The latest news, updates and announcements, reports from our articles. http://www.getresilient.com Copyright 2012 Get Resilient. en-gb Sat, 25 May 2013 14:17:56 0000 Sat, 25 May 2013 14:17:56 0000 codeworks script (1.0.0) http://www.getresilient.com/login/uploaded/template/logo.jpg http://www.getresilient.com Get Resilient latest news, updates and announcements, reports from our articles 92 Lavalle is a rural district situated at the north east of Mendoza, Argentine. Surrounded by beautiful desert landscapes this place has, for many years, been home to the Huarpes, one of the last remaining aboriginal communities of the region of Cuyo, in the foothills of the Andes. Grouped in small, distant villages, these people received, a few years ago, official recognition from the government to apply and live under their own communitarian rules as a measure to protect cultural heritage. For generations the Huarpes have adapted their traditions to thrive, fighting against chronic water shortages and limited vegetation with tenaciously ingenuity. Consequently, they have learned to develop under harsh conditions far away from urban areas, and have developed remarkable strategies to increase their resilience to the inclement weather conditions. The value of the Huarpes’ knowledge is not lost on local decision makers. Lavalle’s municipal officer Oscar Chacón underlined this saying; “they know very well the desert, that’s why we always listen what they have to say”. You would be hard pressed to find anyone at the District office that would disagree with that sentiment. Nevertheless, in recent years, Huarpes communities have struggled to adapt to climate change. Heat waves and droughts have become even more frequent, sounding the alarm for the communities and exposing the fragility of their position. The fact remains that even well adapted communities such as the Huarpes struggle when water courses run dry. Many in the community have been forced to sacrifice some of their animals and irrigate their crops with potable water. The community’s resilience has been increased by maintaining close connections, and good relations with local authorities. Pablo Termini from the City of Lavalle Environmental Service Department explained that, “We knew [the Huarpes] were having problems, they came to us and we started to work together. We helped to build some channels to direct water surpluses from two main rivers - The Mendoza and The San Juan.” “If we don’t have cold winters and there is less snowfall in the Andes Mountains we have water supply problems throughout the summer. Mendoza’s rivers are mostly fed by snow melting so if we don’t have snow, the streams run dry” he continued. Water supply is problematic for rural and urban areas alike. As the water reaches suburban areas it is channelled along an intricate canal network from west to east, serving both rural and urban communities. Those further from the sources are often short of water especially if communities lie beyond agricultural areas where large quantities of water is used for irrigation.  The rural district of Lavalle is one such area; far away from the mountains watercourses serve only the regions’ urban areas. Water availability in the rural areas of the district, is extremely poor, posing considerable challenges for communities engaged in crop farming and caprine (goat) husbandry. A few years ago the situation for the Huarpes became so severe that, local newspapers published disturbing images showing the consequences for the local communities. Severe water shortages had given rise to severe undernourishment and forced slaughter of farm animals. The images caused a public outcry and resources were mobilised to assist the district. However, the problem of water scarcity in Mendoza remains complex. Managing competing interests is becoming increasingly difficult as resources reach critical scarcity. Mr Tremini explained that the physical adaptation measure was not sufficient to solve the water scarcity problem completely, saying “we had a lot of problems, even water steeling incidents. Some farmers opened the lock-gates to irrigate their lands in detriment of more distant settlements”. The Huarpe community of Laguna del Rosario decided to take proactive action to increase their resilience. They collaborated with the government in an effort to find and effective solution that would work for all water users in the region. Municipal representatives and community leaders started to work together to design simple strategies to resolve water supply issues. Their combined efforts eventually led to a workable solution that was grounded in the cultural heritage of the Huarpe community. For many years the Huarpes have learned to identify underground watercourses, observing especially wet areas during the infrequent rainy periods. By identifying these ancient watering holes in the desert, plans to create a network of natural springs were put together. Using the Huarpe’s know-how, municipal engineers started to dig 1-2 m diameter holes along river watercourses. The first “aguadas” (waterholes) steadily changed the arid soils and became water sources for farmers’ animals. In less than two years 12 waterholes were uncovered in Laguna del Rosario. The Huarpes are acutely aware of the significance of the impacts of climate change on their livelihoods. They know that it will keep forcing them to struggle against extended dry seasons and water related problems in the years to come. But they show a positive attitude. As one of them said to me just before I left Lavalle “we don’t need a lot of money to resolve our problems, we – the Huarpe people – just need genuine governmental support to acclimatise and keep developing our villages, after all, these are our lands”. The “aguadas” have helped increase the resilience of isolated rural communities, the experience of the Huarpes underlines the importance of collaboration and  seem to be a really good idea to fight against desert water supply problems. In this case innovative solutions to environmental problems have their roots in ancient techniques and cultural knowledge.   Pablo Fernández is a biologist and development practices consultant, dividing his time between living in Paris and Latin America. Pablo is experienced working in environmental education, CSR and projects development, with a large variety of non-governmental and private organizations in several countries. As an international consultant, climate change is one of his top concerns. He teaches courses on environmental sensibilization, climate change and development practices.  Find him on twitter: @pabfernan / Or online: practicasdeldesarrollo.blogspot.com http://www.getresilient.com/article/83 http://www.getresilient.com/article/83 Tue, 14 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT Johan Rockström, Director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, explains why we must redefine sustainable development and develop Sustainable Development Goals that link poverty eradication to the protection of Earth's life support. Following up from recent UN meetings on the definition of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a group of international scientists have published a call in Nature, arguing for a set of six SDGs that link poverty eradication to protection of Earth's life support.  They argue that in the face of increasing pressure on the planet's ability to support life, out-dated definitions of sustainable development threaten to reverse progress made in developing countries over the last decades. "Ending poverty and safeguarding Earth's life support system must be the twin priorities for the Sustainable Development Goals, says Rockström,  co-author of the Nature article. ___________________________________________  The six goals The new set of goals — thriving lives and livelihoods, food security, water security, clean energy, healthy and productive ecosystems, and governance for sustainable societies — aim to resolve this conflict. The targets beneath each goal include updates and expanded targets under the MDGs, including ending poverty and hunger, combating HIV / AIDS, and improving maternal and child health. But also a set of planetary "must haves": climate stability, reducing biodiversity loss, protection of ecosystem services, a healthy water cycle and oceans, sustainable nitrogen and phosphorus use, clean air and sustainable material use. Co-author Dr. Mark Stafford Smith, science director of CSIRO's climate adaptation research programme in Australia says: "The key point is that the SDGs must genuinely add up to sustainability. The SDGs have the potential to lock in the spectacular gains on human development that we have achieved in the past two decades and help the global transition to a sustainable lifestyle. But the link between these two aims must be more coherent".    A new model for sustainable development: the illustration explains the six goals that, if met, would contribute to global sustainability while helping to alleviate poverty. Download illustration(credit: Sustainable Development Goals for people and planet, Nature, Griggs et al (2013)) http://www.getresilient.com/article/82 http://www.getresilient.com/article/82 Thu, 25 Apr 2013 00:00:00 GMT Substitution of nature’s services with technological alternatives has been pursued with almost religious zeal as societies have industrialized over the past three centuries. But the time for reverse substitution may be upon us. In a wide variety of settings, from water purification to climate change adaptation, investors are increasingly considering the worthiness of green infrastructure solutions, such as mangrove restoration, rather than conventional gray investments, such as sea walls, to achieve the same environmental quality outcomes. But in times of fiscal austerity, cost-effectiveness is paramount. The problem is that infrastructure investors do not have a consistent and robust way to compare gray with green infrastructure in an apples-to-apples manner that is convincing to budget hawks. In addition, uncertainty is greater with “unproven” green infrastructure approaches. As a result, green solutions are often neglected. Here, we present the contours of a general methodology called green-gray analysis (GGA) and demonstrate its usefulness in a green-gray trade-off facing the Portland Water District in Maine. Results provide evidence for the superiority of green investments in several scenarios, purely on financial terms. When ancillary benefits, such as carbon sequestration or passive-use values for Atlantic salmon are factored in, the case becomes even more compelling. A replicable GGA methodology can be one important solution for scaling up green infrastructure investments worldwide. For almost a century, New York City has drawn its drinking water from the Catskill Mountains, more than 100 miles to the north. In April of 2007, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced the results of a several-year review of the city’s ongoing program to maintain clean drinking water supplies with forest and open space conservation in the Catskills rather than the construction of filtration plants. The results were encouraging. The EPA concluded that as long as the city agreed to set aside $300 million over the next 10 years to acquire land and restrain upstate development that causes runoff and pollution, the agency would exempt New York from having to build an $8 billion filtration plant.1 The Catskills aqueduct has been held up as the quintessential example of green infrastructure trumping gray and has prompted cities worldwide to consider alternative solutions to the infrastructure demands of the twenty-first century. Green infrastructure is increasingly recognized as a superior investment. Cities around the country are starting to realize the economic—to say nothing of environmental—benefits of this shifting reality. A recent analysis by New York City found that green roofs and bioswales could help meet water-quality goals with savings of more than $1 billion compared to conventional infrastructure; the Chesapeake Bay could reduce nitrogen loading at less than half the price by using cover crops instead of upgraded wastewater plants. The City of Philadelphia found that the net present value of green infrastructure for storm-water control ranged from $1.94 to $4.45 billion, while gray infrastructure benefits ranged from only $0.06 to $0.14 billion over a 40-year period.2 And using a system of wetlands, North Carolina could minimize storm-water runoff for 47 cents per thousand gallons treated. Using conventional storm-water controls, this figure jumps to $3.24 per thousand gallons.3-5 An emerging hypothesis in environmental management settings is that investment in ecosystem-based green infrastructure solutions provides economically superior environmental quality outcomes when compared to investments in technology-based or “gray” infrastructure. As noted by economists Lucy Emerton and Elroy Bos, “It is increasingly apparent that investment in ecosystems now can safeguard profits in the future, and save considerable costs.”6 While there is no single definition, current literature suggests that green infrastructure comprises “all natural, semi-natural, and artificial networks of multifunctional ecological systems within, around, and between urban areas, at all spatial scales.”7 Examples of green infrastructure investments include reforestation, installation of grass and riparian buffers, green roofs, porous pavement, urban trees, constructed wetlands, stream restoration, and best-management practices for agriculture and forestry. Many of these assets even appreciate in value over time. For instance, as urban trees mature, they do better at cooling down the urban heat-island effect. As riparian buffers mature, they do better at regulating water quality and flow, and supporting fisheries. This stands in stark contrast to gray infrastructure, which only depreciates. Yet there is no consistent and accessible methodology to compare green with gray. Although existing case studies are intriguing, green-gray analysis (GGA) is in its infancy and has yet to permeate public infrastructure investment decisions. While calculating the costs and benefits of gray infrastructure is relatively straightforward, placing