Michael Eliason and Aaron Yankauskas, of Brute Force Collaborative, have a great case-study up on a recently completed 'Passivhaus' housing project in the Lodenareal complex in Innsbruck, Austria

Developed by Neue Heimat Tirol and designed by architekturwerkstatt din a4 with team k2 architekten, the new building will provide well designed and highly energy efficient homes for low-income residents:

Pushing for low-tech solutions, low operation and heating costs, and energy independence – Neue Heimat Tirol sounds like an incredible organization to work with. These strategies allow them to work with some stellar architects, producing quality buildings for those that might not otherwise be able to afford it. The Lodenareal complex is expected to save an astonishing 680 tons of CO2 per year. This is an area where Passivhaus really shines – nearly achieving 2030 Challenge now, at costs slightly more than code minimum buildings. We predict that larger housing estates meeting passivhaus will become the norm, as cities and developers realize significant cost savings can be achieved through these schemes.

Those are some impressive stats! Click here to see the full case-study and learn more about the construction assemblies and heating systems, as well as find more images and links to further information on the project.

For another good case study by Michael Eliason and Aaron Yankauskas, see: "Freiburg: A Model of Sustainability"

Photos by Christoph Lackner; via Brute Force Collaborative

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(Posted by Amanda Reed in Green Building at 1:30 PM)

Grist has a new series of interviews up on people who are working to change America's food system in inspiring ways. Yesterday they posted an interview with Gene Fredericks that is worth a read; it introduces Fredericks's new venture: Big Green Boxes.

Big Green Boxes aims to bring a new, high-tech, and sustainable approach to feeding the city. The main idea is to re-use vacant warehouse spaces and fill them with fish ponds, waterfalls, and edible greens and herbs to provide year-round fresh and affordable produce in a closed-loop nutrient cycle. As Fredericks describes it:

It's a new business that will transform unused warehouse space into year-round indoor growing centers. We'll use hydroponics and aquaponics, along with advanced low-energy lighting techniques and vertical growing methods, to produce the very freshest leafy greens for local consumption regardless of climate.

Our goal is to be a sustainable and profitable business that provides tasty, preservative- and pesticide-free fresh food, grown in the community for the community; that creates new jobs; revives some neglected real estate; and offers some pretty interesting educational exposure to green technologies.

What makes Big Green Boxes different from many other urban agriculture projects is its high-tech business approach:

Well, I look at Big Green Boxes as a high-tech business. But it's a very different one from large-scale farming, which has turned into a high-tech business by growing produce in huge volumes far from the end consumer, and which uses technology to modify, preserve, package, transport, and store their produce. BGB could change that. By using a combination of very new and very old technologies, local communities can grow their own fresh produce year round.

Additionally, BGB will take advantage of innovations in lighting, daylighting, alternative energy generation, water collection, and composting to make their growing spaces more energy efficient than greenhouses....with even more efficiencies expected to develop over time:

Ten years ago, Big Green Boxes was not economically or technologically feasible. Now it is. And, as the price of the equipment goes down, the price of oil and water go up it becomes more and more desirable. I know we are creating a somewhat artificial growing environment, and I don't ever expect that we'll replace outdoor seasonal growing, that's not our intention. But in the dead of winter and height of summer we can offer an alternative to sending fresh produce on a 1,500-mile pilgrimage from the fields to the table. Which has to be a good thing!

Read the full interview for more on BGB, including a description of their 'aquaponics' growing system.

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(Posted by Amanda Reed in Food and Farming at 12:00 PM)

Looking back one, two and five years ago today on Worldchanging:

2009
The Cruel Cost of Clunkers
Suzie Boss reports on the hidden social cost of maintaining clunker cars and how one innovative non-profit, Bonnie CLAC, is working to improve the lives of low-income families by getting them reliable, fuel-efficient vehicles...

2009
Free Data. Big Picture. Very Cool.
Which countries are healthiest, wealthiest and most educated? The Gapminder knows...

2005
The Human Storm
Jon Lebkowsky reflects on the social chaos of Hurricane Katrina's aftermath and the painful lessons the storm and the human response to it, can teach us about the kinds of planning and preparation needed to respond to future catastrophic 21st century weather events...

Other recent "look backs":
August 30
August 31
September 1

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Climate Change at 10:00 AM)

The time to act on climate change is now. In that light, a new campaign called FOUR YEARS.GO. has been started to inspire action towards a more environmentally sustainable and socially just planet in the next four years. As they say in their introductory video (see below), the campaign is not a new organization, rather it is a new goal for every organization and for every person to work together in a short amount of time for a better future. Their mantra? "The next four years will determine our planet's next 1,000." So GO!

The campaign is still in its infancy, but it's powerhouse creative team, led by Wieden+Kennedy, the minds behind Nike's "Just Do It" campaign and Lance Armstrong's "Live Strong" yellow bracelet campaign, should help the campaign gain a wider audience and develop more tools for facilitating action. If you'd like to pledge your support, share your stories, or read other people's actions, click here.

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(Posted by Amanda Reed in Movement Building and Activism at 1:45 PM)

For those who – like me – missed the news on Monday: the world's most well known climate change skeptic has done a dramatic about face.

Bjorn Lomborg's 1998 book “The Skeptical Environmentalist” has been a pillar for critics of climate science and policy. He has made a high profile for himself by taking a strip off of pretty much anyone – from the media to the IPCC – who has called for rapid action on climate change. But on Monday in an exclusive interview with The Guardian, he called climate change "undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today" and proposed a global carbon tax to help address the issue.

If that all seems a bit fishy, it's worth remembering that Lomborg never argued that man-made climate change was a fiction. His point has been that, if you do a cost-benefit analysis, dealing with climate change is just too expensive. You get more bang for your buck by focusing policies and money on poverty, disease, and development aid. These in the end give you more immediate positive returns both in terms of human welfare and the environment.

"Energy Miracles" Part 2
Lomborg isn't the first high profile figure to shift his focus from global inequality to climate change. In February Bill Gates announced that the new mission of his foundation (whose core focus is on development and disease) would be to reduce human carbon emissions to zero by 2050. At the time that was a surprising and inspiring move. As was pointed out earlier on WorldChanging, simply by saying “zero carbon by 2050” Gates has helped mainstream what is really our only sensible target. Lomborg's new position may have a similar impact.

Also like Gates, Lomborg is calling for a dramatic investment (to the tune of $100bn per year) in research and development of new renewable energy technologies – an argument that he makes in more detail in an upcoming book. (Gates proposed a $10 billion-a-year U.S. government R&D program to pursue “energy miracles.”) And like Gates, I'd say, Lomborg has (again) got his priorities wrong.

More Results - Less Sex Appeal
Looking for a silver-bullet breakthrough energy technology is romantic and adventurous. But the boring truth is that what we need to focus on right now is market and regulatory barriers.

Not so sexy, I know. I'd rather be driving a Tesla roadster too. But as it stands, new energy technologies enter the market at a snails pace. Royal Dutch/Shell estimates that it takes “25 years after commercial introduction for a primary energy form to obtain a 1 percent share of the global market.” As Joe Romm, excellent climate blogger and energy expert, argued in response to Gates -- we just don't have that kind of time. Rapid effective action depends on getting existing technologies into the market as quickly as possible. It's from that point that practical experience drives innovation and costs really begin to drop. (See Romm's full post for a detailed look at this).

Pushing Deployment: North & South
For those of us working closer to the ground on these issue, the need to focus on getting rid of barriers to implementation is no surprise. Established technologies and established institutions can have a lot of inertia – especially in a sector like energy where the market and infrastructure already in place heavily favours outdated carbon intensive energy sources.

The extensive subsidies and financing options available in the US (but not in Canada) for home efficiency and renewable energy are one example of a way to deal with that. Municipal programs in cities like Berkeley and Portland offer other paths. Passing comprehensive federal clean energy legislation would be another.

But there is another reason why Lomborg's narrow focus on research makes little sense. Energy poverty, the lack of access to affordable reliable energy, is a key factor that keeps people in poverty world wide. Energy availability influences everything from health, to educational performance, to economic opportunities. From an urban perspective, the search for reliable access to energy is one of the factors that drives people into informal settlements around cities in some of the world's poorest countries.

A rapid roll-out of renewable energy technology is an affordable way to provide durable infrastructure to these communities. The push to deploy renewable energy in developing countries has been led both by governments and NGOs; two inspiring examples can be found in the Indian Solar Cities and Barefoot College programs.

There, just as much as in North America, what we need to focus on is doing more with what we've got -- and quickly.

This post originally appeared on Alex's blog openalex.

Photo of Bjorn Lomborg via The Guardian

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(Posted by Alex Aylett in Climate Change at 11:45 AM)

Looking back one, two and five years ago today on Worldchanging:

2009
The Rights of Future Generations
Alex examines the rights of future generations and wonders in what courts those rights might be defended, and how...

