Warming is Twice as Fast in Arctic than Elsewhere

Reducing black carbon (also known
as soot) and ozone in the lower part of the atmosphere, especially in the
Arctic countries of America, Canada, Russia and Scandinavia, could cut warming
in the Arctic by two-thirds over the next three decades. The UN report
suggests, if these and other mitigation measures were adopted everywhere they
could halve the wider rate of warming by 2050.

Arctic sea ice is melting far
faster than climate models predict. Why?

The Economist (24 September
2011):

ON SEPTEMBER 9th, at the height
of its summertime shrinkage, ice covered 4.33m square km, or 1.67m square
miles, of the Arctic Ocean, according to America’s National Snow and Ice Data
Centre (NSIDC). That is not a record low—not quite. But the actual record,
4.17m square km in 2007, was the product of an unusual combination of sunny
days, cloudless skies and warm currents flowing up from mid-latitudes. This
year has seen no such opposite of a perfect storm, yet the summer sea-ice
minimum is a mere 4% bigger than that record. Add in the fact that the
thickness of the ice, which is much harder to measure, is estimated to have
fallen by half since 1979, when satellite records began, and there is probably
less ice floating on the Arctic Ocean now than at any time since a particularly
warm period 8,000 years ago, soon after the last ice age.

That Arctic sea ice is
disappearing has been known for decades. The underlying cause is believed by
all but a handful of climatologists to be global warming brought about by
greenhouse-gas emissions. Yet the rate the ice is vanishing confounds these
climatologists’ models. These predict that if the level of carbon dioxide,
methane and so on in the atmosphere continues to rise, then the Arctic Ocean
will be free of floating summer ice by the end of the century. At current rates
of shrinkage, by contrast, this looks likely to happen some time between 2020
and 2050.

The reason is that Arctic air is
warming twice as fast as the atmosphere as a whole. Some of the causes of this
are understood, but some are not. The darkness of land and water compared with
the reflectiveness of snow and ice means that when the latter melt to reveal
the former, the area exposed absorbs more heat from the sun and reflects less
of it back into space. The result is a feedback loop that accelerates local
warming. Such feedback, though, does not completely explain what is happening.
Hence the search for other things that might assist the ice’s rapid
disappearance.

Forcing the issue

One is physical change in the ice
itself. Formerly a solid mass that melted and refroze at its edges, it is now
thinner, more fractured, and so more liable to melt. But that is (literally and
figuratively) a marginal effect. Filling the gap between model and reality may
need something besides this.

The latest candidates are
“short-term climate forcings”. These are pollutants, particularly ozone and
soot, that do not hang around in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide does, but
have to be renewed continually if they are to have a lasting effect. If they
are so renewed, though, their impact may be as big as CO2’s.

At the moment, most eyes are on
soot (or “black carbon”, as jargon-loving researchers refer to it). In the
Arctic, soot is a double whammy. First, when released into the air as a result
of incomplete combustion (from sources as varied as badly serviced diesel
engines and forest fires), soot particles absorb sunlight, and so warm up the
atmosphere. Then, when snow or rain wash them onto an ice floe, they darken its
surface and thus cause it to melt faster.

Reducing soot (and also ozone, an
industrial pollutant that acts as a greenhouse gas) would not stop the summer
sea ice disappearing, but it might delay the process by a decade or two.
According to a recent report by the United Nations Environment Programme,
reducing black carbon and ozone in the lower part of the atmosphere, especially
in the Arctic countries of America, Canada, Russia and Scandinavia, could cut
warming in the Arctic by two-thirds over the next three decades. Indeed, the
report suggests, if such measures—preventing crop burning and forest fires,
cleaning up diesel engines and wood stoves, and so on—were adopted everywhere
they could halve the wider rate of warming by 2050.

Without corresponding measures to
cut CO2 emissions, this would be but a temporary fix. Nonetheless, it is an
attractive idea because it would have other benefits (soot is bad for people’s
lungs) and would not require the wholesale rejigging of energy production which
reducing CO2 emissions implies. Not everyone agrees it would work, though.
Gunnar Myhre of the Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research
in Oslo, for example, notes that the amount of black carbon in the Arctic is
small and has been falling in recent decades. He does not believe it is the
missing factor in the models. Carbon dioxide, in his view, is the main culprit.
Black carbon deposited on the Arctic snow and ice, he says, will have only a
minimal effect on its reflectivity.

The rapid melting of the Arctic
sea ice, then, illuminates the difficulty of modelling the climate—but not in a
way that brings much comfort to those who hope that fears about the future
climate might prove exaggerated. When reality is changing faster than theory
suggests it should, a certain amount of nervousness is a reasonable response.

It’s an ill wind…

The direct consequences of
changes in the Arctic are mixed. They should not bring much rise in the sea
level, since floating ice obeys Archimedes’s principle and displaces its own
mass of water. A darker—and so more heat-absorbent—Arctic, though, will surely
accelerate global warming and may thus encourage melting of the land-bound
Greenland ice sheet. That certainly would raise sea levels (though not as
quickly as News Corporation’s cartographers suggest in the latest edition of
the best-selling “Times Atlas”, which claims that 15% of the Greenland sheet
has melted in the past 12 years; the true figure is more like 0.05%). Wildlife
will also suffer. Polar bears, which hunt for seals along the ice’s edge, and
walruses, which fish there, will both be hard-hit.