analysis of green infrastructure costs and benefits on equal footing has not yet been formalized. As a result, financial savings potentially gained from green infrastructure investments are not considered or realized. Additionally, ancillary ecosystem service benefits are largely excluded from investment and infrastructure decisions. This methodological gap presents a formidable barrier to public infrastructure investment managers’ contemplating investment in green rather than gray infrastructure.8 But the tools exist. Despite the lack of formal guidance on comparing green with gray infrastructure, the general contour of a standardized GGA methodology emerges from a mix of economic decision theory, portfolio theory, public investment theory, non-market valuation, and a growing list of applied case studies. For example, federal analysts considering the best alternatives for configuring ports, highways, dams, and other major public infrastructure investments are already well steeped in social benefit-cost analysis (BCA) where long-term returns to society in the form of improved navigation, flood control, or transportation savings are compared with capital, maintenance, and operations costs. Green infrastructure presents another alternative that is typically overlooked, but which can nonetheless be compared—albeit with some added complexity—to these more conventional alternatives using standard methods of BCA. Drawing on these tools, we were able to distill six key components for an effective general methodology, which we then tested in Portland, Maine: First, the investment objective and constraints must be very clearly specified. Although intuitive, this step is essential for getting the math right, which involves making sure all relevant benefits and costs are included in the right units, and in the right places in the investment trade-off equations. Small computational errors—such as neglecting to annualize capital investments over the proper length of time—can have huge implications for the feasibility of either green or gray options. Specifying the investment objective in mathematical terms minimizes the probability of such errors occurring. GGA is a special case of public investment limited to situations where environmental outcomes are sought and where both gray and green infrastructure options exist. A survey of existing case studies and potential applications suggests that most green-gray analyses fall into one of three distinct investment objectives. Each of these objectives can be expressed by mathematical formulas familiar to investment managers and used for selecting the optimal investment portfolio when a diversity of options exists.9 Second, portfolios that include both green and gray investments must be developed. In each infrastructure investment situation, there may be one or more gray, and likely several green, investment options under consideration. Developing a portfolio of gray options is fairly straightforward, as technologies are relatively well understood. There is less familiarity with green options, although the literature on the number and applicability of various green infrastructure solutions is rapidly evolving.10 In constructing green portfolios, there are several unique aspects to consider, such as physical constraints (e.g., there are only so many streams where riparian buffers could be restored); the need to incorporate redundancy (e.g., replanting two acres of trees instead of one in case one burns down); and sequencing (e.g., obtaining water rights before constructing wetlands). A more complete GGA methodology would provide practical guidance on all of the unique aspects of green portfolio design. Third, the outcomes must be clearly modeled. This is perhaps the trickiest aspect of GGA. Quantitatively establishing the relationship between the level of investment in any one green infrastructure project and the environmental outcomes requires careful modeling that relates changes in ecosystem function to changes in economic services provided. As one example, there has been considerable work relating wetland acreage to associated maximum storm surge heights, and associated losses.11 On the other, there has been almost no work at all relating installation of green storm water controls to reductions in nitrogen or phosphorous runoff—most studies have focused on volume reductions. In these situations, the trickiest step is making assumptions about the relationship when there is little scientific information to go on. Fourth, present-value costs and benefits of individual green and gray measures must be quantified. Before portfolios of green or gray options are considered, each individual component needs to be analyzed by itself. An important consideration in GGA is to ensure that both green and gray options are analyzed on a common platform so that costs and benefits can be directly compared or combined. The gray infrastructure option should serve as the baseline since GGA is often considered in contrast to some impending gray investment decision, and not vice versa. Adopting gray as the baseline requires evaluation of green options within the general analytical framework offered by standard infrastructure investment methods. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency provides a useful synopsis of standard two-stage discounting to evaluate gray infrastructure investments.12 Present-value costs and benefits of green infrastructure can be modeled in precisely the same way, albeit with a few complexities. Fifth, and at the heart of GGA, is using alternative investment analysis to compare green against gray, or different combinations of green and gray together. Once the benefits and costs of individual green or gray measures are calculated, the next step is then to compare full investment portfolios. Depending on the investment objective, this comparison is carried out by using either benefit-cost analysis (BCA) or cost-effectiveness analysis. BCA is a technique that is used to estimate and sum up the future flows of benefits and costs given particular resource allocation or policy decisions. Based on this sum, the value of a particular choice can be compared against some set of alternatives. Cost-effectiveness analysis on the other hand is a technique for identifying the least-cost option for meeting a specific physical outcome. Finally, one must account for risk and uncertainty. Many believe that green infrastructure investments are generally riskier and more uncertain than gray. But gray is also subject to significant risks, such as plans for maintenance that are never carried out and technological failures that occur all too frequently. Nonetheless, sources of risk unique to green include the possibilities of floods, fires, insect outbreaks, extreme drought, and climate change to significantly affect the function of green infrastructure elements over the long run. Sources of uncertainty include poor existing data on implementation costs, speculative relationships between green infrastructure elements and the environmental outcome sought, and lack of understanding about important land-use trends, market trends, landowner behavior, or policy changes that have bearing on the investment decision. Risk and uncertainty can be dealt with in two fundamental ways—through project design and through project analysis. Redundancy, or having two or more green infrastructure elements included to achieve the same outcome, is one way to reduce risk and uncertainty in the design of green infrastructure investment portfolios. With respect to analysis, standard approaches for incorporating risk and uncertainty include sensitivity analysis, scenarios, and use of expected values. Portland Water District Case Study Drawing on these six components, we conducted a case study of the Sebago Lake Watershed in the Portland Water District in Maine (PWD). Sebago Lake contains some of the cleanest water in the Northeastern United States and is also the primary drinking-water source for PWD, supplying drinking water to over 200,000 people daily. PWD currently qualifies for filtration avoidance under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 1989 Surface Water Treatment Rule (SWTR). The rule waives public water systems from requirements to install filtration systems as long as concentrations of turbidity and either fecal or total coliform are maintained at or below regulatory baselines through upstream land-use management practices. In recent years, concerns have been expressed that upstream development, deforestation, and population growth trends may jeopardize the filtration waiver and force PWD to install a conventional filtration system. For example, the U.S. Forest Service has determined that certain areas of the Sebago Lake watershed are at high risk of forest conversion due to development pressure, which, coupled with unsustainable land use practices, are a major threat to water quality.,sup>13 In response, commercial water users, residents, nongovernmental organizations, recreation interests, and other stakeholders are actively investigating green infrastructure alternatives that would minimize the chance of losing the waiver and otherwise help reduce PWD’s water treatment costs. Using the GGA methods discussed above, we completed a preliminary analysis to provide an initial sense of the economic trade-offs involved and to identify the various data gaps and parameters that would need to be addressed for a more complete analysis. Using cost-effectiveness analysis for our framework, we compared the costs of a new filtration plant with investment in six green infrastructure elements over the next 20 years that together would help maintain the watershed’s high-quality waters. These included riparian buffers, upgrades to culverts, sustainability certification of future timber harvests, reforestation, and conservation easements. The quantity available and costs associated with the green infrastructure portfolio were determined through on-site consultations throughout the watershed, review of publicly available data, and GIS analysis. We ran six scenarios that represented different levels of investment, analysis periods, assumptions regarding the efficacy of green infrastructure measures, cost assumptions, and discount rates. Our key findings include: 1. The present-value life-cycle cost of building a new filtration plant would range from $97 to $155 million across the scenarios. 2. The present-value life-cycle cost of green infrastructure solutions range from $44 to $172 million across the scenarios. 3. Under four scenarios (see box 2, "The Six Scenarios"), green infrastructure represented a cost savings, with the most optimistic case of $111 million saved over 20 years. 4. Under two scenarios (S3, S6) gray infrastructure proved superior. Under the least optimistic for green, green infrastructure would represent a 44 percent increase in costs. 5. Uncertainty over green infrastructure efficacy and costs are what accounted for the wide range of outcomes across the modeled scenarios. 6. Ancillary benefits in the form of carbon sequestration and Atlantic salmon habitat would make an even more compelling case for investment in green infrastructure. By combining empirical data on the ground with calibrated nonmarket benefits transferred from other settings, we estimate that these nonmarket benefits would amount to $72 to $125 million over a 20-year timeframe. Including these ancillary benefits would make green infrastructure superior in all six scenarios. Towards More Widespread and Robust Applications of GGA Three insights emerge from our PWD case study. First, while there are certainly complexities involved, green infrastructure investments can be presented in a manner commensurate with conventional gray investments; the two can indeed be compared dollar-for-dollar, apples-to-apples, by public investment analysts. This suggests that, once fully developed, a GGA methodology could be a standard part of infrastructure investment decisions for a wide variety of settings. Second, the key to an actionable GGA is a robust underlying model that establishes the quantitative relationship between each green infrastructure component and the outcome sought, whether it be regulating pollutants at a specified threshold or generating net public benefits. These models will become more refined and accurate as GGA applications proliferate. Third, green infrastructure presents additional sources of risk and uncertainty relative to gray. Thus, any GGA must place a heavy emphasis on identifying and mitigating risk and uncertainty through portfolio design (e.g., a green multi-barrier approach), analytical adjustments (e.g., modeling the risk of failure), or sensitivity analysis. Nevertheless, and as demonstrated by the PWD case study, green infrastructure may represent savings large enough to warrant selection, even under conditions of significant uncertainty. A standardized GGA methodology that incorporates accurate cost-estimates and site-specific biophysical models will help investment analysts make the case for green infrastructure, even to the most skeptical budget hawks.   Acknowledgments Our partner, the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences, provided critical information for the analysis of the Sebago Lake Watershed. References 1. Depalma, A. City’s Catskill water gets 10-year approval. New York Times [online] (April 13, 2007) (www.nytimes.com/2007/04/13/nyregion/13water.html). 2. Stratus Consulting. A Triple Bottom Line Assessment of Traditional and Green Infrastructure Options for Controlling CSO Events in Philadelphia’s Watersheds (Stratus Consulting, Boulder, 2009). 3. PlanNYC. NYC Green Infrastructure Plan: A Sustainability Strategy for Clean Waterways [online] (City of New York, New York, 2011) (www.nyc.gov/html/dep/pdf/green_infrastructure/NYCGreenInfrastructurePlan...). 4. Chesapeake Bay Commission (CBC). Cost-Effective Strategies for the Bay: Smart Investments for Nutrient and Sediment Reduction [online] (CBC, Annapolis, MD) (www.chesbay.state.va.us/Publications/cost%20effective.pdf). 5. Army Corps of Engineers (ACOE). Applicability of Constructed Wetlands for Army Installations. Public Works Technical Bulletin 200-1-21 [online] (ACEO, Washington DC, 2001) (www.wbdg.org/ccb/ARMYCOE/PWTB/pwtb_200_1_21.pdf). 