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greenfutures No.77 July 2010
Climate of opportunity Is the South on a fast track to a low-carbon future?
Organised by Supported by
Magic lanterns: solar lights up all the way to the bank Towers of flowers (and fruit and veg): vertical farming set to soar “You can’t insure against climate change”… Well actually, now you can
Contents A free book when you subscribe to Green Futures
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Prosperity without Growth
The New Economics
‘One of the best books of 2009.’ Financial Times
’Provocative, timely and incisive.’ Oliver Tickell, Author, Kyoto2
‘Bold and provocative...’ The New York Times
’A bold and sustainable vision based on justice, not exploitation. An important call to arms.’ John Hilary, Executive Director, War on Want
‘A brilliant and compelling account. ’ Jonathon Porritt ‘A new movement seems to be emerging, and this superbly written book should be the first stop for anyone wanting a manifesto. .. In terms of a worldview for the new decade and beyond, this could well be the most important book you will read.’ The Guardian ’A must-read for anyone concerned with issues of climate change and sustainability bold, original and comprehensive.’ Anthony Giddens, Emeritus Professor, LSE
’We need a new economy and this book creates an inspiring, believable vision of what it can be. Read it.’ Caroline Lucas MEP, leader of the UK Green Party ’A brilliant and much-awaited book.’ Safia Minney MBE, Founder of People Tree ‘This book presents a serious challenge to conventional econcomics.’ Charles Middleton, MD, Triodos Bank UK )C t b t
The Three Secrets of Green Business
Surviving the Century
Facing Climate Chaos and Other Global Challenges
Unlocking Competitive Advantage in a Low Carbon Economy
’The combined analysis presented here of why current arrangements are failing the future and clear insights of the way to go, offer us hope.’ Mary Robinson, President of Realising Rights, Ethical Globalisation Initiative
‘Brilliant! The most comprehensive and practical business guide I have ever read about environmental issues.’ Jo Bennison, Director, Daxi Environmental
Surviving the Century is the first major publication by the World Future Council (WFC), a new international voice for future generations. Reflecting the positive mission of the WFC, each chapter addresses a different critical issue in a systematic and constructive way, describing and analysing the topic before indicating real solutions.
‘There is something there for everyone - the person looking for simple practical help right through to the deep thinker.’ Doug Harris, Stride Environmental
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‘A must read for enterprise managers that want to move towards sustainability.’ Dr John Ehrenfeld, Chief Executive, Industrial Society for Industrial Ecology
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Green Futures July 2010
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Features
Regulars
Partner viewpoints
16 Low carbon, fast track? Can the global south leapfrog its way to low carbon prosperity? Martin Wright eyes up the opportunities.
4 Briefings The designs and technologies of the future
39 The Global Alliance for Banking on Values: a new approach to finance Triodos Bank
22 Climate covered A happy marriage of micro-finance and new technology means the world’s poor can now insure vulnerable homes and crops against climate disasters. Deborah Kirby reports. 26 High rise horticulture The hanging gardens of Babylon could inspire new ways to feed our burgeoning cities. Duncan Graham-Rowe looks up. 30 Burning off the myths From Kenya to Manchester, sustainable energy is earning its keep. Front cover: Scott Stulberg/Corbis
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A Bigger Picture
Economics for a Finite Planet
Number 77 July 2010
32 Colours of change When it comes to innovation, you can’t do it on your own. Anna Simpson unveils some surprising collaborations.
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24 A thousand words Butterfly wings inspire a new generation of solar PV 28 Sustainable entrepreneur Martin Wright meets solar entrepreneur Sam Goldman 34 In the know Ron Mathison, MD of Finlays 35 Forum update Family planning for the planet, greening the ICT sector and tweeting farmers 47 Feedback Readers respond to Green Futures online and in print 48 Jonathon Porritt For the Pentagon, green really is the new red, white and blue
40 When it comes to product labelling, less is more Sainsbury’s Supermarkets 41 The business case for sustainable fisheries Marine Stewardship Council 42 Unlocking the potential of microgen in the home Energy Saving Trust 43 Why fish will welcome smallscale hydro Energy Saving Trust 44 Sugary solutions for low carbon packaging Ecover 45 Eco-tourism meets conservation in Costa Rica TUI Travel plc
Green Futures July 2010
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About Us
Contributors to this issue include:
Green Futures is the leading magazine on environmental solutions and sustainable futures. Its aim is to demonstrate how a sustainable future is both practical and desirable – and can be profitable, too. Readership includes key decision-makers and opinion-formers in business, government, higher education, the media and NGOs. The flagship publication of Forum for the Future, Green Futures is financed by subscribers, advertisers and charitable foundations, and by contributions from members of its partnership programme.
Partners are selected on the basis of their demonstrable commitment to the pursuit of sustainable development. They take an active part in the debate through Partner Viewpoint pages, where they share their views and experiences. Partners also receive a wide range of other benefits, including targeted free subscriptions, involvement in networking events, and access to the expertise of the Green Futures team and Forum for the Future as a whole. If you’d like to join us as a partner, please contact Katie Shaw: 020 7324 3660; katie@greenfutures.org.uk
Our Partners AkzoNobel Elizabeth Stokes, 01928 511695 www.akzonobel.com
Ecover Mick Bremans, +32 3 309 2500 www.ecover.com
Natural England Julian Lloyd, 0300 060 0243 www.naturalengland.org.uk
Skanska Jennifer Clark, 01923 776666 www.skanska.com
Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy Jane Howarth, 020 7410 7023 www.ashdenawards.org
Energy Saving Trust 020 7227 0398 www.energysavingtrust.org.uk
Pureprint Group Richard Owers, 01825 768811 www.pureprint.com
Triodos Bank William Ferguson, 0117 980 9770 www.triodos.co.uk
Entec UK Ltd Francesco Corsi, 0191 272 6128 www.entecuk.com
Royal Mail Group Martin Blake, 01252 528681 www.royalmailgroup.com
TUI Travel plc Jane Ashton, 01293 645911 www.fcenvironmentandpeople.com
Firmenich SA Neil McFarlane, +41 227802435 www.firmenich.com
RWE npower Anita Longley, 01793 892716 www.RWEnpower.com
Unilever plc Helen Fenwick, 01372 945000 www.unilever.com
Food and Drink Federation Julian Hunt, 020 7420 7125 www.fdf.org.uk
Sainsbury’s Supermarkets Ltd Jack Cunningham, jack.cunningham@sainsburys.co.uk www.sainsburys.co.uk
Vodafone Group Chris Burgess, 01635 677932 www.vodafone.com
BP Naomi Korolew, 020 3057 2524 www.bp.com BT plc Environment Unit, 0800 731 2403 Bupa www.bupa.com Ecotricity Matt Thomas, 01453 756111 www.ecotricity.co.uk
greenfutures Editor in Chief MARTIN WRIGHT Deputy Editor ANNA SIMPSON Editorial and Marketing Coordinator KATIE SHAW Contributing Editor BEN TUXWORTH Design Art Director: DECLAN Buckley Design and Production: The Urban Ant Ltd Founder JONATHON PORRITT Green Futures would like to thank: Michael Ashcroft and Sarah Zerback (interns) , Helius (proofreading), Shelley Hannan (web)
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WWF Dax Lovegrove, 01483 412395 www.wwf.org.uk
Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) James Simpson, 020 7811 3315 www.msc.org
Editorial Overseas House, 19-23 Ironmonger Row, London, EC1V 3QN Tel: 020 7324 3660 Email: post@greenfutures.org.uk Subscriptions Circa, 13-17 Sturton Street, Cambridge CB1 2SN Tel: 01223 564334 Email: greenfutures@circaworld.com Green Futures is published by Forum for the Future Registered Charity Number: 1040519 ISSN No: 1366-4417 The opinions expressed in the magazine are not necessarily those of Forum for the Future, nor any of its associates. © Forum for the Future 2010.
Green Futures July 2010
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How often do you come across this phrase in a guidebook? “Out there, in the wilds of [insert exotic location here], you’re in a land where, to all intents and purposes, time has stood still.” Sure, it’s the most dreadful cliché. But there are plenty of places in the world where, on the surface, it still applies. Take the far south of Bangladesh, where the rivers widen into estuaries and the estuaries merge into the sea. Stand there at dusk, looking out over the water, and the 21st century seems light years away. Behind you, a clutch of thatched houses; in front, a few small fishing boats, like skiffs, trailing nets against the flow. There’s a moon rising over the distant shore… Suddenly, an unmistakeable double beep shrills out across the water. The fisherman stirs, pulls a mobile out of his pocket and starts tapping a reply. Almost simultaneously, another phone rings, and there’s a voice from the bank behind you in earnest conversation. You can’t make out many of the words, but it’s clear he’s talking about money. Then, from what seemed like a simple thatched house just around the corner, there’s an explosion of cheers and applause. Tamim Iqbal has just reached his 100. The house is a café, and half the men in the village are there, watching Bangladesh take on England at cricket. Looking up to the roofline you spot a solar panel and a satellite dish. And over there, a phone mast sprouts between the trees. Three emblems of a quiet revolution: a surge of innovation which is sweeping through much of the global South, and overturning some hackneyed notions of ‘development’ as it does so. In ‘Low Carbon, Fast Track?’ (p16), we ask whether this could, for once, be a case of third world first: the solar-rich South leapfrogging the rest towards a sustainable future. There’s no mistaking the speed and scale of change underway. Across Asia and Africa, old models of top-down development aid are being made redundant by fleet-footed entrepreneurs, finding ways to deliver low-carbon light, power and income opportunities to the rural poor – and at a profit, too (‘Magic Lantern’, p28; ‘Burning down the myths’, p30). Technological innovation is combining with fresh thinking to throw up whole new business models. In ‘Climate Covered’ (p22), we explore the rise of micro-insurance – allowing the previously ‘uninsurable poor’ to cover their homes and harvests against the ravages of wild weather. All of this comes at a time when confidence in the 20th century version of development – driven by fossil fuels, delivered by heavy industry and financed by towering levels of debt – is looking shakier than ever. So it’s timely, perhaps, that a network of designers in developing countries, tongues only partly in cheeks, have decided it’s time to send aid the other way (‘Can the Rest save the West?’, p21), and are dreaming up solutions to save the struggling first world from itself. Many of these, perhaps, will be far-fetched – as are some of the more optimistic visions of an Africa transformed within a generation by solar power and mobile phones. But which of us would have predicted, back in the 80s, that some of the poorest Bangladeshi fishermen would soon be wielding a communications device of a range and sophistication way beyond anything we could lay our hands on? Similar surprises surely lie in store.
Martin Wright Editor in Chief martin@greenfutures.org.uk
Sara Parkin, one of Forum for the Future’s Founder Directors, is an environmental writer and campaigner of many years’ standing. Her latest book, The Positive Deviant: sustainability leadership in a perverse world, is out this month.
Ron Mathison is Managing Director of James Finlay Limited, whose tea and flower plantations stretch across Kenya, South Africa, Sri Lanka and China. A former director of Cathay Pacific Airways, Ron was born in India, giving him an early taste for tea.
Biologist and economist Deborah Kirby has a particular interest in viable finance for sustainable communities and ecosystems. She works from her home on the edge of an old tea plantation in Kenya, and makes every effort to be its best customer.
Educated at Imperial College, Jack Cunningham worked as an energy and climate consultant for AEA Technology and Entec and headed up ITV’s corporate responsibility team, before moving to Sainsbury’s as Head of Climate Change and Environment – firm grounds for his holistic vision of food supply chains.
independent publisher of the year
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Green Futures July 2010
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Briefings
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LEDs come home
House proud
72 million The expanse of land, in hectares, to be protected under the world’s largest commercial forest conservation deal. The Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement brings together 21 member companies of the Forest Products Association of Canada and nine green groups to protect national forests from unsustainable logging.
The juice on EVs Electric vehicles set to surge in China, Japan and the US.
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A new wave of zero energy homes takes shape in South Korea.
Tidal kites
Soft light solution: new technology gives LEDs that warm and friendly glow.
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Green Futures July 2010
14 From cold war bunkers to tourist honey pots: Albania’s military gets the ultimate makeover.
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Photos: Minesto AB; Yamaha; NASA/JPL/U.S.Navy/Scripps Institution of Oceanography
Barack Obama
Magical history tours Photos: Samoo Architects & Engineers; Philips; Concrete Mushrooms
Our continued dependence on fossil fuels will jeopardise our national security. It will smother our planet. And it will continue to put our economy and our environment at risk.
Spin low deep chariot: tethered turbines capture ‘the wind under water’.
It would be great some day to have astronauts in a rover on Mars. But just about anyone except an oil company executive would say it’s more important to have 50 million solar powered vehicles in the United States. Brad Sherman, US Congressman
15 8 Plugging into the oceans Sleeper technology stirs at sea: heat exchange system powers underwater vehicles.
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Green Futures July 2010
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Winds of change for Google Search giant looks to clean energy for new business A significant investment in clean energy by Google suggests it sees the renewable market as a key plank in its emerging business model. Earlier this year, the search giant spent $38.8 million in tax equity investments on two wind farms in North Dakota, following approval from the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in February to buy and sell energy on the open market. Google’s philanthropic arm, Google.org, has previously made investments in startups developing innovative renewable energy technologies, such as eSolar and AltaRock (see GF71, p9). But its investment in NextEra – a significant renewable energy organisation operating in 26 US states, as well as Canada – indicates a change in motivation from
Next generation search engine
Dutch courage: time to take the finger out of the dyke
corporate responsibility to income generation. A spokesperson for Google.org said: “Wind is among the least expensive sources of renewable energy. Google benefits through returns earned on our capital, and NextEra benefits from more capital for additional projects.” The wind farms, with a combined capacity of 170MW, will make use of the latest efficiency technologies, such as laser-directed blade angle adjustment (see GF76, p6). Tim Stephure, Senior Analyst for Emerging Energy Research’s North America Wind Energy Advisory, believes the move should be considered a sign of things to come, rather than a major play per se. “Despite the figures involved, which sound large, this is a very humble start for Google, and a safe investment,” he says. “Once it gets more comfortable, we could see further investments down the line.” – Lynley Oram
Letting the defences down Dutch flood barriers set for an environmental double whammy
Sheathed and silent Critics of wildlife-unfriendly wind turbines have quietened down since the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds installed one on its flagship visitor centre and applauded the 175piece London Array (see GF73, p8). Now, a new technical development could just silence them altogether. Solar Aero Research, New Hampshire, has patented a bladeless wind turbine with a meshcovered air inlet, which poses no danger to bats and birds. Nor will it disrupt radar used by air traffic controllers and the military.
Tim Jackson, author of Prosperity without Growth
He’s in favour
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Green Futures July 2010
The Fuller Wind Turbine, developed over four years with £215,000 of private investment, harnesses the viscosity of air passing over the rims of thin discs to generate energy. Designed with urban rooftops in mind, the entire housing swivels almost silently as it tracks the wind – the only visible motion. “This enclosed turbine should produce significant power at half the life-cycle cost of the windmills,” says Howard Fuller, its i nventor. The savings are due to the elimination of up-tower maintenance – to rebalance the blades of conventional wind turbines, for example. A proof of concept model exists and a prototype is expected to generate 10kW, with production units ranging from 5 to 100kW. An insignificant amount, perhaps, compared to a 3MW windmill, but – argues Fuller – power generation can be scaled up by grouping arrays more densely, with blade clearance no longer a concern. Nick Medic of Renewable UK (formerly the British Wind Energy Association) welcomed the innovation: “The fact that people are coming up with such a variety of solutions testifies to the vibrancy and viability of the wind energy market, and shows that there is a lot of potential”. Whether the Fuller can boost micro-wind for the home remains to be seen. As Dale Vince of Ecotricity remarks, it’s “a huge challenge – nobody seems to have cracked it yet”. Solar Aero is seeking tax-deductible grants to develop the technology further. Manufacture will be licensed to franchisees, and Fuller expects “many thousands” to be made. – Andrew Purvis
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Tidal kites New marine technology to be trialled off Irish coast
Photos: lingbeek/istock; Minesto AB
Bladeless wind turbine poses no threat to birds and bats
Photos: NEXTeraEnergy; Bazza1960/istock
A world where nine billion people achieve Western lifestyles… will require a 130-fold reduction in carbon intensity… that is on a scale never before achieved… This is magical thinking: it’s not going to happen.
Holland was saved, so the story goes, by the boy who plugged a breach in a dyke
with his finger. Odd to think then that, as sea levels rise, the Dutch are planning to do exactly the opposite and punch holes in the dams that protect their low-lying nation. But a solution to revive lost ecosystems and
generate clean energy involves just that. Zeeland’s immense Brouwersdam – built in response to the catastrophic floods of 1953 – has resulted in stagnant, algaecovered fresh water lakes that have been disastrous for native wildlife. Now, a plan to let sea water flow through the dam in a controlled manner could breathe new life into the lakes. And, by installing hydro turbines in the gaps, tidal energy will also be generated. Spending to the tune of €1 billion a year from 2020 has been announced by the Delta Programme Commissioner, to ensure the safety and environmental wellbeing of the south-western region. The budget will be met by revenue generated as the turbines come on stream, with additional government investment to fund research and development. According to Peter Vermey, Director of Delta Technology at sustainable design consultancy Grontmij, the plan could generate more than 200GWh, sufficient to meet the domestic needs of the region’s 60,000 families. The project is also exploring innovations in renewable technology, such as ‘blue energy’, which takes advantage of the different saline levels of fresh and salt water (see ‘Pulling power’, GF75, p32). – Dixe Wills
Underwater ‘kites’ could unlock the potential of the tides, if a €2 million pilot project meets with success. The energy potential and commercial opportunities of wave and tidal power are enormous. With the UK Marine Foresight Panel calculating that just 0.1% of available marine energy could supply five times the global demand, it’s no wonder that a number of companies are vying to turn their ideas into credible contributions to the renewable energy mix. Swedish enterprise Minesto, a spin-off from the Saab Group, is floating one promising plan. It has developed a prototype underwater kite, dubbed ‘Deep Green’, which comprises a 12 metre wing attached to a turbine and tethered to a fixed point on the seabed by a power cable. The wing swoops in a figure of eight, much like a kite in the wind, but in this case, steered by an automated rudder to harness the current. The technology has advantages over existing tidal systems, Minesto claims. For one, it can be deployed in deep water with low flow speeds. Operational costs are low – €0.06-0.14 per kWh compared to €0.15-0.30
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Perpetual motion: water wings harvest both the ebb and the flow
for other tidal technologies – because only the anchorage of the units happens offshore. And the unit can be adapted to suit various current velocities and depths. Too good to be true? Guy Doyle, Chief Energy Economist at engineers Mott MacDonald, is undecided. “For technologies such as these to be viable in the long-term they have to use few materials, be very
robust, be produced cheaply and be easily deployable”, he says. In 2011, Minesto will get the chance to prove the concept works in practice. It recently announced that €2 million has been raised to fund a pilot project off the Northern Irish coast. If trials are successful, the company plans to build a full-scale 200-500kW demonstration project in 2013. – Flemmich Webb
Green Futures July 2010
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Diving robot harvests temperature differential A robotic buoy developed by NASA dives hundreds of metres beneath the surface of the Pacific, taking readings on ocean currents and salinity. Nothing unusual about that, perhaps, except the source of its power: the very seawater it passes through.