2009
Manifesta: Caring for Fungi and Pollution
Regine Debatty reviews two artistic architectural works at the Manifesta biennale that both explore waste residue...

2005
Smart Sprawl
Jamais Cascio reflects on Walter Siembab's idea of "Smart Sprawl," a networked approach to re-imagining and restructuring suburbs and cities...

Other recent "look backs":
August 27
August 30
August 31

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Imagining the Future at 11:00 AM)

The New Security Beat is on a roll of late, most recently running this short interview with Iraq’s first Minister of the Environment, Mashkat Al Moumi:

NSB: Iraq’s water minister recently called the water infrastructure situation “a threat to national security.” Would you agree with that assessment?...

MM: I definitely agree with Minister Latif Rasheed on his analysis. The lack of proper infrastructure to supply water aggravates the population against the government. The water supply situation was critical when I was in office. For example, according to the Ministry of Water Resources only 32% of the Iraqi population enjoys access to safe drinking and 19% enjoys access to a good sewage system.

Stories like these are really bringing home the point that environment, development and security issues are so intertwined in many cities as to be essentially the same issue (though we still address them with professional-silo-defined solutions).

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Water at 5:45 PM)

Cities need to plan for the future now by developing infrastructure and communities that make them resilient, rugged and adaptable to planetary changes. Coastal cities are particularly vulnerable to increased flooding from larger storm surges and sea level rise. And, as Bruce Stutz noted last year, "adapting to this reality has become a key part of future planning for London, Rotterdam, St. Petersburg, Tokyo, and Seattle, as well as low-lying cities across Asia" and New York City. Here's another waterfront city that is taking future-adaptive urban planning seriously: HafenCity.

HafenCity is marked by the red dot adjacent to Hamburg, Germany and along the river Elbe. | (Image captured with Bing Maps)

HafenCity, or Harbor City, is a new city quarter under development in the old harbor of Hamburg, along the river Elbe. It is one of the largest inner-city rebuilding projects in Europe and has been in development for over ten years already, with completion expected around 2020-2030. I'm not breaking any news here, yet I somehow had not heard of this development until I read this recent interview with Kristina Hill in which she lays out three design strategies for responding to climate change - protect, renew, and re-tool - and says that the 'protect' category of adaptive action is exemplified by the HafenCity development:

Hamburg...will allow flooding, but designed a major new part of the city to be resilient to high water, with water-proof parking garages, a network of emergency pedestrian walkways 20 feet above the street, and no residential units at ground level. Even the parks in this new Harbor City district are designed to withstand battering by waves and storm surge, either by floating as the waters rise, or by incorporating lots of hard surfaces that only need to be washed off when the waters recede.

Intriguing! I immediately started scanning the Net to learn more. Since HafenCity is such a large and long standing development project - it features building, bridge, and landscape designs from over 700 architects, including powerhouse names like Rem Koolhaas, Herzog & de Meuron, and Behnisch - it was easy to find well illustrated articles that discuss the development's architectural projects and overall sustainability features, but coverage of its water adaptation design strategies, with illustrative images, was sparse. This post is an attempt to remedy that lack. By looking through the development's official website, scouring Flickr, and exploring a selection of the architecture, landscape architecture and engineering firms' websites, I think I've been able to pull together a serviceable attempt at a visual case study of HafenCity's future-adaptive urban design strategies.

BASIC LAYOUT

Physical model of HafenCity looking east, with the new buildings in the development modeled in a light wood tone. Hamburg proper is connected to HafenCity by bridges to the north, and is primarily modeled in white. The old harbor warehouse district, Speicherstadt, runs east to west between Hamburg and the new HafenCity development to the south, and is primarily modeled in the darker wood tones. The new iconic concert hall, Elbphilharmonie, is visible as a translucent form above a darker wood base on the far right, and at the end of the pier. | (Image courtesy of Flickr/m.prinkle)

This diagram shows what parts of the HafenCity development have already been completed or are under construction, and which sites have been allocated or are ready for allocation. | (Image captured from page 2 of the PDF "HafenCity Hamburg Projects March 2010: Insights into Current Developments")

A diagram of the districts in HafenCity. | (Image captured from page 7 of the PDF "HafenCity Hamburg Projects March 2010: Insights into Current Developments"; titles enlarged to be readable here)

FLOOD PROTECTION >>> 5 Levels of Public Space
HafenCity and Speicherstadt lie to the south of the main Hamburg dike and are therefore susceptible to flooding. Rather than build new dikes, the developers incorporated other flood resilient and adaptive infrastructure into the actual construction of the roads, buildings and public spaces with the intention of both controlling flood waters and providing residents with waterfront access:

The intensive reciprocal interaction between land and water can be regarded as unique, for HafenCity will not be surrounded by dikes, nor cut off from the water. With the exception of the quays and promenades, the total area, i.e. streets, parks and development sites will be raised to 7.5 to 8 meters above sea level. This creates a new, characteristic topography, also maintaining access to the water and emphasizing its typical port atmosphere. ("HafenCity Hamburg Projects March 2010: Insights into Current Developments" [PDF], page 5)

Essentially, HafenCity has five occupiable public levels:

On the water: Floating docks are accessible at sea level, which changes twice daily:
The pontoons of the Traditional Ship Harbor provide a...level of urban perception which rises and falls with the tide. Since the water level of the River Elbe varies twice daily by more than 3 meters, depending on the ebb and flow of the tide, perception of the quarter is constantly changing. The relationship here between water level, quay walls and edges, pontoons, watercraft and buildings is continuously shifting.

This photo shows the Traditional Ship Harbor at Sandtorhafen. | (Photo: ELBE&FLUT; Source: HafenCity Hamburg GmbH)

Waterfront Promenades: Embankment promenades for walking and cycling are at 4 to 5.5 meters above sea level.

This photo shows a waterfront promenade in the Dalmannkai district. | (Photo: ELBE&FLUT; Source: HafenCity Hamburg GmbH)

This photo shows a waterfront promenade and the Vasco da Gama Plaza in the Dalmannkai district. These pathways are popular routes for bikers and walkers, and bring people right to the waters edge. | (Photo: Daniel Barthmann; Source: HafenCity Hamburg GmbH)

This photo shows a waterfront promenade in the Dalmannkai district with the higher street level and building plinths visible in the background. | (Photo: ELBE&FLUT; Source: HafenCity Hamburg GmbH)

Terraces: The Magellan and Marco Polo Terraces provide the largest public squares in the city, and creatively transition the public thoroughfares from the waterfront promenades to the street level.

Panorama of the Magellan Terraces. | (Photo by Roland Halbe; via Enric Miralles - Benedetta Tagliabue | EMBT Architects)

Aerial view of the Marco Polo Terraces looking north. The terraces face west towards the evening sun and descend in gradual steps to the water. | (Photo: T. C. Kraus; Source: HafenCity Hamburg GmbH)

Streets: All streets (and buildings) are built on artificially raised, flood-protected bases at around 7.5 to 8 meters above sea level.

This photo of a promenade in Dalmannkai shows all levels of public space, from water, to waterfront, to street level; it is clear how much higher the street level is than even the waterfront. A section of the raised plinth on which the streets and buildings sit is visible as a decorated wall in the mid-ground of this photo. | (Photo: T. C. Kraus; Source: HafenCity Hamburg GmbH)

The flood-protected base of the Headquarters of Germanischer Lloyd building, in the Brooktorhai district, stands out dramatically in the water. | (Image via gmp-architekten)

Above the streets: In addition to the street level, there are higher elevations of occupiable space, some public and some private. A new public plaza is being built at 37 meters above sea level as part of the new Elbphilharmonie.

This rendering shows the design of the new concert hall, Elbphilharmonie, with a public plaza occupying the space between the old Warehouse A structure and new glass building above. | (Rendering: © Herzog & de Meuron; via Elbphilharmonie website)

The 'above the streets' level of the private realm is also characterized by residential units, which all start at one-story above street level.

This photo shows residential units overhanging a waterfront promenade in Am Sandtorkai/Dalmannkai. The building plinth wall is visible on the left; street level and the first floor of the buildings start at the top of the white portion of the wall. Residential units begin one-story above street level, and here, appear over two-stories above the waterfront promenade. | (via Flickr/iPhotography)

LEVEL CHANGES: Water-to-Street with Terraces, Old-to-New with Bridges and Stairs;

Because HafenCity has so many different levels of public space there are many interesting points of interaction between levels. In HafenCity quarter proper, the terraces are the sites of the most dramatic places of transition. They link the waterfront to the streets above; stepping up from sea level (0 m), to promenade level (4.5 m) to street level (7.5 m).

A view of the Magellan Terraces in Am Sandtorkai/Dalmannkai. | (Photo: ELBE&FLUT; Source: HafenCity Hamburg GmbH)

Another dramatic point of level change occurs between the old historic district of Speicherstadt and HafenCity along Am Sandtorkai street. While all the streets in HafenCity that are south of Am Sandtorkai are raised at 7.5 to 8 meters above sea level, Am Sandtorkai remains at its historic level. In consequence, bridges and stairs are necessary to navigate these level changes.