6. Emerton, L. & Bos, E. Value: Counting Ecosystems as an Economic Part of Water Infrastructure (IUCN, Gland, Switzerland and Cambridge, UK, 2004). 7. Tzoulas, K et al. Promoting ecosystem and human health in urban areas using green infrastructure: A literature review.Landscape and Urban Planning 81, 167–178. 8. Forest Research. Benefits of Green Infrastructure. Report Defra and CLG (Forest Research, Farnham UK, 2010). 9. Talberth, J, Gray, E & Yonavjak, L. Green versus gray: Towards a common approach for evaluating infrastructure investment trade-offs. Journal of Environmental Management (forthcoming). 10. American Society of Landscape Architects. Stormwater Case Studies [online]www.asla.org/stormwatercasestudies.aspx. 11. Resio, DT & Westerink, JJ. Modeling the physics of storm surges. Physics Today 61, 33–38 (2008). 12. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). OAQPS Economic Analysis Resource Document (U.S. EPA Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards, Innovative Strategies and Economics Group, Washington DC, 2009). 13. Gregory, PE & Barten, PK. Public and Private Forests, Drinking Water Supplies, and Population Growth in the Eastern United States [online] (Forest-to-Faucet Partnership, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2009) (forest-to-faucet.org/pdf/NA_insert_east.pdf) http://www.getresilient.com/article/81 http://www.getresilient.com/article/81 Fri, 12 Apr 2013 00:00:00 GMT During Herman Cain’s brief moment as the leader of the Republican primary pack in late 2011, his iconic “999” tax plan got its fair share of criticism from pundits and analysts. But nothing was as damaging as the fact that it looked suspiciously close to the tax code in another land: SimCity. Cain denied taking any ideas from the SimCity franchise, and the episode became just another punch line in a bizarre campaign. But maybe we should have taken advantage of that moment to ask whether the urban planning simulator could actually give lessons that might help us out in real life. Past SimCity games inspired many a dilettante’s interest in urban policy. Now the first new SimCity title in a decade, available for PCs in North America on Tuesday, can do even more to teach us about urbanism in the 21st century. The four major SimCity titles, released between 1989 and 2003, made urban planning something kids could do for fun. The task is to plot out a city, manage its services, grow its population, and—above all—keep the citizens happy. Along the way, the player, as mayor-overlord of the simulation, controls zoning, budgeting, transportation networks, power grids, and more. Whether or not it was meant for presidential politics, the big takeaway was that a balanced budget was the key to success, and megapolitan sprawl was the reward.   The decade since SimCity 4’s release has seen a major urban renaissance. For the first time in history, most of the world’s population lives in cities. Big cities are safer than they’ve been in generations, and cookie-cutter suburbsare falling swiftly out of fashion. In their place, the New Urbanism movement has taken hold, spreading the gospel of dense, walkable, tech-savvy, environmentally friendly cities. These values have become paramount for cities around the world, and guiding principles for cities built from scratch. It’s only right that the new SimCity, which Slate’s Farhad Manjoo deems “crazily addictive,” embraces these new precepts and builds on them, showing the rewards and challenges of the new urban planning. Chief among them: understanding all the systems at play in urban life, and figuring out how to manage the information they give us. The game’s so good that when FastCoExist brought together a bunch of urban planners to play, thinking that they would work together to create utopia, they ended up becoming insanely competitive. It used to be that ignorance was bliss. Beyond managing commercial, residential, and industrial zones, and their necessary infrastructure, players mostly just knew when things went really right—or very badly. Thanks to new computer modeling, however, SimCities are now functions of citizens, networks, resources, and consequences—making them more applicable to the real world than ever before. In past games, all it took to fix pollution was bulldozing some factories. Now, actions affecting the environment have real, lasting consequences.   To tinker with the environment during a preview of SimCity, I created Sneedville, a playground for my more destructive tendencies. The area in which I founded my city was rich in coal and metal ore, so I chose to specialize in industry. The town began with an industrial site on top of the ore deposits. I constructed neighborhoods so factories and mines would have employees, and I built commercial zones where citizens could shop. As the simulation played out, the industrial zone thrived, and the mines brought in money from other cities in the region. Because of the work available to them, the residents of Sneedville were low-income. This limited the city’s tax revenue, and there was little incentive for people to move into town. Worse, data showed that pollution from the industrial park was lowering property values and diminishing quality of life. It also turned out that the ore beneath the mines was being depleted. The city was off to a decent start financially, but following the trend lines wasn’t hard. Real estate was limited, so I needed to make a decision. Should I dedicate myself to industry, knowing it will bring money as well as environmental damage, and that the area’s lifeblood would someday run out? Or should I try diversifying the economy by shifting to, say, commerce, education, or tourism? The second approach would take time, money, and land away from the city’s greatest source of income, and there was no guaranteed success. My ill-fated city faced two challenges that are all too familiar for real urban areas. First is the difficulty of changing course. The decisions I made early on made sense and brought rewards. But as I focused on maximizing them, other elements suffered. Even though it was a simulation, the degree of ownership I felt over this town led to a real sense of conflict when faced with the risks of correcting course. It’s a situation all too familiar in the Rust Belt, where cities have long relied on the once lucrative manufacturing industry for jobs and tax revenue. As those dried up, Detroit and Cleveland became notorious for their struggle to move on. Pittsburgh, on the other hand, made notable progress by acknowledging that its days as a steel powerhouse were over, finding new life by investing in research and education.   Similarly, the second lesson was one in resilience—a wildly popular buzzword at the moment. As long as the area relied on mining, a shutdown in the supply chain brought everything to a halt. If storage facilities filled up, or transportation shut down, or a fire broke out, people couldn’t work and the city couldn’t make money. Urban resilience had its big moment in the spotlight after Hurricane Sandy. Flooded subways and busted power grids hobbled New York City for days and caused an estimated $18 billion in damage there. The question then was how to limit the damage from increasingly powerful natural disasters, and that’s still a worthy question to ask. But one thing that’s not as obvious to us, that SimCity demonstrates expertly, is how even small events can have cascading consequences. Another way SimCity accurately captures in the leading edge of urban planning is through its use of Big Data. Cities around the world are using sensors to measure everything from energy and water usage to pollution levels and crime trends. The game puts the player at the helm of the ultimate smart city as it tracks just about every metric of life in the simulation. At the click of a button, dynamic, colorful maps—inspired by the infographics of data scientist Edward Tufte—present real-time data on traffic, crime, pollution, public health, property values, and much more. (There’s even a map showing human waste as it flows to sewage treatment plants—a gross, mesmerizing way to find the tempo of a city.) The real problem for the game’s designers: figuring out how to turn massive amounts of data into meaningful information. “We knew from previous SimCitys that there’s this data overload that can happen that turns off a lot of players,” said Stone Librande, SimCity’s lead designer. “[That] game isn’t approachable because it feels like you’re playing a spreadsheet.” That’s a fact that real cities need to realize as they embrace technology and data to help inform their citizens. They can collect and release all kinds of data, but it’s essentially meaningless if it’s not presented in a useful way. SimCity’s creative director Ocean Quigley, who lives in Oakland, Calif., looked to his own city’s crime map as a starting point, and built on the idea from there. The result is something like an ideal version of Rio de Janeiro’shigh-tech command center, which collects data in order to identify trends in the city. IBM’s chief technology officer, told the New York Times that the command center runs on “sense-making software,” and that’s the best description of how SimCity treats data. One map might show a high death rate in a corner of a city. Glancing at a map for crime or illness can shed light on the fact that emergency vehicles can’t get there in time, or pollution is out of control, or those enthralling sewage pipes have backed up and spread disease. Once you know the problem, you can get started on a solution.   After understanding the real-time, on-demand stats in SimCity, you’ll want to know what your city—the one you live in—has to offer. With a few small exceptions, you’ll probably find out how much you don’t know about your area, and how much it doesn’t know about itself. Cities around the world are latching on to the open data movement to fix this. Palo Alto, Calif., recently launched an online dashboard for public data, and groups like Code for America pair local governments with programmers and designers to help open up data to the people. However, turning data into usable forms is still difficult for cash-strapped cities, and even opening up that data to the public can become mired in politics. Growing up in a household that loved SimCity, my family had a common refrain that anyone holding public office should be able to pass the SimCity Test. The newest game, putting players face-to-face with climate change, resilient systems, and open data, makes that more true now than ever before.   Adam Sneed is a researcher for Future Tense at the New America Foundation. Follow him on Twitter at @atsneed This article arises from Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, the New America Foundation, and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, visit the Future Tense blog and the Future Tense home page. You can also follow them on Twitter. http://www.getresilient.com/article/80 http://www.getresilient.com/article/80 Sun, 24 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT In March 2005 I wrote the following: “In 1934, Aldo Leopold, a young professor at the University of Wisconsin and one of the pioneering figures of the environmental movement, tried to recreate a prairie on a piece of disused farm-land. He discovered what countless others have discovered after him: that it is extremely difficult to design and assemble an ecosystem. “Like a prairie, savannah or rain-forest, the new and renewable energy industry must also evolve to form a complete, stable and complex ecosystem. “Sector-specific legislation, like the sowing of seeds of a particular strain of grass in creating a prairie, clearly has a role to play. Research grants, renewable obligations, portfolio standards, power feed-in tariffs and so on can all ensure at least temporary success of some species of new energy companies. “On their own, however, can they ever be sufficient to create a sustainable new energy ecosystem? Or will we just end up with a hothouse collection of subsidy-supported exotics, dependent forever on the efforts of politicians to prune back the advances of the fossil fuel undergrowth?” In other words, the global shift to clean energy is all about systems. And not just one system either. It interacts with politics, regulation and finance, as well as with adjacent industries such as transportation, real estate and telecoms. One of the main implications is that analysis at the level of just one clean energy technology will only get you so far. That is why Bloomberg New Energy Finance set out from the very start to bring knowledge under one roof about as many elements of the transition as possible. The value of a solar rooftop in a world of electric vehicles is very different from the value of the same solar rooftop in a world without. The value of demand response is negligible in a world optimised around “baseload-plus-peak” generating capacity. The value of energy efficiency is negligible in a world of fuel subsidies. And so on. We saw the weakness of reductionist thinking in a system world, in the responses to our recent analysis showing that wind power is now cheaper than coal on an unsubsidised, levelised-cost basis in Australia. There was outrage and disbelief – mainly from those closely aligned with the Australian coal industry – yet our analysis unequivocally showed that in an electricity system capable of absorbing all the power produced by a wind farm, the returns are better than from building a new coal-fired power station. It did not say you should dismantle existing power stations. It did not say you should never build anything but wind. The problem with a levelised cost calculation is that it makes lots of assumptions, not least about capacity utilisation, and it does not include the cost of managing intermittency. What happens when you saturate the system with wind or solar depends on what you think is going to happen next with power storage, demand response, electric vehicles, mandated back-up and dozens of other factors. These are all highly dynamic because, of course, they are part of a complex system, and systems exhibit emergent behavior. You can spend a lifetime studying the construction of a single neuron, yet know