The time to talk about climate change as if it’s merely a hazy possibility that won’t occur in our lifetime anyway has long passed. Multiple recent reports have made it clear that it’s already happening, and its effects will be much worse than previously expected.

In 2016, the Paris climate accords set a goal of limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius (at which it’s already failing); the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change now says two degrees is both inevitable by the year 2040 and genocidal, set to cause the death of all coral reefs, extreme wildfires, heat waves and other weather events that will subsequently threaten the world’s food supply and transform the global economy.

Clearly, addressing the problem at its source is the most crucial course of action. For the sake of the planet and virtually all life upon it, including our own species, we must rework practically every aspect of civilization, from our energy infrastructure and agricultural practices to corporate and governmental operations (because, while the efforts require widespread support and small actions are still important, the onus to lessen the impacts of inevitable climate change cannot be placed on individuals.) Technology and architecture won’t save the world alone, but it can help, and if we’re going to head off some of the most immediate climate change effects, we have to start now.

Architects, engineers and urban planners have already begun to work on approaches that range from visions of futuristic cities that would take many decades to build from the ground up to more practical and immediate solutions that adapt to the new normal. Extreme weather, rapid influxes of climate refugees and the need to continuously evolve in response to the changing world are among the top issues to address.

Managing Fires and Floods

Flooding is inevitable. Stronger, more frequent storms are already wreaking havoc on the United States and throughout the world, leaving catastrophic flooding in their wake that can extend much farther inland than anticipated, particularly along rivers. The pace of ice melting in Greenland and Antarctica is on track to raise sea levels 26 inches by the year 2100, and many scientists consider that to be a conservative estimate. Cities like Miami, Houston, Jakarta, Bangkok, Manila, Lagos, London and Shanghai are at immediate risk due to groundwater extraction, soft sediments and, in Miami’s case, permeable limestone that will allow water to rise from underground.

Sea levels are rising faster on the east coast of the United States than anywhere else, and locales from North Carolina to Florida already lost 5 inches of coastline between 2011 and 2015. Researchers believe it has something to do with the slowing Gulf Stream, the effects of El Niño cycles and shifts in major Atlantic Ocean weather patterns. Experts predict that many cities could be swallowed altogether within the lifetime of children born in the current decade. 3D animated Google Earth gifs by Climate Central based on an extreme sea level rise scenario from the NOAA show us what this could look like in a few major cities, and it’s not good.

So what are cities doing to plan for this? Not much, in most cases, but that could change soon. Many of the most vulnerable cities are consulting with experts on plans of attack that involve building in safer areas, transforming the most flood-prone zones into buffer areas, integrating green spaces capable of absorbing large quantities of stormwater, elevating new structures, improving the climate resiliency of low-income housing and creating systems that work with, rather than against, a changed waterfront.

For a recent competition called Resilient by Design, which challenged design teams to reimagine the Bay Area in the face of potentially devastating climate change, global design firm HASSELL envisions a new network of green spaces and “water-loving places” connected by canals and creeks. Forging these wide, green waterways creates controlled paths for flooding and plans to use them for transport and recreation. Native plants treat runoff, a “living levee” forms a wetland for restoring habitat and holding stormwater and schools built on higher ground become hubs for water treatment and community activities.

In Boston, SCAPE Landscape Architecture collaborated with the Mayor on a vision to protect the city’s 47 miles of shoreline as part of the Imagine Boston 2030 initiative. Using the city’s Climate Ready Boston 2070 flood maps, the team demonstrates how flood-resilient buildings, elevated landscapes, waterfront parks, connections to the waterfront and a deployable flood wall system could address rising water and enhance community access to the waterfront at the same time. Key transport corridors like Main Street and Bennington Street will have to be elevated.