Photo shows the dramatic difference in street levels between Speicherstadt and HafenCity proper. | (via Flickr/madle-fotowelt.de)

Birds eye photo looking west up Am Sandtorkai | (Photo via Bing Maps)

These photos show the Am Sandtorkai street that runs between the old Speicherstadt district (right) and the new Am Sandtorkai district (left). The street itself is at the historic level of the Speicherstadt, but the new new buildings in Am Sandtorkai are elevated on flood-secure plinths. The top image shows the street in dry conditions and the lower image shows it in a flood. | (Top image captured from page 13 of the PDF "HafenCity Hamburg Projects March 2010: Insights into Current Developments." Lower image via HafenCity Hamburg; © ELBE&FLUT)

Another photo of Am Sandtorkai street during a flood. The doors of the "flood gates" to the lower levels of the buildings, where much of the parking garages are located, are visible at the base of each building. | (via Miniatur Wunderland)

The bridges and stairs along Kibbelstegbrucke are a particularly striking example of how Speicherstadt and HafenCity come together.

Kibbelstegbrucke | (Birds eye photo from the east, looking west via Bing Maps)

Bridge and stairs on Kibbelstegbrucke | (via Flickr/Eichental)

The Kibbelsteg bridges are also an integral part of the safety infrastructure of HafenCity. As the bridge engineers note:

In order to make the new areas of the HafenCity accessible to fire protection and first aid services, there is a need for a new network of pathways at 7.5 m above sea level. The Kibbelsteg bridges connect this network to the high tide protected areas of the inner city, crossing the Zollkanal, the Brooksfleet, and the “Am Sandtorkai“ street.

Kibbelsteg Bridge | (Image captured from page 48 of the PDF "HafenCity Hamburg Projects March 2010: Insights into Current Developments")

CONCLUSION
HafenCity reveals one approach to tackling future-adaptive urban development. The raised roadways and buildings, water resilient surfaces, floating waterfront promenades, terraced landscapes and bridges all work together as important infrastructure and create an architecturally vibrant district that connects residents to the waterfront -- while also making the whole area resilient in the face of more frequent flooding.

In addition to its water adaptive design strategies, HafenCity exemplifies many other sustainable urban planning ideas. It is dense, walkable, bikeable, served by public transit, and full of multi-use buildings and public spaces. Much of the land was formerly brownfields and has now been cleaned and developed. Additionally, the historic character of the area is honored: many buildings in the neighboring Speicherstadt area have been refurbished (see the International Maritime Museum for one example); and some buildings in HafenCity proper, like the new concert hall, adaptively reuse existing buildings.

I'm very excited to learn more about this project and I'd welcome reader feedback from any of you who've visited (or even live there!). Is the project as great as it seems?

Did anyone attend the recent "Watercities in Transition" conference where HafenCity was presented as an example of flood resistant urban design? Please let me know what you learned in the comments below!

...

Note to local Seattlites: If you're interested in waterfront design, mark your calendars for Wednesday, September 15! The four shortlisted teams working on designs for reshaping Seattle's waterfront will present their designs to the public that evening from 7:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. at Benaroya Hall.

...

LINKS OF INTEREST

Other 'sea-level rise' urban design projects:

• New York After the Seas Rise | Yale Environment 360, 19 Apr 10
  
• Sea Change 2030: Three First Prize Winners Re-Imagine Sydney Harbor for Rising Seas | Amanda Reed, 10 Aug 10

Selection of HafenCity websites:

• Developer: HafenCity Hamburg GmbH
  
• Master Plan: A revised Masteplan for HafenCity - Background and Goals
  
• Brochures and working papers on HafenCity: HafenCity Publications

Architects, Landscape Architects, and Engineers of HafenCity:

• Architects of the Magellan (2005) and Marco Polo (2007) Terraces, 2005: Enric Miralles - Benedetta Tagliabue | EMBT Architects and WES International GmbH Landscape Architects
  
• Architect of the Kibbelsteg Bridges: gmp von Gerkan, Marg + Partner
  
• Architect of the International Maritime Museum, 2008: MRLV Architects
  
• Architect of the Footbridge to the Maritime Museum, 2007: Dietmar Feichtinger Architects
  
• Architect of the Unilever House and Marco Polo Tower: Behnisch Architects
  
• Elbphilharmonie Concert Hall Project Team: Herzog and deMueron (architects), Hoehler + Partner Architects, ReGe Hamburg (developer)
  
• Architects of the Sandtorkai Promenade and Basements. 2002: Bendfeldt • Herrmann • Franke LandschaftsArchitekten BDLA

In case you missed them in the post above, here are most of the links I embedded in the text; in order of appearance:

• Applying Climate Foresight | Alex Steffen, 11 Aug 04
  
• Infrastructure for the Future We Want | Alex Steffen, 13 Feb 08
  
• Principle 14: Density, Compact Communities and Smart Growth | WorldChanging Team, 22 May 07
  
• Resilience and Ruggedness: Why Faster, Bigger and More Complex May Be Better | Alex Steffen, 10 Apr 10
  
• Adaptation to Climate Change and the Future of the IPCC | Balaton Group, 30 Nov 07
  
• Sea Level Rise: We Decide How Much | Sarah Kuck, 12 Dec 08
  
• Bracing for a Century of Rising Seas | Rob Young and Orrin Pilkey / Yale Environment 360, 14 Jan 10
  
• New York City Girds Itself for Heat and Rising Seas | Bruce Stutz / Yale Environment 360, 10 Sep 09
  
• To Protect, Renew, and Re-Tool: An Interview with Kristina Hill on Managing the Effects of Climate Change | Amanda Reed, 25 Aug 10
  
• Hamburg: HafenCity - Bring the City to the Water | Sustainable Cities (case study)
  
• Waterfront Living and Working: Hamburg's HafenCity | Falk Jaeger / Goethe-Institut e.V, May 2008
  
• HafenCity | (official website of the developer)
  
• HafenCity Hamburg Projects March 2010: Insights into Current Developments | (PDF)

Related stories in the Worldchanging archives:

• The Lessons of Katrina: Global Warming Adaptation is a Cruel Euphemism and Prevention is Far, Far Cheaper | Joe Romm, 31 Aug 09:
  If we won’t adapt to the realities of having one city below sea level in hurricane alley, what are the chances we are going to adapt to the realities of having all our great Gulf and Atlantic Coast cities at risk for the same fate as New Orleans — since sea level from climate change will ultimately put many cities, like Miami, below sea level? And just how do you adapt to sea levels rising 6 to 12 inches a decade for centuries, which is the fate we risk by 2100 if we don’t reverse greenhouse gas emissions trends soon. Climate change driven by humans GHGs is already happening much faster than past climate change from natural causes — and it is accelerating.
• Seven Meters | Jamais Cascio, 22 Mar 06:
  Flood Maps mashes up NASA elevation data and Google Maps, and offers a visualization of the effects of a single meter increase all the way to a 14 meter rise. The default increase of seven meters -- about 23 feet for those who avoid the whole metric thing -- is the amount the world's oceans will rise once Greenland's glacial ice pack melts completely. This melting is already underway, and is happening with startling speed.
• Information is Beautiful: When Sea Levels Attack | David McCandless / The Guardian, 23 Feb 10:
  ...in this diagram, I've tried to sum up all the current research on sea level rises. What will happen, when it will happen, and where the sea water is coming from.
• Environmental Restoration in the Age of Climate Change | Alex Steffen, 31 Mar 06:If we're going to bring Puget Sound back to health, we need to bring those shorelines back to health. To do that, People for Puget Sound, the Nature Conservancy and Trust for Public Land have teamed up to announce the Alliance for Puget Sound Shorelines, an effort to raise $80 million over the next three years to "restore and protect Puget Sound's ecologically rich shorelines and ensure they're available for people to enjoy for generations to come."

  This is good work. The challenge, though, is that the shorelines themselves are becoming moving targets. Already, global warming is changing Puget Sound, causing the water to warm and the sea to rise. Predictions for the future are even more alarming. "Business-as-usual will yield warming of 6 to 9 degrees F by the end of the century and...sea level will rise. The last time it was 5 degrees F warmer than now sea level was at least 80 feet higher," says James Hansen, NASA's chief climate scientist. Other studies suggest that without drastic action, we may have already committed ourselves to as much as a twenty feet of sea-level rise. Studies suggest that melting ice sheets alone are already causing the sea to rise at about a millimeter a year.

• Urban Resilience for Dummies, Part 2: Failing the Milk Test | Warren Karlenzig, 10 Mar 10:
  We can no longer manage and develop our communities with no regard for the limits of natural resources and ecological systems that provide our most basic needs.