little of what drives a nematode, let alone a human. Real-life systems exhibit unexpected population surges and crashes, periods of equilibrium punctuated by periods of shattering change, tipping points, phase changes, extinctions. This is the reality of the world’s energy transition: it is dynamic, complex, unpredictable and fraught with risk. And it is among these shifting sands that energy decision-makers must plant their feet. Not surprisingly, perhaps, some choose to cling to old certainties, heuristics that worked fine during a long period of strategy stability: demand stimulation, baseload-plus-peak, centralisation, scale, vertical integration, dispatch management, control, confidentiality. But a shifting environment means increasingly replacing dinosaur heuristics with mammal heuristics: efficiency, flexibility, responsiveness, open data, transparency, coalitions. It is with this system approach in mind that we have designed the agenda of our upcoming sixth Bloomberg New Energy Finance Summit (which takes place in New York, on 22 to 24 April). We are focusing it on what we are calling the New Energy ROI: Resilience, Optionality and Intelligence, after three strategic elements which we think can be decision-makers’ allies as they place bets in an energy environment characterised by risk and change. Resilience The energy world is becoming more volatile. Energy systems need to be able to withstand larger shocks, from more quarters than ever before. Technological change. Commodity price spikes. Climate-related extreme weather. Financial instability. Policy change. Impacts on the energy system from any of these sources may begin gradually, but they do not end that way. Floodwaters rise gradually, but can jump from “within tolerances” to “catastrophic” with a marginal movement; intake water temperatures have forced the shutdown of nuclear plants in France and in the eastern US. So it is too with technological change. The reduction in price of solar between 2000 and 2010 made little impact on its viability. The same percentage reduction since 2010 has meant that huge markets for unsubsidised rooftop solar are now opening up. To borrow Ernest Hemingway’s description in The Sun Also Rises of how a character lost his fortune, impacts happen “Gradually, and then all at once.” More than ever, therefore, decision-makers need to ask not just “what is the best expected outcome”, but “what is the worst that can happen”. Certain solutions are inherently better than others. Distributed beats centralised. Diversity beats a mono-culture. Consensus beats confrontation. Local beats distant. Resilience means power storage, to build in tolerance. It means smart grids, to match supply and demand. It also means future-proofing the design and location of assets; floodplains and valleys which provide cheap access to cooling and make-up water may be out of the money if they bring flood risk in future climate scenarios. Financial firms may be ahead in this respect; after all, Thomas Edison’s very first electricity plant in New York City served a single client – JP Morgan and Company. During Hurricane Sandy, one of the few fully operational buildings in Lower Manhattan was Goldman Sachs’ headquarters. Hurricane Sandy’s impacts inspired Governor Andrew Cuomo to create the NYS2100 Commission “in response to the recent, unprecedented, and severe weather events experienced by New York State and the surrounding region.” The executive summary of its recent draft report invokes “resilience” 36 times and demands that New York “rebuild smart: ensure replacement with better options and redundant systems”. Optionality Optionality means thinking through the various scenarios that might follow a decision, not just Plan A, and placing appropriate value on possibilities opened up or shut down by each path. Breaking projects into elements has value. The ability to delay a capital commitment has value. Adding assets in smaller increments has value. Reducing capital intensity has value. The ability to hedge or insure outcomes has value. A mine-mouth coal plant is only – and forever – that. Its options are limited. But an electric utility or a fuels distribution company is fundamentally a provider of energy and related services, and not just a coal generator or a gas burner. Optionality allows a company to embrace new opportunities first at the margin, but eventually at the heart of operations. Most century-old firms know this already, as do all technology companies. Today, IBM is a services company; Apple a consumer devices and services company. Asking the counterfactual “what would they be if they still made only mainframes or iMacs?” gives a simple answer: they would be out of business. Energy is a service to meet a need. As technical and societal needs change, so must the service, and that means portfolio options. Some utilities hold fast to decades-old strategies and asset portfolios, but many of their bankers already think in terms of option pricing when analyzing new power generation. Investment banks are already pricing in risks for one-way fossil fuel bets that drive up the cost of new-build coal plants in Australia, as our recent research has highlighted – and try finding a major investment bank comfortable financing a new coal plant in the US. For institutional investors, the question is much the same: “Are you comfortable allocating funds in a one-way bet without hedging against technology, policy, regulation, economics, or environment?” For long-term assets that may be exposed to unquantifiable risks, traditional models of analysis run out of oxygen. As Harvard Business School professor Martin Weitzman states in a recent paper, the assumption that risk-adjusted discount rates “decline over time towards the risk-free rate is very much dependent on the assumption that the project is not risk-exposed.” The gathering momentum of the movement to force divestment from fossil fuel companies is an example of this change in discourse. In a 1990 referendum, 52% of Harvard students voted to divest from South African firms, with a 38% turn-out. Last year in a first-of-a-kind referendum, 72% of Harvard students voted to divest its $30bn endowment from fossil fuels with a 55% turn-out. In response, the Harvard Corporation stated that it “is not considering divesting from companies related to fossil fuels,” as most institutional investors would say on first instance. Are you prepared to bet that this generation of students will fail? What is your plan B? Intelligence Our third strategy to deal with the changing energy system is Intelligence, in all its forms. One example is up-to-date information on costs. Our own work on the cost of clean energy shows that power generation from PV has become anywhere from 35 percent to 55 percent cheaper, depending on which technology you choose, over a three-year period, while generation from onshore wind has come down by around 15 percent. (The cost of generation from offshore wind has meanwhile risen significantly.) And what about costs in the future? There is an underlying experience curve for PV, onshore wind and even offshore wind – that will produce further improvements over the medium term. Smart decision-makers need the best information about what the future will bring, and we look forward to continuing to provide the best possible information on future energy options. Intelligence is also about collecting, analysing and harnessing data that is several orders of magnitude beyond what was available to energy companies in previous decades. GE chief executive Jeff Immelt recently referred to the emerging world of connected, sensor-imbedded machines and the processing power to analyse it as the “Industrial Internet”. Energy efficiency software applications are allowing building owners to optimise consumption and control costs with greater granularity than ever before. Smart meters make possible the use of detailed information on which consumers use electricity when, and offer the opportunity to shape their consumption habits over time. Smart grid sensors and analytics software allow utilities to pinpoint and correct faults, and optimise energy networks in response to real-time conditions. Opportunities for new intelligence range from managing grid losses to predicting renewable and distributed generation performance, from pricing strategies and maintenance schedules to arbitrage opportunities. Ultimately, new connected and intelligent capacities allow us to, in Immelt’s words, to “find meaning where it did not exist before”. And not only meaning: value. Finally intelligence is about improving our ability to learn. The era of the internet and open data has made possible the rapid transmission of ideas and practices that might have taken many years to spread in the old days of centralised, conventional energy. A White Paper I co-wrote last summer with eight international policy experts on Open Source Software and Crowdsourcing for Energy Analysis, argued that open modeling efforts can improve the utility and accessibility of energy models, and lower the cost of data collection and management. This advance should make it far easier for developing countries, in particular, to make intelligent choices on energy – difficult choices, involving billions of dollars.   Michael Liebreich is Chief Executive of Bloomberg New Energy Finance: Twitter: @MLiebreich http://www.getresilient.com/article/79 http://www.getresilient.com/article/79 Fri, 15 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT White sandy beaches, crystal clear seas, coral reefs and guaranteed sunshine. These are the natural assets that ensure that tourists continue to flock to the Islands of the Caribbean. But over the last few years there has been an extraordinary invasion that threatens to seriously damage the economies and ecosystems of the pristine coastlines. Island authorities from Anguilla to Tobago have been trying to rid seas and beaches of huge quantities of algal seaweed that has been, quite literally, piling up along the coasts. But as the authorities struggle to identify the cause of the algal blooms, the answer may lie in scientific research undertaken over 15 years ago. The intruder is a species of algae called Sargassum that has tiny air bubbles inside it which allow it to float on the surface of the water. Though harmless in small quantities, the algae have been washing up on Caribbean beaches in huge numbers. In Antigua, the St. James’s Club & Villas had to close for 5 weeks in order to remove 10,000 tons of Sargassum from its beaches.  Swimmers have been warned away from some beaches because of fears that they could get tangled in particularly thick flows of the seaweed, which has been creating piles of up to 5 feet high.   Authorities struggle to deal with such large quantities of the algae. In Barbados, the government has used booms of the type designed to contain oil spills to try and prevent the Sargassum from coming too close to the beaches. The algae normally originate from the Sargasso Sea, an area of very weak, circular ocean currents to the east of the Caribbean Sea.While authorities continue to try and prevent the Sargassum from coming too close to the coast, there has also been some innovative adaptation measures put in place by some island states. In Tobago, for example, the government has been encouraging farmers to use the seaweed as fertilizer for their crops. If treated properly, the seaweed can be mulched and spread on farmland to create an effective organic fertilizer. But the scale of the problem that has caught authorities by surprise; David Freestone, executive director of the Sargasso Sea Alliance, was unequivocal, “This is completely unprecedented… [it] has never happened [on this scale] in living memory”. If left unchecked the phenomenon could have serious implications for the region’s tourist industry that makes up 80% of GDP for some of the islands in the Caribbean archipelago. The blooms, although less intense than a month ago, have lingered on into the November high season. While they are not directly dangerous to human health, in large quantities the algae omits a strong odor as organisms that get caught in the mass decay on the shorelines.   So what is causing these algal super-blooms? And why have they only recently appeared? There have been many theories as to what has caused the Sargassum invasion, ranging from shifts in ocean currents to the gulf oil spill. Some, including Jerry Ault, professor of marine biology and fisheries at the University of Miami, suggests that climate change may be a factor. Cooler autumn weather slows algae growth but climate change may have caused, warmer autumn temperatures and slight shifts in ocean circulation patterns and nutrient systems which could have stimulate Sargassum growth and cause it to drift westward. Possibly. But, in my opinion, the most robust explanation for the phenomenon can be found by looking at resilience theory. In short the ecosystem changed from one stable state to another, from one that was not algae dominated to one that was. There was a ‘regime shift’. This theory is supported by a study in the mid 1990s, published in the journal Science, which studied the reasons for large Sargassum blooms around the coast of Jamaica. Terence Hughes, the study’s author, showed how ‘regime shifts’ in complex marine ecosystems had allowed the algae to flourish. His findings clearly highlight the importance of analyzing and understanding the significance of every part of complex socio-ecological systems. Hughes and his team found that over-fishing in the region reduced the number of herbivorous and carnivorous fish. Initially this had little impact on algal growth as it had the effect of dramatically increasing the number of Diadema sea urchins (the fish were their main predator). Diadema urchins graze heavily on algae keeping the Sargassum at bay. At this point the reef had less fish and more urchins, but recovery was still possible. If fishing was reduced then the stocks could recover and the urchins would be eaten back. But with less fish, the system had become less resilient. It was more vulnerable to other shocks. Over time ocean acidity increased, principally due to climate change, and there were several hurricanes and storm surges, in quick succession. These shocks destroyed some of the coral and with it the Diadema urchins. In the normal way, storm damage to reefs is not catastrophic, the reefs recover, and, in the meantime, there are enough herbivorous fish to keep Sargassum blooms at bay.   