Welcome to the world of Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) – something of a sleeper technology. It uses the same heatexchange principles applied to fridges and air conditioners, taking advantage of the difference in temperature between the chilly depths of the oceans and the warmer upper regions. Back in the 1970s, the all-powerful US technology corporation Lockheed Martin developed a small
Coastal synergy Wind and hydro key to Ireland’s bid for energy independence Ireland could become energy independent if it adopts a plan to create a series of pumped hydro storage stations along its western coast. That’s the claim of the team behind Natural Hydro Energy (NHE), which proposes to flood and dam coastal valleys from Donegal to Kerry, creating reservoirs to provide hydroelectric power as a back up to wind energy. The idea is simple: when the wind is blowing, some of the energy is used to pump water up to a dammed valley; when the wind drops, the water is released back down into the sea inlet through turbines, which generate electricity. The €3.45 billion project will comprise a 2GW peak power plant, including 18 onshore wind farms, a hydro station and a grid transmission connection. NHE claims that there is strong investor interest and that “detailed financial models show a strongly profitable entity capable of producing carbon-free, price-stable and secure electricity of strategic importance”. The project also comes with the blessing of the country’s chief scientific officer, Peter Cunningham. But others are not so sure. “You would normally fill a reservoir of the size mentioned by gravity using water supplies”, says Bill Finlinson, Associate Director of environmental consultancy Entec UK. “Energy costs to fill it
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Green Futures July 2010
would exceed the output generated if all the water had to be pumped up. This raises question marks over its viability.” But NHE’s Chief Executive Officer, Graham O’Donnell, dismissed the qualms. “We have more than sufficient energy, especially when there is surplus wind. The storage capacity is 90GWh” – enough, he claims, to keep the turbines spinning for four days non-stop. Over the next 15 months, NHE’s environmental team will undertake detailed further hydrological and geological studies on potential reservoir locations. – Flemmich Webb
A US research team is the first to claim an efficiency rate of nearly 100% for biomass gasification. Their modified system, developed with funding secured through Barack Obama’s greenish American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, uses a catalyst to maximise the output of clean fuel ingredients. Conventional gasification uses extremely high temperatures to break down carbon-based molecules such as coal, wood, crop waste, rubbish and even plastic into carbon monoxide and hydrogen. This can then be converted into clean ‘mixed alcohol’ or synthetic fuels which burn with fewer emissions than conventional fuels. Until now, the process has been only around 50% efficient, with much of the carbon converted into CO2. But the new system, developed by researchers at the University of MassachusettsAmherst, pioneers a built-in catalyst made of radium or nickel to maximise the amount of carbon monoxide and hydrogen produced. While sceptical of the 100% efficiency claim (“energy must be supplied from somewhere”), David Fulford, independent energy consultant and Ashden Awards adviser, finds the process “interesting”. However, “the story of the use of catalysts in gasification has not been a smooth one”, he warns – citing Swedish company TPS, which successfully demonstrated catalysts in the lab, only to fail at commercial scale. But Amherst research leader Paul Dauenhauer is convinced that the new system will stand out. “We’ve tested this in the lab for over 40 hours and it has worked very well.” The team is now looking for $15-20 million in funding to run a much larger prototype. – Alex Johnson
By bringing a simple inanimate object to life, we start to appreciate the value of things and to understand where they come from and where they go once their use has come to an end. Charles Ward, creator of the plastic bag manga character, Fukuro-chan
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Just add catalyst...
Photos: Jan-Otto/istock; Chris Harveyy/shutterstock
Plugging into the oceans
First gasification system to claim near 100% efficiency
Photos: NASA/JPL/U.S.Navy/Scripps Institution of Oceanography; Spirit of Ireland
Hot and cold treatment
Best of biomass
OTEC plant that produced 50kW of electricity over three months. “Then along came Ronald Reagan and killed off renewable energy activities”, says Richard Meyer, President of the Florida-based Ocean Energy Council. NASA is touting its new invention, the SOLOTREC diving robot, as the world’s first unmanned underwater vehicle running solely on renewable energy. Key to the design are tubes filled with oil and surrounded by wax. The warm surface water liquefies the wax, which expands, thus forcing the oil into a high-pressure compartment. A batterycharging generator is then driven by releasing this oil. As the buoy dives into colder water, the wax solidifies once more. When it comes to establishing more widespread applications of OTEC, says Meyer, the difficulty is scale. A power plant would need to pump a lot of cold water up from the depths to create the thermal differential required – an energy intensive process which, according to the Ocean Energy Council, could swallow up to 40% of the power generated. But since 2008, the US Department of Energy has handed Lockheed Martin grants totalling over $2 million for collaborative work with universities and other companies to commercialise the technology. A pilot power plant with a budget of $200-250 million is currently in the design stage. – Dixe Wills
Piezo pioneers Kinetic energy converters give more sparks for your stride Whether it’s clubbers on the dancefloor, soldiers on the go, or just lonely long-distance runners, energy harvested from toiling muscles is a hot topic. Until recently, prototypes have relied on high-impact movements to generate any current to speak of. But the race is on to harness power from the slightest swish of a skirt, twist of a wristwatch or shrug of a shoulder. The US National Science Foundation has offered a $350,000 grant to researchers at the University of California-Berkeley, who are developing microscopic piezoelectric fibres that could be woven into any garment. The research team claims that a million fibres spun into a shirt would generate enough current to power an iPod. So far the team, led by Professor Liwei Lin, has succeeded in converting energy from small finger movements using fibres attached to a glove. The Pentagon is also backing the project, in the hope that it will put an end to heavy battery packs for soldiers. The technical term for the conversion process is piezoelectricity – from the Greek piezo, meaning ‘to squeeze’. Mechanical stress is applied to a material, which generates an electric field in response. Maintaining the current depends
on a continuous movement to and fro, like the swing of a foot. Microfibres aren’t the only application for the science. Researchers at Princeton and the California Institute of Technology have embedded tiny chips into silicone sheets that, they claim, could be surgically implanted in the body, harnessing movements as slight as the rise and fall of the lungs (see GF76, p18). – Julian Rollins Coming soon... • A supple, six gram power generator created by an engineer at the Louisiana Tech University that can be fitted into the heel of a trainer, offering added shock absorption while converting the runner’s energy into voltage for direct use or storage in batteries. Developer Ville Kaajakari claims that the generator is capable of producing up to 10 milliwatts – comparable to the laser of a DVD player – and costs less than a dollar to manufacture. • Authorities in the French city of Toulouse are trialling kinetic energy pads set into pavements to power street lights. They use modules first developed by Dutch company Sustainable Dance Club, which converts the thud of clubbers’ dancing feet into electricity (see GF72, p19).
1 million The number of electric vehicles to grace German roads by 2020, if the National Electric Mobility Platform, launched by Chancellor Angela Merkel in May, is successful. The programme, supported by all German car manufacturers, coincides with a new €12 million fund to develop batteries for the vehicles.
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Green Futures July 2010
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Glitter, paper, sun
Chemical solution
Close the window, let the power in
French company claims answer to hydrogen storage conundrum
A new generation of cheap, nano-sized PV is on the rise A surge in innovative design to capture sunlight could see the cost of photovoltaics (PVs) plummet as their applications soar. The inventor of a nanocrystal cell that could see “the glass of all high-rises in New York” become electricity-generating panels has been awarded the €800,000 Millennium Technology prize. Professor Michael Grätzel of the Lausanne Federal Technology Institute and creator of the dye-sensitised, ultra-efficient Grätzel cell, took inspiration from natural photosynthesis to develop films in which the PV particles “are so small, they don’t scatter light”. His microscopic suntraps are capable of collecting light from all angles, and could be incorporated into window panes, assigning heavy roof-top panels to the past. Small is beautiful for researchers at Sandia National Laboratories, New Mexico. By producing PV cells no bigger than glitter, they claim to have opened up the door to electricity-generating coatings for almost any shape or surface. The tiny
With energy density three times that of petrol, it’s easy to understand why clean-burning hydrogen is often pegged as the green fuel of the future. And as a means of transport and storage for energy, it offers an attractive solution to the intermittent nature of renewables such as wind (see GF74, p13). So far, so good. But storing hydrogen is no easy matter. In liquid form, it has to be held in pressurised containers at temperatures of -252°C, at great expense. Moreover, its incredibly low density means that, to get the same kind of mileage out of liquid hydrogen, a car would need a fuel tank four times the standard size. cells are made from crystalline silicon and can be produced cheaply using techniques common to today’s electronics industry. Researcher Murat Okanda claims that the micro-cells match the efficiency of current PVs, with the added bonus of “a significant reduction in manufacturing and installation cost compared with (standard) techniques”. Glitter-sized or paper-thin? Scientists at
the Solar Frontiers Research Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say they have managed to print solar cells on sheets of paper. Carbon-based dyes act as semiconductors that can convert sunlight into electricity. As yet, the paper cells are far less efficient than current PV cells, but their relatively low cost could make them an attractive option. – Julian Rollins
Power down below
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the carbon sequestered as organic matter in soil hummus is held for hundreds or even thousands of years. Agricultural practices such as biochar (see GF72, p26), which improve this soil sequestration, can make a real difference to the global carbon balance. If you take all aspects of the equation into account, says team leader Gail Taylor, the research already suggests that bioenergy crops could potentially reduce carbon emissions by several million tonnes in the UK alone over the next decade. – Roger East
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Photos: McPhy Energy SA; GoodOlga/istock
When and where is it really smart to use farmland for energy crops? A research team has set out to improve our knowledge of how to do the carbon calculations. And a big part of the answer, it says, lies in the soil. A University of Southampton team is comparing different ways of producing biomass for fuel, such as growing grasses and short rotation coppiced woodland, to yield a new kind of ‘carbon opportunity map’. The aim is to identify
the best locations for biomass crops in the UK, in terms of the CO2 they would lock away. The research involves detailed analysis of the plants’ photosynthesis, root structure, and interaction with micro-organisms in the ground – asking how these variables affect the capacity of the surrounding soil to capture and store carbon. Estimates suggest that there are over a trillion tonnes of carbon stored in soil worldwide – significantly more than the total amount in the atmosphere, and perhaps twice as much as in all living vegetation. Some of this storage is quite short-term, but most of
Geothermal warms up Indonesia recently made headlines by investing $5 billion to add 9GW to its geothermal capacity by 2025, meeting 5% of national energy needs by exploiting the heat from its many volcanoes. But a quick glance around the globe reveals that Indonesia is but one country among many who are playing the hot rock card. According to the US Geothermal Energy Association (GEA), global growth has been steady, increasing by around 20% over the last five years. But, with 70 countries reporting projects currently in hand or under active consideration, the GEA is predicting an 80% rise by 2015. Currently, the US leads with close to 4GW of installed capacity, but another 8GW are in the pipeline, with 188 new projects underway across 15 states. Another frontrunner is the Philippines, which has plans to increase its capacity to over 3GW within a decade. At their heels are Mexico, Italy, El Salvador, Kenya and, perhaps most surprisingly, Papua New Guinea – one of the least developed countries in the world but second only to Germany in terms of geothermal growth. As for future trends, Pete Rose, Geothermal Programme Coordinator at the Energy and Geoscience Institute of the University of Utah, anticipates work on the Pacific Ocean’s largely untapped Ring of Fire volcanoes. He is also excited about advances in drilling technology, to reach depths of over 5km, where temperatures of up to 600°C could significantly increase output. – Dixe Wills
The subsidy, in yuan, being offered to electric vehicle (EV) buyers in five cities across China, including Shanghai. The sum, equivalent to US $8,800, will be paid directly to car manufacturers by the Government. The Chinese EV market already benefits from affordable cells, thanks to local lithium-ion battery production and low-cost manufacturing. This could see it shift up yet another gear.
Photos: Serp77/istock; Sally Wallis/shutterstock
Research project maps prime locations for soil sequestration
caption here one line if possible
storage expert at University College London, the conversion process – a relatively simple reaction involving electrolysis – remains “inefficient”. But McPhy Energy insists that there are significant cost and maintenance savings compared with existing gas storage solutions. Their first tank will be capable of storing just 1kg of hydrogen, but if it proves successful, the company plans to test a 15kg unit later this year. – Duncan Graham-Rowe
Predicted 80% rise in global ‘hot rocks’ power by 2015
60,000 Buried treasure
Now, a company in France claims to have developed a way to store it chemically, in the form of metal hydrides. Lyon-based McPhy Energy has found that chemically reacting hydrogen with a magnesium-based substance allows it to be stored more densely than in liquid form. And the beauty of this reaction, according to CEO Pascal Mauberger, is that it is completely reversible. The company has teamed up with the French Laboratory of Innovation for New Energy Technologies and Nanomaterials to test two prototype storage tanks, designed to hold 40% more hydrogen than in liquid form, under industrial conditions. There are concerns over the relative efficacy of storing hydrogen in chemical form, as opposed to liquid. According to Xiao Guo, a hydrogen
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ETS goes east
House proud
Snow-capped Fuji, carbon-capped city
LEDs come home
Tokyo bids to lead Japan towards a national cap and trade scheme
China eyes carbon tax
Proposed tax could push China towards Copenhagen emissions target China’s top economic planners are proposing a carbon tax to be incorporated into the 12th five-year plan. China’s pledge to reduce carbon intensity by 40-45% by 2020, against a 2005 baseline, was arguably the most significant event of the Copenhagen summit. Now, with reductions behind schedule, Chinese premier Wen Jiabao
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has stated that he will use an “iron hand” to ensure targets are met. The proposed tax may be a welcome addition to his arsenal in an ongoing battle with the heaviest polluters. The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) and the Ministry of Finance worked in collaboration on the proposal. To encourage businesses to cooperate, the NDRC’s Energy Research Institute has recommended that the levy start at $1.45 per tonne of CO2 emitted, rising incrementally to
and heavy industry. He hopes to see the plan approved next year. The step establishes Tokyo as a pioneer member of the International Carbon Action Partnership, which lobbies for a global cap and trade market. Other urban schemes include voluntary initiatives in Chicago, Montreal and the Chinese city of Tianjin, while California aims to introduce a state-wide scheme by 2012. – Julian Rollins
$59 per tonne by 2020. However, some reports in the Chinese media suggest that the tax may rise to just $7.30 a tonne by 2020. This has led critics to claim that the tax is no more than a token gesture to guard against the possibility of more aggressive regulations imposed by the international community. Jiang Kejun, a senior researcher with the Energy Research Institute, told China Daily that the tax is just one of a “portfolio of possible changes”, to be complemented by research and development subsidies to further the country’s dream of becoming a global leader in low-carbon technology. One concern over the implementation of any tax is who will shoulder the cost. According to ecological economist Klaus Hubacek of the University of Leeds, carbon taxes tend to hit the poor hardest, as they lose the greatest proportion of their income. Sam Geall, Deputy Editor of the influential website China Dialogue, adds that, if the tax were to fall on producers, then the cost could simply be passed on to end users, without any concomitant emissions cuts. The advantage of a carefully applied carbon tax, however, as Denmark has successfully demonstrated, is that revenue can be reinvested to facilitate the shift to a low-carbon economy. If, as Jiang suggests, China’s proposed tax is hypothecated to support green technologies, then the country’s ambitious carbon reduction targets could be a step closer. – Sam Jones
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East Asia’s first LEED house unveiled A show home in South Korea has become the first in East Asia to win the US Green Building Council’s prestigious LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) platinum status. Touted as ‘zero energy’, the 423 square metre Samsung Green Tomorrow house, designed by Samoo Architects with support from consultancy Arup, includes features such as high-efficiency lighting and a treatment plant for grey and black water recycling. Energy needs are met by a combination of 176 rooftop photovoltaic panels, generating 21MWh, and groundsource heat pumps. But applause for the development doesn’t flow in from all quarters. Jonathan Hines of Architype, which has pioneered the energy efficient Passivhaus concept, is concerned
that award schemes such as LEED could fuel a ‘tick box mentality’, whereby developers profit from one-off, costly, and ultimately unscalable, publicity stunts. According to Hines, the micro-generation systems of “buildings that are effectively zero carbon islands... are too small to be efficient or financially viable on a commercial scale”. Green Tomorrow was no exception, with building costs double those of a standard three-bedroom house. But Samsung intends to address this gap, commercialising the design by 2013. The pilot development could prove no more than a drop in the ocean for South Korea, where a government-backed programme to create a million green homes by 2020 aims to stimulate clean technologies (see GF76, p13). – Sam Jones
Remote controllers Major retailers switch off the least efficient TVs Photos: Samoo architects & engineers; caracterdesign/istock; Philips
those that manage to exceed theirs. There are concerns that the limited geographical reach of Tokyo’s new regulations may, for some organisations, detract from more significant steps on a national and international level. But Koji Miyazawa, Director of Emissions Trading, Tokyo Government, has submitted a proposal for a national scheme which, he claims, would cover more than 100,000 installations, including power plants
Photos: ooyoo/istock; Richmatts/istock
While Japan deliberates over a nationwide cap and trade scheme, the city of Tokyo has ploughed ahead with mandatory targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions – launching Asia’s first carbon trading initiative. In April, the capital’s Metropolitan Government launched a scheme to cut emissions by 25% by 2020, against a 2000 baseline. The new regulations affect the 1,400 business, factories and public buildings which, together, are responsible for 20% of the city’s emissions. Interim targets have also been set, under which factories are obliged to make cuts of 6% by 2014. Tokyo has had a voluntary emissions reduction scheme since 2002, but city leaders now see mandatory targets as the only way to achieve significant cuts. Mirroring the EU’s Emission Trading System (ETS), organisations that struggle to meet their reduction targets will be allowed to buy emissions credits from
Ubiquitous light bulb replacement targets domestic market
Eight major UK electrical retailers – including Comet, Marks & Spencer and Sainsbury’s – have joined with the Energy Saving Trust (EST) and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to remove the least efficient TVs from their shelves. The move could result in significant savings for consumers, as some of the larger
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A new design for LEDs is being touted as the world’s first replacement for the ubiquitous 60W incandescent bulb, in a bid to shift the smart lights from the commercial sphere to the domestic. Phillips’ 12W EnduraLED reportedly lasts for 25 times longer than traditional incandescent bulbs and uses just 20% of the energy, while producing a similar quality of light. Efficiency and cooling features have been incorporated, such as ‘remote phosphor technology’ to maximise light output. Designed with domestic users in mind, the bulb is compatible with dimmer switches, and can send light to every corner of the room, instead of just the one sharp beam. Ian Cheshire, CEO of the UK’s leading supplier of low-energy lighting, B&Q, called the step “very significant”. Cheshire welcomed, in particular, Phillips’ work on the quality of the light. Many domestic consumers, he remarked, find LEDs too ‘bluey-white’, compared with the golden glow of incandescents, adding: “LEDs are a key future technology, critical in reducing domestic energy consumption”. In 2007, around 15% of the UK’s home electricity consumption was used for lighting and appliances, up from just 7% in 1970. Low-energy light bulbs would mean significant domestic energy savings. Cost remains the most significant barrier to low-energy lighting. The EnduraLED’s shelf price has yet to be determined, but Cheshire confirmed that “subject to normal commercial processes, (B&Q) will stock” it – adding that “the sooner it can be mass produced, the better”. – Michael Ashcroft
TVs currently on the market use a surprisingly high amount of power. EST calculates that a typical 32 inch TV, if watched for the average 4.8 hours per day and on standby the rest of the time, costs more to run than a fridgefreezer. The move echoes B&Q’s decision to stop selling patio heaters, suggesting that ‘choice editing’ – in which retailers take decisions with obvious implications for the environment out of consumers’ hands – is set to become a more mainstream phenomenon. Jack Cunningham, Environmental Affairs Manager at Sainsbury’s, confirmed that using choice editing to maximise consumer confidence in the brand is a key driver behind the move: “Making it easier for people to be environmentally responsible is an important part of our customer offer, and green products and services are a key element of our climate change strategy.” – Michael Ashcroft
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Magical history tours
Eco-tourism project to “repurpose” Albanian bunkers In Albania, where 750,000 military bunkers litter the landscape as an indelible reminder of the Cold War, plans are afoot to turn symbols of hostility into hospitality. Built to survive
bombardment, the domed pillboxes have proved costly and difficult to destroy – but two Albanian graduates from Milan Polytechnic have found a sustainable use for them: as bars, cafes and small, perfectly formed hotels to kickstart a flagging eco-tourism industry. Elian Stefa and Gyler Mydyti, who studied
landscape architecture, have mapped and categorised the bunkers and identified uses for them – ranging from highland hotels for two with mountain views (albeit through a slot), to ten-bed igloos for backpackers. Their Concrete Mushrooms Project is now seeking to raise funds and engage stakeholders, including UNESCO. As well as “giving bunkers value instead of having them as a burden”, claims Stefa, the project will create jobs. It will also “preserve the memory of a significant period in Albanian history”. Built between 1950 and 1985, the bunkers were the brainchild of an increasingly paranoid Enver Hoxha, Albania’s Stalinist prime minister, who alienated not only the West, but neighbouring Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union and China. Fearing attack, he began a programme to build one bunker for every four Albanians, each big enough for a family or a squad of soldiers. Vicky Murray, sustainability advisor to the tourism industry at Forum for the Future, applauds the repurposing of the bunkers. “It demonstrates the potential for innovative, sustainable tourism to have a positive impact on destinations,” she says, adding, “I hope they use our Paradise Found guidelines to ensure this develops as sustainably as possible!” – Andrew Purvis
Electric vehicles (EVs) are attracting a fresh wave of interest and investment in Japan, China and the US. Tsukuba goes electric Fifteen Japanese companies and government agencies have joined forces to showcase the future of EVs in Tsukuba City, one hour north of Tokyo. The three-year collaboration will pilot rapid charging technologies, stationary lithiumion storage, second life applications for EV batteries, and the use of renewable energy at charging points. As part of the project, Mazda and battery manufacturer EnerDel are working to fit Mazda Deimos with a 24kWh lithium-ion battery pack, rechargeable at public EV stations. High speed solar-powered charge points will be installed at Family Mart convenience stores, so customers can recharge while they shop. Coordinated by government agencies and the National Research Institute, the project will analyse the performance and uptake of the infrastructure to determine future investments. – Sarah Zerback
Sewage source
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Bacteria could turn sewers into energy producers The search for sustainable sewage management solution yawns back millennia to the beginning of civilisation. A strain of bacteria discovered just 20 years ago may finally provide the answer. Scientists at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, led by Gijs Kuenen, have been working with bacteria which, they claim, may not only make sewage plants self-sufficient – it may make them net producers of energy. The treatment of sewage traditionally passes through three stages. The first sees microorganisms digesting solid waste into methane, ammonium and phosphates. The second, most energy-intensive, phase involves bacteria which convert ammonium into nitrate. The snag is that
these bacteria require oxygen, which must be constantly driven into treatment tanks by electric pumps. Finally, denitrifying bacteria convert the nitrate into nitrogen gas, which is released into the atmosphere. However, the anaerobic anammox bacteria can short-cut this process by converting ammonia straight to nitrogen gas without oxygen – negating the use of electric pumps and cutting energy use. In a paper published in Science, the research team projects that the bacteria could turn a sewage plant from an energy drain into a positive source of power. A standard sewage plant consumes 44 watt-hours per day for every person whose waste feeds the system, but this could be turned around – the claim goes – generating 24 watt-hours per person per day. – Sam Jones
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Chrysler group and NASA have announced a three-year collaboration that may put rocket science on the road. Battery systems, energy storage mediums and robotics feature among the focus areas of the newly formed alliance to facilitate technology and resource sharing.