  A shining alternative is metropolitan areas that have begun to plan for the future by building their resilience with economic, energy, and environmental uncertainty in mind: top U.S. metro locations include Portland, Oregon, Seattle, San Francisco, New York and Denver, and suburbs such as Davis, California and Alexandria, Virginia. These communities are employing some of the following key strategies that underpin resilient urbanism:

• The Future of Cities and Transportation: Learning from the Parable of the Horse | Amanda Reed, 2 Aug 10:
  "Bus rapid transit systems and "complete streets" are great. But to design urban transportation systems that are truly sustainable, we have to think much further ahead." So writes Mathias Crawford at the beginning of his new post up at GOOD titled "The Future of Cities and Transportation," in which he explores how to plan future cities that both address current needs and are flexible enough to adapt to changing technologies and behaviors. As an example of the dilemma urban planners face, he shares the parable of the horse...

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(Posted by Amanda Reed in Features at 2:30 PM)

An interesting idea by our friends at Bjarke Ingels Group to use a proposed new rail line to link Copenhagen and Malmö and their surrounding cities into a binational metropolitan area.

What I find compelling about these sorts of ideas is the possibility of taking new infrastructure and laying it over existing agglomerations of (often broken and unsustainable) places to make possible both radical innovation and intelligent infrastructural reuse. Whether this BIG idea has practical legs, and whether even something like this could do much to revitalize the ruins of the unsustainable in suburban North America, well, that's a whole different discussion altogether. For now, it's just gratifying to see someone thinking about change at the proper scale.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Urban Design and Planning at 12:45 PM)

Looking back one and five years ago today on Worldchanging:

2009
The Lessons of Katrina: Global Warming Adaptation is a Cruel Euphemism and Prevention is Far, Far Cheaper
Joe Romm adds an update to his writing about climate adaptation and argues that there's still time for prevention, which is the better way to go...

2005
Patrick di Justo: Climate Consensus
Patrick di Justo, a New York-based science journalist, reports on the current state of understanding of the interactions between climate and ecosystems, and the efficacy of climate models...

Other recent "look backs":
August 26
August 27
August 30

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Climate Change at 10:30 AM)

by Katie Allen

Charity predicts more food shortages in Africa because of EU target to produce 10% of all transport fuels from biofuels by 2020

Cane cutter wields machete. Friends of the Earth says that biofuel crops, including sugar cane, 'are competing directly with food crops for fertile land'. Photograph: Juan Carlos Ulate/Reuters (via The Guardian)

European Union countries must drop their biofuels targets or else risk plunging more Africans into hunger and raising carbon emissions, according to Friends of the Earth (FoE).

In a campaign launching today, the charity accuses European companies of land-grabbing throughout Africa to grow biofuel crops that directly compete with food crops. Biofuel companies counter that they consult with local governments, bring investment and jobs, and often produce fuels for the local market.

FoE has added its voice to an NGO lobby that claims local communities are not properly consulted and that forests are being cleared in a pattern that echoes decades of exploitation of other natural resources in Africa.

In its report "Africa: Up for Grabs", the group says that the key to halting the land-grab is for EU countries to drop a goal to produce 10% of all transport fuels from biofuels by 2020.

"The amount of land being taken in Africa to meet Europe's increasing demand for biofuels is underestimated and out of control," Kirtana Chandrasekaran, food campaigner for FoE in the UK, said. "Especially in Africa, as long as there's massive demand for biofuels from the European market, it will be hard to control. If we implement the biofuels targets it will only get worse. This is just a small taste of what's to come."

A number of European companies have planted biofuel crops such as jatropha, sugar cane and palm oil in Africa and elsewhere to tap into rising demand. But the trend has coincided with soaring food prices and ignited a debate over the dangers of using agricultural land for fuel.

Producers argue they typically farm land not destined, or suitable for, food crops. But campaigners reject those claims, with FoE saying that biofuel crops, including non-edible ones such as jatropha, "are competing directly with food crops for fertile land".

ActionAid claimed this year that European biofuel targets could result in up to 100 million more hungry people, increased food prices and landlessness.

Natural disasters including floods in Pakistan and a heatwave in Russia have wiped out crops in recent weeks and intensified fears of widespread food shortages.

The United Nations has singled out biofuel demand as a factor in what it estimates will be as much as a 40% jump in food prices over the coming decade.

Estimates of how much land in Africa is being farmed by foreign companies and governments, either for food or fuel crops, vary significantly. The FoE report focuses on 11 African countries in what it sees as a rush by foreign companies to farm there. In Tanzania, for example, it says that about 40 foreign-owned companies, including some from the UK, have invested in agrofuel developments. It argues that such activities are actually raising carbon emissions in many cases because virgin forests are being cut down.

Lip service

The report concludes: "While foreign companies pay lip service to the need for 'sustainable development', agrofuel production and demand for land is resulting in the loss of pasture and forests, destroying natural habitat and probably causing an increase in greenhouse gas emissions." Sun Biofuels, a British company farming land in Mozambique and Tanzania and named in the report, criticised the charity's research as "emotional and anecdotal" and said that its time would be better spent looking into ways to develop equitable farming models in Africa.

Sun's chief executive, Richard Morgan, said his company's leasing of land in Tanzania had taken three years, during which 11 communities, comprising about 11,000 people, were consulted.

"I find it insulting from Friends of the Earth. Somehow it's indirect criticism of Mozambiquan and Tanzanian governments that they would allow this dispossession to take place," he said.

Morgan conceded that such a protracted process could raise expectations among local people of jobs and investment that could not be met, and said that it was often those negative testimonies that were collected by newspapers and NGOs. But he insisted that Sun was creating jobs where possible and that much of the biofuel production was destined for domestic markets in Africa rather than Europe.

"There's an opportunity here to get investment into local communities in an ethical way," he said.

In many cases, biofuel production was replacing or reducing illegal tree felling, Morgan added. "Tanzania has a large landless community felling forest land. If you give employment to those people as an alternative, there is a chance you can intervene commercially there in a good way."

Biofuel crops were being grown on land that was not intended for food production, he said: "Often we are growing trees on land already cut down for charcoal or in some cases tobacco. We haven't displaced anyone."

But FoE argues that "most of the foreign companies are developing agrofuels to sell on the international market". Its campaigners in Africa are demanding that African states should immediately suspend further land acquisitions and investments in agrofuels. Instead, they want to see fundamental changes in consumption habits in developed countries – be it making more use of public transport or adopting different diets.

Chandrasekaran said: "Biofuels is just a small part of what is happening. What needs to change are consumption patterns in the west. That means [eating less] meat and dairy, given more than a third of the world's agricultural land goes to feeding meat and dairy production. It also means [reducing] consumption of fuel."

This post originally appeared on The Guardian.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Food and Farming at 12:00 PM)

Reaching peak population as quickly as humanely possible is a pressing Worldchanging concern, but on the ground in poor countries, the concern is less about peak population than the demographic transition it takes to produce stable societies in an age of resource constraints. In a fascinating article, Richard P. Cincotta argues that for the 45 (out of 46) Sub-Saharan African nations with median ages under 25, that demographic transition appears to be stalling, for a variety of reasons, with implications for these nations, and the planet:

These age structures cut a familiar pyramidal-shaped profile of a population with a large proportion of young adults in the working-age population (greater than or equal to 42 percent), a rapidly growing school-age population, and high rates of workforce growth, typically exceeding 3 percent per year. These qualities tend to be associated with rampant unemployment, institutional failures, and political instability.

And here’s the bad news. Unless African governments and their development partners can stimulate quick reversals in fertility trends, the passing of two decades will only slightly modify this situation. According to the UN medium-variant projection, by 2030, only Botswana, South Africa, Cape Verde, and Djibouti are expected to have matured significantly beyond this conflict-vulnerable stage of the age-structural transition, leaving sub-Saharan Africa as the remaining epicenter of the “demographic arc of instability” (see map above for 2010, and below for 2030).

Figure 2. UN demographic projections (medium fertility variant, 2009) suggest that the demographic arc of instability will narrow dramatically during the next two decades. By 2030, sub-Saharan African countries will comprise about three-quarters of all countries in the arc (in red and pink). (via New Security Beat)

Matt Jones flies off on a riff about various things, including peak everything and the need to reconceptualize resource "peaks" themselves:

Going beyond PeakX: as a way of thinking = throw up hands and say hey-ho, that’s that then, isn’t everything complicated and terrible! Aren’t we wicked! There’s nothing to be done. How about ‘precious X’? ‘Resilient X’? ‘Chronodynamic design’ was something prententious that I wrote down a while back on a post-it, suggesting a Loewy-esque aesthetic celebration of an object’s resilience through time. Although at first blush, this might just be vernacular design – it might have legs as a more spectacular-vernacular. The High-Viridian Aesthetic. Moving beyond “Resource Constraints = design”, to source of ornament, cultural-invention, semantic-wealth. Charles & Ray Eames’s definition of the act of design still rings like a bell: do the best, for the most, with the least. Rhys, Raph and others work on Homegrown remains inspiring. I like Adaptive Path’s (at least that’s where I heard it first) conceit of ‘constraint-storming‘. Of course, most of the 1st-world isn’t even thinking about PeakX yet, and we don’t feel the pinch until we feel the pinch, so yeah. Anyway. I probably need to re-read “In The Bubble", and wear a “John Thackara Was Right” (hair)t-shirt…

Buzzword: Constraint-storming.