In this case of course, there were too few fish, and so when the urchins lost much of their habitat, there was neither enough fish, nor enough urchins to control the algal blooms, and the ecosystem had entered into a fundamentally different state. One where there was nothing left to control the algae. The relationships that govern complex systems can influence not only the actors within that system, but can also affect the vulnerability of each actor and of the system as a whole. In human systems, complexity reduces our ability to understand the relationships that make them work (see the global financial system before the 2008 crash and, worryingly, see the global financial system as it remains today). The emergence of algal blooms in the Caribbean Sea shows that in order to understand the implications of our actions that affect such systems, we must first understand what gives the system its resilience.    Will Bugler is Editor at Get Resilient, he has worked within the ‘Adapting to Climate Change’ department at Defra, Friends of the Earth, and for the UK government's advisory body on climate change issues; The Energy and Climate Change Committee. http://www.getresilient.com/article/78 http://www.getresilient.com/article/78 Fri, 08 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT A recent food security panel held by Columbia University’s Earth Institute hosted a rich discussion about a wide range of food security matters. But it is important to look at not just the very real food insecurity of the developing world, but also to question how robust our own food systems are. One small detail from the afternoon, concerning a specific kind of fragility, was especially striking. The treatment of this detail illustrates both my admiration for, and frustration with, the Earth Institute and its worldview. Fragility can be characterized in many ways, such as crop vulnerability to weather shocks, or falling yields due to environmental degradation or ever-more resistant pests. Fragility can also be more formally defined as the way in which a system is – oftentimes endogenously – vulnerable to disruption or outright breakdown, as defined by Charles Perrow’s important work on complex technological systems. But it was economic fragility that was the focus of the following chart, shared by the Earth Institute’s Jessica Fanzo, from FAO’s “The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2011” (p14): Note that this is the lowest quintile of the population for each country. But it should provide an indication of the extent to which food security relates to financial fragility as well. That is, any increase in food prices requires a significant additional portion of a family’s income in these countries, if they are to maintain the same level of caloric intake, let alone nutrition. More frequently, families are not able to spend more money on food, and must employ other strategies to make ends meet: fewer meals; less caloric or nutritional value in each meal; the reallocation of meals away from members who are not income earners; taking children out of schools when a family must choose between education and food (i.e., as a result of school fees); the preferencing of employment for children over education, etc.   This kind of anxiety is inherently difficult for people in the U.S. to envision. Let’s look at our own situation to better understand why. In the United States we are used to a good deal of food security, simply because food is ridiculously affordable. In fact, we pay less per capita than any other nation. Setting aside the arguments that have been amply made elsewhere about the fact that we as end-consumers do not pay for the “true cost” of food, there are three other things worth pointing out: how little we pay; the consistency with which we pay so little; and the further invariability of how we spend our food money. The first point is illustrated by the USDA’s research that, for every year this century, our food costs as a proportion of income have come in under 10% of total income. Not only that, but during this time that number has consistently ranged from 9.5% to 9.9%. In fact, from a superficial point of view, neither of the two recessions during the past 11 years, nor stagnation of real income, have moved the needle very much. This is altogether remarkable. Moreover, we have seen a steady decline since the post-War peak of 23.5% in 1947, so this is a trend that has decades of socio-economic and technological momentum behind it. Third, and most interestingly, is how we choose to eat. In 2011, eating at home took up 5.7% of our income, while eating out constituted 4.1%. In fact, the same USDA surveys inform us that during the last decade or so, we have consistently averaged a 60-40 split between eating at home and eating out. This too is remarkable, since the received wisdom dictates that eating out is one of the first activities attenuated by a recession. Perhaps we cut out more big-ticket meals for cheaper but more frequent ones, but the ratio essentially stays the same. These three indicators imply that the system for growing, processing and distributing food in the U.S. has been supremely successful, if only because it has smoothed out any shocks that would suddenly raise prices for consumers (or depress prices for producers). This is especially impressive when one considers that price spikes have consequences, such as the Arab Spring. Obviously, the Earth Institute, like anyone else, would love to see the poor of Tajikistan or Ghana progress towards a world where their food expenses are both a smaller fraction of their income, and much more resistant to disruption (we can hold off on getting them to Applebee’s for a while yet). However, is reproducing the food security that we seemingly enjoy in this country at all viable – and is our own food security even all that realistic? _________________________________________________ To understand this, we ought to look beyond price stability, which is really symptomatic of the underlying system, and question the infrastructure that makes this stability possible. Our food systems are in fact optimized and stretched to the breaking point. Recall Charles Perrow, who characterized complex systems by analyzing how “tightly coupled” they were, among other traits. To paraphrase; the sub-components of a tightly coupled system have prompt and major impacts on each other. If what happens in one part has little impact on another part, or if everything happens slowly (in particular, slowly on the scale of human thinking times), the system is not described as “tightly coupled.” Tight coupling also raises the odds that operator intervention will make things worse, since the true nature of the problem may well not be understood correctly. This is an excellent characterization of our current food system. As a simple example, consider the trajectory of a salmonella outbreak, where the ground meat from a single tainted animal can then be intermingled with hundreds of others. The consolidation and verticalization of our food system amplifies the ease with which tainted food is spread. Moreover, the difficulty of tracing tainted food back through the supply chain leads to even greater volumes of food being recalled. And this is something to be concerned about, since the frequency of food recalls has been rising for the last decade. Another example of tight coupling in our food system is the just-in-time nature of our distribution systems. Most of our cities have only a few days’ worth of groceries available in stores; a complex distribution network is constantly replenishing the needs of an ever-more urbanizing nation. Disruptions such as Hurricane Sandy, which brought a one-two punch of taking down both transportation and electrical systems – that is, both delivery and refrigeration – highlight the thin ice on which we skate when we put a premium on “freshness” to the detriment of resilience. An even more compelling example is our reliance on monocultures that increasingly bend our food production system towards a state of brittleness. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in our excessively enthusiastic use of GMO crops, which I will discuss below. But suffice to say that the years of R&D necessary to come up with drought-resistant strains of cereal crops put all our eggs in a basket, and expose our staples to the catastrophic emergence of so-called “superweeds” and “superpests.” In this way we are engineering our food system to rapidly converge to a linear system that is bottlenecked by a series of single points of failure. There are other factors that indirectly support and ensure the success of food price stability, some of which are under differing degrees of pressure, and some of which are thriving. These include an extensive highway and railroad system; cheap fossil fuels that undergird our transportation system and fertilizer production; and a rich set of subsidies that have been enjoyed by farmers for decades. Add to this steady technological progress, including GMOs; advanced financial markets that smooth price fluctuations via futures contracts; and the communications and IT infrastructures that nearly erase market information costs, and we can see that there is a tremendous amount of context that goes into ensuring food price stability. Thus, the extraordinary food price stability we see in the United States is really a red herring, a lagging indicator not dissimilar to the stock price of a company whose sales are still robust, but whose R&D pipeline has been exhausted. The idea that poor countries can approach greater levels of price stability through the importation of this model is difficult to conceive, and yet that is precisely what is happening. _________________________________________________ Let’s return to the macro-level thinking evident in the first chart, which showed the portion of income spent on food by the poorest quintile. It is easy to compare US food price stability with that of other countries and state, “Yes, these are the outcomes we want to achieve.” But we ought to be careful what outcomes we choose to privilege, since these will determine the direction of our efforts. For example, if your primary outcome is to successfully feed lots of people, it is logical to favor GMO crops (as we do in the United States). However, this kind of approach does not look forward to possible future consequences. One of the things I like about the Earth Institute is its emphasis on the importance of data, and the use of that data to drive policy. However, data is intrinsically backward-looking, and the evidence-driven attitude can thus become fundamentally conservative to a fault. But we don’t need to look to the future, and its admitted lack of data, to find trouble. It is not so much the productivity of GMOs that is at issue, but their dependence on a restrictive, indeed almost monopolistic, intellectual property regime. The below chart should give an idea of the extent to which a single company controls the technology that has ensured, on the supply side, cheap food enjoyed by millions of Americans (and their livestock).   To drive home the intensity of Monsanto’s monopoly, it should be mentioned that while this 2004 chart represents only GMO-planted acreage, currently 90% of US soybean planting is GMO. But it is the manner in which Monsanto flexes its intellectual property rights that is of greatest concern: as of 2010, Monsanto has “filed 136 lawsuits against farmers for alleged violations of its Technology Agreement and/or its patents on genetically engineered seeds…in 27 states… Sums awarded to Monsanto in 70 recorded judgments against farmers totaled $23,345,820.99.” Thus food price stability, in the form of GMO crops, is provided  courtesy of a monopolist unhesitant to sue its own customers into bankruptcy. Despite all attendant criticisms, contrast this with the original open-source ethos of Norman Borlaug and the hybrids that precipitated the Green Revolution of the 1970s, and it is easy to conclude that we are generating fewer options for ourselves, not more. Another troubling aspect of Earth Institute thinking came up in the panel’s answer to my own question. I wanted to know about the impact of long-term leases on a country’s agricultural productivity, a relatively recent trend. Following the 2008 food price spike, rich countries with a dearth of agricultural land have sought to secure basic food supplies. By 2011, South Korea, Saudi Arabia and others have pioneered 80 million hectares’ worth of deals, and Africa, due in no small part to its weak governance, has become the favored site for these so-called “land grabs.” The panelists were happy that private-sector interest in partnerships is finally taking hold, but under what terms? This is resource extraction writ large, and anyone looking for real consequences need look no further than Madagascar: When Madagascan President Marc Ravalomanana was ousted in March 2009, a major factor in his new unpopularity was the deal he had made with South Korea’s Daewoo corporation, effectively handing over 1 million hectares of Madagascar’s best agricultural land. The firm planned to use a South African workforce to grow 5 million metric tons of corn a year in addition to cultivating 120,000 hectares of palm oil, mainly for export to land-poor Korea to ensure its food security. With two-thirds of the Madagascan population living below the poverty line of less than US$ 0.64 a day and more than 500,000 relying on food aid, the deal provoked outrage from the international community. The 99-year land lease was quickly repealed by incoming Madagascan President Andry Rajoelina. However, the really compelling bit will happen when the two threads I cite above become entwined – that is, when companies like Monsanto begin selling GMO technologies for planting millions of hectares that virtually no longer belong to a country. Indeed, will host governments have any say when GMO seeds are used to fuel the monocultures that naturally accompany such economies of scale? Will