Wheel-E Looking for a clean two-wheeler, but not finding electric bikes racy enough? Yamaha is selling shares to raise $812 million to bring low-cost electric motorcycles to a wider audience. The move is just the tip of the iceberg according to cleantech market analysts Pike Research, who expect to see worldwide sales of electric bicycles, motorcycles and scooters top 466 million by 2016. China – where 120 million e-bikes currently outnumber cars by as much as four-to-one – will continue to dominate the market for two-wheel EVs, Pike anticipates, representing more than 95% of sales over the next six years. – SZ
Photos: Chrysler; Yamaha
Writer and conservationist Gary Nabhan
Rockets to the road
Photos: Concrete Mushrooms; ewenjc/istock
Many of the finest tasting apples in the US are either exquisite in ciders or as baked apples, but Americans can’t stand the way they look. Diversity and perfection are at odds with each other in people’s minds. We need to redefine perfection as diversity.
Chrysler, which aims to launch its first EV in 2012, hopes that the partnership will stimulate innovative design and engineering. Nick Cappa, Head of Engineering and Technology at Chrysler, singled out NASA’s energy storage mediums as particularly interesting to the company. – SZ
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Low carbon, fast track? The tropical sun is beating down. The wind is picking up. Yet the co-op farmers and their VIP visitor from the National Treasury are wreathed in smiles. Of course, their spirit of wellbeing owes something to the creature comforts of this airy, ultra-modern building, and to the friendly shade and shelter of the tree belt that surrounds it. But the real story is there for all to see on the LED wall in the atrium. The huge i-screen switches from a live collage of the smallholder co-op members scattered all across what was once southern Mali, to display a series of animated graphs. Not everyone grasps all the details, but it’s still impressive to see the combined total for all the juice those hybrid minigrids are pumping out. And the relentless upward trend of the carbon price tracker is a special source of satisfaction to the Treasurer. She can’t resist a glance through the porch to those thousand shimmering mirrors, just glimpsed beyond the trees. So much for those who doubted her enthusiasm for putting all her yuan in one basket: concentrated solar power (CSP) has repaid her faith tenfold. Now her position in the regional cabinet of the Federation des Trois Fleuves – or ‘SNV’ (as the media call the new powerbloc named after the Senegal, Niger and Volta rivers) – is pretty much secure. After all, it’s down to her that the Prime Minister can strut his stuff as President of OSEC – the Organisation of Solar Exporting Countries. She allows herself a modest tweet… This, of course, is a fast-forward vision, and the future is another country: they’ll do things differently there. And you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s way too fanciful. The idea that Africa could somehow leap to a boom economy will strike some as hopelessly wishful thinking. But the seeds of this possible future already exist. The combination of solar power, mobile phones and IT, for example, is already transforming the economic prospects for villagers across the continent. A simple piece of software enabling the transfer of small amounts of money instantly and cheaply by mobile is plugging remote rural backwaters into the global economy as never before. Millions are saving money, time and their health by switching to clean, efficient sources of energy – from solar to biogas, biomass to hydro. Agricultural innovations, too, are mushrooming, from water
harvesting and hydroponics to the precise application of fertiliser and irrigation via GPS. All such breakthroughs have one common characteristic: they are low-carbon technologies. The phrase has a rather worthy feel – especially when applied to developing countries. But it masks an intriguing possibility: that low-income nations could outflank the industrialised world, skipping the heavyweight, fossil fuel-dependent economic model and leapfrogging into a carbon-light future. Nothing epitomises that potential better than the mobile phone revolution. “In India in the 1990s”, observes Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah, Director of the Royal Commonwealth Society, “it took four years to get a landline. In come the private phone companies, and now the poorest Indians use mobiles to their fullest advantage – not just calls, but cash transactions and new business models. Rural India has genuinely leapfrogged the world in optimising the benefits of this technology.” As surprising as the extent and speed of the shift is the way it’s been delivered. Once upon a time, late last century, a massive infrastructural achievement like this could only have been conceived as a huge aid project – and one that would probably never have got off the drawing board. If the World Bank had been asked to fund a functioning telephone network for every Bangladeshi back in the 80s, its bean-counters would have thrown up their hands in horror. Instead, it’s happened virtually without any subsidy, delivered by private companies at a profit to people near the very bottom of the pyramid. It’s been repeated right across the developing world – and it’s only just beginning: as IT migrates to mobiles, expect a surge of apps specially designed for Indian farmers, say, or African school kids. It couldn’t have happened without a parallel surge in solar. Still seen as an expensive luxury in the rich world, it has spread rapidly among off-grid communities in developing countries; sometimes subsidised, increasingly not. A typical solar home system, providing lights, mobile charging and power for TVs, radios and DVDs, costs around $500. Not cheap, but thanks to the widespread availability of microcredit, increasingly affordable. The benefits in terms of education, health and income-generation are nothing
Photo: Martin Wright
As a new report sets out the prospects for the global south to become ‘climate-resilient’, Martin Wright asks whether it can leapfrog its way to low-carbon prosperity.
Looming large: renewables could dominate India’s power horizon
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Bengal tigers Like millions of his countrymen living in coastal areas in lowlying Bangladesh, fisherman Faroukh Mia and his family are acutely at risk from rising sea levels. They’re often portrayed by the world’s media as the helpless victims of a climate disaster waiting to happen. But that’s just half the story. They’re also entrepreneurs, exploiting new technology sold to them by one of Bangladesh’s most dynamic businesses. Faroukh lives miles from the nearest mains power. His mobile, like the lights in his home and in his wife’s sewing workshop, are charged by solar electricity, courtesy of a small PV panel attached to his roof. He bought it from Grameen Shakti (‘village energy’) – an offshoot of the hugely successful Grameen Bank. Thanks to a simple micro-credit system, families like Faroukh’s are part of the company’s rapidly expanding customer base. The savings on fuel costs of kerosene lanterns easily cover the monthly repayments. The clean, bright solar lamps mean that he and his wife can work into the evenings – more than doubling their income as a result – while the phone grants them access to the wider economy in a way unimaginable just a decade ago. Now, when Faroukh hauls in his nets, the first thing he does is ring round various ports to get the best possible price for his catch: a small example of low-carbon development redistributing economic power in favour of the poor. Grameen Shakti – winner of an outstanding achievement prize in the Ashden Awards for Sustainable
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Jemima Jewell says: “Low-income countries cannot and should not have to make a false choice between addressing climate change and development. The report clearly demonstrates how the two are fundamentally, inextricably linked, with future scenarios to provide a practical means of exploring how low-income countries can best capitalise on the synergies.” Climate finance should, of course, help speed the roll out of low-carbon technologies – although whether existing institutional models such as the much-criticised Clean Development Mechanism can achieve much here remains to be seen (see GF68, p42). But geopolitical shifts will play their part, too. These are the twilight days of easy petroleum and cheap coal: irrespective of any carbon tax, oil and gas prices are set to continue their unsteady rise. Coal remains a relatively cheap option, but as carbon capture becomes mandatory, it too will be less competitive. Countries rich in alternative energy sources – notably solar – will start to wield more clout. Shifts in inward investment models could accelerate the trend. Nothing epitomises this more than Africa, where Chinese ‘soft power’ – wielded via the mighty yuan – is starting to replace Western-style aid diplomacy. This far from altruistic intervention is often seen as nothing more than asset-stripping on a grand scale. But it’s also opening up the prospect of a new kind of development which could give Africa renewed self-confidence. As Arnold Ekpe, of Lome-based Ecobank, remarks: “The Chinese are not setting out to do good. They’re setting out to do business. It’s actually much less demeaning.” And Chinese energy and IT companies are increasingly interested in major solar investments… So how might a low-carbon future for low-income
Tapping into new markets: mobiles bring cash as well as conversation
Energy (see p30) – has now installed close on half a million solar home systems across the country, and confidently expects to hit one million by 2012. With over 30 million families marooned off grid in Bangladesh alone, the potential for future growth is enormous. Inland, meanwhile, a fleet of ‘solar boats’ is bringing education and technical advice to children and farmers in some of the most remote parts of the country, accessible only by river. Shidhulai, a local development organisation, runs floating classrooms which double as all-purpose advice centres, connected by webcam to health and agricultural experts hundreds of miles away. Manna by mobile In theory, people in developing countries have everything to gain from carbon trading. After all, they lead unavoidably low-carbon lives. But these can often be improved by making them lower carbon still: for example, by switching from a kerosene lantern to solar power, or from a smoky wood stove to a clean burn version running on carbon neutral crop waste. These not only cut emissions – they usually save their users money and time, and dramatically improve their health. If these could also claim carbon finance, it would revolutionise their prospects. That’s the thinking behind Carbon Manna, a beta project which aims to use mobile phones to make micro payments to such individuals, rewarding them for emissions reductions. achieved by making the low carbon switch.
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Photo: REUTERS/Antony Njuguna
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The Chinese are not setting out to do good. They’re setting out to do business. It’s actually much less demeaning
short of revolutionary. Millions of solar installations have been sold over the last decade; the market is growing exponentially, and specialist companies like India’s SELCO, and the Indian-American D.light (see p28), are becoming serious players. The biggest solar surge, though, could come courtesy of CSP, with its potential to turn the Sahara from wasteland to powerhouse, meeting a large chunk of European as well as local needs, and greening the Sahel via desalination (see ‘The light at the end of the desert’, GF76, p26). Meanwhile, technical innovations across the solar sector promise to bring the price down and the efficiency up, leading Adair Turner, Chair of the UK Committee on Climate Change, to conclude that “a very rapid deployment of solar energy” is a distinct possibility. The real excitement is the way technologies such as these can combine to create a new economy. Mike Harrison of the UK Department for International Development (DFID) in Kenya sees signs of this happening already: “There’s a huge number of individual initiatives, and we will continue to see lots of these being successful. Microgeneration, mobiles, IT breakthroughs, water harvesting, community jatropha plantations… could these spark some kind of momentum and change the game completely?” It’s a question explored in a major new study by Forum for the Future, funded by DFID. The future climate for development: scenarios for low-income countries in a climate-changing world sets out a range of possible scenarios for the coming decades. They are not all exactly rosy – one scenario foresees a world in which oil shortages play havoc with the global economy. But they share a common conclusion: that the days of high-carbon prosperity are over. As lead author
countries take shape? In energy, expect networks of smart micro- and mini-grids, using everything from solar and wind to mini-hydro and biomass. These could prove a far more effective way of delivering electricity to rural and even urban areas than attempting to roll out an inefficient, centralised system which in many countries is already stretched to breaking point. It’s a possibility explored in The future climate for development, and one which is already taking shape, as governments begin to recognise the potential. Nepal is planning mini-grids for its remote mountain valleys; China is rolling them out in sparsely populated western provinces; and the Indian Government has finally unveiled its much vaunted ‘Solar Mission’, with a target of installing a hefty 20GW of solar by 2022 – and bringing its price down to a par with coal generation. Already ICT companies, such as Cisco, IBM and Google are looking at the opportunities, bringing their network management expertise to bear. The clean slate of many low-income countries in this area may allow more creativity than the fixed infrastructure of high-income countries – possibly leading to successful models ‘transferring back’ to wealthier nations. Cities which have yet to collapse in gridlock or spend billions on old-style metro schemes, says Chris West of the Shell Foundation, could leapfrog to next generation urban transport systems, like bus rapid transit (BRT) of the sort pioneered in Curitiba (see Sol e Sombra, p22). He sees a future for “small, efficient bus fleets, structured like an underground but running on the surface… Undergrounds are so expensive, no city ever recovers the cost”, he says. By contrast, land values around BRT networks go up, and so rising rents swell the city coffers. Adair Turner sounds a cautionary note: “Status fascination remains a problem… High-income
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people in London will use the tube. High-income people in Nairobi will not use the bus. We will not have emerging economy middle classes immediately jump to the attitudes of the green middle class in high-income countries.” So there may be more potential in electric taxis, already proving a success on the narrow streets of Kathmandu. And further down the line, electric car clubs, too: most journeys in third world cities are well under 50 miles – ideal for electric vehicles, recharged by a web of solar stations which can double as ‘energy balancers’ for the notoriously unstable urban electricity networks. There’s leapfrog potential for the farmers of the third world, too. A combination of new technology, more resilient local business models and improved farming techniques could revolutionise agriculture across Africa and Asia. The traditional agribusiness route of investment in monoculture on a large scale, with all the implications for mechanisation and high fuel and other input costs, is already being challenged by breakthroughs in intensive organic or semi-organic production. It’s particularly so for commodities such as cocoa, coffee and tea, as well as spices and medicinal plants. with networks of smallholder farmers offering a more resilient model in the face of climatic and market fluctuations. Christof Walter, a sustainable agriculture expert at Unilever, points out that, at present, “the food industry tends to source from just the 0.5% of the world’s farmers who work more than 100 hectares. The greatest potential for productivity increases is with smallholders in low-income countries. However, it is often expensive and complicated for the food industry to buy from smallholders. So the question is: can we efficiently scale up models of smallholder-based buying that have proven to work?”