Alexis Madrigal makes some great points about mobile technologies, driving and the ways in which wireless communication actually undercuts the viability of car commuting:

This might seem like a trite bonus of city life. But I think it's more than that. Car time is wasted time, but commuting time doesn't have to be. Look at well-heeled Silicon Valley companies. They offer their employees cushy, WiFi-enabled buses for commuting. That first hour of the day, Apple and Google employees are banging out emails and getting ready for the day, not sitting in traffic carrying out a set of repetitive, low-level, and occasionally dangerous tasks to maneuver their exoskeletons southward.

We've covered a lot of this ground before, but Alexis nails it on the commute.

Image of World population density via Flickr / arenamontanus

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Resource - Planet at 11:30 AM)

Looking back one, two and five years ago today (give or take!) on Worldchanging:

2009
BIKE-O-RAMA: A Roundup of the Best in New Bikes, Bike Infrastructure, Blogs, Books and More
This roundup is a great resource of links to all things bike...

2008
Hot Japan's Cool Green Trends
Madeline Ashby reports on how Japan markets green tech and how other countries could follow their lead...

2005
Foresight in the Age of the Storm
Jamais Cascio reflects on Hurricane Katrina and says she was a reminder that climate foresight means more than imagining the worst and preparing for it...

Other recent "look backs":
August 25
August 26
August 27

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Transportation at 10:00 AM)

by Angie Schmitt

An aerial photo of an L.A. parking structure. (Image via Heli Photo)

New evidence connecting minimum parking requirements and sprawl is bolstering the argument for an overhaul of government policies related to much space we devote to the storage of cars.

A team of economists from the University of Munich recently released a study examining the effects of mandatory parking minimums on development in urban and suburban Los Angeles. The team found that parking minimums "significantly increase" the amount of land devoted to parking, to the detriment of water quality, pedestrian safety and non-automotive modes of transportation.

The report offers a critical piece of empirical evidence regarding the connection between parking minimums and oversupply. For writer Stephen Smith at Market Urbanism, the new research is compelling evidence supporting the work of parking reform guru Donald C. Shoup, whose book "The High Cost of Free Parking" examined the adverse effects of government policies that subsidize parking:

Although we at Market Urbanism are big fans of Donald Shoup’s work on parking minimums, we have to admit that rigorous econometric evidence that parking minimums mandate more parking than the market would otherwise supply has been a bit lacking. Randal O’Toole at The Antiplanner quite rightly asks to see empirical proof that parking minimums are binding. Tyler Cowen appears to have found this proof, in the form of paper posted online very recently which seeks to determine whether or not non-residential developers in Los Angeles County build more parking than they would in the absence of minimum parking mandates.

Randal O’Toole suggested that Shoup’s residency in Los Angeles might be biasing his research, since the City of Los Angeles is quite dense indeed. This study, however, uses a large dataset with data points from all over the County of Los Angeles, home to almost 10 million people, or over a quarter of all Californians. (Many more live in other dense areas, like San Diego and the Bay Area.) And in fact certain parts of the paper focus solely on suburban areas, and claim to be undercounting some of the denser areas where the discrepancy between what the market would choose and what the law currently dictates would be even greater.

The study ends up finding that at least half of all non-commercial properties have more parking than they would otherwise choose, and that the excess can oftentimes be quite large.

Market Urbanism has asked O'Toole, the libertarian analyst notorious for glossing over the role of government in promoting sprawl, for a response to the new research and has promised to update readers if they receive one.

This post originally appeared on Streetsblog.

Related stories in the Worldchanging archives:

• Free Parking Isn't Free
  
• Parking Policies Can Reduce Car Use
  
• Link Round-Up: Walkable, Dense, Smart, and Livable Streets and Cities

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Urban Design and Planning at 1:00 PM)

Can declines in home sales mean a different kind of American Dream?

by Roger Valdez

Recent headlines have been blaring about July’s huge drop in home sales across the United States. Along with a drop in the stock market, the plunge in sales has also lead to a spate of discussion about how the housing market got to this place, and its role in the overall economic downturn the country is experiencing. While the news is bleak, there is a silver lining, I think, for sustainability. There could be a serious shift in attitudes about what housing means. Does the American Dream look like a single family house with a car parked out front? Or is it possible that we might revise that vision to include living in the city and relying on transit? We may be closer than you think.

In July the South had the smallest decline in home sales since June in the country with a 23 percent decrease, followed by the West with 25 percent, and sales dropping 30 percent in the Northeast. The Midwest was hardest hit with a 35 percent decline. Nationally, the fall-off in sales of previously occupied homes was 27 percent, reaching the lowest level in 15 years. Even though prices have fallen, people are holding off on buying, believing that the market hasn’t yet reached bottom.

The fall of the housing market is important because it is an indicator of the health of the larger economy. It’s an indicator because for the better part of the last 60 years home ownership was the driver in many aspects of economic growth. Buying a house was a way of building wealth. Take a loan, buy a house now, and by the time it comes to sell that house you’ll make a tidy profit—which you can use to buy a bigger house. That’s how the pitch went anyway.

The theory goes that this process of people borrowing more and more for more and more house went on, like a balloon filling with air, until it ruptured at the end of 2008. There seems to be some consensus emerging though about the larger reasons the bubble burst. Part of it was banks reselling mortgages in complex securities. But the other aspect of the problem was government policy that backed the loans for mortgages and gave big tax breaks to people buying homes. Here is Robert Samuelson—an economist who has written extensively about the impact of entitlements—in an article entitled “The U.S. Housing Fetish Hurts the American Dream:”

Government subsidizes homeownership in two ways: through tax and spending policies and through credit markets. Tax breaks for homeowners (mainly the deductions for mortgage interest and property taxes, plus preferential treatment of capital gains on homes) exceeded $120 billion in 2009, reports the Congressional Budget Office. These benefits go heavily to higher-income borrowers, who are encouraged to buy bigger and more expensive homes that generate larger tax savings. This is both unfair and unnecessary. By contrast, government subsidies for lower-income renters are skimpier, totaling about 25 percent of the support for homeowners.

True, runaway speculation through the repackaging and reselling of mortgages was what lit the fuse. But Samuelson, who is considered conservative, points out the most critical thing that caused the bubble in the first place: tax policy.

Tax policy (not to mention lots of free, publicly subsidized highways) helped shift the polarity of housing toward land use favoring big lots and big houses. Where is the best place to build the “bigger and more expensive homes that generate larger tax savings” that Samuelson talks about? Certainly not in dense, compact neighborhoods. The current tax code incentivizes unsustainable behavior while penalizing “lower-income renters,” for example, who most often bear higher proportional housing, transportation and health care costs.

And we know that density is better for a lot of reasons (energy, CO2, water quality, and tax revenue) I’ve already talked about in other posts. But that kind of development wasn’t what ended up getting subsidized according to Samuelson. Bigger houses meant bigger tax savings. Well those days are over; as we’ve pointed out, lots are getting smaller and so is the size of houses. This is due largely to the fact that people just don’t have a lot of money and that the market is getting pushed further down by reluctant buyers waiting for the bottom.

As I suggested last week, maybe the best land use strategy is not about revising local land use codes, or promoting more sustainable design, or even transit-oriented development. Perhaps the best way to achieve the dense, compact communities is to reverse the polarity of the tax code, creating a code that subsidizes living in those communities. Consider this tax break essentially a payment for doing what is most beneficial for the broader community and planet—an “urban homesteader tax credit.”

A local example helps make the point. A neighbor of mine moved out of our building and into a 182 square foot condo in a different neighborhood. (And I thought my place was small!) Here’s what he said about it when he was featured in an article in the Sunday Seattle Times:

'I wanted to compress my home to squirt me back out to the community,' he says, taking inspiration from dwellings in Scandinavia and Japan, places where space is dear. 'That was one of the philosophical reasons. I want to be able to shop daily, not store a lot and eat really well.'

Now imagine if along with the benefits he describes he also got to pay less of his money in taxes next year. That kind of tax break—typically reserved for home buyers spending more money on housing—could incentivize living in multifamily rather than single family for instance. Since the earliest days of our history the federal government has promoted behavior with subsidies. In the 19th century for example it gave away free land to people who were willing to move west through the Homestead Act.

The idea of an urban homesteader tax credit—providing big tax benefits to people who buy compact homes in compact communities—could help reinvigorate the housing market and make small not only beautiful but affordable as well. It might also lead to a different, more sustainable American Dream.