Monsanto, et al. enforce the integrity of their intellectual property against other farmers of the host countries with equal gusto as against their own, for example when GMO seed spills across the boundaries of leased land, as it inevitably will? And, to return to our first chart, will these arrangements have any effect on the ability of the most vulnerable, in the poorest countries, to better afford the food they need? Outcomes are indeed something that ought to be chosen carefully. There is a lot to like about the Earth Institute. A sprawling enterprise whose mandate is to cultivate basic and applied research to inform public policy and generate awareness about the great issues of our time must be on to something. And yet, emerging from Lerner Hall on a chilly November day, I want to caution it and other development institutions playing by yesterday’s rules: careful what you wish for, you might just get it.     http://www.getresilient.com/article/77 http://www.getresilient.com/article/77 Fri, 22 Feb 2013 00:00:00 GMT As the horsemeat scandal gallops on apace and we learn that as well as worrying about the amount of sugar in meat products we are also to be concerned about their Shergar levels, it is appropriate to reflect on the nature of the meat-supply chain. The saga has not only exposed the full extent of the capacity for social media to generate jokes at a frankly frightening rate, but has also uncovered how spiralling complexity can undermine resilience. One of the most surprising things about the affair, after the initial shock that something labelled ‘beef’ may actually be up to 100% horse, is the  difficulty that the authorities have had in finding the source of the problem. One might have thought that, on discovering that a large portion of beef products that have been sold, in good faith, to consumers across Europe, was horsemeat, it would be a fairly simple process to find the source. Yet weeks after the discovery of horse DNA was first made in beef burgers sold throughout the UK and Ireland, the authorities have only just discovered that the likely source is in Romania. Not an exact company mind you, just someone in Romania. Resilience in the food supply chain, as with most complex-systems, should protect against a wide variety of shocks. Environmental disasters, fuel price rises and technological failures are all shocks that can disrupt the supply chain. However, disturbances can take innumerable forms, and in the case of the horsemeat scandal, we see that corruption and criminal activity can also constitute a threat to the system. There are many drivers for this, religious conviction or revenge could feasibly lead people to undertake criminal acts that might threaten complex systems. In this case, of course, it appears that the primary driver was money.   As agriculture has become increasingly market oriented, exposure to price-related shocks has inevitably increased. This is not an irreconcilable weakness but it does mean that, as with any other free-market, it is vulnerable to corrupt practice. We have seen this in many other systems as well of course, from bankers fixing Libor rates to fishermen under weighing their catches. Such weaknesses are moderated through measures such as monitoring, regulation and penal deterrents. These control processes rely, to a large extent on transparency and the availability of information. Prior to the horsemeat scandal many people - this author included - may have understandably assumed that traceability would not be a problem, especially for branded products sold by the some of the biggest retailers in Europe. Horsemeat in a lasagne? They’ll find out who is responsible in hours, minutes even, a click of a mouse button, one phone call. Now of course, we are all too aware that this is not the case. So why is it that when a beef burger is found to be a horse burger no one quite knows who to blame? The simple answer is complexity. So often the enemy of resilience, complexity can make systems far more susceptible to shock, as identifying and understanding the areas of weakness become increasingly hard. The horsemeat scandal is a prime example of this. You don’t have to take my word for it; Dalton Philips, Chief Executive of Morrisons, told the BBC that the key issue that needed addressing was... the complexity of the food supply chain: "If you think about [the food supply chain] in its simplest terms you have got the farmer, you've got the abattoir, you've got the meat processor, and the retailer, so there is four people in the chain. But today in the UK [supply chains] have become so complex that the retailer or the manufacturer doesn't know where the product's coming from... It doesn't need to be complicated and we need to bring it back to its simplest terms. When you introduce complexity, you introduce risk." The supply chain of Finders ‘beef’ lasagne, shows what a mess our meat-supply is in. The French Anti-Fraud Office, which is investigating the product, has tried to shed some light on the situation. They have found that Finders, a Swedish brand supplying British supermarkets, employed Comigel – a French company – to make its ready meals. In order to get meat for its factory in Luxembourg, Comigel asked another French company Spanghero, who went to an agent in Cyprus, who in turn used another agent in the Netherlands, who placed the order at an abattoir in Romania. Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive. In an article for the Harvard Business Review called, “Want to Build Resilience? Kill the Complexity” Andrew Zolli, founder of PopTech and co-author of the must-read book on resilience of 2012, ‘Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back’, explains why complexity is so problematic: “As the complexity of these systems grow, both the sources and severity of possible disruptions increases, even as the size required for potential 'triggering events' decreases — it can take only a tiny event, at the wrong place or at the wrong time, to spark a calamity...” he writes. Zolli also warns against simply adding more layers to the complexity, by introducing many more monitoring procedures or bureaucracy: “Without taming complexity, greater transparency and fuller disclosures don't necessarily help, and might actually hurt: making lots of raw data available just makes a bigger pile of hay in which to try and find the needle.” In the case of the horsemeat scandal it is perhaps unsurprising that the way we may eventually trace the culprit is by following the litigation trail; each link in the chain suing the next until there is no one to pass the buck on to. At the moment this trail has lead the authorities to Romania; a country where the price of horsemeat has recently dropped suddenly as the government introduced a new law banning horse and carts from the country’s roads. The fact that this saga has been sparked by a minor piece of legislation in a country in Eastern Europe underlines how unexpected events can threaten vital systems. Following Zolli, our response to this problem must not be to beef-up (no pun intended) our monitoring processes, strengthen our reporting strategies or demand a more detailed paper trail. Our response must be: simplify.   Will Bugler is Editor at Get Resilient, he has worked within the ‘Adapting to Climate Change’ department at Defra, Friends of the Earth, and for the UK government's advisory body on climate change issues; The Energy and Climate Change Committee. http://www.getresilient.com/article/76 http://www.getresilient.com/article/76 Sun, 10 Feb 2013 00:00:00 GMT How do we design a resilient socio-technical system? Let’s look to natural systems; their tolerance of breakdowns and their adaptation capacity (that is, their capability of sustaining over time) may give us direction (Fiksel, 2003; Manzini, 2012). As a matter of fact, it is easy to observe that lasting natural systems result from a multiplicity of largely independent systems and are based on a variety of living strategies. In short, they are diverse and complex. These diversities and complexities are the basis of their resilience – that is, of their adaptability to changes in their contexts. Given that, it should be reasonable to conceive and realize something similar for man-made systems. The socio-technical systems that, integrated with natural ones, constitute our living environment should be made of a variety of interconnected, but (largely) self-standing elements. This mesh of distributed systems, similarly to natural ones, would be intrinsically capable of adapting and lasting through time because even if one of its components breaks, given its multiplicity and diversity, the whole system doesn’t collapse (Johansson, Kish, Mirata. 2005). How far are we from this complex, and therefore resilient, man-made environment? In my view, this question has no single and simple answer; contemporary society demonstrates a contradictory dynamism that forces us, on this point as on many others, to describe what is happening as a double trend: the mainstream, unsustainable trend, enduring from the last century, and a new, emerging trend. In our case, we have the clash between the big dinosaurs of the 20th Century, and the new, interconnected small creatures of the emerging new world.     Considering this metaphor, we can see that the mainstream processes of modernization, held over from the last century, are moving in the “wrong direction”, trying to kill (what remains of) traditional agriculture and craftsmanship and pushing toward global agro-industrial and industrial production. In other words, we can see powerful interests at work promoting large plants, hierarchical system architectures, and process simplifications and standardizations. These interests are therefore, consciously or not, using their power to reduce biodiversity and socio-technical diversity and, consequently, to increase the overall fragility of the system.  Luckily, at the same time, something else happened and is happening; new generations of distributed systems emerged and are emerging. This emergence is driven by different factors: the power of technological networks and a growing number of enthusiasts (who, wherever these distributed systems become possible, tend to adopt them enthusiastically) Biggs, Ryan, Wisman, 2010). This complex trend towards distributed systems can be described as having three main waves of innovation. The first evolution occurred when the architecture of information systems shifted from the old hierarchical systems to new, networked structures (distributed intelligence). This change started with the diffusion of distributed intelligence and the radical changes in our systems of organization it made viable. The result is that rigid, vertical organizational models that were dominant in industrialized society are melting into fluid and horizontal ones as new distributed forms of knowledge and decision-making become more common  (von Hippel, 2004; Bawens, 2007). The success of this innovation is such that, today, networked architecture is considered an obvious “quasi-natural” state. But of course this is not the case; before laptops and the Internet, information systems, concurrent with the mainstream model at the time, were based on large mainframe computers and their consequently hierarchical (and therefore fragile) architecture.  The second wave of innovation has altered energy systems.  These shifts are driven by a cluster of dynamic fields, including those producing small, highly efficient power plants, renewable energy plants and “smart” grids that intelligently connect them (distributed power generation). Today, these new but already viable solutions are challenging the (still) mainstream systems, which are based on large power plants and hierarchical (stupid and fragile) grids. Distributed power generation is one of the main components of the ongoing and powerful “green technology” trend. It is reasonable to think that energy systems will follow the trajectory of information systems, moving increasingly toward distributed system architectures (Pehnt, 2006).   The third wave of innovations toward distributed systems challenges mainstream globalised production and consumption systems. These production systems include initiatives ranging from the rediscovery of traditional craftsmanship and local farming, to the search for hyper-light and lean production, to the hypothesis of networked production systems based on the potentialities of new forms of micro-factories such as fab labs (“small-scale workshop[s] offering personal digital fabrication”) and by the makers movement (“[a] subculture … representing a technology-based extension of DIY culture).While this trend is still in its initial phase, the whole production and use system must be re-shaped following a new localization principle; products must be designed so that their production can be as near as possible to where they will be used (point of use production). This principle can be implemented by mixing traditional technology, craftsmanship and high-tech solutions.   These three waves of innovation have one factor in common: they refer to a globalisation aimed at using local resources and reducing distances between both production and use, and producers and users.  A range of very different motivations has driven this result. One of them is the search for efficiency in dealing with information, energy and production in the quest for lean production, with products specifically created not only for whoever needs them when he or she needs, but also in the same place (or at least, as near as possible to the place) where it will be used or consumed. The second strong motivation is the desire to use local and minimal resources.  A third motivation is an interest in “quality of proximity”: a perceived quality deriving from the direct experience of the place where a product comes from and of the people who produce it, as with the creation of new local food networks in which citizens and farmers are linked at the local level (Petrini, 2007; Petrini, 2010). Last but not least, there is a growing demand for self-sufficiency (in food, energy, water, and products), in order to promote community resilience to external threats and problems  (Thackara, 2012, 2013; Hopkins, 2009).  