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problems more acute, but it should also help focus attention, and add urgency.” For Jewell, “the biggest obstacle is one of perception. The low-carbon route is still sometimes seen – especially in the countries concerned – as a second class option; a sort of neo-colonialism on the part of the rich world, as if it were saying ‘Right, we’ve pulled the ladder up after us. Now you’re just left with this…’. That not only stymies the potential of low carbon development: it’s also plain wrong. After all, the so-called developed world is not exactly having it easy: it’s locked into a fossil-fuelled economy and facing an energy crunch! By contrast, a low-carbon economy is positive in so many ways that this perception fundamentally has to change. [Because] whether we like it or not, whether it’s fair or not, we are going to move to a low-carbon economy across the globe. That is what is going to happen. And low-income countries can leapfrog precisely because they haven’t got locked into a highcarbon model. That gives them a tremendous competitive advantage. So this is not just about mitigating climate change: it’s about opportunity.” India’s solar entrepreneur Harish Hande of SELCO agrees: “Too often things are framed in terms of fear – of worrying about global warming – or of blaming someone else for it. And that can just paralyse people. Governments can get stuck in the past, too – trying to solve new problems with old thinking. There are 500 million people in India today with no access to energy. Now, when the Indian Government thinks of energy, it usually thinks about mega-scale projects – about coal, nuclear and so on. And those just feed into all the inefficiencies of the existing, centralised grid.” Instead, argues Hande, the Government should think: “‘What are the best interventions we can make to meet the needs of those 100 million households?’ And once you start looking at that, everything changes. A lot of people’s basic needs – like cooking, lighting, education, ways of earning income – can best be met with a combination of low-carbon interventions – solar, biomass, biogas, micro-hydro, and so on. These are site specific, highly efficient ways of meeting those needs; they’re not dependent on help from outside. So there’s a huge potential for developing countries to grab this with both hands, rather than just complain about the rich world.” Perhaps the most crucial shift of all, then, is not one of technology, politics or money, but of attitude. It’s early days, but from India to Africa to Latin America, there are signs of a break from the post-war consensus that development necessarily involves ‘catching up’ with the industrialised West. Catching up, that is, through a distinctly 20th century mix of fossil fuels, heavy industry, intensive chemical-fuelled agriculture and mass urbanisation. “We might just be looking at a ‘values leapfrog’”, says Jewell, “where because low carbon living carries so many benefits in its wake, people see it not just as a necessity, but as an aspiration”. Such a leap could give a whole new slant on that hackneyed term, ‘development’. In years to come, perhaps, ‘developing country’ will mean just that: unfolding and evolving, rather than striving to emulate the fossilised model of the 20th century West.
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Low-income countries could have a tremendous competitive advantage. So this is not just about mitigating climate change: it’s about opportunity
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The not-so-distant future could see smallholder cooperatives, supported by microfinance loans and investment from global private finance, becoming the dominant agricultural model. Armed with iPhone-style handhelds, farmers would use sophisticated GPS field software, complete with pinpointed local weather forecasts, to plan cropping patterns, irrigation and inputs with a precision unimaginable a generation ago – so minimising costs and maximising yields. Expert advice via facetime video will be just a call away, and ‘crowdsourced wisdom’ – drawing on the experience of millions of other farmers – will be, too. Concerns over ‘peak phosphorous’, rising input costs and water scarcity would drive research into highly efficient mixed organic systems, resilient to drought or pest attack. Many farmers would be members of global sourcing networks organised using collaborative software to dynamically match supply and demand. Tomorrow’s multinational food companies will be able to plug into these networks to mutual benefit. As the ‘leapfrogs’ multiply, so developing countries will start to be attractive places to do business. Some companies could relocate their HQs there, drawn by cheap, low-carbon electricity and a vibrant workforce. Western countries could find themselves scrambling to keep up, says Camilla Toulmin, Director of the International Institute for Environment and Development. Unless we meet tough carbon reduction targets, she argues, we will be increasingly left out of the new economy. She cites a cautionary tale from the last century: “The US auto industry fought tooth and nail against government regulation on emissions. The net result was a complete inability to compete with the Japanese and Europeans for the 21st century car market. It shows how it’s a real mistake for government to listen to industry lobbies too much!” Some even see the post-colonial structure of nation states, especially in Africa, begin to lose relevance and
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authority to more ‘intuitive’ geographic and economic entities – such as major cities, or vital water catchment areas. There’s been much talk of impending ‘water wars’, fuelled by the latest tensions over the Nile headwaters. But as a new study from the Stockholm International Water Institute points out, this “ignores massive amounts of recent research which shows that water-scarce states that share a water body tend to find cooperative solutions rather than enter into violent conflict”. States will go to war over oil, but make peace over water. It’s easy, of course, to get carried away on a rush of optimism. Toulmin sounds a note of caution. “[The low carbon transition] is not going to happen by itself… you need a mixture of measures, some economic such as subsidies, some institutional – like establishing and safeguarding land rights. And you need a proper price for carbon.” Other experts emphasise the need for vast improvements in fiscal and regulatory control, and in governance – with trust and transparency still lacking. But virtually all agree that a simple functioning carbon market would be the single most effective intervention. “The minute you charge a proper price for carbon”, says Alan Winters, Chief Economist at DFID, “many other sorts of decisions – on food miles, on energy sources, and so on – become perfectly obvious. So many policies would be simpler if we could have a basic global carbon tax, involving every significant player. Yes, it’s politically difficult, but [it] is also the easiest solution in the long run.” “There are lots of practical reasons why fast tracking low-carbon development is difficult”, says Jewell, “but none of these are insurmountable.” James Goodman, Forum’s Head of Futures, agrees: “One thing we’ve learnt from this work is that the barriers to low-carbon development are the same as the barriers to development in general, namely: institutional inertia, power inertia, lack of available funds and corruption. In one sense that’s depressing – but at least we don’t have to reinvent development because of climate change! It makes
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Photo: Martin Wright
Energy independence, Honduras-style: the power lines never came, so the village went solar instead
Martin Wright is Editor in Chief of Green Futures. Additional material by Roger East. Read the report and watch animations of the scenarios at: www.forumforthefuture.org/ projects/the-future-climate-for-development
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Can the Rest save the West? A competition for altruistic design sends creative juices upstream. From solar fridges and clean cook stoves to mobile applications for remote banking, a multitude of ‘altruistic’ designs from the West is winging its way to off-grid communities in low-income countries. Now Carolina Vallejo, a Colombian designer, thinks it’s time that altruistic design started to flow the other way. Inspiration came in the form of an assignment during her studies at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. “We were given a one-week deadline to develop a socially responsible design for developing countries. I was fed up with this paternalistic approach, so I decided to reverse the equation.” The result was ‘Design for the First World’ (Dx1W), a competition asking ‘the other 90%’ to come up with solutions to the problems faced by high-income communities. In spite – or even because – of near limitless access to water, energy and food, says Vallejo, so-called ‘developed’ countries clearly have plenty of problems to solve. Meanwhile, she argues, there’s no shortage of creative minds in low-income nations, where tight resources and finances spur innovation on a daily basis. Necessity, in that context, really is the mother of invention. Straplined ‘the Rest saving the West’, Dx1W challenges any citizen of a developing country aged 13 or older to submit up to five designs addressing chronic ‘first world’ concerns. The solutions must respond to one of four key areas: obesity, ageing populations, the mass production and over consumption of goods, and the integration of immigrants. The competition has sparked interest across the world, from established institutions such as the BBC and MIT, to up-and-coming blogs dedicated to design, peace and aid. Prize money is small – $1,000, raised through a social media campaign – but profile seems guaranteed. “I think we – the developing world – have grown accustomed to the top helping the bottom,” says Vallejo. “We don’t even think it can work both ways. There is a need to reeducate ourselves and gain agency.” Jury member Arvind Lodaya, from Bangalore’s Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, agrees: “We have a plethora of western NGOs working to help our people. We need a similar plethora of non-western NGOs working to help theirs.” – Anna Simpson www.designforthefirstworld.com
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Leading edge technology combined with innovative micro-finance is for the first time enabling the world’s poor to insure themselves against climate disasters. Deborah Kirby reports.
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Insurance allows you to transfer risk into the future. It takes the surplus of the good years and uses it for the bad
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The rain fell as a solid sheet for nine hours. When it eased, Corumi Street in Quezon City, where Maria Baltao had lived for 30 years, was a frothing torrent of brown water. Her house, a small concrete block with one bedroom into which she squeezed her three sons, was waist deep in water, and the roof had disappeared. Until then, Maria had managed to keep her children in school by making and selling pulutan, a typical Filipino snack food, from her house. When, in a few hours last October, Typhoon Ketsana ripped through the Philippines, it seemed that everything was lost. Not only had she and her children lost their home, they had also lost their only means of income. So far, it sounds like another story about a hapless victim of a climate disaster. But although Maria’s life was disrupted, it was far from ruined. Within three days, she’d had an insurance pay-out which gave her the money for a new roof, and the means to restart her business. Conventional wisdom says that the poor are uninsurable. That no insurance company would take the risk of covering people on the margins, prone to disasters such as these. Thirty years ago, the same was said about banking – who would lend to people without assets or collateral? Then came Grameen Bank, and the rise of microcredit – which showed that poor people could prove more creditworthy than many a large business. Today, there are signs that ‘micro-insurance’ could be every bit as successful – and help boost the resilience of people most vulnerable to climate change. The year before Ketsana ripped the roof off her home, Maria had purchased PAID (‘packaged assistance in case of disaster’), a micro-insurance plan launched in 2007, specifically designed to help the poor in the Philippines recover from natural calamities. It was the brainchild of a local NGO, the Filipino Centre for Agriculture and Rural Development (CARD), which works with rural communities. It already had a track record in life insurance and microbanking. But it was not until 2006, when it was distributing emergency aid in the wake of two typhoons and a
Green Futures July 2010
volcanic eruption, that it hit on the idea of insuring them against climate disasters. CARD’s members had told the organisation that they had enough immediate assistance; what they needed was financial help to rebuild their homes. So CARD went into partnership with insurers Pioneer Intercontinental to develop a product that could be both affordable and commercially sustainable. The trick, explains CARD’s Alex Dimaculangan, was to package the natural disaster insurance with personal accident and funeral cover. This not only addressed members’ needs, it also overcame a key hurdle for any insurance scheme: managing ‘covariant risk’. With climate disasters the risk can be very high, in that many people are affected at once. This could leave them uninsurable – or send premiums skyrocketing far beyond affordability. But by packaging the climate element together with more banal products, the risk was reduced to manageable levels for a commercial scheme. As a result, the premium is just US $4.50 a year, which, Dimaculangan says, is sufficient to finance the payouts, typically around US $180 in the event of a house being destroyed. “It is only a small amount but it helps a lot,” says Maria Baltao. “Without PAID, I would be like other people, living in their houses even though they are all in pieces.” The scheme’s proved popular with CARD members, with 133,000 plans sold to date. And it’s washing its own face, too. So far fewer than 3,000 claims have been made, and income from premiums is more than double the amount paid out. While typhoons can cause spectacular damage, a more insidious threat of climate change is persistent crop failure due to either drought or excessive rains. These can prove devastating to rural communities in Africa who already find themselves on the edge of viability. Which makes them prime candidates for micro-insurance. In Kenya, farmers can get cover against crop losses through Kilimo Salama (Swahili for ‘safe harvesting’). It’s an insurance scheme with a difference, introduced last year by UAP Insurance in partnership with the Syngenta Foundation
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Photo: Martin Wright
Climate covered for Sustainable Agriculture and mobile phone service provider Safaricom. Farmers who enroll pay an extra 5% on inputs such as seeds sold by companies registered with the scheme. The premium effectively insures the resulting produce. The bar code of every purchase is scanned with a mobile phone camera and immediately registers with the insurance provider, UAP. Farmers then receive confirmation of the insurance policy through a text message. To make a claim, farmers must be registered with one of 30 automated solar-powered weather stations. When a station broadcasts data indicating that drought or excessive rainfall has destroyed crops, farmers automatically receive an insurance payout via Safaricom’s money transfer service, MPESA. It’s technology such as this which makes the scheme commercially viable, says UAP’s Head of Marketing, Joseph Kamiri. Previously, the costs of collecting and assessing many small premiums and claims were prohibitive. But the new mobile phone technology enables the collection of very small premiums at low cost, and the ‘index’ insurance means that, if rainfall is outside an agreed range, payment is made automatically, without the need for costly on-theground assessment. Rose Goslinger, who developed Kilimo Salama at the Syngenta Foundation, says that not only is the minimum premium of 20 Kenyan shillings (about $0.25) perfectly affordable for farmers, but trust in the product has also grown. “In the first year farmers were insuring one bag of seed, but we are seeing them come back this year and insuring them all”, she says. To date, over 11,000 farmers have registered with the scheme. In Ethiopia, meanwhile, Oxfam America is testing another model of agricultural micro-insurance, this time to protect teff, a hardy cereal crop, against drought. As with Kenya, payouts are triggered when rainfall levels in a particular area fall short of a specified minimum. Here, though, satellite data rather than weather stations are used
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for monitoring, which further cuts costs, explains Oxfam’s micro-insurance specialist David Satterthwaite. The scheme is linked to a government security initiative, the Productive Safety Net Program, which allows farmers to work on community projects such as irrigation trenches and tree planting in return for having their crops insured. Rather than promoting the insurance directly, Oxfam uses educational tools, such as games that simulate weather cycles, to build understanding and acceptance of the idea within the community. The insurance company partner, Nyala, can then introduce the product knowing that potential clients have the financial skills and knowledge to assess its worth. Although it’s still at piloting stage, Satterthwaite aims to have tens of thousands of clients in 2011. Such schemes, he says, make farms more credit worthy since, if a harvest is lost, farmers know they have the ability to recover from it. This in turn encourages prudent borrowing, allowing farmers to invest in increasing productivity and so generate more income. “Insurance allows you to transfer risk into the future. It takes the surplus of the good years and uses it for the bad,” says Satterthwaite. “Its value cannot be overstated.” So can these models be replicated and expanded elsewhere? Satterthwaite is optimistic, but cautions: “Reaching the last mile in providing services for the rural poor is very challenging.” Insurance is governed by the law of the large: it needs big numbers to make it work financially, and that takes time to achieve. But over the next decade, he adds, “we will see how advances in mobile technologies, satellite weather monitoring and regulatory environments [could] allow these small-scale initiatives to scale up”. Alice Chapple, Director of Sustainable Financial Markets at Forum for the Future, is excited about the potential. “Micro-insurance has come a long way in recent years, and in some cases at least, full commercial viability is a definite prospect. And that could really change the landscape, in more ways than one.”
Shelter from the storm: microinsurance can help safeguard livelihoods for farmers vulnerable to extreme weather, such as in the Philippines, above.
Deborah Kirby is an environmental economist and writer.
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Butterfly catcher The glitzy iridescence of these butterflies, gadding by the shore of Brazil’s Juruena River, is thanks to thousands of microscopic, multilayered scales, through which the sunlight bounces back and forth. Now, scientists from Shanghai’s Jiaotong University have drawn on these intricate, natural ‘photonics’ for insights into the next generation of solar power. Using moulds taken from butterfly wings as a template, they have redesigned the thin film Grätzel photovoltaic cell (see ‘Glitter, paper, sun’, p10), building in complex microstructures to trap the rays. Tests show that the ‘butterfly cells’ absorb light more efficiently than previous dye-sensitised photovoltaics, and the fabrication process is relatively fast and inexpensive. Photo: Zig Koch/WWF
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Green Futures July 2010
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High rise horticulture “
It’s a beguiling simple idea: make maximum use of a small amount of space by filling glass houses, with plant beds stacked high one above the other
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The vaults rose up as high as the city walls, bearing reeds richly bedded in bitumen and gypsum. The layered galleries peered each beyond its neighbour to reach the sunlight, and water drawn from the river was pumped through conduits up to the highest level. The topsoil was thick enough to root even the largest trees... These were the renowned Hanging Gardens of Babylon, as described by the Greek historians Diodorus and Callisthenes, and the earliest example of vertical farming – at least according to Dan Caiger-Smith. His company, Valcent, is taking the concept into the 21st century, recently launching the first farm of its kind at Paignton Zoo in Devon. It’s a beguilingly simple idea: make maximum use of a small amount of space by filling glass houses with plant beds stacked high one above the other. Financial and environmental pressures on modern agriculture have sparked new interest in vertical farming. With global population expected to exceed 9 billion by 2050, competition for land to grow both food and energy crops will become increasingly fierce. Four-fifths of us will live in dense urban areas, and increasing awareness of the carbon and water footprints of welltravelled food will have pushed locally grown produce even further up the list of desirables. So it’s easy to see the appeal of a system which, its proponents insist, can surpass the productivity of existing agricultural spaces by up to 20 times, while using less water, cutting mileage and energy costs, and delivering food security. “It answers so many of the big questions of the future”, says Caiger-Smith. Valcent’s system requires about the same amount of energy as having a home computer on for ten hours a day. That’s enough to produce half a million lettuces a year – and, the company claims, seven times less than is required to grow the same crop on a traditional farm.
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The 100 square metre farm at Paignton Zoo grows leaf vegetables for animal feed. It applies a technique called hydroponics, where plants are grown in nutrient rich solutions instead of soil. Stacked in trays eight layers high, the crops are continually rotated to ensure that all have adequate access to air and sunlight. The system also allows nutrients that have not been directly taken up by the plants to be collected and recirculated, along with the water, reducing usage and minimising waste. This is just the beginning, says Caiger-Smith. His company now has more than 150 clients around the world queuing up to see how hydroponics could meet the needs of human food production, too. How indeed. Inspiring concepts and artists’ impressions abound, but with none actually up and running yet, how can vertical farms meet the impressive efficiency and production claims being made for them? By cutting lots of corners. For a start, they remove the need for tractors and other fuel-dependent equipment. Distances to ship the produce from grower to retailer to consumer are also slashed. As Jeanette Longfield, Co-ordinator of the food and farming nonprofit group, Sustain, puts it: “Intensive agriculture is currently entirely dependent on fossil fuels, from its use of nitrogen-based fertilisers to mechanical equipment, transport and refrigeration – and so urban agriculture really makes a lot of sense”. In particular, Longfield sees “great potential for perishables that don’t travel well”. Moreover, the traditional dependence of yield on the weather is taken out of the equation, offering greater security to the full supply chain. Proven business models are still a way off. “It takes a stock market to build a high-rise,” says Natalie Jeremijenko, an aerospace engineer and environmental health professor at New York University. She doubts that the income from vertically farmed crops would be sufficient to recoup the rent. But this hasn’t stemmed her interest. Instead, she’s come up with two designs to
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Photo: Oliver Foster, O Design, www.odesign.com.au
With more mouths to feed and increasing demands on land, are vertical farms the future? Duncan Graham-Rowe scans the sky for supper.
sidestep the problem: one is a small hydroponic rooftop pod with a curved shape to maximise exposure to the sunlight. The other is a vertical farm designed around a fire escape on an occupied high rise. Sustain has also set out to demonstrate that urban land doesn’t always come at a premium. The organisation has launched the programme Capital Growth, which aims to create 2,012 new food growing spaces in London before the city hosts the Olympics that year. The search encompasses “all kinds of nooks and crannies” – from school grounds and the banks of canals to roof terraces. The other option is to simply do things on an industrial scale. Dickson Despommier at Columbia University, author of The Vertical Farm: The World Grows Up, believes there is scope to take vertical farming to an entirely new level, quite literally. He wants to create a new type of skyscraper to pierce the Big Apple’s skyline – vast multi-storey buildings dedicated to vertical farming. According to Despommier, a single 30-storey building could provide enough food for 10,000 people. And he’s not alone in thinking big. Belgian architect Vincent Callebaut has drawn up plans for a huge tower, also in New York, on the city’s Roosevelt Island (see GF75, p31). Callebaut’s vision, dubbed the Dragonfly, is
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to create buildings with lush, fertile interiors that function as self-contained, sustainable eco-systems, producing food for their residents. It’s not just a flight of fancy. Will Allen in Milwaukee has already demonstrated the concept with a community food aquaculture system he calls Growing Power. This symbiotic cultivation system relies on aquatic life, such as tilapia fish and yellow perch, to redistribute nutrients. Waste products from the fish fertilise plants, while vegetable waste and worms from the gardens feed the fish. Both the vegetables and the fish are sold to local businesses at a marked up price, so that local residents can buy the produce directly from the farm at a subsidised price. If vertical food does prove cheaper to produce and consume, then it’s unlikely to face much opposition. In years to come, “locally grown” may mean just a few blocks from home.