“We’re not just planning for the next storm we’ll face, we’re planning for the storms the next generation will face. A resilient, climate-ready Boston harbor presents an opportunity to protect Boston, connect Boston, and enhance Boston, now and for the future,” says Mayor Martin J. Walsh. “As we enter a new era in our Harbor’s history, Boston can show the world that resilience is not only the ability to survive adversity but to emerge even stronger than before. That’s the promise of a Resilient Boston.”

In fact, reintroducing natural systems could be key, all over the world. For Seoul, architect Chris Reed of ASLA proposes giving water more space in the city with the knowledge that we can’t hold it back and might as well do what we can to enjoy it. We could “bring new life and richness into the public realm” with fish parks, canal streets, water plazas and other spaces, and transform vacant land into new wetlands that bring value into adjacent neighborhoods. The city’s Cheonggyecheon River is already a great example of this approach, uncovered from beneath roadways and highways and renovated into a central riverfront offering both floodwater containment and recreational space in the heart of downtown.

Water, of course, isn’t the only force of nature we have to protect ourselves from. With wildfires raging across much of the West, many people are wondering what they can do to make their homes more fire-resistant. While land management practices will have to change in many parts of the country to anticipate and mitigate wildfires to the greatest extent possible, fireproofing could at least help salvage some structures when they can’t be stopped. The good news is, a few small changes can make a huge difference, and they can be surprisingly affordable, too.

Las Vegas-based GigaCrete makes prefab houses with recyclable, non-flammable materials including steel frames, interlocking wall panels and special wall coatings that make them hurricane resistant, bulletproof and waterproof to boot. A 576-square-foot, one-bedroom model costs just $24,000, and they can be scaled up and customized. Other approaches involve the use of tempered glass, minimizing exposed wood, non-flammable decks, rooftop sprinkler systems, mesh screens that prevent smoldering materials from getting into vents and strategies to clear brush. It’s likely that features like these will increasingly be built into new construction in fire-prone areas.

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Come Hell Or High Water Cities Must Evolve In The Face Of Climate Change

Human civilization has grown and expanded at an amazing rate – or alarming, depending on who you ask – and you can watch the last 32 years of it unfold via satellite imagery thanks to Google’s Timelapse feature. Originally released in 2013, Timelapse has been updated to add four more years of data and tons of new imagery data from two new satellites, offering clearer views with more detail than ever before. Choose any location in the world to see how it has changed – from cities to the shrinking ice caps.

Some of the most dramatic changes have occurred in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Dubai and Chongqing, China, but you can also watch the Aral Sea dry up and the Shirase Glacier of Antarctica melt into the sea.

Aral Sea

Miami, Florida

Beijing, China

Las Vegas, Nevada

Shirase Glacier

Hangzhou, China

Look for the location of your choice and create your own annual time lapse at Google’s Time Engine Tour Editor.

The living play karaoke among headstones, hang their laundry from mausoleums, put on plays in crypts and golf right on top of graves in multipurpose cemeteries around the world, where the dead are integrated into modern life instead of remaining in solemn roped-off spaces. In some cases, it’s happening due to sprawl, like the family graveyard in a Walmart parking lot in Georgia, but in others, it’s more deliberate. As we grapple with population growth and urbanization, alternate ideas for the burial of our dead are coming into focus, all seemingly sending the same message: life goes on.

Habitable Cemeteries: Living with the Dead in the Philippines

Within the walls of Manila’s largest cemetery, 6,000 living residents thrive, going about their lives right on top of gravestone after gravestone, sometimes living in mausoleums alongside the tombs of their dead. The residents of North Cemetery are typically extremely poor, creating makeshift domiciles and living surprisingly normal lives. Within their cemetery city, they’ve created systems of public transit and schools.

A second cemetery in the Philippines, the Chinese Cemetery, is nicknamed the ‘Beverly Hills of the Dead’ for the spacious, luxurious tombs that are fancier and more comfortable than most homes of the living. These houses of the dead have fully-functioning kitchens, bathrooms and bedrooms where relatives can sleep alongside their deceased loved ones, and sometimes live there full-time.