Sustainable qualities Distributed systems are the result of complex, innovative processes in which technological components cannot be separated from social ones. While centralised systems can be developed without considering the social fabric in which they will be implemented, this imposition is impossible when the technological solution in question is a distributed one; the more a system is networked, the larger is its interface with society and the more the social side of innovation has to be considered. In other words, with regards to our discussion here, we can say that no resilient systems can exist without social innovation. Considered all that, the good news is that social innovation is spreading worldwide (Mulgan, 2006; Murray, Caulier-Grice, Mulgan, 2010). And that the emerging ways of living and producing these innovations generate are largely convergent with the trend toward resilient distributed systems. In fact, in its complexity and with all its contradictions, contemporary society is developing a growing number of interesting cases in which people have invented new and more sustainable ways of living (Meroni, 2007). We are increasingly seeing, for example, groups of families sharing services to reduce economic and environmental costs, while also improving their neighborhoods; new forms of social interchange and mutual help, such as time banks; systems of mobility that present alternatives to individual ownership and use of cars, such as car sharing, car pooling, and the rediscovery of bicycles; and the development of productive activities based on local resources and skills that are linked to wider global networks (e.g., certain products typical of a specific place, or the fair and direct trade networks between producers and consumers established around the globe). Further examples touch on every area of daily life and are emerging all over the world. (To read more about them, see: DESIS, http://www.desis-network.org )  Being localized, small, connected and open (to others’ ideas, culture and physical presence), these promising social innovations actively contribute to the realization of resilient, distributed socio-technical systems. And vice versa: distributed socio-technical systems may become the enabling infrastructure of a society where these kinds of social innovations can flourish and spread (Manzini, 2011). Behind each of these promising social innovations there are groups of people who have generated them – groups of creative and entrepreneurial people who invented, enhanced and managed innovative solutions, recombining what already exists without waiting for larger changes in the system (in the economy, in institutions, in large infrastructures). Creative communities that challenge traditional ways of doing things introduce behaviours that, often, present unprecedented capacities for bringing individual interests into line with social and environmental ones (for example, they often incidentally reinforce the social fabric). In doing so, these communities generate ideas about a more sustainable wellbeing – a wellbeing where greater value is given to a new set of qualities (Jegou, Manzini, 2008).  People involved in these innovations compensate for their reduction in consumption of goods and space with an increase in something else that they consider more valuable. This “something else” is qualities of their physical and social environments that, for them, substitute for the unsustainable qualities that have been predominant in industrial societies until now. The most evident newly valued qualities are the recognition of complexity as a value; the search for dense, deep, and lasting relationships; the redefinition of work and collaboration as central human expressions; and the human scale of the socio-technical systems and its positive role in the definition of a democratic, human-centered, sustainable society. The qualities that these frameworks generate radically diverge from the ones that mainstream models have spread worldwide in the last century. For this reason, we can refer to them, as a whole, as "disruptive qualities" – qualities that clash with mainstream ways of thinking and doing. In this battle between cultural and behavioral models, several different social actors play a role. Among them designers (who are, or should be, the most influential players when the topic at stake is daily life experience and its quality) are doing their part, on both the sides of the front. In the past, they did a lot to promote the past century’s unsustainable qualities. Today, many of them are continuing in this same old direction. But others are starting to play a different role (and a potentially very important one) in promoting the new, sustainable, disruptive qualities. This battle is still at its beginning. It is, and will be, a dramatic, fascinating confrontation.  Emerging scenario Resilient systems and sustainable qualities are two elements of an emerging scenario characterized by four adjectives that appeared several time in the previous paragraphs: small, local, open, and connected. Considered together, these four adjectives outline the emerging scenario’s main characteristics. Individually,  they are comprehensible (since everybody can easily understand their meanings and implications) but, considered as a whole, they generate a totally new vision of how a sustainable, networked society could manifest. In my view, this SLOC Scenario (where SLOC stands for small, local, open, connected) could become a powerful social attractor, capable of triggering, catalysing and orienting a variety of social actors, innovative processes and design activities (Manzini, 2010; Manzini 2011). More precisely, the SLOC Scenario is neither a dream nor a forecast of what the future will be. It is a motivating vision of what the future could be if a large number of social actors move in the direction that it indicates as viable and desirable (Manzini, Jégou, Meroni, 2009)). To be implemented, therefore, the SLOC Scenario requires a large number of converging design programs to focalize and develop an array of themes that, as a whole, outline a possible (and in my view necessary) design research program. These themes include collaborative solutions (systems of products, services, and communication capable of empowering people and communities to collaboratively solve everyday life problems); updated craftsmanship (the development of traditional and high-tech craftsmanship within the framework of the network society); territorial ecology (the sustainable valorisation of the physical and social resources of a given place or region); and sustainable qualities (the widening and deepening of emerging qualities that are driving people’s choices toward more sustainable ways of being and doing). To conclude, to make the SLOC Scenario meaning, motivations and implications clearer (and to underline its novelty), let’s take a step back in time. Some forty years ago, E.F. Schumacher wrote his famous book Small is Beautiful (Schumacher, 1973). At the time, he made a choice in favour of the small and local on cultural and ethical grounds as a reaction to the prevailing trend toward the large scale, standardization and loss of sense of place he saw around him. Today, we follow Schumacher for these and other new and compelling reasons.  But at the same time, we have to recognize that in these four decades things have deeply changed. What at Schumacher’s time was only a utopia is today a concrete possibility.  Forty years ago, the “small” that Schumacher referred to was really small. In fact, it was so small, it had little chance of influencing things on a large scale. The same can be said for his concept of “local” – it was truly local as it was (quasi) isolated from other locals. In contrast, at the time, technological and economic ideas were largely driven by ideas of economy of scale and “the bigger the better”. Prevailing trends discounted any possibility that the small could be beautiful if economy and effectiveness were taken in account.  Today, as we have seen, the context is extremely different. Today, the small can be influential on a large scale, as it acts as a node in a global network. The local can break its isolation by being open to the global flow of people, ideas and information. In other words, we can say that today, in the networked society, the small is no longer small and the local is no longer local. The small and the local, when they are open and connected, can therefore become a design guideline for creating resilient systems and sustainable qualities, and a positive feedback loop between these systems.  This article is part of a series supporting Compostmodern13, a 2-day conference March 22 + 23 in San Francisco, exploring design’s role in creating a more resilient world, with some of the world’s leading designers, entrepreneurs, scientists, architects and more.    References 1. Bauwens, M. (2007), Peer to Peer and Human Evolution, Foundation for P2P Alternatives, p2pfoundation.net 2. Biggs, C., Ryan, C. Wisman, J. (2010), Distributed Systems. A design model for sustainable and resilient infrastructure,  VEIL Distributed Systems Briefing Paper N3, University of Melbourne, Melbourne. 3. DESIS, 2012, http://www.desis-network.org 4. Fiksel, J. (2003) Designing Resilient, Sustainable Systems. Environmental Science and Technology. Vol 37, pp 5330-9. 5. Jégou, F. Manzini, E., (2008), Collaborative Services Social Innovation and design for sustainability, Polidesign. Milano 6. Johansson, A., Kish, P., Mirata. M. (2005), Distributed economies. A new engine for innovation, in the Journal of Cleaner Production 2005, Elsevier.  7. Hopkins, R. (2009), The Transition Handbook: from oil dependency to local resilience, GreenBooks, UK  8. Manzini, E. (2010), "Small, Local, Open and Connected: Design Research Topics in the Age of Networks and Sustainability," in Journal of Design Strategies, Volume 4, No. 1, Spring. 9. Manzini, E. (2011), SLOC, The Emerging Scenario of Small, Local, Open and Connected, in Stephan Harding, ed., Grow Small Think Beautiful (Edinburgh, Floris Books);  10. Manzini, E. (2012), Error-Friendliness: How to Design Resilient Socio-Technical Systems, in: Goofbun, J. (ed), Scarcity. Architetcture in and Age of Depleting resources, Architectural design. 04/2012. 11. Manzini, E., Jégou, F., Meroni, A. (2009), Design orienting scenarios: Generating new shared visions of sustainable product service systems. UNEP in Design for Sustainability.  12. Meroni A.(2007) Creative communities. People inventing sustainable ways of living, Polidesign, Milano 13. Mulgan, J. (2006), Social innovation. What it is, why it matters, how it can be accelerated, Basingsotke Press. London 14. Murray, R., Caulier-Grice, J., Mulgan, G. (2010), The Open Book of Social Innovation, NESTA Innovating Public Services, London 15. Pehnt et al. (2006), Micro Cogeneration. Towards Decentralized Energy Systems, Springer, Berlin, D. 16. Petrini, C. (2007), Slow Food Nation. Why our food should be good, clean and fair, Rizzoli, Milano 17. Petrini, C. (2010), Terra Madre. Forging a new network of sustainable food comunities, Chelsea Green Publishing Company, London, UK 18. Schumacher, E.F. (1973), Small is Beautiful, Economics as if People Mattered, Blond and Briggs, London, UK 19. Thackara, J. (2005), In the bubble, Designing in a complex world, The MIT Press, London, UK 20. Thackara, J. (2012), Oil-powered Thinking, http://www.doorsofperception.com/energy-and-design/oil-powered-thinking 21. Thackara, J. (2013), Healing The Metabolic Rift,  http://www.doorsofperception.com/infrastructure-design/john-thackara 22. von Hippel, E. (2004), The Democratization of Innovation, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA http://www.getresilient.com/article/75 http://www.getresilient.com/article/75 Sat, 09 Feb 2013 00:00:00 GMT Widespread heatwaves. Spiking temperatures. Uncontrollable wildfires. Unforeseen floods. Oppressive droughts. These kinds of extreme events are becoming the norm and, according to a growing body of scientific literature, are obvious signs of ongoing climate change. This literature includes the “State of the Climate in 2011” report released by the United States’ National Climatic Data Center. The peer-reviewed report, compiled by 378 scientists from 48 countries around the world, notes that back-to-back La Niñas (the build-up of cool waters in the equatorial eastern Pacific as part of the El Niño Southern Oscillation cycle) in 2011 affected regional climates and influenced many of the world’s significant weather events throughout the year. These events included historic droughts in East Africa, the southern United States and northern Mexico; an above-average tropical cyclone season in the North Atlantic hurricane basin and a below-average season in the eastern North Pacific; and the wettest two-year period (2010–2011) on record in Australia. In a recent opinion article published in the Washington Post, the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, James E. Hansen, wrote: “It is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change. To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change.” Rethinking energy policies The growing awareness of the reality of climate change and its accompanying impacts and risks is causing many to rethink current energy policies and to reconsider the reliance on conventional energy sources that have contributed to creating the global climate crisis. Although many countries are looking toward low-carbon technologies and clean, renewable energy sources to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, fossil fuels are still our primary energy source, as illustrated in BP’s “Statistical Review of World Energy 2012”. To quote from the review: “Despite high growth rates, renewable energy still represents only a small fraction of today’s global energy consumption. Renewable electricity generation (excluding hydro) is estimated to account for 3.3 percent of global electricity generation. Renewables are, however, starting to play a significant role in the growth of electricity, contributing 8 percent of the growth in global power generation in 2010.” The definition of renewables includes hydropower, wind and wave power, solar and geothermal energy and combustible renewables and renewable waste (landfill