalks, and rails, fences, and screens. Exemplary case studies from around the world are highlighted, and key resources such as assessment tools, information transparency tools, and benchmarking measures are provided.

Responding to the need for landscape architecture to account for climate change, resource consumption, and habitat destruction, this important book is key reading for both professionals and students alike.

Meg Calkins, FCELA, FASLA, is Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at North Carolina State University. She holds an MLA and MArch from the University of California at Berkeley and has taught and written about resilient site design and sustainable construction for over 25 years.

Meg is also the author of Materials for Sustainable Sites (2008) and editor of the Sustainable Sites Handbook (2012). She has been a frequent contributing editor to Landscape Architecture magazine, writing several articles on site construction materials and exemplary designed works, and she won the Bradford Williams Medal for Journalistic Excellence in 2003.

Meg has taken an active leadership role in development and implementation of the Sustainable Sites Initiative (SITES) since 2003. In 2023–24, Meg received a Landscape Architecture Foundation Fellowship for Leadership and Innovation where she developed key themes for this book. She currently serves on the LAF Board of Directors.