The fields above: according to one estimate, a single 30-storey building could provide enough food for 10,000 people.
Duncan Graham-Rowe is a former staff writer for the New Scientist and a regular contributor to The Economist and The Guardian. Additional material by Anna Simpson, Deputy Editor, Green Futures.
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Magic lantern
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They told us they could see properly for the first time at night… They would be talking to us and they’d start crying
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One night in a hut in West Africa, Sam Goldman was bitten by a snake. “I walked into my house, couldn’t see anything because I only had a kerosene lantern. I got a bite, dropped the lamp and the light goes out. Now I’m alone in a room with a snake in the dark...” As inspiration for new businesses go, this was at the scary end of the spectrum – but perhaps all the more effective for that. Ten years ago, Goldman was a Peace Corps volunteer in Benin, all too aware of the downsides of living without electricity – which included relying on kerosene lamps. Notoriously unsafe, these injure or kill hundreds of thousands of people each year – as Sam had seen at first hand. “I knew people whose houses had burnt down; my next door neighbour was so severely burned he almost died.” And on top of that, the lamps are a pretty ineffective source of light, casting a paltry glow over just a few feet. Not much good for spotting a snake in the dark. Goldman lived to tell the tale, thanks to a panicky motorbike dash from village to village until he found one with a clinic storing anti-venom serum. A few weeks later, a friend came to stay, equipped with a camping torch – the kind you wear on a strap round your head. It used LED lights: simple, relatively cheap and – crucially – needing far less power than conventional bulbs, so able to last tens of hours on a single battery charge. While not as bright as a normal torch, it outshone kerosene – a feature not lost on Goldman’s neighbours, mostly poor farmers. “They all wanted it, and they didn’t really care how much it cost because it made total economic sense, compared with kerosene, which was expensive and often watered-down.” At that stage Goldman was an anti-globalisation idealist, convinced that corporations were ruining the world. But he could still see that here was an opportunity waiting to be seized. “So I wrote to all the LED lighting companies saying, ‘I’ve found a product that’s really simple and we can make it for peanuts. There’s a huge market here, what are we going to do?’.” The response surprised and infuriated him. None of
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those he contacted showed the slightest flicker of interest in selling to the bottom of the pyramid. LED lights were “for fancy kitchens in Europe or the US… Most didn’t even write back, it was just really depressing”. Fired by the apathy of others, convinced there was a massive untapped market, Goldman decided to go it alone. He’d already been converted from student anti-capitalist to nascent entrepreneur by his experiences in Africa. “The nearest big town to me had one or two computers with internet, which at the time cost up to $8 per hour. Then, over the course of three or four years, private businesses in mobile phones, computers, internet cafes, yoga, even, seemed to take off. Everything was just buzzing. I figured out I had to get into that, but I didn’t want to [do it the traditional way].” Although he didn’t know the phrase at the time, he wanted to be a social entrepreneur. As luck would have it, Stanford University’s MBA course was launching a module entitled ‘Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability’ – business school speak for ‘producing stuff which poor people can afford’. “I realised this was what I wanted to do with my life,” says Goldman – and he duly signed up. The first year project included designing something suitable for a community in Burma (“a rough environment with the most amazing people”). Like Benin, much of rural Burma has no mains electricity: fertile ground for Goldman’s ambition of designing a simple, cheap household lamp. The basic principles were obvious: cheap, low-wattage LEDs, with a battery recharged by solar power, suitable for the most remote rural locations. A simple enough idea: the hard part came in making it bright enough, tough enough, userfriendly and – crucially – affordable. Goldman was joined on his project, dubbed D.light, by a few fellow-enthusiasts at Stanford, and together they worked up some prototypes. “It was all rapid style. Take a lunchbox, stuff a battery inside, take a breadboard, stuff some wires together, and drill some holes.” But the response was electric. “We’d give some to people to try out, we’d go back to find out how they’d got
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Photos: Martin Wright; Robin Chilton/D.light Design
It started with a scary night in an African hut. Now it’s a multi-million dollar business bringing solar electricity to the poor of rural India. Martin Wright meets Sam Goldman, CEO of D.light.
on, and they’d tell us all these stories you wouldn’t imagine – how the light was changing their lives. It was clean, it was safe, they could see properly for the first time at night…They would be talking to us and they’d start crying…” Equally impressed, Stanford offered to incubate the team and funded field testing out in Burma. Gradually, D.light shifted from being a student project to a nascent business – a shift crystallised when, after a string of awards, it won the prestigious Draper Fisher Jurvetson competition (“set up by real hardcore venture capitalists”). More important than the $250,000 cash prize was the surge of interest from serious venture capitalists. Before long, D.light had attracted over $6 million worth of investment: enough to undertake some extensive R&D, find manufacturers in China, and set up a commercial HQ in Delhi – an obvious choice, given the fact that over half a billion Indians live without decent electricity, with kerosene virtually their only source of light. Several years down the line, D.light has notched up sales of over 220,000, mainly in India and Tanzania. With the cheapest model retailing for around $8, it’s within reach of all but the poorest. The savings on kerosene alone give the lanterns a payback time of as little as six months to a year. But finance is the least of D.light’s selling points, as I discovered while visiting some users in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh earlier this year. Top of the list is its ability to provide clean, safe, bright light: simple benefits taken for granted in the electrified world, but representing a huge boon for rural India. “I bought it for the children, really”, mother of three Geeta Devi told me. “The smoke from the kerosene used to get in their eyes, and stop them studying after an hour or so. Now they can do their homework properly – and we don’t have to keep the door open in the winter because of the fumes.” The lights are impressively robust: keen to show me just how tough his lantern was, one man stood on a chair, raised his arm, and dropped it on the concrete floor. It stayed lit, its ABS plastic body barely scratched. It’s a useful attribute for a product designed to be
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used out in the fields, warding off snakes and helping latenight irrigation, as much as indoors. In India, D.light’s expansion is driven by a network of over 400 ‘rural entrepreneurs’: postmen, teachers, insurance agents – people with a little standing in their village. They take on a few lanterns at a time, and sell them to existing contacts. It’s a deceptively simple model which gives the company access to a market out of reach of more conventional approaches. As yet, D.light has yet to record an operating profit, although the investors seem content, and Goldman insists it’s on track to do so in a year or two. It’s the combination of this commercial promise with the solar lanterns’ social and environmental benefits which helped earn D.light the Gold Award in this year’s Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy (see p30). Slim, nervy and driven, Goldman is well aware that his company could attract envious attention from bigger fish. India’s giant manufacturer Reliance, for example, has recently launched a range of ‘R-Lites’, with a logo which, to the casual observer, might just look a little like D.light’s own starburst mark. Goldman’s keen to diversify – commercially coy about precise products, but adamant about his choice of market: “If people don’t have electricity they usually don’t have a lot of things. They don’t have the infrastructure, they have a lot less money, less of an education, people don’t usually care about them and they don’t have a lot of power. These are the only customers I really care about. Everything’s piled up; the odds are stacked against it, but that’s the challenge...”. And when he talks of the future, he still has the laid back Californian patois of the Google-era start-up, combined with the sweeping confidence of the Stanford alumnus. “Dude, we got some really cool stuff coming out. We’re not idiots. We’ve made some mistakes, but we’ve learnt from them, so our products in the next two years will be awesome.”
Homework, before and after solar
Martin Wright is Editor in Chief of Green Futures.
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Burning off the myths From the highlands of Kenya to the Manchester streets, sustainable energy is earning its keep – as is clear from this year’s Ashden Award winners.
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I saw the beauty of biogas, and I knew others would, too
In a small farm on the hills above Nairobi, a slender woman in a flower-patterned headscarf is gently, politely shattering myths. Standing among the fruit trees on her shamba (smallholding), Mary Waringa Nguku dispels two of the most common clichés trotted out about the developing world. First, that people in Africa and elsewhere are too busy worrying about day-to-day life to share the West’s obsession with forest loss or climate change. “We cannot trust the weather any more”, she tells me. “It doesn’t rain like it used to, and the rivers are drying out. We do not always have the water we need… The forests are less, so we are going short of wood and it is more expensive. That is why, when I saw the biogas at my brother’s farm, and he told me how much money he was saving, I really wanted to give it a try.” That last remark gives the lie to the second myth: that sustainable solutions always cost more than unsustainable ones. Mary is among over 200 customers of Skylink Innovators, a local Kenyan company which is installing biogas energy plants in the nation’s schools and even two of its prisons. The plants use a mixture of cow dung and human waste to produce cooking fuel via a process of anaerobic digestion (AD). It’s a well-established technology which tackles several problems at once: it provides clean fuel in place of smoky firewood for cooking; it helps to reduce pressure on dwindling forests and cuts out the greenhouse emissions from burning wood; and it saves people money. Once the biogas plant is in place, there’s
no need for firewood. Many farmers save at least as much again on chemical fertiliser, too, as the nutrient-rich residue from the digester does the job just as well. Most plants pay for themselves in a couple of years. All of which makes it a sound business prospect for the likes of Skylink’s founder, Samwel Kinoti. “My father was a pioneer of biogas on his farm, so I grew up with it. I saw the beauty of it, and I knew others would, too.” It’s this combination of entrepreneurship and environmental good sense which has won Skylink one of the 2010 Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy, presented by David Attenborough at a ceremony in London. The Ashden Awards celebrate local sustainable energy success stories in both developing countries and the UK. In doing so, they echo and amplify Mary Waringa’s mythbusting, turning the pursuit of sustainability from something worthy into pure common sense. The beauty of biogas is appreciated in Vietnam too – on an impressive scale. Here, Dutch development agency SNV is collaborating with the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development on a scheme to install 168,000 biogas digesters by 2012. Based on a hugely successful SNV programme in Nepal, the project works with hundreds of masons across the country, training them to become self-employed biogas engineers. Anyone who’s eaten in a Vietnamese restaurant will know that pork plays a prime part in the country’s cuisine. It’s also at the heart of its biogas success: for thousands of pig farmers across the
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Photo: Ashden Awards
Photos: Martin Wright
From pig to pot: digesters turn slurry into clean cooking fuel
country, a biogas digester doesn’t just mean abundant cooking fuel in place of wood, coal or LPG. It’s also the perfect solution to the age-old problem of pig muck. Instead of (literally) shovelling the shit on an almost daily basis – which is just as unpleasant a task as it sounds – they simply sluice it down a hole in the pigsty and into the digester, where, by the miracle that is AD, it’s transformed into cooking gas. “It’s so much quicker to cook meals now”, farmer Nguyen Van Vach told me, “and you don’t get smoke in your eyes the whole time… It’s a lot less smelly indoors and out – so I’m more popular with my neighbours!” As in Kenya, multiple benefits abound. “Before, we used to have to get rid of all the slurry, so we put it in the fishpond”, Nguyen explains. “But sometimes there was too much, the water turned black and the fish died. There’s no such problem with the purified residue from the biogas. On the contrary, it actually boosts production. Now the water stays clear and we’re selling around one-third more fish.” A modest subsidy has helped the programme take off, but increasingly the trained masons are simply selling directly to householders, who are eager to reap the benefits of biogas and unwilling to join the programme’s waiting list: proof that, with the right technology, sustainability can pay for itself. Further evidence for that comes from Delhi, where solar start-up D.light has scored dramatic successes with its simple solar lanterns – over 220,000 sold worldwide in little over two years, almost all without any subsidy (see ‘Magic Lantern’, p28). Such rapid growth from a standing start belies another common charge levelled at sustainable energy: that it will struggle to reach scale. In Nicaragua, Ashden-winner TECNOSOL has sold everything from solar home systems, water heaters and pumps to solar fridges (vital for storing vaccines in areas without mains electricity), benefiting over a quarter of a million people. And in the far south of Brazil, the CRELUZ power co-operative has harnessed local rivers to provide clean, affordable electricity to over 80,000 of its members and their families. In Uganda, by contrast, green energy is in its infancy. But it’s poised to grow fast, thanks to the efforts of another of this year’s Ashden winners, the Rural Energy Foundation. It’s aiming to kickstart a robust commercial market for solar power across the large swathes of countryside beyond the reach of reliable mains electricity. This means training local shopkeepers as expert solar vendors, helping them access and, in some cases, offer credit, and generally raising awareness of solar’s potential. As well as using familiar techniques like radio and newspaper ads, REF staff also adopt a more direct approach: standing on a corner in a busy marketplace with a portable power system, demonstrating solar’s potential to light a lamp, recharge a mobile – or even power a haircut or a shave. In a ‘developed’ country such as the UK, of course, an electric shave is hardly novel. But as concerns over energy security and a looming ‘generation gap’ kick in, so the search for home-grown power is taking on a new urgency. It’s a quest taken to heart by the fiercely
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independent islanders on Eigg, off the west coast of Scotland. Having bought out a feudal landowner back in 1997, they’ve taken steps to green every aspect of island life – culminating in the installation of their own renewable grid. Powered by a 100kW hydro turbine, a small wind farm and a solar PV array, it meets 90% of the island’s electricity needs. Home-grown energy is a winning theme in Suffolk, too, where the council is helping local schools switch from oil- to wood-fired boilers – with fuel sourced from the county’s own woodlands. It’s knocked a quarter off the schools’ heating budgets – and cut their carbon emissions by 90%. Two other schools – Okehampton College in Devon and St Columb Minor in Cornwall – won Ashden Awards for making dramatic savings in energy use and carbon emissions while inspiring the wider community to take action, too. Meanwhile, over in Northern Ireland, a local family plumbing and heating business, Willis Energy Systems, has been rewarded for its ‘Solasyphon’: a device which allows householders to retrofit a solar water heater, without going to the hassle and expense of installing a big new water tank. Saving money as well as carbon is key to the success of Northwards Housing, which has given ‘whole house’ energy efficiency makeovers to 70% of north Manchester’s housing stock. “The house used to be an absolute nightmare, it was so cold”, recalls tenant Susan Savill. ”I even considered renting privately, but I’m glad I didn’t now, as it’s so good. Now we can just have the heating on for a couple of hours instead of all day long.” And, echoing Mary Waringa, she adds: “It’s definitely reduced the bills.” The Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy is a Forum for the Future partner. www.ashdenawards.org
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As concerns over energy security and a looming ‘generation gap’ kick in, so the search for home-grown power in the UK is taking on a new urgency
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Eigg: island in the sun
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Colours of change The world is crying out for innovation – and it’s a case of the bolder the better, says Anna Simpson.
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“It’s not possible to deliver really big innovations as one company alone anymore,” says Ellen de Vries, Head of Communications. “The speed of innovation has accelerated and you need to focus on what you’re good at.” Philips’ design group has set up a process which pools the knowledge and expertise of industrial and academic partners to fast-forward breakthroughs. Design Probes identifies possible trends of the future and the products or services that could be in demand, and rehearses them as design concepts. One recent example is the ‘biosphere home farm’, where various mini-ecosystems thrive in a small indoor space, sharing nutrients and filtering water in a constant interdependent flux. A more controversial idea, also from Design Probes, responds to the ‘nature deficit’ of urban living. In project Metamorphosis, ‘air trees’ mimic the rhythm of outdoor airflow and create subtle changes in humidity, and ‘healing beds’ with fibre optic canopies produce natural sun and moon light effects. ‘Why not just open a window?’ you might well ask. But at this stage, the aim of the game is to challenge assumptions and behaviours, making space for radically different ways of doing and looking at things – and so it really is the thought that counts. Innovations that challenge our customs and comfort zones don’t always meet with approval at first. “Often really interesting concepts get hammered internally,” Sherwin remarks, “but then they go and win loads of awards, get great press, and heads start to turn…”
Other outfits are opening up the innovation process to their consumers – a smart way of generating new ideas and raising the profile of a particular initiative. Levi Strauss & Co.’s ‘Care to air design challenge’ is a crowd-sourcing competition for the most “covetable and sustainable airdrying solution for clothes”. It’s also a way to raise awareness of the extravagant use of energy that tumble drying represents, when simple exposure to fresh air will do the job and give your clothes that breezy outdoors scent. In another crowd-sourcing initiative, Starbucks asked coffee lovers to find an alternative to disposable cups. The winning solution, Karma Cup, isn’t a cup at all. It’s a behaviour change incentive in the form of a blackboard. Every time a customer brings a reusable cup with them, it’s tallied on the board, with a free drink awared to every tenth person. Innovations to challenge and change behaviour are sprouting up across the world. When Japan’s three most important banks joined forces to save energy on indoor temperature regulation, the result was a sudden, massive shift in business clothing etiquette. By leaving the air con off until room temperatures rose above 28°C, they encouraged employees who would have worn suits and ties whatever the weather to opt for open-necked shirts. It sounds sticky, and even smelly. But the race is on to design a world cool enough for comfort, and those willing to risk a few raised eyebrows now, could well be laughing later.
Metamorphosis (above): a ‘healing bed’ to challenge assumptions
Anna Simpson is Deputy Editor, Green Futures.
Superficial futures How innovators are rethinking our surfaces
Photo: Philips Design
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But if all these solutions were so obvious, why did no one do it before? Because, explains the Forum’s Head of Innovation, Chris Sherwin, “no single company can own or influence the entire lifecycle [of a product], as generally they are only involved in one phase”. It’s by bringing people together that inefficiencies are exposed and new ideas born – and for Sherwin, the project’s biggest win was how effectively it illustrated this. “The greatest innovations occur across a system,” he argues, insisting that conversation and ‘co-development’ across the lifecycles of products and services and between sectors are a major catalyst for change. With paint, the reward is scale: if you add together small steps taken by individual companies to address everything from product design to consumer use, the result is a leap for the industry. But cross-sector collaborations can lead way beyond incremental change. With mobile technology and the web transforming how we live and work, more companies are getting nosy about their neighbours in the race to keep ahead. For some, the out-of-the-box thinking inspired by delving into another sector or mindset leads to radical transformation. And the most innovative companies, it’s emerging, don’t just reinvent themselves, but transform the way things are done around them. Interestingly, it’s leading players in the information and communication technology (ICT) sector – the ones behind the rapid rate of change – who seem most eager to find new roles and identities. They are taking their core skills and asking where else they could be used: effectively gatecrashing other sectors. Take Google. It has spotted that the future of energy is as much about managing information, networks and systems, as it is about actual generation. Smart grids, for example, will link a range of renewable sources, switch between them to minimise the impact of intermittency, and then monitor and influence the end user’s demand. With Google’s growing portfolio of investment in clean energy start-ups and some major generation projects (see p6), it would be no surprise to see the web pioneer of the last couple of decades become the energy giant of the next… Another extrovert of the ICT world is Philips Electronics.
Photo: prill/istock
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Often really interesting concepts get hammered internally, but then they win loads of awards, and heads start to turn...
