Giving Compass' Take:

• Adele Peters reports that a building in Manhattan will act as a monarch butterfly sanctuary thanks to support from nonprofits.  

• How can funders scale up solutions like this one? Is this sufficient intervention for monarch butterflies and other insects? 

• Learn about declining insect populations. 

On a new eight-story building planned for Manhattan’s Nolita neighborhood, the facade will double as a wildlife habitat. “It’s essentially a vertical meadow for butterflies,” says Mitchell Joachim, founder of Terreform One, the nonprofit architecture and urban design firm that designed the structure.

From offices inside, people will be able to look out into a terrarium attached to the wall, a climate-controlled space where suspended milkweed vines and flowers support monarch butterflies through their life cycle. Tiles that are 3D-printed from carbon-sequestering concrete will give the insects places to land. (BASF, the chemical company that makes the concrete, supported the project with a grant.) Gardens on the roof and a terrace will be filled with more pollinator-friendly plants.

It’s an urban intervention for a species whose numbers have been declining. Last year, when a nonprofit counted the number of eastern monarchs spending the winter in Mexico, it had dropped 15% from the previous year. On the West Coast, another group estimated that the number of western monarchs in California had fallen 86%. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will soon decide whether to list the butterfly as an endangered species. The butterflies, which migrate long distances across North America, face multiple threats, including climate change and pesticides. But loss of habitat is another key factor.

Read the full article about the urban solution for monarch butterflies by Adele Peters at FastCompany.