Watch our animation of the
receding Arctic ice-shelf and the shipping routes it could unlock

The effects on the wider climate
are tricky to assess. Some meteorologists suspect unseasonal snow storms off
the east coast of America in 2010 were partly caused by Arctic warming shifting
wind patterns. One feedback loop that does seems certain, though, is that the
melting Arctic will enable the extraction of more fossil fuel, with all that
that implies for greenhouse-gas emissions.

The Arctic is reckoned to hold
around 15% of the world’s undiscovered oil reserves and 30% of those of natural
gas. Hence a growing polar enthusiasm among energy companies—as witnessed last
month in an Arctic tie-up between Exxon Mobil, of America, and Rosneft,
Russia’s state-controlled oil giant. Recent plankton blooms suggest a warmer
Arctic will provide a boost to fisheries there, too. And the vanishing ice has
begun to allow a trickle of shipping across the Arctic’s generally frozen
north-west and north-east passages, thus linking the Atlantic and Pacific
oceans. In August a Russian supertanker, the Vladimir Tokohonov, aided by two
nuclear icebreakers, became the first such vessel to cross the north-east route
(or, as Russians refer to it, the northern sea route), hugging the Siberian
coast.

So far, despite some posturing by
Canada and Russia, there are few territorial disputes in the region and the
Arctic Council, the club of Arctic nations, has functioned reasonably well.
Whether the interests of these countries coincide with those of the wider
world, though, is moot. A warming Arctic will bring local benefits to some. The
rest of the world may pay the cost.

Source: www.economist.com

In 2004, US Pentagon defense adviser
Andrew Marshall, predicted that “abrupt climate change could bring the planet
to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and
secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies.” Christian Parenti, the
author of “Tropic of Chaos”, says that climate change is causing violence
around the world right now, particularly in the global South. The book “looks
at the intersection of the legacy of cold war militarism, free market economic
restructuring and the onset of anthropogenic climate change”

By RP Siegel in Triple Pundit (22
September 2011):

For years, the Pentagon has been
saying that climate change is perhaps the biggest threat to American security
of all. Back in 2004, a report commissioned by Pentagon defense adviser Andrew
Marshall, the man behind the restructuring of the US military under Donald
Rumsfeld, predicted that “abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the
edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure
dwindling food, water and energy supplies.” The report went on to declare that
the threat to global stability posed by climate change was indeed greater than
that of terrorism.

Ironically, while climate change
denial seems to be a communal oath among right wing politicians, folks in the
military that they so staunchly support, are busy preparing for it, both
strategically and tactically. Retired Rear Admiral Dennis McGinn  has called climate change a threat
multiplier.

Most of the coverage of the
subject has focused on natural forces, not military ones as a threat to our
continued existence. Should we be concerned about this? Will the Pentagon’s
prediction come true?

According to Christian Parenti,
the author of the newly released book Tropic of Chaos, it already has. Parenti
says that climate change is causing violence around the world right now,
particularly in the global South. The book “looks at the intersection of the
legacy of cold war militarism, free market economic restructuring and the onset
of anthropogenic climate change” and traces how these factors, with particular
emphasis on the latter as a kind of socio-economic last straw, create the
conditions for increased civil war, religious war, banditry and increased
violence. He suggests the best way to deal with this violence is to mitigate
the exacerbating condition.

The book opens with the death of
a Kenyan tribesman named Ekaru Loruman who is killed in a cattle raid in the
midst of a severe drought. Cattle raids are not unusual among the Turkana
people, in fact they have been going on for generations. But Parenti sees
deeper forces at work.

…perhaps Ekaru was killed by
forces yet larger, forces transcending the specifics of this regional drought,
this raid, this geography, and the Nilotic cattle cultures. To my mind, while
walking through the desert among the Turkana warriors scanning the Karasuk
hills for the Pokot war party, it seemed clear that Ekaru’s death was caused by
the most colossal set of events in human history: the catastrophic convergence
of poverty, violence, and climate change. This book is an attempt to understand
the death of Ekaru Loruman, and so many others like him, through the lens of
this catastrophic convergence.

This line of reasoning reminds me
of the correlation between the increase in severe storm activity and warmer
ocean temperatures. While it is impossible to blame any given storm on the
changing climate and the anthropogenic activity responsible for it, the trend
is clear: deadly storms are on the increase, as are floods and droughts and
other extreme weather events.

Likewise, it might be difficult
to pin the blame for the death of Ekaru Loruman specifically on climate change,
though this doesn’t stop  Parenti from
suggesting it. It was clearly a significant contributing factor, as it was in
countless other examples, which can be tallied, in a statistical sense, to
support Parenti’s assertion.

Drought, floods, food shortages,
refugees have all put enormous stress on situations that in many cases were
already stressed with the result that the breaking point has or will soon be
reached.