It’s just a lick of paint: canary yellow to liven up a little nook; white to cool a south-facing room; red for that homely front door. But that slim skin of colour can fast track materials to landfill. According to estimates, half of the UK’s landfilled waste comes from buildings that – after an average life of just 27 years – are no longer wanted. Yet, in spite of this incredibly short lifespan, most buildings are not designed with decommissioning in mind, or “with an eye to their later existence as ruins”, in the words of WG Sebald. Recycling companies are keen to salvage what they can, but valuable resources have to be thrown away because the paint can’t be separated from the ‘contaminated’ raw material. What seemed to add value when the decorators were first called in detracts from it at the ‘graveyard’ stage. It may blend – quite literally – into the background of our lives, but with roughly 400 million litres sold in the UK each year, the environmental impact of decorative paint is significant. A look at its lifecycle reveals concerns at every stage. There are energy-intensive ingredients like synthetic binders from fossil fuels; there’s the release of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) – a form of greenhouse gas and sometimes detrimental to health; there’s packaging and transporting the stuff; and then there’s the heavy draw on water, both during production, and later on, to clean brushes and rollers. As one WWF campaign warned, “A single tin of paint can pollute millions of litres of water”. Fortunately, the answer isn’t ugly walls. A project by Forum for the Future linked up various players in the paint supply chain – including manufacturer ICI Paints AkzoNobel, and contractor Carillion, a major user – to address some of these problems. The collaboration, they found, threw up all sorts of opportunities for innovation, with rewards in cost and efficiency. One result was a water-based paint, virtually free of VOCs, and with 50% less embodied carbon than previous formulations. Other outcomes included a new recycling process for paint cans, packaging formats to reduce bulk by 98%, and a mobile brush and roller cleaning station so as not to contaminate local water supplies (www.forumforthefuture.org/projects/ paint-the-town-green).
• Dutch interior designer Jonas Sampson has seen the lighting on the wall with his LED-enhanced wallpaper that both illuminates and decorates the room. Light patterns can be static, moving or motion-activated. • Lumitec, a new paint technology from Dulux, claims to reflect twice as much natural light as normal white paint, so you’d need less artificial light to keep a room
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bright. Imagine the cooling effect it could have if used to paint our roofs... • There’ll be no more papering over cracks or repainting your car if a self-healing paint developed by scientists in Illinois makes it to market. Tiny liquid-filled capsules in a polyurethane coating burst when the paint cracks, spilling to repair the damage.
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Intheknow
Forumupdate
Pregnant pause
Ron Mathison, MD, Finlays, tea and flower producer
Sara Parkin explains why the planet needs family planning.
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The obsession with measurement gets in the way, too. Everyone wants to measure everything these days, but it’s almost impossible to get agreed standards. All the supermarkets use different measuring standards, the European standards are different to the American, and in Europe there’s a difference between British and German. It’s just a mess. People say: ‘How does tea compare to, say, sugar in terms of its water footprint?’ It’s an almost meaningless question. Is it from crop to teabag or to the loose leaf? What about the water in your kettle? How do you measure, and where do you define your boundaries?
Green Futures July 2010
Eucalyptus, waste and water give us the energy we need. We’ve been spending a lot of time and money trying out new alternative sources of energy. We grow virtually all our own fuel – in the form of eucalyptus wood, which is used for the tea boilers. It’s completely renewable, but all the same we still want to burn less of it. So we’re looking at using tea waste, which is currently composted – it’s all organic – to see what sort of calorific value we can get if we burn it. We’re just experimenting, seeing what’s possible. We want to be as self-sufficient as we can. We have two [mini] hydro plants, and they’re great – as long as the rivers are flowing. We’ve tried solar and wind, but they don’t work for us, which is disappointing. But we’re very excited about anaerobic digestion. We’re hoping to use tea, flower and human waste to produce biogas. Sustainability just means taking the long view. On our estates, it would be cheaper for us just to throw a lot of fertiliser on the ground and get more yield that way, than make the hard yards that we do looking after the soil, the water, all the crop husbandry, to get more life out of the land in a more sustainable fashion for a longer period of time. But then we wouldn’t have a long-term future. We can [make the extra effort] because we’re a family business; we don’t have shortterm shareholder pressure, so we can take the long view. Providing they do that, most businesses will be sustainable almost by definition. Ron Mathison was in conversation with Martin Wright.
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Planning our family is a personal responsibility, as well as a global dilemma
Photo: pidjoe/istock
Ninety-nine times out of 100, policy gets in the way. It’s the friction that’s caused by regulation that drives unsustainable behaviour. I’m very much against big government-type directives, they generally cause a huge amount of extra cost and inefficiency.
How do you translate them into meaningful comparisons? Just aggregating the data internally and then presenting it in a way that is meaningful to an external audience is very difficult, and it’s consuming a huge amount of effort and energy. And in a way, all that effort and energy would be better focused on other things…
Photo: Finlays
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If they take the long view, most businesses will be sustainable by definition
I remember seeing old ladies in Hong Kong jumping on cans in the street… They were compacting and collecting them, and then selling them. If you want people to behave sustainably, give them a financial reward for doing so. I don’t think it’s that hard. For example, we all know that consumers are motivated by things that cost less. So ideally, if you want a Fairtrade or Rainforest Alliance (RFA) product, you should find a way to reduce its price, not impose a hefty premium. That’s the paradox of it all. And at Finlays we’re very aware of it. But when it comes to retailers, we often find there’s no alignment between their commercial departments and their sustainability [strategy]. One part of the retailer wants everything to be Fairtrade or RFA or whatever, but [it doesn’t happen] because the [part that counts] knows the product is going to do less well if they do that. I think there’s a lack of honesty about this stuff, and that if we were more honest about ourselves and our motives, we would make much more progress.
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Thwarting death – and particularly child mortality – has been one of the greatest human achievements of the last 200 years. Average life expectancy across the world has risen from 47 to 68 in the last 60 years alone. Growing old remains a privilege, though. Citizens of richer countries still live around ten years longer than those in poorer ones. Unfortunately, lowering birth rates is not so prestigious and attracts significantly less investment. Although family size has dropped from a global average of over five children in 1950 to just 2.6 today, we are still on course for a world population of 10.5 billion by 2050. According to many ecologists, it would be impossible for the earth to sustain so many. Already, at 6.8 million, we are over-consuming and over-polluting to a dangerous degree. There are plenty of incentives for politicians to hasten an ‘ecological demographic transition’ – in which birth rates come down to equal death rates, and populations stabilise at a lower level. As solutions to climate change and resource shortages go, this is one of the easiest and cheapest available – and would bring many additional benefits to women, children and economies. When rich countries discuss population control, a commonly voiced fear is the cost of an ageing population. But, as Adair Turner, former Chair of the UK Pensions Commission, has calculated, raising children represents a far greater cost to families and to the state than caring for the frail and dying. Globally, up to 40% of pregnancies are unplanned, revealing a huge unmet need for contraception and family planning services. Just by filling this gap, we would have a chance of bringing world population down to the lower UN projection of 8 billion by 2050. In the poorest countries, where the average family size is over four children, women need the most
help to plan their families and be confident that the children they do have will thrive. Improved access to contraceptives and advice in Iran, Thailand and Rwanda, for example, has been welcomed greatly by women – and has proved very successful at reducing growth rates. For determined governments, distance is no obstacle to making effective interventions. In remote upland regions of Mexico, contraceptives arrive in the villages in panniers carried by donkeys – with medical supplies in the same load. Yet in the UK, where over a third of pregnancies are unplanned, Primary Care Trusts are failing to provide adequate services. Currently, rich countries are alone in showing a rise in average family size. With a disproportionate impact on the environment, this puts them on fragile ecological, moral and diplomatic territory. A child born in Europe accounts for 11 times more greenhouse gas emissions than one born in Africa; for North America, the figure is 24 times. (These do not include ‘offshore’ emissions embedded in imports.) Ultimately, it is clear that, with increasing pressure on key resources, such as land, food and water, everywhere, planning our family is a personal responsibility, as well as a global dilemma. Sara Parkin is Founder Director of Forum for the Future.
Forum for the Future’s new report, Growing Pains, warns that the UK will struggle to meet the needs of a population officially projected to reach 70 million by 2030, and calls on politicians to start planning now. Read it online at www.forumforthefuture.org/ projects/growing-pains.
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Brand salad
Tomorrow’s leaders Since 1996, Forum for the Future’s Masters in Leadership for Sustainable Development has been training the sustainability leaders of the future. Each issue, we track the career of a Forum alumnus.
Julie Hirigoyen Class of: 1997-98 Currently: Lead Director, Upstream Sustainability Services at Jones Lang La Salle. Why I chose the MProf I was doing a Masters in Environmental Protection and Management at Edinburgh University, which gave me all the important scientific knowledge, but missed out the wider social and political forces that affect our ability to achieve sustainability. I wanted to work in policy and business, and so when my mum forwarded me an ad for the course – a cut-out from the first ever issue of Green Futures – I applied straight away. It ticked all the right boxes. What I learnt It felt very elite at the time, and unique, with Jonathan Porritt and Sara Parkin and Paul Ekins – all these people you were reading about – spearheading it. The entry criteria were really tough, too. I remember thinking, “If I get onto this, it’ll be extraordinary”. You just knew that once it was over you would a) know lots of people, and b) have a much better feel for what’s out there and where you could have an impact. It did all of that. One of the key things I learned is that you can’t know it all. The course covered such a broad set of issues and sectors, and there were so many inspiring people... I got a lot of inspiration from it, which I don’t think one necessarily gets from an academic exercise. Career to date It’s quite straightforward really. As soon as I finished at the Forum, I joined Upstream. They were working with several
Sally Uren samples the ingredients for sustainable retail.
major property companies in the UK, and it was the first year the Business in the Environment index came out. Several of the companies were right at the bottom, and so we asked them why they weren’t doing anything. For the next ten years we expanded the practice, trying to get sustainability taken more seriously. After about five years, interest shot up and the business went exponential. It was also partly to do with having been there right at the start, when no one else was addressing the real estate industry.
There’s no shortage of talk about smart, sustainable retail. But how do we make it work in practice? Here is a personal recipe. A large helping of leadership We need to speed up the shift towards sustainable business models – ones that deliver economic success within environmental limits. A great example of this is Unilever’s announcement that it will double its size, while reducing its overall impact on the environment.
What I plan to do next A big change took place in 2007, when we sold Upstream to Jones Lang La Salle, so now we’re part of a much bigger group. The vision behind that was to embed sustainability at the heart of real estate transactions, so that – rather than sitting on the outside and advising individual companies on what they can do – we’d influence all the deals and loans from within. From a personal perspective, I have two missions: one is the real estate industry, and the other is this firm – I want to integrate sustainability into everything it does. Recently, it’s been very challenging given the market: we’ve been in survival mode, really. But when we do get back to normal practice, this is going to be at the heart of what we do – because we know it has to be.
An infusion of innovation If you want to make sustainable living affordable and easy, innovation is the way to go. B&Q’s partnership with Bioregional and the London Borough of Sutton to offer home owners loans to improve the energy efficiency of their houses is just one example of the fresh thinking that will deliver immediate financial and carbon savings. A dash of making-it-easy juice By providing recipes and even little boxes for bits of food that would normally get thrown away, Sainsbury’s ‘Love your Leftovers’ campaign made it easy for people to reduce their food waste, and so reduce food to landfill.
Advice for future leaders Don’t jump too soon. Make a measured, informed choice about where to channel your efforts before you take your first job, because it will shape your whole career. And maintain your contacts. If you can find a way to do that systematically, then it will help all of us to achieve a great deal.
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Everything is getting smart – fridges and lighting, homes and cars, workplaces, cities and services, too. Behind this ‘smart’ revolution is a radical rethink of how we can achieve what we need – personal contact, satisfaction, variety, excitement, security – without relying solely on ‘stuff’. We’re increasingly using ICT to connect more aspects of our daily life, allowing us to understand and manipulate the mountains of data in a growing variety of ways – and there’s every reason to believe this trend will accelerate. But while ICT can be used to wean us off our material obsessions, it’s not without its own environmental impact. Globally, the greenhouse emissions of the sector are similar to that of the aviation industry – about 2% of the total. And, like aviation, these emissions are set to rise. There is much work underway to reduce them, of course – but rising ICT emissions is not necessarily wholly bad news. Because in general, ICT is providing a substitute for more carbon intensive services in energy, travel – especially aviation – and retail, among others. So overall, global emissions should fall, even while the proportion accounted for by ICT rises. But in addition to energy consumption and carbon
Photo: blackie/istock
Photo: eliandric/istock
Madeleine Lewis co-manages the Farming Futures project.
And a topping of brand delight People trust brands in a way they don’t trust business or government. Smart retailers will use this trust to encourage more sustainable behaviours, recognising that endless labels on packaging have their limits. Sally Uren is Deputy Chief Executive, Forum for the Future. Read more about Forum for the Future’s work on sustainability, brands and consumers in the October issue of Green Futures.
Is ICT a help or a hindrance on the low-carbon road?
More farmers are getting caught in the web should work together in response to this challenge. Online ‘knowledge cooperatives’ featured among their ideas for kicking off the conversation – unsurprising, given that 56% of farmers now surf the web on a regular basis. Traffic on a new blog testifies to the demand. Discussions around everything from mob grazing, solar farming and feed-in tariffs, to Twin N, winter chill and fat-fingered farmers have been posted at www. farmingfutures.org.uk and tweeted round the fields. Social media is about ideas, change and collaboration – and that’s exactly what the agricultural community needs.
A layer of living it It’s critical that staff on the shop floor can answer questions from the hapless consumer on green issues, and retailers can help staff practise what they need to preach. M&S offered their staff free home insulation, while Walmart handed out energy efficient lightbulbs.
Smarter still
Julie Hirigoyen was in conversation with Katie Shaw.
Rural tweets
Social networking is the fastest growing webbased activity, accounting for one in every four and a half minutes spent online. Once dominated by flirting teenagers and fired-up students, sites such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and online forums are increasingly at the hub of professional circles – not least Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Now, farmers are turning to chat rooms to share approaches to climate change. The agricultural sector is facing a big challenge. With a growing population, food production needs to go up while the environmental impact of the industry goes down. And all this has to happen at a lower cost, using resources as efficiently as possible. In a recent Farming Futures survey, 82% said they thought that the sector
A dose of reward We all like a little more than a pat on the back. One of the best examples is the partnership between M&S and Oxfam, where M&S customers are rewarded with a £5 voucher for taking their old clothes, and more recently curtains, to the charity shop.
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emissions, there are significant raw material demands associated with the sector, such as toxicity and waste disposal – as well as social concerns, such as access to information. Unfortunately, there has been a tendency for ICT organisations to overlook their impacts and develop as they see fit – assuming that all growth is good for society and that negative impacts will be swamped by the flood of positives. It’s a short-sighted view. If we develop and apply ICT badly, it will add to the world’s problems – from resource shortages to equality gaps. But if we apply it well, the rewards could be enormous. It could enhance problem-solving creativity and innovation, build communities, give more people access to goods and services, and allow us to use precious resources more efficiently. James Taplin is Principal Sustainability Advisor for the Forum’s Business Programme. Read more about Forum’s work with leading ICT organisations in the next issue of Green Futures.
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Forum for the Future works in partnership with over 100 leading organisations, mainly from the public and private sectors, to find practical ways to deliver a sustainable future. For more information, visit www.forumforthefuture.org
It’s a loan, not a shark – from BRAC, Bangladesh
Advantage West Midlands Tom Anderson, 0121 380 3500
Cornwall County Council Anthony Weight, 01872 322633
Leeds City Council Tom Knowland, 0113 395 0643
Skanska Jennifer Clark, 01923 776666
AkzoNobel Elizabeth Stokes, 01928 51169
Corus Ceri George, 01244 892460
London Borough of Croydon Peter McDonald, 020 8760 5791
Sony Ericsson Fortuné Alexander, 020 8762 5857
Alliance Boots Andrew Jenkins, 0115 968 6766
Ecotricity Matt Thomas, 01453 756111
AOL Time Warner www.timewarner.com/corp
Ecover Belgium NV Mick Bremans, +32 3 309 2500
London Borough of Newham Fiona Perry, fiona.perry@newham.gov.uk
South East England Development Agency Nick King, 01483 484200
Arup Chris Trott, 020 7636 1531
EDF Energy David Ferguson, 07875 119978
London Borough of Waltham Forest Jane Brown, www.walthamforest.gov.uk
South West Tourism Neil Warren, 01392 353234
Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy Jane Howarth, 020 7410 7023
Energy Saving Trust Paula Owen, 020 7654 2411
Marks & Spencer Rowland Hill, 020 8718 6885
AXA Insurance Truska Angel, 07974 833109
The Environment Agency Brian Francis, brian.francis@environmentagency.gov.uk
Middlesbrough Council Bob King, 01642 728233
Balfour Beatty Jonathan Garrett, 020 7216 6837
Eurostar Louisa Bell, 020 7922 2442
Morrison Construction Guy Wilson, guy.wilson@ morrisonconstruction.co.uk
Bank of America Merrill Lynch Matt Hale, 020 7996 2054
Fife Council Neil Gateley, 08451 555555
Benchmark Software Simon Harvey, 01458 444010
Finlays Michael Pennant-Jones, 020 7802 3239
BCME Sophie Brown, sophieb@chocolatecom.co.uk
Firmenich SA Neil McFarlane, +41 227802435
Birmingham City Council Sandy Taylor, 0121 303 1111 Bottletop Cameron Saul, cameron@bottletop.org BP Naomi Korolew, 020 3057 2524 British Council www.britishcouncil.org British Waterways Jim Stirling, jim.stirling@britishwaterways.co.uk BT Environment Unit, 0800 731 2403 Bupa www.bupa.com Cadbury Alison Ward, 01895 615568 Cafédirect Whitney Kakos, 020 7490 9540 Capgemini James Robey, 0870 904 5761 Cargill Europe Fiona Cubitt, 01932 861916 Carillion Louise Perry, 01902 316258 Carmarthenshire County Council www.carmarthenshire.gov.uk City of London Simon Mills, 020 7332 1431
NHS Bristol Angela Raffle, angela.raffle@bristolpct.nhs.uk
Food and Drink Federation Julian Hunt, 020 7420 7125
O2 Simon Davis, simon.davis@O2.com
Friends Provident Sandra Latner, 08452 683135
Panasonic Simon Eves, 01344 853325
GSH Group Nicola Barker Wyatt, 01782 200400
PepsiCo UK & Ireland Andrew Smith, 0207 734 0582
Halcrow Group Nick Murry, murrynja@halcrow.com
Powys County Council Heather Delonnette, 01597 827481
Heineken UK Richard Heathcote, 01432 345277
Pret A Manger Nicki Fisher, 020 7827 8888
IGD Dr James Northen, 01923 851919
Prudential Fay Hogg, 020 7548 3581
InterfaceFLOR Ramon Arratia, 020 7490 3960
Pureprint Group Richard Owers, 01825 768611
Interserve www.interserveplc.co.uk
Rail Safety and Standards Board Joanna Gilligan, 020 7904 7655
Jaguar Land Rover Fran Leedham, fleedham@ jaguarlandrover.com
Royal Dutch Shell Elfrida Hughes, +31610974798
John Lewis Partnership Gemma Lacey, 020 7592 4412
Royal Mail Group Martin Blake, 01252 528681
Johnson Matthey Sean Axon, 020 7269 8400
RSA Paul Pritchard, 020 7337 5712
JT Group John Pontin, 01275 373393
RWE npower Anita Longley, 01793 892716
Kingfisher Christina Allen, 020 7644 1142
Sainsbury’s Supermarkets Jack Cunningham, jack.cunningham@sainsburys.co.uk
Knowsley Metropolitan Borough Council Phil Monaghan, www.knowsley.gov.uk
The Co-operative Group Chris Shearlock, www.co-operative.coop
Kraft Foods Jonathan Horrell, 01242 236101
Green Futures July 2010
Network Rail www.networkrail.co.uk
FirstGroup Terri Vogt, 07799 885171
Colors Fruit Craig Schaefer, 01354 691 340
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Natural England Julian Lloyd, 0300 060 0243 www.naturalengland.org.uk
SC Johnson Chris Lambert, 01784 484100
Sustainability West Midlands Simon Slater, 0121 202 3265 simon.slater@swm.org.uk Tata Global Beverages Sara Howe, 020 8338 4590 Tesco Ruth Girardet, 01992 644053
From crisis to resilence
Tetra Pak Richard Hands, 0870 442 6623 Thames Water Utilities Darren Towers, 0118 373 9063 Thomson Reuters Julia Fuller, julia.fuller@thomsonreuters.com TJX Europe Jo Murphy, 01923 473089
When the world’s leading progressive banks gathered for a key meeting earlier this year, their choice of location spoke volumes.