New Lucky Graveside Restaurant, India

The patrons of New Lucky Restaurant in Ahmadabad, India don’t seem to mind dining right next to coffins from an old Muslim cemetery, which may belong to the followers of a 16th century Sufi saint. The owner decided to leave the coffins in place when building his establishment, and says the proximity to death hasn’t put a dent in business, which is brisk. In fact, he believes that it brings good luck, hence the restaurant’s name. Each morning, the servers pay their respects to the graves, wiping them, covering them with cloth and decorating them with fresh flowers.

Solar Power in Santa Coloma de Gramanet, Spain

With so much of the rest of the land too hilly and shaded to be of use, the town of Santa Coloma de Gramanet outside Barcelona found the one location that would be viable for its solar energy program. It just happens to be a cemetery. The densely-built town packs 124,000 residents into 1.5 square miles, so they have to make creative use of every inch. Now, 462 solar panels provide enough energy to power 60 homes each year. The panels are perched above ground level, so there’s no notable change to the feel of the sacred spaces below. “The best tribute we can pay to our ancestors, whatever your religion may be, is to generate clean energy for new generations, says the director of Const-Live Energy, which runs the cemetery.

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Living With The Dead 12 Cemeteries With Surprising Alternate Uses

Few nations have experienced quite the explosive rate of growth over the last century as China, and a new photo series shows us just how dramatic those changes actually look on the ground. Photographer, computer scientist and MIT alum Dheera Venkatraman pored through books and archives to find images taken in the 20th century and then went out and re-took them, shot by shot, attempting to frame them exactly as they were originally photographed. All of the new imagery has been converted to black and white to highlight what’s different and what has managed to survive after decades of frantic industrialization.

The result is a series called Time Travel in China, creating pairs of images that Venkatraman likens to a ‘spot-the-difference’ game. Agricultural fields become towns, skyscrapers shoot up into the air, bridges stretch across waterways, dirt roads are paved, infrastructure becomes more complex.

Yet not only do the contours of the land and the silhouettes of the mountains remain the same, a surprising number of buildings do, too, especially temples and historical structures. In some cases, the only notable shifts in a forty- or even eighty-year period are the vehicles, some lights and a handful of modern towers.

“When most people travel, they think of traveling in space,” she says. “Whether it’s hiking through a national park or learning about a distant culture, it’s usually about the destination. This time, I decided to travel in time.”

“It wasn’t always easy to get that perfect angle match,” she continues in a post on PetaPixel. “In some places, the vantage point ended up being in a private location, and in some cases there was a large obstruction or building preventing me from getting the same view. But nonetheless, I managed to capture several shocking contrasts over the past century of Chinese history.”

Today, that charming old brick building on the corner might be a market where you can still grab a six-pack at a decent price; within mere months, it could be knocked down for a gleaming high-income condominium tower. The shift in a city’s character can seem to occur in the blink of an eye as the look and usage of its architecture changes. As gentrification rapidly alters the face of the city around him, Philadelphia artist Drew Leshko documents and preserves building facades as they presently stand in miniatures made of paper and wood.

Whatever your opinion may be about the onward march of modernization and urban progress, it’s hard to deny that too much ‘spiffing up’ without the careful preservation of historical details and the imprints of the people and cultures that have shaped them can make all cities look the same.

Though cleaner and safer, New York City has become virtually unrecognizable within just a couple decades, replacing all of the independent businesses that once lined its streets with chain stores and sleek signage. The same is happening in cities around the world, much to the chagrin of people who have a sentimental attachment to what those places used to be.

Leshko cycles around Philadelphia documenting interesting buildings to later recreate in his studio at a 1:12 scale. Details like bars on the windows, hand-painted banners, graffiti and uneven weathering are reproduced in three dimensions as a way of archiving their condition before they’re gone.

Though they may still be a reflection of what Philadelphia really looks like, it won’t be long before these sculptures are mere nostalgia. No matter where you live, taking a close look at them might just prompt you to appreciate the current state of your own city a little bit more.