On August 30, 2022, the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA) announced the selection results of the IFLA AAPME Awards 2022. The projects Reviving Lakeshore: Adoption of Small and Micro Wetlands to Support Biodiversity & Human Livelihoods in the Shuanggui Lake and Wild and Scenic Drawdown Zone Designation: Operationalising Resilient Design to Adapting Hydro-fluctuation in the Three Gorges Reservoir designed by landscape and ecological restoration team of the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning, Chongqing University respectively won the Outstanding Award and Awards of Excellence.
Reviving Lakeshore: Adoption of Small and Micro Wetlands to Support Biodiversity & Human Livelihoods in the Shuanggui Lake won the Outstanding Award in the fields of stormwater and flood management and wildlife, biodiversity, habit enhancement or creation.
The design of this project introduces small and micro wetland elements such as ladder pond, wet pond, depression, pond pit, biological ditch, rain wetland, etc., and combines with the revegetated plant to optimize the structure and function of the ecosystem in the Shuanggui Lake, so that the wetland of the Shuanggui Lake, which was originally covered by severely degraded park lawns and some abandoned low-yield farmland, had a single habitat and was seriously polluted, becomes a natural space for birds, amphibians, insects and other wild animals to inhabit and a sustainable public space that provides high-value ecosystem services such as water conservation, biodiversity conservation, lakeshore carbon sink and wetland nature education.
Based on small and micro wetland network in the Shuanggui Lake, the practice and exploration of design team has promoted the development of ecological civilization in Liangping District, created a continuous body of urban wetlands where people live and work in peace and prosperity and also provided an excellent model for the sustainable development of ecology-economy-society in hilly cities. Liangping District was listed in the second batch of international wetland cities in May this year, the only city selected in Southwest China. The innovative adoption of small and micro wetlands has greatly promoted the construction of Liangping District as an international wetland city.
Wild and Scenic Drawdown Zone Designation: Operationalising Resilient Design to Adapting Hydro-fluctuation in the Three Gorges Reservoir won the Awards of Excellence in the fields of stormwater and flood management and wildlife, biodiversity, habit enhancement or creation.
Aiming at the severe environmental challenges caused by the combined action of construction management and seasonal hydrological changes of the world-famous Three Gorges Dam, resulting in a large area of drawdown zone, decline of vegetation and habitat, enrichment of non-point source pollution, and instability of bank slope structure, the project is constructed in the drawdown zone of Wuyang Dam in the Hanfeng Lake, Kaizhou District to carry out a long-term practical exploration on the restoration design of ecosystem in the drawdown zone. Through provenance screening and in-situ planting, the design team constructs a resource bank of suitable plants adapting to the water level change in the drawdown zone, and designs a variety of near-natural plant community configuration modes in the drawdown zone and further establishes a resilient landscape of drawdown zone with the most suitable plant species, the most complete life styles, diversified plant functions and rich seasonal aspects in the Wuyang Dam. On this basis, the team through the coupling design of elevation, topography, sediment and plants, creates a stable and vibrant habitat of drawdown zone, making the Wuyang Dam a vivid land for birds.
The ecological restoration of drawdown zone in the Wuyang Dam provides an excellent demonstration for the environmental control of the drawdown zone in the Three Gorges Reservoir and the sustainable development of ecologically degraded urban waterfront space and accumulates a frontier technology system. The series of engineering practices carried out by the design team in the Hanfeng Lake National Wetland Park of Kaizhou District, with the restoration of drawdown zone in the Wuyang Dam as an example, makes Hanfeng Lake the best restoration case of urban reservoir drawdown zone in which man and nature coexist synergistically and the case is widely concerned and praised at home and abroad.
It is reported that IFLA AAPME Awards-"Climate Crisis Design" is an international design award jointly organized by IFLA Asia-Pacific Region and IFLA Africa and Middle East. It calls for active actions in landscape architecture planning and design to deal with the current global climate and environmental upheaval crisis. In this competition, 9 categories of completed project awards were set and 20 Outstanding Awards (OA), 45 Awards of Excellence (AE) and 139 Honorable Mentions (HM) were selected.