Transport for London Helen Woolston, 020 7126 3976 Triodos Bank William Ferguson, 0117 9809770 TUI Travel Jane Ashton, 01293 645911 Unilever UK Helen Fenwick, 01372 945000 United Nations Environment Programme Niclas Svenningsen, +33 144 37 14 33 VisitEngland Jason Freezer, 020 8563 3180 Vodafone Group Chris Burgess, 01635 677932 Volac Andy Richardson, 01223 208021 Warburtons Sarah Miskell, 01204 556600 Welsh Assembly Government Victoria Thomas, 029 2082 1667 Wessex Water Dan Green, 01225 526000 West Sussex Council Daire Casey, 01243 752287 Willmott Dixon George Martin, 01932 584700 Wm Morrison Supermarkets Gillian Hall, gillian.hall@morrisonsplc.co.uk WWF-UK Dax Lovegrove, 01483 412395
Severn Trent Kathryn Barker, 0121 7224314
www.greenfutures.org.uk
Photo: BRAC Bank
Aviva Investors Steve Waygood, 020 7809 6000
Entec UK Ltd Francesco Corsi, 0191 272 6128
Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) James Simpson, 020 7811 3315 www.msc.org
Bangladesh is geographically dominated by the Ganges delta, acutely prone to floods and drought. It’s at the sharp end of two converging crises – climatic and economic – which are to some extent threatening us all. The country has made great strides in protecting vulnerable villages through simple techniques such as tree belts, embankments and buffer strips along rivers. But it cannot pay for the hugely sophisticated – and costly – defences which guard rich world cities from climate upheaval. And even if it could afford to borrow the money required, the economic crisis means there’s little to be lent. It’s just one example of the way in which life gets a lot harder when crises converge. We can expect more of the same in the not so distant future. As peak oil looms, we face the chilling prospect of a combined energy and food crisis. And we will surely face an even greater, more lasting economic one, unless we devise a financial system that is better connected to the real, physical economy. A system which attaches value to the environmental and social impact of investments, not just to their short-term financial reward. One which helps developing countries achieve a sustainable society and economy, without incurring the hugely detrimental environmental cost of our own economic development in the industrialised West. In short, we need a financial system to address the emerging, converging crises – rather
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than being the root cause of them in the first place. And we need the finance industry to play its part in achieving that. It’s one of the reasons Triodos Bank helped found the Global Alliance for Banking on Values (GABV). Set up last year, this brings together 11 of the world’s leading sustainable banks to create a positive alternative to a global financial system in crisis. While each is unique, they are united by a common goal: to use money as a tool for enhancing the quality of life. Together, they have assets of over $10 billion, serve over seven million customers in 20 countries, and range from a green bank in the US to a Mongolian microfinance institution. And crucially, unlike many of their enormous mainstream contemporaries, they are profitable, growing and crisis-resistant. This is no coincidence: as sustainable banks they’re more resilient because their core business model is sound, based on a responsible, long-term approach to finance. This March, the GABV met for the second time, fittingly in Bangladesh. They spent three days planning how best to grow sustainable finance across the world, focusing on issues such as joint capital raising, supporting existing banks looking to adopt genuinely values-driven models, and encouraging the creation of new sustainable ones. In the coming years, they aim to grow their membership significantly. At the summit’s close, the Alliance pledged to touch the lives of one billion people by 2020.
Achieving that will mean everything from empowering entrepreneurs in the developing world, to financing renewable energy projects to meet global power needs. Bangladesh’s own BRAC Bank, for instance, helps develop small enterprises among communities facing huge challenges of poverty, illiteracy and disease. As these businesses become more financially sustainable, so they can provide some desperately needed stability to the lives of the people they employ and their communities. At the other end of the lending spectrum, Triodos is financing over 275 innovative climate and energy projects across Europe. Together they have a generating capacity of over 1GW – equivalent to the electricity consumption of around 630,000 European households. Peter Blom, chair of the GABV and Triodos CEO, argues that this diversity of different approaches is key to the Alliance’s strength. “There’s no one single answer to the global financial crisis. There are many. And the leaders of these organisations, acting on an international stage, hold many of them. Together they are an extraordinary force for change”. Bevis Watts is Head of Business Banking, Triodos. Triodos Bank is a Forum for the Future partner. www.triodos.co.uk www.gabv.org
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Less is more – in every sense
Hook, line and certified
Jack Cunningham, Head of Climate Change and Environment, Sainsbury’s, on why he’s seeking a new simplicity.
When it comes to sustainable fishing, premiums aren’t the only incentive.
You choose for me...
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“The trend is for Government to look to people like Sainsbury’s to help deliver on carbon reduction targets. But what I don’t want to see at this stage is Government forcing suppliers to do x and y without first giving retailers the opportunity to find solutions ourselves. What will work for one farmer in Devon might not work for another in Scotland. There are all sorts of variables: you can’t take a cookie cutter approach.” Of course, Cunningham recognises, there are business opportunities for retailers who go beyond passing information back and forth from supplier to consumer, and get actively involved in creating change. Take energy. Sainsbury’s is working with the Energy Saving Trust (EST) and a large utility company to set up a onestop shop, where people can go for advice on efficiency in the home, or help installing solar panels on their roof. “At the moment, customers come to us because they trust the brand; they know what it stands for. They don’t necessarily think of it as somewhere they can solve a problem like their energy bill. But I think that, in the future, they will.” Jack Cunningham was in conversation with Anna Simpson. Sainsbury’s Supermarkets is a Forum for the Future partner. www.j-sainsbury.co.uk
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Photo: damore/istock
court. And what’s worse – they get in the way of good, straightforward dialogue between the shopper and their store: “It’s all very well printing figures on packaging, but in fact, it’s our colleagues in store who can help consumers find what they came for. The great thing would be if every store colleague could articulate with confidence what we know about fish, say, or the impact of a product on communities.” But point of sale is just one piece of the jigsaw, says Cunningham. “If we want to make informed decisions for our customers, we need to work with suppliers, so that we can influence the product before it lands on our shelves”. And the same rules regarding open conversation apply. “The most important thing for us is making sure that the supplier doesn’t go bust, environmentally or economically. So we don’t go to our suppliers saying, ‘We want our beef low carbon and for a low price: what can you do?’ We find we can have a much more mature conversation on costs if we develop a close working relationship with them – helping them save money by becoming more efficient, for example.” It’s a lighter touch, but a more intelligent and human one than forcing suppliers to rise to regulations or targets. “Regulations stymie innovation,” says Cunningham. Which is why he’s looking for the same sort of openness and display of trust from Government.
Photo: RapidEye/istock
“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” TS Eliot’s words are sharply relevant in this age of endless ecolabels and ‘product advisories’. And they might just strike a chord with shoppers. These days, everything from a packet of tea to a toilet roll carries a whole litany of assurances about provenance, impact, recyclability and so on. And there could soon be more, if carbon and water labelling follow. But, says Jack Cunningham, Head of Climate Change and Environment at Sainsbury’s, there is evidence that customers are becoming weary of it all. “It’s almost impossible to communicate the ‘embedded carbon impact’ of products to a customer. They might be aware of what carbon is, in the global sense, but understanding the impact of a particular product is another matter. The same goes for water. They do worry about animal welfare; they like to know where our meat comes from, how the animals have been treated, and so on. But regardless of the issue, they feel that they’re getting too much information. What they really want is to come into the store and buy some stuff in a hasslefree way, knowing that the brand is taking care of all these issues for them.” When it comes to building that sort of confidence, food labelling can be counterproductive, Cunningham argues. Besides the logistics and cost involved in collating the data, labels put the ball firmly back in the customer’s
When the American Albacore Fishing Association (AAFA) had its tuna certified to the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) standard for sustainable fisheries, the effect in financial terms was dramatic. Certified tuna can command premium prices from demanding European buyers such as restaurants, and for a small fishing community like that of Bonita, California, this made all the difference. With certification secured, they were able to sell direct, rather than depend on the constant flux of dockside prices. Whereas previously they’d received an average of $1,700 per tonne, they could now command, and stick to, a price of $2,260. With the extra $560 per tonne, they were able to make their crumbling vessels seaworthy, and start to attract a new generation into what had been a dying industry. “It was the first time we had set [our own] price and enjoyed that stability,” says Natalie Webster, Director of Operations at AAFA. It underlines the fact that the MSC is not just about ensuring sustainable fish stocks. It can also be a lifesaver for fisher folk. With this sort of premium, they have the power to stand their ground in a tough market, just as Fairtrade certification has helped out coffee farmers. Across the Mexican border in Baja California, meanwhile, the certification of red rock lobster led to a significant investment in the infrastructure of ten coastal villages. When the Regional Federation of Fishing Industry Cooperatives (FEDECOOP) became the first community fishery in a developing country to meet the MSC’s criteria for sustainability and good management, international interest in the region soared. According to Mario Ramade of FEDECOOP, this attracted a $20 million grant from the Mexican Government to supply the villages with electricity, improve their roads and ensure access to drinking water. For Rupert Howes, Chief Executive of the MSC, this reinforces evidence of a link between certification and wider social and economic benefits – something he hopes will attract new fisheries into the programme. “The potential market incentives are manifold, with fisheries reporting a combination of stable prices, stable customer base, market preference and access to new markets”, he says. “It’s not just higher prices.” Take Norwegian saithe. While the extent to which fisheries have been able to mark up the price of their MSC-certified stock has varied, a surge in demand from food companies has helped business across the board. As Howes explains: “Greater throughput in factories means
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lower production costs.” And so, whatever the point of sale premium, other economic benefits are realised along the supply chain. That is not to say that small-scale fisheries need wait for wider change in the industry to reap certification’s rewards. In Australia, the Lakes and Coorong fishery has sold MSC certified perch, mullet, mulloway and ‘pipi’ (cockles) to restaurants in Melbourne and Sydney at premiums of 30-50%. While in southern England, the Hastings fishery has secured price hikes of up to 15% for its Dover sole, herring and mackerel in European ports. “I have no doubt that the business case [for joining the MSC programme] has been proven,” says Howes, “and it’s not just the smaller guys who are demonstrating that.” Also, most importantly, a strong ecological case is emerging. “There’s growing evidence of the environmental benefit of fisheries operating at such a high level of sustainability – and how market incentives can drive change in the way
the oceans are fished”, adds Howes. Markets are responding positively and changing rapidly. The Findus Group has announced that all its wild-caught seafood will come from fisheries certified to the MSC standard by 2012. Birds Eye also aims to buy all its wild and farmed fish from certified sustainable sources by that year. For wild fish, this means MSC certification, since no other standard meets Birds Eye’s fish policy requirements. As the market grows, and consumers demand certified sustainable seafood, there is hope that the decline in global fish stocks can be reversed. Already, 12% of the global harvest is in the MSC programme. Over 5,000 individual products are available in 60 countries. The MSC aims to help increase that proportion to 25% over the coming decade. – Andrew Purvis The Marine Stewardship Council is a Forum for the Future partner. www.msc.org
Calm waters ahead: certification brings stability to fishing communities
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Against the flow A new wave of hydro plants might be a boon for fish, as well as an energy source.
Home truths
Serious investment is needed to get the UK’s microgen industry off the ground. Jaryn Bradford makes the case.
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give their sector as a whole the best chance of success. This ‘collegiate’ approach could also help generate a collective research fund, with a wide cross-section of industry contributing small sums to benefit the market as a whole. Government-led measures to spur investment offer some grounds for optimism. In the next year, feed-in tariffs will be backed up by the Renewable Heat Incentive – which will oblige utilities to meet a proportion of heating demand through renewable means. This could be a neat source of income for savvy householders, but work is needed to build their confidence first. The EST is offering the UK’s microgen industry a hand over these hurdles. Get it right, and it could take a big slice of the emerging global market. Get it wrong, and it could stagnate. While it’s the householder who will be using these technologies, it’s down to industry to prove their efficacy – and the challenge starts now. Jaryn Bradford is Development Manager – Renewables, at the Energy Saving Trust. The Energy Saving Trust is a Forum for the Future partner. www.energysavingtrust.org.uk
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Photo: Liz Eves
already under way, with more in the pipeline if industry backing is secured. One trial, now complete, showed that the UK has the potential to generate 3,250GWh from domestic wind turbines alone. The exercise, dubbed ‘Location, Location, Location’, offered the most comprehensive technical monitoring yet of the nation’s small-scale wind resources – and left no doubt that there are excellent business opportunities going begging. Building on this success, EST is now carrying out similar assessments of ground source heat pumps, solar water heating, solid wall insulation, advanced heating controls and LED lighting. The aim is to identify technologies that are particularly well suited for the domestic sector, and make sure householders can access solid data to encourage take-up. It is also looking to industry for further funding to support trials of mCHP and smart home energy management systems – both of which are at an early stage, but have exciting potential. But if EST’s experience of major fundraising is anything to go by, convincing an industry to maximise its chances through early investment is no easy task – even if there are billions of pounds’ worth of business to be won. Ideally, competitors would adopt an open source attitude, pooling their knowledge to
Photo: Chris Rudge
You’re slowly paying off a mortgage on your new home and rumour has it you could make a few pennies by fitting it with new devices to generate clean energy. You look into it, but no one seems to be able to tell you just how much that solar panel or ground source heat pump will really provide, and what sort of payback time to expect. Confused, you decide to put your plans on hold for a few years – and, in the meantime, your enthusiasm begins to ebb... It’s an all too common story. And it’s a frustrating one, too. Because there’s no doubt that the UK has massive potential for microgeneration. Initial research by the Department for Energy and Climate Change suggests that up to nine million units could be installed by 2030, including around four million PV installations, and 2.5 million each of ground source heat pumps and micro combined heat and power (mCHP) plants. But more research is needed to turn this potential into reality. We don’t yet know enough about how households use these technologies in practice, and how much money they can save. Answering these questions would build consumer confidence – and give this new market the best chance. An ambitious portfolio of in-situ trials is
Install small-scale hydro at suitable sites across England and Wales, and you’d generate enough electricity to meet 1% of the country’s predicted demand for 2020. With all their locks and sluices, weirs and waterfalls, the waterways of England and Wales present nearly 26,000 opportunities for smallscale hydropower, according to Entec’s Neil Webster. He’s mapped every single one for the Environment Agency (EA), gathering data on water flow and gradient to estimate the energy potential of each site. The total available capacity, according to his team, is a respectable 1.2GW. That is, of course, relatively small beer. In 25 countries, hydro power is by far the most important source of electricity, meeting 90% of demand – while Norway, the undisputed hydropower champion of Europe, relies on it for 99%. By contrast, the UK generates no more than 2% of its electricity needs from hydro. Much existing hydro, in Britain and Europe, is produced by big dams, which can be highly disruptive to local ecology. But small-scale ‘run of the river’ hydro offers a more benign alternative. So, as clean tech solutions go, increasing the UK’s hydro capacity by half through smallscale projects may seem like relatively ‘low hanging fruit’. However, Webster stresses, the top line total from his mapping study doesn’t tell the full story, taking no account of the environmental impact of installation. One of the most important considerations for the EA is the well being of migratory fish, such as salmon, sea trout and eels. Any scheme that impedes their free movement will not get the go-ahead. “A site can have high potential [for energy generation], but if it lies within a salmon spawning ground it rates as a low opportunity, because there’s no way you could get a proposed scheme past the regulator”, says Webster. For the purpose of the exercise, Entec cross-checked each site against fish monitoring data and maps showing areas of high nature conversation value. The results show up a built-in tension between energy generation and the interests of wildlife. Broadly speaking, the best hydropower opportunities are in the uplands, where water moves quickly downhill, but these rivers are also key to the fortunes of migratory fish. The obvious solution is to install a fish pass – a sort of flyover for fish on the move that removes an existing obstacle to swimming upstream. But
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such passes add cost to any scheme. Take Osbaston, on the River Monnow, in Monmouthshire, where an EA-supported hydro scheme is now generating around 670,000kWh of electricity a year. Here, the fish pass which allows salmon to leap into the upper reaches of the Monnow added hundreds of thousands of pounds to the installation cost. On the plus side of the balance sheet, the introduction of feed-in tariffs for small-scale renewables is shifting economics in favour of schemes such as these. Hydro producers will receive 20p per kWh, which should help offset the capital costs. Further incentives come from Europe. The European Commission’s Water Framework Directive (WFD) has set an ambitious target for all water bodies to achieve a ‘good ecological status’ by 2015. Under this legislation, the UK is obliged to draw up a river management programme to minimise the ecological impact of man-made modifications – and this includes helping native species to return. In some cases, a hydro scheme complete with fish pass might actually be an improvement
on what was there before, allowing salmon, say, to navigate past a man-made obstacle, such as a dam or lock, which had hitherto blocked their passage. Moreover, the WFD insists on the fullcost recovery of all water management schemes, and so income from the hydro scheme would make this an ideal response, both economically and ecologically. Webster’s estimate is that a little over 4,000 potential hydropower sites – including many on major rivers like the Severn and the Thames – could offer this ecological payback. If schemes are implemented at each site, they would meet about half the UK’s total hydroelectric potential without harming fish. “Our thinking is that if you remove an [existing] obstruction [to upstream migration] and replace it with a hydropower barrier that has a fish pass, you are improving a watercourse – you not only harvest energy, but you can bring back fish” says Webster. “That really is a win-win.” – Julian Rollins Entec UK Ltd is a Forum for the Future partner. www.entecuk.com Mill race: a clutch of new incentives may bring water power back on stream
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Treehuggers transformed
Sweet wrapper
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Green Futures July 2010
than ‘renewable’ plant-based ones. The research was prompted by the results of an investigation into its carbon footprint, which found that, in some cases, the packaging was having as great an impact as the product itself. And so Ecover turned to the cane fields of São Paulo. Because if you’re looking for a low carbon alternative to petrol-based plastic, explains Ecover’s Marketing Manager Tom Domen, then sugar cane could be your best option. Though, paradoxically, it could also be your worst. It all depends on where, and how, it’s grown and harvested. “If the plantation destroys rainforests and relies on slash and burn, then it is absolutely the worst choice.” None of this applies to São Paulo, however. The region’s fertile soils were never home to rainforests. Before the sugar rush, indeed, there had been a thriving coffee industry…
Ecover is a Forum for the Future partner. www.ecover.com
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Photo: Tony Magdaraog/shutterstock
High above the tributaries of the River Paraná, as far as the eye can see, stretch vast swathes of sugar cane. The city of São Paulo may be the economic powerhouse of Brazil, but its eponymous hinterland state is the agricultural hub – not least because it produces over 60% of the country’s sugar. Demand is driven not so much by sweet teeth, as a hunger for fuel. ‘Low-carbon’ ethanol derived from sugar is a booming industry. Over 90% of cars produced in Brazil are designed to run on it, and there’s a growing export market, too – not just for motor fuel, but a range of other uses from paper to plastics. Two years ago, cleaning products company Ecover commissioned a study which found that plastics sourced from fossil fuel have 75% more embedded carbon
Ecotourism drives jobs and reforestation in Costa Rica
Photo: aldra/istock
Seeking a renewable source of plastic for its bottles, Ecover finds a sugary solution.