Photo credit: taliesin from morguefile.com.

This post originally appeared on Sightline Daily.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Resource - Shelter at 12:30 PM)

Five years ago today Jamais Cascio looked back at Alex Steffen's essay on "The Culture of Extinction" in which Alex made a powerful and moving suggestion: the creation of a living archive of the dead:

So, here's my modest proposal: I propose that we start wearing the dead on our skin.

Images exist of a great many extinct species, and I expect the proportion of well-documented extinctions to increase in the next couple decades. I propose that we assemble and maintain a database of names, pictures and information on species which have gone or are clearly soon to go extinct. I propose we make it possible for people to "adopt" a dead species, on one condition.

That condition? That you have an image of that species tattooed on your body in a visible place, with the Linnaean name underneath.

In honor of this small anniversary, and in the spirit of some Friday fun, I thought I'd share some photos I've collected of people who have acted on Alex's idea. I hope you enjoy these images and please let us know if you've got an extinction tattoo too!

Adder Snake (via EXT INKED Facebook Photos)

Black Grouse (via EXT INKED Facebook Photos)

Mole Cricket (via extInked at the Ultimate Holding Company website)

Pine Marten (via EXT INKED Facebook Photos)

Snort Snouted Seahorse (via EXT INKED Facebook Photos)

Dodo Bird (via Discover Magazine's Science Tattoo Emporium)

Deinonychus (via Discover Magazine's Science Tattoo Emporium)

Trilobite (via Discover Magazine's Science Tattoo Emporium)

Check out these outside links for more images and stories about tattoos of extinct and endangered animals:

• Discover: The Newest Plan to Save Endangered Species: Science Tattoos!
  
• The Guardian: The ExtInked project: Weird, wonderful and unique – just like those endangered species
  
• Tatzoo

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(Posted by Amanda Reed in Arts at 11:30 AM)

Looking back one, two and five years ago today on Worldchanging:

2009
See it Before it Disappears: Reconciling and Regulating Disaster Tourism
Carissa Bluestone examines the growing interest in 'see it before it's gone' tourism, its impacts on local economies, and how to participate intelligently...

2008
Seeing Climate Change Through the Trees
Sarah Kuck reflects on her trip to the Greater Yellowstone Area in Wyoming, and shares a story about how warming temperatures and a changing water balance are upsetting a complex mountain ecosystem, and how the people who love it are using science to save it and maybe the world...

2005
Retro: The Culture of Extinction
Jamais Cascio looks back at Alex Steffen's essay on the Culture of Extinction in which he makes a powerful and moving suggestion: the creation of a living archive of the dead...

Other recent "look backs":
August 24
August 25
August 26

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Climate Change at 10:00 AM)

Consumers now have little information about the true ecological impacts of what they buy. But that may be about to change, as new technologies that track supply chains are emerging and companies as diverse as Unilever and Google look to make their products more sustainable.

by Daniel Goleman

With climate legislation dead in Congress and the fizzled hopes for a breakthrough in Copenhagen fading into distant memory, the time seems ripe for fresh strategies — especially ones that do not depend on government action.

Here’s a modest proposal: radical transparency, the laying bare of a product’s ecological impacts for all to see.

Economic theory applied to ecological metrics offers a novel way to ameliorate our collective assault on the global systems that sustain life. There are two fundamental economic principles that, if applied well, might just accelerate the trend toward a more sustainable planet: marketplace transparency about the ecological impacts of consumer goods and their supply chains, and lowering the cost of that information to zero.

First transparency. A maxim in economics holds that transparency makes markets work more efficiently. This rule has long been applied to price, but why not also apply it to the ecological impacts of industry and commerce? At present when it comes to the ecological consequence of the things we buy, we have information asymmetry, where sellers know far more than buyers.

This seems about to change. One big mover is WalMart, which last summer announced it will develop a “sustainability index,” a credible rating of the ecological impacts of the products it sells boiled down into a single metric that shoppers can use to compare Brand A and Brand B. There are signs this is more than marketing hype: WalMart has started to pilot life-cycle analyses of products it carries, and, some say, hopes to make transparent such data on the environmental and social impacts of suppliers four levels deep in the chain of vendors. The key, of course, will be to make sure the cost of quantifying and listing such data is minimal, as price will remain the primary determining factor for consumers.

WalMart is by no means the only player in taking steps to become more ecologically transparent. Companies such as Unilever (brands like Dove Soap and Lipton Tea) and Google (its servers consume enormous amounts of energy) are following their own maps to transparency about the eco-impacts of their operations, to find ways to make operations more sustainable.

Several global companies are forming a “Group of Ten” to develop a supply chain transparency system called Earthster into its newest version, “E2 Turbo.” Rather than go to the expense of a full life-cycle analysis (which can cost $50,000 and take months), E2 Turbo asks for data only on the 20 percent or so of a product’s life cycle that accounts for around 80 percent of environmental impacts.

Now under development, this supply-chain-tracking software lets companies understand where their largest negative impacts are, and how to find more sustainable alternatives. A built-in recommendations engine, drawing on a Department of Commerce database, suggests suppliers or other players that can help companies improve those impacts. That guides business-to-business decisions, with companies better able to find vendors that will let them keep their eco-impact scores low.

As more and more companies feed data into E2 Turbo — which is open source — they will together build what amounts to an information commons. There has also been discussion about the U.S. government establishing a site for that commons, creating a public database on ecological impacts that amounts to new public resource that any company, small or large, could draw on to improve the impacts of its operations.

A radical transparency about the ecological impacts may yet emerge from these efforts — and many in the business world are paying attention. A recent article in Harvard Business Review proclaims that sustainability has become an essential business strategy and the key driver of innovation. To be sure, there are large numbers of companies who resist — but they may yet join in, if markets shift toward brands that are more transparent about ecological footprints, creating a compelling business case.

That shift will become far more likely with the application of the second economic principle, lowering to zero the “cost” of this information, the cognitive effort we must make to get relevant data. Consumer surveys show that about 10 percent of today’s shoppers will go out of their way to get information about the ecological impacts of what they buy, while about a third could not care less. The majority in the middle say that if the information were easy to come by, they might use it in deciding what to buy.

That’s where the action is: making crucial data easy to get. That was done, for instance, at the Hannaford Brothers grocery chain in Maine, with nutritional ratings of foods. While the ratings were sophisticated — made by nutritionists at institutions like Yale and Dartmouth — they were boiled down into a three-, two-, or one-star rating posted next to the price tag (there was also zero, which about 80 percent of foods received, mainly because of the salt and fats in processed foods).

The result was a significant shift in purchases toward the more nutritious food and away from the less. The shifts in market share were large enough to get the attention of food brand reps who started asking what they needed to do to get higher ratings.

That switch in a company’s actions because transparency in the marketplace has driven consumer decisions in a better direction has been called a “virtuous cycle” by Archon Fung at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Fung led a group studying how transparency alters market dynamics and becomes a mechanism for positive change.

Such marketplace transparency about the ecological impacts of consumer goods can be seen today at www.GoodGuide.com, a website that aggregates more than 200 databases on the environmental, health, and social impacts of tens of thousands of consumer goods. GoodGuide — a free smart phone app — allows shoppers to compare the eco-virtue of products while in the aisles of a store. Today that comparison requires running your shopping list by the website on your computer or swiping a product’s bar code with a cellphone. But the day will come when a daring retailer puts that data next to price tags — thus reducing the information cost to zero, as Hannaford Brothers did with nutritional data.

Another website, Skin Deep, a project of the Environmental Working Group, reveals the potential medical risks of the chemicals used in personal care products, and so ranks them from safest to most risky. Skin Deep’s ratings are made by searching in medical databases for the biological effects of a given ingredient, and then weighting the health risks accordingly. Skindeep has been consulted more than 100 million times by shoppers wanting to know which skin cream or baby lotion might be a better bet.

These two websites offer ratings that are credible, independent, and transparent themselves — the three criteria proposed by the Kennedy School of Government group. To be sure, systems like GoodGuide have yet to obtain fully transparent data about the total eco-impacts of any company or product. These consumer-facing transparency systems are more proof of concept than state-of-the-art. But they offer a hopeful sign we may be headed in that direction.

As the head of product innovation at a global company pointed out to me, ecological transparency would change the business landscape in two ways. First would be a shift in the “value basis” of a product, adding its ecological impacts into the equation. Second, such transparency would drive intense competition to rethink products to lower those impacts, and so protect a brand’s market position.

As non-proprietary data collection systems like Earthster compile numbers on the ecological footprints of industry, that information could well feed into an emerging metric that has been designed to replace GDP. Called the “General Progress Indicator,” or GPI, this index of national progress rethinks economic indicators by, for example, rising when the poor receive a larger portion of a nation’s income and dropping when they get less.

