DE Design + Environment is an environmental consultancy, design atelier, and a technology company that works around the world. The company was incorporated in Vancouver and launched in Montreal, Quebec, in 2005 by David Oswald.

Addressing Climate Change and No Hunger

“Food security is a huge issue, as most of us are aware. With the SDGs and climate action, we can’t separate social issues from environmental issues. We have to look at them together. A lot of the projects we work on, they’ll be mandated to address data acquisition and decision-making for food security in addition to climate change,” said David. “A community that is vulnerable to hunger is also vulnerable to climate change, and vice versa.”

For example, DE worked with Guyana and the United Nations (UN) on their green state development strategy to analyze it and come up with indicators to benchmark its progress. Guyana had created that strategy to plan up to 2040 and become food resilient (among other things). DE looked at the levels of poverty, levels of education, agricultural productivity, etc. in addition to greenhouse gas emissions, climate adaptations, and other environmental factors.

On the data side of the business, DE works on the intersection between hunger and climate adaptation for vulnerable communities. On the mitigation side, they address issues like how to make agriculture more climate benign. For instance, they look at different modalities of agroforestry for sequestering carbon and consider how best to monitor that and look at data that supports those decisions. In the middle of all that, DE also works on risk management, specifically related to disasters. They’ve done work on agricultural disaster risk management in Trinidad and Tobago. When there’s a flood, it wipes out food production. Plus, the transportation infrastructure goes, roads get washed out, and it becomes a huge economic and social problem in addition to the physical impacts.

Read the full article about DE Design + Environment by Tyler LePard at Global Washington.