This wasn’t the first time Ecover had explored plant-based plastics. But until recently, says Domen, “they just weren’t an option: the quality wasn’t good enough for liquid bottles. Now, they’re comparable to other plastics in everything except the raw material. You can even recycle them in the same way.” Drawing on precious land and water for technical applications – as opposed to food crops – remains a thorny issue. “We need to make sure that the amount of land we require will not grow drastically as our business expands,” says Domen. There are two ways to do this: improving the efficiency of the sugarcane plantation, and increasing the proportion of recycled plastic used. On the efficiency front, significant changes are already under way. The practice of cutting cane by hand and burning off the residue is being replaced by mechanical harvesting, with the leftover leaves and stalks – known as bagasse – used for energy generation. Recent innovations – such as GPS to enable precise planting and fertilisation – promise even greater yields (see Sol e Sombra, p16). Ecover is encouraging such innovations in partnership with bioplastics producer Braskem. Long term, Domen hopes that “we’ll be able to produce up to four times more ethanol, using the same amount of land.” The company is keeping an eye on other potential renewable sources for plastic, such as algae and food waste. But for now, Domen maintains, sugar is the most practical solution. It’s still early days. The first 20,000 renewable and recyclable bottles from sugarcane will be produced this year, and Ecover aims to use a 30:70 mix of renewable and petrol-based plastics in all its bottles from 2011. The ultimate vision is for all plastic packaging to be a blend of renewable and recycled, dropping the virgin petrol-based variety from its chain altogether. All of which begs the question: why not just use 100% recycled plastic? Unfortunately, Domen explains, the technology just isn’t advanced enough yet – although he expects that to change enormously in the next five years. “The only reliable source of recycled plastic is milk bottles, but the grade isn’t compatible with detergents. They are in separate recycling streams.” Of course, the most efficient, moneysaving option of all is straightforward refill. Ecover launched a redesign of their refill system in health food shops in 2009, which they’re hoping to distribute more widely soon. – Anna Simpson
“There was only one rock you could stand on to get a Blackberry signal!” Debbie Dwyer, Management Development Director of TUI Travel, is describing the challenges faced by colleagues on their management training course in Costa Rica. “Senior managers were incommunicado for a week, which to them was torture.” Propelling ‘high potentials’ out of their comfort zone was one aim of the Heliconias Lodge and Rainforest Project, in which key executives met colleagues from across the group to discuss shared values and ideas on doing business better – or, as Dwyer puts it, cultivating the “Too-ey Spirit” (which is how TUI is pronounced). So far, so corporate. But if you knew the history of Heliconias, you’d never think it a likely spot for management training. On the edge of the Volcán Tenorio National Park, a biodiversity hot spot, this patch of primary rainforest was earmarked for deforestation and redistribution in 1985. But the plans were opposed by 23 local families, who formed the Asociación Bijagueña de Productores Agricolas (ABIPA) to manage and protect the
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land, and diversify local income streams. Ten of the original families remain, and with TUI Travel’s support they have transformed their private reserve into an ecotourism business. Staying in basic rooms and working with local people, TUI Travel’s castaway managers used their travel expertise to help lay the foundations. For early participants, build was the operative word. “They literally dug trenches for six new lodges which they built by hand,” Dwyer explains. Referred to as ‘three-star’, the new accommodation is “clean, en-suite with a nice bed and a wardrobe to hang your clothes in”, says Bruce Haxton, Operations Director of i-to-i, a TUI Travel-owned company that places volunteers (including corporates) on development projects abroad and ran the Heliconias programme. As a result, the lodge doesn’t just attract backpackers – but families, mainstream tourists from the coastal resorts, and “San José urbanites”. The transition from treehugger HQ to alternative hotel has been helped by a new website, an online booking engine, financial help and staffing controls – areas in which TUI Travel’s strategic advisors specialise. The result? More
visitors, more foreign currency and the creation of 20 jobs in a rural area dependent on erratic subsistence farming. In the neighbouring village of Bijagua, taxi drivers and stalls selling meat and vegetables benefited, too. “There’s even a little pizzeria now, which didn’t exist before,” says Haxton. “The project has shown people that there are ways of earning money other than farming” – ones which make fewer demands on the renowned local landscape. The upshot, Haxton explains, is that with viable alternatives, such as working as forest guides or restaurant staff, Bijagua is less likely to lose its younger generation to the urban attractions of San José. “Community-based enterprises frequently struggle to develop effective links with the tourism market, and to create products which are best suited to that market,” says Jane Ashton, Head of Sustainable Development, at TUI Travel. “The Heliconias project has avoided simply building something ‘blind’ which they hope tourists like. Instead, it has worked with industry to design a product that will be an asset for future generations.” A further advantage for communities, continues Ashton, is that tourism is labourintensive compared to other non-agricultural industries. “It offers work opportunities for the unskilled and semi-skilled, and employs high numbers of women.” And it means that ABIPA has more money to spend on reforestation, planting tens of thousands of trees a year and supporting local wildlife as well as partially offsetting the carbon cost of their visitors’ flights. Local children are encouraged to help out with tree planting, carrying forward the message that the forest is a precious resource – and one that can be profitable. But isn’t pizza in a remote Costa Rican village the thin end of the tourism wedge? Couldn’t the trickle of visitors swell to a torrent, consuming more resources? “Economic activity has an impact,” Haxton concedes, “but if we do nothing, nothing improves. Besides, there is a self-control aspect because people don’t want mass tourism here. There’s no push to tarmac the roads; they don’t want coach-loads of people swinging from the trees.” And what came of TUI Travel’s adventurous management training stint there? Dwyer insists that the advantages have been striking. “What people brought back was humility and a better, simpler way of doing things. One guy looked at all our systems to make sure we weren’t making things overly complex for our customers.” Next, they might even give up their Blackberries. – Andrew Purvis TUI Travel is a Forum for the Future partner. www.tuitravelplc.com
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CO2 as fuel In â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Air supplyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; (see GF76, p32) you refer to carbon dioxide as a â&#x20AC;&#x153;fuelâ&#x20AC;?, whereas in reality that consists of the methanol, methane and hydrocarbons generated from the CO2. This in effect is no different to using biomass. Energy, from renewable sources or fossil fuels, is still required to convert the CO2 into fuel. So, at best, this is a carbon-neutral solution, whereas Duncan Graham-Roweâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s article suggests that it is some sort of perpetual motion cycle that releases more energy when the fuel is burnt than is used to produce it. BadgerFrank
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Concentrated solar power (CSP â&#x20AC;&#x201C; see â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;The light at the end of the desertâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, GF76, p26) can take us into win-win territory. It becomes easier and cheaper to add capacity, and the infrastructure is lasting â&#x20AC;&#x201C; unlike that of fossil fuels, which becomes redundant once a particular well or mine is exhausted. But Europe should, surely, [also] develop its own resources: solar in the south, wind in the north, tidal, wave, and so on. Piffedoff Do we Europeans have to pinch the sun from Africa too? If desert-based CSP is the miracle solution that is claimed, let Africa power itself with it. Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t get me wrong: I think itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a great idea to harness the sun, but does nobody else question the morality of this being the answer to Europeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s energy woes? Bossacapella The Desertec initiative has a long way to go and will almost certainly be bogged down in politics, but it is a wonderful idea. Africa and the Arab states already provide the world with oil, and so a shift to being clean energy suppliers makes sense and could create jobs. DY The constraints [of desert-based CSP] are the cost of investment and the political instability of the Sahara nations. But income from clean energy could do much to ensure the stability of the region. What we need is the political will to invest now, even though the cost per kWh will be higher than that of existing sources for a while to come. Matthew, London
Duncan Graham-Rowe responds: Oil also has to be processed to turn it into a useful fuel, and so the distinction you make is little more than semantic. You are right to say that using CO2 for fuel is a carbon-neutral solution. Strictly speaking, if you assume that the CO2 got into the atmosphere by burning a fossil fuel in the first place, it is not even neutral: itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s simply a way of burning it twice. But, if the CO2 is sequestered, then this air capture technology has the potential to reduce overall levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. This is what sets it apart from traditional carbon capture and storage, which is merely designed to stem CO2 emissions at the source.
Sustainable sex In â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Save the forest, wear a condomâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; (Sol e Sombra, p31), you praise the virtues of condoms made from a sustainable source. But the truth is that even if condoms are made with petroleum-based rubber and the foil packages are not recycled, they are still hugely important from a sustainability standpoint. A single condom which helps an unplanned pregnancy to be avoided is the cheapest and most effective means of protecting the earth. The resources consumed by one person and the CO2 emitted are a mountain to the tiny molehill of the condom and its wrapper. HogFarmer
Towels of change I agree with Stephanie Draper about the importance of â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;social proofingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; in environmental messaging [convincing people that doing the
right thing is also the social norm â&#x20AC;&#x201C; see â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s all the fluff about?â&#x20AC;&#x2122;, GF76, p37]. But perhaps the messaging around hotel towels is effective because there can be no reason to doubt it. Social proofing is best suited to situations in which people have poor access to information. For example, if a supermarket says to its customers â&#x20AC;&#x153;the majority of our customers reuse their bagsâ&#x20AC;?, but everyone in the queue is doing the opposite, then the impact on behaviour is unlikely to be as great. Luke Wellock
Inventing climate change Martin Wright is spot on with the blog â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;If climate change didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t exist, would we have to invent it?â&#x20AC;&#x2122; (www.greenfutures.org.uk/ editorsblog). Any politician whoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s aware of peak oil is probably quietly relieved that climate change is an issue. If it wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t, they would have to push the message of peak oil, as the technological and behavioural responses required are the same. And that would be a much greater challenge than insisting on [the reality of] climate change. Mike
Greens united Jonathon Porritt criticises Justin Rowlatt for implying that the green movement should be â&#x20AC;&#x153;at oneâ&#x20AC;? (GF76, p48). But I too am surprised that it canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t agree on how best to engage with the general public on climate change â&#x20AC;&#x201C; especially given that only 25% of people agree that climate change is both happening and primarily manmade, and that, according to the Chartered Management Institute, five out of six business managers are doing nothing about it. As Justin identifies, there are huge differences in the advocacy and strategies of environmental organisations, many of them incompatible, and unless a way forward can be agreed which brings on board as many of them as possible, the green agenda will go nowhere. Nigel Farren
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showed that 46% of US citizens are now persuaded that climate change is caused by natural factors rather than man-made emissions. On the other, a big piece in Time Magazine a few months ago highlighted what it called the new ‘Responsibility Revolution’ sweeping America, with 40% of US citizens claiming to put the environment at the heart of their purchasing decisions. On one thing, however, everybody agreed: the US political system is broken. Any dreams of bi-partisanship have withered in the face of Republican intransigence; Capitol Hill is besieged as never before by lobbyists of every description; and that good old US ‘pork-barrel’ is as prominently displayed at the heart of Congress as it’s ever been. The likelihood of getting any climate treaty passed is close to zero. Indeed, the requirement to have a majority of two-thirds in the Senate means that there are already 45 international treaties stuck in the logjam waiting to be ratified. To that resonant election catchphrase “Yes We Can!”, have been added the words “but we probably won’t”…! And so Barack Obama is increasingly dependent on going over the heads of such a chronically dysfunctional Congress. With the emphasis on energy security, new jobs, skills and innovation, he’s out with a nationwide crusade around the “Clean Energy Economy”. By all accounts, this has hardly been barnstorming Barack at his best, and hopes are fading that it could parallel JFK’s summons of the entire nation in support of efforts to get a man on the moon – before the Russians did! It’s hard to go over the heads of Congress, directly to the people, if you can’t rely on the media’s help. And that just isn’t happening. When I’m in the US, I’m invariably over-taken by a bizarre compulsion to tune into Fox News, immersing myself masochistically in its melee of misinformation and madness. What’s most scary about Fox News is that it gives no more standing or authority to science (as in the pursuit of evidence for or against any particular hypothesis) than to political opinion or ‘received wisdom’. Whether Fox News is simply reflecting a growing denialist trend, or actively fashioning it, the implications for policy-makers are grim. And it’s not just businesses that find this very perplexing indeed. Jonathon Porritt is Founder Director of Forum for the Future. Jonathon’s blog is available as a podcast at: www.JonathonPorritt.com Listen to Jonathon at: www.ipadio.com/ phlogs/JonathonPorritt
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‘Weak signals’ are ideas, trends and technologies that are as yet unrecognised by mainstream society. They might have a big impact or they might disappear. Monitoring them helps challenge
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Lunar solar
No man’s land
Gellified grub
The man in the moon has a new look. A 400km broad belt of photovoltaic cells, stretching 11,000km around the moon’s equator, has transformed his ‘light side’ into the perfect suntrap. The energy harvested on the far side is transmitted by cable to the side facing the earth, then converted into microwave and laser power and beamed down to clean energy-hungry humankind. At least, that’s the dream of Tokyo’s Shimizu Corporation: some plan for a rainy day. – Anna Simpson
Forget health and safety protocols. Construction sites are saying goodbye to builders’ bums and hello to sleek computerised systems. Automated cranes, laser excavators and industrial robots, complete with sensors to minimise collisions, could build entire complexes with apartments, offices, roads and canals. Any tweaks to the design plan could be communicated by satellite. But will they be programmed to wolf whistle? – AS
Dipping into your fridge just got gooey. Instead of neat white shelves and bright lights, you pop your veg into an odourless gel where it is suspended and cooled by luminescent bio robots. Gone the monotonous hum of the 1930s design: this motorless model – the brainchild of designer Yuriy Dmitriev – needs just enough energy to light up a little control pad. – AS
Small island summers
Peter Madden basks on tomorrow’s beach.
Photo: CarolinaSmith/istock
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For the Pentagon, green really is the new red, white and blue
I still find the US a very perplexing place. I was over there in May, on the east coast, for the latest in a series of seminars run by The Prince of Wales’s Business and the Environment Programme. We had a fantastic bunch of business delegates: open-minded, deeply concerned about the state of the earth and climate change in particular, and all incredibly keen to see themselves and their companies as part of the solution rather than the cause of the problem. For a lot of them, the highlight of the week was the sharing of a new film, Carbon Nation. This picks up from where An Inconvenient Truth leaves off, with 80% of the content focused on developments in energy efficiency and renewables in the US. It’s a smart piece of work, interviewing both the usual suspects (Amory Lovins, Lester Brown and so on) and treehuggers, with some ‘salt of the earth’ entrepreneurs, farmers, community activists and even military types. It was the first time I’d heard of the Pentagon’s Green Hawks. They’re driving a programme of energy efficiency through the US armed forces (particularly ‘in theatre’ in Afghanistan and elsewhere) which makes most civilian enterprises look weak-kneed by comparison. Its success can largely be put down to its appeal to patriotic and nationalistic sentiments – summed up neatly by Thomas Friedman (author of the brilliant Hot, Flat and Crowded) with the soundbite, “Green is the new red, white and blue”. This stuff works in the US. Friedman’s latest rallying call is that American environmentalists should give up on their ‘Earth Day’ rhetoric and focus instead on the emerging ‘Earth Race’ – the race between the US and China to become the dominant player in the burgeoning cleantech sector. This is a big deal: the cleantech market is worth around $150 billion a year at the moment, but will need to grow to a minimum of $500 billion a year if we are to meet today’s targets for reducing greenhouse gases. Tough-talking army officers and aggressive entrepreneurs add a new dimension to the way all this sits with US citizens. But it’s still a tug of war. On the one hand, a Gallup poll in March
WeakSignals
In a couple of decade’s time, holidaying abroad could be but a distant memory for Brits. We’ll flock instead, with our buckets and spades, to the UK’s new eco-resorts and regenerated seaside towns. Who’d want the heat, hassle and exorbitant cost of going overseas? As key resources become more scarce, power cuts, water shortages and searing summer
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temperatures will make the Med less fun. And exotic resorts might be glad to see the back of us, with resource shortages weighing down on local needs. Tough quotas could send prices sky-rocketing, meaning that some of the most iconic attractions in the world, such as the Pyramids, can only be visited virtually by most people. Some destinations will be uncomfortably crowded as mass tourism from China causes problems from traffic congestion to eroded landscapes. Other destinations will feel less welcoming as strict religious laws prohibit bikinis and booze. At the same time, the UK could feel more attractive as it experiences milder winters and dryer summers. English wines and olives will bring the Mediterranean experience north. Holidaying in the British Isles won’t just be the most affordable option; it will also be chic and ethically ‘cool’, with celebrities spotted on the beaches of South Wales. And when people do venture abroad,
a combination of tough personal carbon budgets and restrictions on flying will mean they travel overland, or hop on an airship. Those who really want to fly will save up for years for special occasions such as honeymoons or visiting friends and family. We can see some of the seeds of these changes already, with quotas and water levies in some destinations, and the recent vogue for ‘staycationing’. Will this be a good thing from a sustainability point of view? There will certainly be big carbon benefits from less air travel. But there will be downsides, too, including loss of revenue for countries that have depended on tourism and increased pressure on habitats in the UK from higher numbers holidaying here. We may even see the French middle classes descend en masse to our campsites in August, to escape their sweltering summers. Peter Madden is CEO, Forum for the Future.
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