Among the indicators factored into GPI are resource depletion, pollution, and long-term environmental damage. So while the GDP counts pollution as a double gain for an economy – for the economic activity while it is created and again while being cleaned up – GPI counts the costs of that pollution as a loss. Earthster-type databases could bring more precision and currency to GPI’s metrics.

Another movement in economics that might embrace such data is the attempt to “internalize externalities” — that is, to make companies bear the costs of, say, cleaning up their pollution rather than governments, by taxing their goods proportionally to their negative eco-impacts. That idea remains a hard sell to business, and to most governments. But marketplace ecological transparency makes pollution, toxics and the like a reputation cost for a brand or company. This substitutes a market force for government action, which — given political realities — may be both more realistic and quicker.

While many business people are starting to take ecological transparency seriously enough to embed it in their strategic thinking, the question arises: Are economists paying attention? A few are. But for the most part these potentially disruptive information technologies, and the marketplace transparency they promise, are beneath the field’s radar, or entirely off the map.

One exception is James Angresano, a political economist at The College of Idaho, who sees promise in ecological transparency as a tool for sustainability — itself not a topic central to orthodox thinking in economics. “We’ve got to think differently,” Angresano told me.

When Angresano lectured on these ideas recently to students in environmental economics at Peking University, they were so interested they stayed an extra hour. “Of all the theories I covered over several weeks of lecturing, this resonated the best,” he commented. “They’re depressed just hearing what the problems are. This is a way of making changes; here are some solutions.”

This post originally appeared on Yale Environment 360.

See these related stories in the Worldchanging archives for more on this topic:

• The Emergence of a Biosphere Economy | John Elkington and Alejandro Litovsky, 28 Jun 10: "An economic transformation to rival the Industrial Revolution is on its way – and this time nature will be properly valued..."

• Transparency, Accountability and the "dot eco" Debate | Peter ter Weeme, 25 Aug 09: Peter reports on the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers' idea to introduce a new top-level domain like ".eco", which could, like the practice of eco-labeling, provide one more tool to help consumers make good, green choices online...

• Sticker Shock: Walmart’s Labeling Scheme Will Be Costly, But Will It Be Effective? Two Views | Joe Romm, 17 Aug 09: "Eco-labeling is becoming globally hot, thanks in part to Walmart. Here are two perspectives. The first is from Stephen Stokes of AMR Research, by way of Climate Inc., edited by David Levy, Professor of Management at UMass, Boston. The second perspective is from the Center for American Progress, with a post titled 'The Meaning of Eco-Labels'."

• Interview with Mark Anielski | Hassan Masum, 9 May 08: "We recently had a chance to talk with Mark Anielski, Albertan and author of The Economics of Happiness: Building Genuine Wealth. Mark has been working for many years on better ways of measuring progress, and this conversation delves into the potential of moving beyond GNP. Whether in measuring a sense of community or valuing ecosystem goods and services, better measures of progress can align us on the targets that really matter."

• The Eco-Nutrition Label | Jeremy Faludi, 17 Sep 07: A classic Worldchanging post where Jer introduced the concept of the eco-label.

• Strategic Consumption: How to Change the World with What You Buy | Alex Steffen, 26 Mar 07: "...the glut of green shopping opportunities is overshadowing the most basic message of all, which is that the most sustainable product is the one you never bought in the first place...So, should we give up on trying to spend our money in ways that could do some good? Absolutely not, but we need to start getting better at buying in ways that make an impact. We need to begin to practice strategic consumption...What makes consumption strategic? Multiplied leverage...The ideal is to buy products that not only do their job more sustainably, but send market signals back through the economy that are likely to result in more meaningful systemic changes...If we want to see these changes, we should pursue five strategies, listed in order of increasing importance..."

• Background Stories: Building Context Connection | Sarah Rich, 6 Mar 07: "One of our running themes at Worldchanging is the importance of knowing the backstory of the things we use and buy. There's no better incentive to be a responsible consumer than seeing previously invisible (and frequently unsavory) aspects of our commodities. At Doors of Perception, we met a participant who has applied design thinking to backstories. Within the context of this year's food theme, Arlene Birt has begun designing communications campaigns for edible products; specifically, she has dragged the lifespan of a chocolate bar into transparency, from unharvested cacao bean to first delicious bite, by designing an easy-to-decipher graphic label for the interior of a chocolate bar wrapper."

• The Happy Planet Index | Alex Steffen, 12 Jul 06: "What ultimate goals should we pursue? The Happy Planet Index offers and claims to measure one answer: happy, long lives within environmentally sustainable ecological footprints. The HPI ranks countries based on the reported happiness of their inhabitants, the length of their lives and the size of their ecological footprints..."

• Joshua Farley, Ecological Economist | Hassan Masum, 24 Feb 06: An interview with Joshua Farley, "a professor at the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics - home of the original $33 trillion estimate for ecosystem service value. Joshua co-authored the recent textbook Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications,which reconceptualizes economics with a few key new axioms: ecosystem and resource limits, distribution issues, and broader definitions of human well-being. He's in the vanguard of a growing movement to get economics right - with sustainability and human well-being as core principles."

• Introducing "Inclusive Wealth": A New Economic Measure of Sustainability | Alan AtKisson, 30 Jun 05: "Allow me introduce you to "Inclusive Wealth." Technically, Inclusive Wealth is a reform of neo-classical economics, using accounting prices (i.e., substitution prices) to put a monetary value on key capital stocks in nature, the manufactured economy, human welfare, and human knowledge. The core idea: manage all those stocks so that they don't decline over time, and you get sustainability..."

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(Posted by Yale Environment 360 in Transforming Business at 4:00 PM)

by David Bois

Recent scientific advancements have led to one innovation that can extract potable water from atmospheric moisture and another that produces synthetic fuel feedstock by removing atmospheric carbon dioxide. Science Daily now reports of cutting-edge clean energy developments that are poised to harvest the electrical energy produced naturally in the atmosphere.

It's a phenomenon that has been known about for centuries. Nikola Tesla knew that the interaction between air and water in the atmosphere generated an electrical charge, but he was unable to fulfill his vision of capturing electrical energy from the air. It's a challenge that has continued to both tempt and confound scientists. But Brazilian researcher Fernando Galembeck, in a presentation given before the 240th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in Boston, maintains that it's not simply theoretically possible, but that it's nearing our reach.

Science Daily describes the process of capturing ambient atmospheric electricity as analogous to how a solar panel captures energy from the sun. Using very small particles of silica and aluminum phosphate to mimic the electrical charge gathering ability of water droplets, Galembeck's research team has developed an early stage device that successfully gathers and transfers the electrical energy that surrounds us.

"Our research could pave the way for turning electricity from the atmosphere into an alternative energy source for the future," Galembeck explains. "Just as solar energy could free some households from paying electric bills, this promising new energy source could have a similar effect."

He concedes that the developments aren't quite ready for prime time, but that early indications are that the approach holds great promise for bearing fruit with the benefit of additional research and development: "These are fascinating ideas that new studies by ourselves and by other scientific teams suggest are now possible. We certainly have a long way to go. But the benefits in the long range of harnessing hygroelectricity could be substantial."

A safety payoff could even arise with successful development and adaptation of the technology. By installing networks of energy harvesting devices in areas prone to thunderstorms, the buildup of electrical charge could conceivably be captured and redirected before it builds up to critical levels that lead to damaging and sometimes deadly lightning strikes.

This post originally appeared on Tonic. Additional links added by Worldchanging.

Image of lightning over Campinas via Flickr/Cheval Brasil.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Energy at 2:30 PM)

In the chaos of Mumbai’s best-known slum, thousands of recyclers process the megacity’s garbage and provide an invaluable environmental service, but the health and social costs are high. Today, many organizations are working to improve the working conditions of India's valuable waste-pickers...

by Anna da Costa

“It’s funny how we popularise our movie stars,” said Vinod Shetty, director of the Acorn Foundation, when we met in his crowded office in Mumbai. “There are so many other people we should popularise for the work that they do, but instead, they are invisible and expendable.” This experienced advocate was referring to the work of the thousands of recyclers who reside in the city’s largest slum, Dharavi, and whose rights he spends much of his time promoting.

Although the BAFTA [and Academy] award-winning film Slumdog Millionaire did a lot to highlight the plight of Mumbai’s slum-dwellers, Shetty believes it overlooked a story of true heroism in this infamous quarter; one that forms part of the day-to-day reality for its residents, and for millions of others across India.

Dharavi, which has more than 1.2 million inhabitants, stretches across a 175-hectare area of prime real estate in central Mumbai. Thousands of corrugated iron huts are crammed side by side amid open sewers and muddy walkways. Electricity is sporadic and safe drinking water – in fact any water – is scarce. Yet despite these hugely challenging conditions, Dharavi houses one of the largest recycling industries in India. An estimated 20% of its inhabitants work on different aspects of waste processing, and the slum itself has an annual turnover of more than US$650 million (4.4 billion yuan).