gas, waste incineration, solid biomass and liquid biofuels). What the West calls ‘Resources,’ we call ‘Relatives’. — Oren Lyons, Faithkeeper of the Onondaga Nation While this growth in renewable energy represents an important breakthrough, it is crucial to remember that the harvesting of these alternatives, if poorly planned and sited, can have serious environmental and social impacts — particularly on local and indigenous communities. Nevertheless, at the same time, the shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources has to be central in our transition to a low carbon society. Indigenous peoples and energy alternatives Many indigenous territories have tremendous wind, solar, biomass and geothermal resources, and there are varying opinions as to whether energy-related climate change mitigation activities are having a positive or negative impact on local and indigenous communities. Research suggests that problems can arise when indigenous peoples are not involved or consulted in the development and implementation of energy alternatives. In Guatemala, for example, Mayan communities have been displaced from their lands by large-scale hydroelectric projects. “We know this is clean energy,” says Felipe Marcos Gallego of the Ixil Nation, “but when the resources are not distributed equally, or when people don’t receive any benefits from the hydroelectrics… [in] return for the role that indigenous communities play in the forest protection, water protection and in hydroelectrics downstream… it is an abuse and a mockery to the Ixil people’s dignity.” The situation is similar in Mexico, says Saul Vicente Vasquez of the International Indian Treaty Council. “The problem is that these renewable energy elements are not being shared with the indigenous communities. They are not part of the process and the resources located in their territories are just used with no sharing of benefits.” In countries such as the Philippines and Malaysia numerous indigenous communities have also been displaced by the expansion of biofuel plantations and villages are fighting to secure sustainable forests and climate-friendly futures. However, if instituted appropriately, renewable energy projects can enhance and maintain traditional livelihoods and also foster local employment. In North America, for example, the increased demand for renewable energy — in the form of wind, hydro and solar power — is making indigenous lands and territories an important resource for such energy. Replacing fossil fuel-derived energy both reduces greenhouse gas emissions and creates economic opportunities for indigenous peoples. Energy sovereignty can revitalize communities The Navajo Nation in the Southwest United States, for example, is conducting feasibility assessments for wind energy generation on tribal lands as a strategy for community revitalization. According to Bob Gough, Secretary of COUP (the Intertribal Council on Utility Policy, representing ten tribes located in three states across the northern Great Plains of North America), tribally-owned renewable energy generation can contribute to social and economic development, while at the same time help reduce carbon emissions. Historically, the tribal experience with increasing energy demands here has been catastrophic: tribes along the Missouri River were flooded by dams constructed to provide hydropower and flood control benefits for downstream communities. “Tribes never got the dams, what they got were the reservoirs,” says Gough. “Dams that were built for flood control, if you are an Indian, it means you get the reservoir. You’re permanently flooded.” But the current development of wind power alternatives provides a great sense of local community control over the next round of energy development across the Great Plains, and many of the tribal representatives consider tribal wind power an environmental justice issue. Since 1995, the Rosebud Sioux and other COUP tribes have committed to the utility-scale development of tribal wind resources on their reservations (estimated in the hundreds of gigawatts of potential), and the integration of large-scale distributed tribal wind generation with diminishing reliance on hydropower from federal transmission grids. The COUP plan encourages tribally-owned development of significant distributed wind generation on Indian reservations as a viable strategy for building sustainable homeland tribal economies. If you live on an Indian reservation you are 10 times more likely not to have electricity in your home than anywhere else in the United States, so wind power allows tribal communities to meet their own energy needs on the reservation, providing a source of pride and self-reliance as well as clean energy. Further, wind energy brings new, sustainable jobs to 20 high-unemployment reservation communities with tens of thousands of tribal members. There is even a possible revenue stream if power can be sold back to the national grid. In the United States, although native tribal lands cover only 5 percent of the country’s land area, they have the potential to create wind power equivalent to 14 percent of the total energy production in the US. “[Native communities] recognize the value in that kind of energy sovereignty and energy independence,” explains Gough, speaking at a recent conference on Climate Change Mitigation in Cairns, Australia.  “We are excited about the possibility of ‘Green Collar’ jobs for Indian Country. Renewable energy production is labour-intensive, with jobs created in manufacturing, construction, operation and maintenance. For example, one 240 MW wind farm brings 200 6-month long construction jobs and 40 permanent maintenance and operation positions. Over one-half of Indian Country is under 18 years of age. Why not create good jobs building wind turbines and healthy, affordable and energy efficient homes? A sustainable tribal economy could provide quality jobs and healthy housing for growing reservation populations.”  While the use of wind energy is certainly not new, projects such as this promote a novel pooling of resources among geographically dispersed communities. This creates economies of scale that advance clean energy far more than any one community could do individually. This project provides a model that could be replicated beyond the United States, uniting culturally similar communities scattered over broad landscapes with significant wind and other renewable energy resources. Sustainable energy pioneers Although indigenous communities bear the least responsibility for human-induced climate change, they are very active in spearheading renewable energy initiatives in both developing and developed countries as a means of achieving energy self-sufficiency on their lands and territories. In the Arctic, the Sami have transitioned from using petroleum to using solar light technology in their nomadic reindeer camps. In Indonesia, the Dayak Pasar indigenous peoples developed a project to install clean energy electricity from micro-hydro in an effort to ensure sustainable and community-based development and conservation. And in Mexico, local communities have developed high efficiency wood stoves to reduce their reliance on forest products. In Rajasthan, India, an extraordinary school is helping rural communities become self-sufficient by teaching rural women and men — many of them illiterate — to become solar engineers. Since 1989, the Barefoot College has been pioneering solar electrification in rural, remote, non-electrified villages. The College demystifies solar technology and decentralizes its application by placing the fabrication, installation, usage, repair and maintenance of sophisticated solar lighting units in the hands of rural, illiterate and semi-literate men and women. The College trains community members from remote villages to be ‘Barefoot Solar Engineers’ (BSEs) during a six-month course in India. In return, the BSEs agree to install, repair and maintain solar lighting units in their communities for a period of at least five years, and many go on to replicate solar technology in other rural communities. The Barefoot College has worked extensively with communities in India, Africa and Afghanistan with much success, and the Barefoot approach to training and rural solar electrification has been replicated in Asia and South America. The College focuses particularly on training illiterate middle-aged women, such as those who are widows and single mothers with families, who have their roots in the village and will stay and work there for its development rather than migrate to the city soon after training. “What’s the best way of communicating in the world today?” asks the founder of Barefoot College, Sanjit “Bunker” Roy. “Television? No. Telegraph? No. Telephone? No. Tell a woman.” The impact of such work in poor communities cannot be underestimated. Speaking at a TEDGlobal conference in 2011, Roy explains: “We went to Ladakh … and we asked this woman, ‘What was the benefit you had from solar electricity?’ And she thought for a minute and said, ‘It’s the first time I can see my husband’s face in winter’.” Arctic energy independence Initiatives like the Barefoot College mean that the cultural potential of renewable energies and energy independence is increasingly being embraced even by the world’s most isolated communities. These new sources of energy not only help to mitigate climate change, but they also help keep remote communities alive by encouraging younger people to stay on their traditional lands. Elena Antipina and Pyotr Kaurgin from The Northern Forum traveled from the harsh and unforgiving environment of the Arctic Tundra to the Cairns workshop in tropical northern Australia, to share their experiences in bringing solar light technology to the nomadic reindeer herders of the Chukchi Nation in Siberia. “Children are not going into reindeer herding,” says Antipina. “What has to be done? We all agreed and arrived at one important decision, this being the introduction of solar panels.” To build and sustain the technical capacity needed for this solar venture, the community collaborated with the Barefoot College and Arctic NGO the Snowchange Cooperative. Tero Mustonen from Snowchange elaborates: “The engine for this process is two grandmothers, who went from Kolmya to India to be trained as solar engineers. And now, after many twists and turns, the panels are in Kolyma finally and the grandmothers are back… The idea is to solar electrify the nomadic camps and nomadic schools in the region.” The ‘twists and turns’ of this project were many, ranging from health difficulties for the grandmothers acclimating to the high temperatures and altitudes of the Indian training sites, to years of delays in navigating Russian customs requirements to import the solar panels. But the newly trained engineers and partner organizations remained committed to overcoming the obstacles, and the communities continued to prepare by designing special sleds to transport the solar panels and experimenting with wrapping fragile objects in reindeer skins to cushion against vibration when moving. Finally, two years after completion of their training, the panels arrived in the Turvaurgin community. “You can turn the kettle on, and kids can watch or listen to music, radio, TV… Lately they started to bring notebooks,” says Kaurgin. “The main thing is that our children are with us, because our traditional way of life must be passed on to them, from generation to generation,” he says. A similar story is told by Chagat Almashev, who lives in the Golden Mountains of Altai, the major mountain range in western Siberia and home to the endangered snow leopard. Almashev shares how the indigenous and local peoples of the Altai Republic have benefited from projects such as supplying herder families with portable solar panels, empowering these families to migrate appropriately (and comfortably), while maintaining their traditional livelihood which is connected to closely observing their lands and seasonal indicators.  On the high alpine Ukok Plateau, another community were trained and constructed a combined solar-wind generator to supply electricity to the training center located at their mountain farming camp, allowing them to train young unemployed people from surrounding camps and villages. “…We are giving opportunity to traditional cultures to lead their traditional style of life,” says Almashev. “Having new technology and sources for energy, and to have access to Internet, even just light in their houses… [this is] stimulating young people to stay on their lands.” A low-carbon future When introducing renewable energy technologies to indigenous and local communities a balance must be struck between opening these communities to the modern world in a way that offers social and economic benefits, and choosing appropriate technologies that will not create burdensome financial or technical dependencies. As the framework for the green energy economy emerges, indigenous and local communities are positioning themselves to assert their rights, attract investment and initiate culturally appropriate energy solutions. Renewable energies are a popular solution as they promote energy autonomy and reduce dependency on fossil fuels brought in from distant locations. Further, they can even offer potential revenue streams, sustainable ‘green collar’ skills development and employment, while also providing power for devices like computers and televisions that are important to retaining younger people in the communities. If sensitively implemented, clean energy solutions can reduce pollution, biodiversity loss and other adverse environmental impacts experienced by traditional energy solutions, as well as help to avoid the destructive carbon-intensive development path followed by so many developed countries.   Further reading •  Weathering Uncertainty: Traditional Knowledge for Climate Change Assessment and Adaptation (2012) •  Climate Change Mitigation with Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples: Practices, Lessons Learned and Prospects (2012) • Indigenous Peoples, Marginalized Populations and Climate Change: Vulnerability, Adaptation and Traditional Knowledge (2011) http://www.getresilient.com/article/74 http://www.getresilient.com/article/74 Fri, 25 Jan 2013 00:00:00 GMT