Descend the rickety steps at Sana Birla Compound Pipeline, where a giant steely pipe taking water into Mumbai passes through the slum like an artery, and you soon see the evidence. Along narrow paths, within murky huts and beneath grimy warehouse roofs, piles of the city’s waste rise high. Used electronics and tangled wires sprawl like spewing intestines amid ageing fridges, stacks of flattened cardboard and piles of sorted plastic.

But watch for a moment and you notice order in the chaos. Men, women and children work from morning to night, sorting, assembling, breaking up and reassembling these elements of municipal waste in an endless, informal supply chain. According to the Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Development Authority, Mumbai residents generate 11,209 tonnes of waste a day, and the vast majority comes to Dharavi, where it is sorted and processed. On average, each waste-picker sorts through 8.5 tonnes of rubbish each day.

The water pipe that runs through Sana Birla Compound

The recycling process in India is like a complex ecosystem, powered largely by informal labour. There are “waste-pickers”, who hand-sort and sell waste from homes, landfills and street containers; there are “waste-buyers”, who act as middlemen, purchasing recyclable goods from waste-pickers; and there are “retailers”, “stockists”, “recyclers” and many more in between. Millions of people across the country – an estimated 1% of urban populations alone – earn a livelihood by reclaiming reusable and recyclable materials from waste. “Not only does recycling provide nearly 25 times more jobs than landfill or incineration, it also offers far greater economic, social and environmental benefits,” said Laxmi Narayan, general secretary of waste-picker trade union Kagad Kach Patra Kashtakari Panchayat (KKPKP).

Through recycling and wet-waste composting, municipalities save money thanks to lower volumes of waste going to landfill. In Pune, India’s eighth-largest city, informal recycling is estimated to reduce garbage-handling costs by at least 25%, saving around 120 million rupees (around US$2.5 million) a year. In addition, roads and public spaces are kept clean and secondary products, such as roofing material, paper and plastics are created from the recycled materials. Recycling and composting also reduces the pressure on ecosystems and leads to a significant reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions. A recent study found that, in Delhi alone, the services of the informal-recycling sector are equivalent to removing around 175,000 passenger-vehicles from the roads each year.

Recycling is not only a green job, but also a highly skilled one. In Dharavi, I met Peer Mohammad, one of the local recyclers. He was sitting amid white sacks of plastic waste, sorting piles of rubbish, piece by piece. Mohammad explained to me how each type of plastic carries a different value, from as little as 5 rupees (US$0.11) per kilogram to as much as 60 rupees (US$1.29) per kilogram. By hitting each item on a rock and testing its flexibility, his expert hands can differentiate between more than 50 types of plastic. Sitting on an upturned computer monitor case, I watched him work efficiently through the endless piles stretched behind him, flies buzzing around us in the exhausting afternoon heat.

“These sorters are experts,” said Shaikh Mobin, a recycler from Mumbai who purchases plastic materials from workers like Mohammad and converts them into granules to make products ranging from plastic sheets to suitcase handles and irrigation pipes. “Learning to differentiate between these waste streams takes at least two years of intensive training. No institute in the world can train you in these skills. It’s not a joke. A lab would have to test these plastics to tell the difference between them if these guys were not doing the job.”

Making green jobs decent jobs

As “green jobs” gain increasing attention, not just from environmentalists, but also trade unions, government and business, an emphasis on ensuring they are also “decent jobs” is advancing too. Nowhere is the need to align these two objectives more obvious than in India’s waste-picking communities.“We must remember that India's high rates of recycling accrue in large part due to abject poverty,” said Narayan. “[This] forces people to eke an existence out of collecting, segregating and selling waste…not necessarily our environmental concerns.”

In most Indian cities, recyclers receive no formal recognition from the municipal authorities. “They are largely anonymous, have no social security and no identity,” explained Narayan. Their work also exposes them to diseases as well as hazardous waste, which they generally do not handle safely, creating dangers for both themselves and those in the vicinity.

Peer Mohammed sorting through plastic

Waste-pickers earn an estimated average of around US$1 (6.8 yuan) per day and are often forced to do their work by night and out of sight. “Instead of being recognised, they are marginalised. They are nobodies. It’s our mess they are clearing, they live in filth and they do what they do at our service,” said Shetty. “If they stopped doing what they do, the city would be swimming in filth.”

According to one study, unsafe exposure to garbage can reduce the life expectancy of waste-pickers in developing countries by more than 40%. Shetty wants to see the government support training of waste-pickers on how to handle hazardous waste and recycle safely: “Workers need basic tools and protective clothing, such as gloves. There is a great need for space or zones to be created for this sector to do their sorting in safety and dignity.”

Parashar Baruah, producer of the award-winning film Waste believes the foundation for improving these working conditions is respect: “Waste-pickers and recyclers need to be given the acknowledgment that they are doing a crucial job for society…not only in the way we recognise and compensate them, but in the way we treat them and segregate our waste, starting with separating our wet and dry waste as we dispose of it.”

The Acorn Foundation and KKPKP are leading the fight to achieve this. Through the Dharavi Project, the Acorn Foundation is providing more than 350 waste-pickers with identity cards – a crucial step towards recognition and respect, which, in certain cases, also provides access to public or private schemes and grants – plus training in waste-management and safety. And thanks to KKPKP, registered waste-pickers are now provided with both life and health insurance and access to loans for education and other needs at reasonable interest rates.

“There are now 35 organisations working with waste-pickers in India,” said Narayan, who believes these efforts are enhancing public and political awareness of the needs and opportunities of this sector. A recent directive from India’s Ministry of Urban Development calling for the recognition and integration of waste-pickers testifies to this, though, cautioned Narayan, it is ultimately up to local governments to ensure there is compliance.

A separate – and growing – pool of organisations, including Conserve India, Thunk, Green the Gap, Haathi Chaap and Darpana, is also working to produce high-end products from waste to sell both domestically and abroad. Others, such as Daily Dump, are promoting home composting and segregation of waste at disposal.

And it isn’t just small-scale, local outfits focusing on the sector. Waste management is gaining recognition as a major economic driver in India and internationally. One recent analysis by consultancy firm Frost & Sullivan found that the Indian waste-management services market was worth close to 10 billion rupees (US$216 million) in 2009 and predicted it would grow to 27 billion rupees (US$582 million) by 2013. VC Circle, an investment news forum, has reported that water treatment and waste recycling raised US$216 million in 12 deals from venture capital and private equity firms in 2009 alone. Business intelligence provider Cleantech Group has also touted the sector as a potential growth area.

Venture capital firms are seeing this start to play out, according to Kartik Desai, vice president of Lok Capital, a New Delhi-based social investment firm. “There are good reasons why the investment case for waste management is so strong. It is a very large, badly served market because of historic underinvestment and poor delivery of basic services, especially to the poor. A variety of new business models have been developed over the last few years by an increasing number of entrepreneurs, investors and intermediaries.” Examples of these in India include EcoWise, WasteVentures and Ecoreco.

Mainstream investment funds are also alert to the opportunities. Anand Prakash, managing director for south-east Asia at private equity fund manager FE Clean Energy, told VC Circle: “I see companies like waste management in the US emerging in India. Multibillion dollar companies that are going to take waste management on private contract in the same way as distribution companies have…so we are very much on the lookout for companies that have that vision and are positioning themselves right now.”

This trend is not unique to India. Around the world, the waste sector is gaining attention as waste volumes rise, burial costs increase, environmental and social impacts become clearer and concern over natural-resource limits intensifies. Terracycle, an organisation founded in the United States and now with offices in the United Kingdom, Brazil, Canada and Mexico, has created a waste-management model similar to that found in India. It recruits and pays “collection brigades” to gather and sell back specific waste products, which are turned into new consumer goods.

Unlike many countries, especially in the developed world, India already has a skilled recycling and sorting workforce in place. “India’s recycling industry has the expertise and capacity to scale massively, but it needs to be properly valued, formalised and supported,” said Shetty as we sat in his Mumbai office. There are signs of change, “But these need to be magnified.”

I looked down at Shetty’s desk where a series of small ID cards were carefully laid out, identifying recyclers as members of the “Dharavi project”. An image of a young boy, who could not have been more than nine years old, gazed back at me, accompanied by a name in bold type: “Sameer”. For Sameer, this card is the difference between invisibility and visibility, anonymity and belonging. For India, it is a step on the long road to tackling the enormous waste challenge, and creating dignified, green jobs.

This post originally appeared on Chinadialogue.

Related stories in the Worldchanging archives:

• The Latest in E-Waste Recycling: e-Steward Certification
  
• Review: Garbage Dreams
  
• Rapid Re(f)use: Promoting Debate About Waste
  
• From Muck to Riches: Waste-Chain Innovation in India
  
• Daily Dump -- Product Service in India

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Megacities at 12:45 PM)