Parenti writes in TomDispatch,
“Get used to it.  Food, weather,
upheaval, and war.  Those are likely to
be in the headlines not only for decades to come, but tied together in all
sorts of complicated and unsettling ways.
Extreme weather and increasingly severe droughts, whether in Texas,
China, or Somalia; crops burned to a frizzle or obliterated in some other
fashion; starving people desperately on the move; incipient resource wars; and
a world in which the basics of everyday life are increasingly beyond the buying
power of tens of millions, if not billions of the poor — that’s a recipe for
our future.  Unfortunately, it’s also
increasingly the present, as grain crops fail in various global breadbaskets
and food prices soar.”

The book goes on to discuss the
militaristic response that many major powers including our own have taken, such
as  securing their borders or
counter-insurgency operations, which he argues are doomed to fail. Instead,
says Parenti, we should focus our efforts on learning to live within the limits
of the planet. Sounds like something I might have said myself a time or two.

RP Siegel is the co-author of the eco-thriller Vapor Trails, the first
in a series covering the human side of various sustainability issues including
energy, food, and water.  Like airplanes,
we all leave behind a vapor trail. And though we can easily see others’, we
rarely see our own.

Source: www.triplepundit.com

The sheen appears to have fallen
away from Green IT in Australia, judging by the findings of the latest Fujitsu
ICT Sustainability Benchmark. The overall index, covering seven countries,
declined from 56.4 to 54.3 in the last 12 months, while the index for Australia
fell to 52.8, putting it below the average for Canada, the UK and the US. Meanwhile,
a small army of nearly 100 students descended on 78 companies, cities and
universities in the US to hunt for efficiency projects. Participating in the
Environmental Defense Fund’s Climate Corps program, they found ample
opportunities: US$650 million worth. That’s nearly double the savings
identified in 2010.

A faulty green drive

Charis Palmer in Technology
Spectator/Climate Spectator (20 September 2011):

The sheen appears to have fallen
away from Green IT in Australia, judging by the findings of the latest Fujitsu
ICT Sustainability Benchmark.

The overall index, measured
across seven countries, declined from 56.4 to 54.3 in the last 12 months, while
the index for Australia fell to 52.8, putting it below the average for Canada,
the UK and the US.

It’s a case of out of sight, out
of mind, with less than one per cent of ICT departments surveyed in Australia
responsible for ICT’s power consumption.

More than half the respondents
had no understanding of how much power ICT consumes, with only one in seven ICT
divisions across the entire survey including the cost of ICT’s power
consumption in their departmental budgets.

Fujitsu says many organisations
appear to have reached a plateau with ICT sustainability, having already
tackled the “low hanging fruit” such as PC power management and telecommuting.
In some cases Green IT may have been viewed as a project – once the box was
ticked the organisation moved on to other things.

So what’s driving this so-called
“green fatigue”?

One culprit is likely to be cloud
computing, which continues to be hyped, pushing Green IT down the list of
priorities. Cloud computing is also being used as an example by the broader ICT
industry as an example of how it can become more sustainable.

But a recent report from
Greenpeace found if the internet was a country it would rank 5th for the amount
of electricity usage, just below Japan and above Russia.

The huge banks of servers
required to support cloud computing are consuming 2 per cent of global energy
demand, often powered with coal. Research from Gartner has also found data
centre emissions in the US are increasing faster than other carbon emissions.

Ovum analyst Rhonda Ascierto
recently argued for cloud computing to truly be ‘green’ it must make greater
use of renewables. She says some providers are researching novel ways to
accomplish this, but in the meantime, cloud service providers should be more
transparent about their ‘green’ data centre claims in order to build customer
confidence in them.

Ascierto also points out cloud
computing may spur new demand for IT services, and as prices for cloud services
fall, IT demand may grow, regardless of the global economy’s health. And it
remains to be seen whether advances in energy efficiency in data centres will
outweigh the effect of these growing demands.

In the meantime, it’s inevitable
that corporate Australia will have to take another look at ICT power use as
part of the broader move to price carbon.

While any carbon tax is only
likely to impact the big end of town, the Sustainability Index shows it’s the
manufacturing sector that is currently falling behind, with the lowest score
across the eight industry sectors measured.

Source: www.climatespectator.com.au

2011 Climate Corps Fellows Show
How Energy Efficiency Can Pay Off

By Tilde Herrera In GreenBiz.com
(21 September 2011):

Think energy efficiency is
boring? Think again. A group of graduate students just gave us 650 million
reasons to believe otherwise.

A small army of nearly 100 MBA
and MPA students descended on 78 companies, cities and universities this summer
to hunt for efficiency projects that would save energy and money. The students,
participating in the Environmental Defense Fund’s Climate Corps program, found
ample opportunities: $650 million worth. That’s nearly double the savings
identified in 2010.

Now in its fourth year, the
program that gives graduate students a crash course in real-life corporate
energy management shows no sign of slowing. The number of fellows and host
organizations continues to swell with each class, and even expanded this year
to include cities and universities.

“What that demonstrates is
the power of a good idea, the effectiveness of this model and the impact you
can have by building the case for energy efficiency,” said Victoria Mills,
managing director of EDF’s Corporate Partnerships program.

The numbers speak for themselves:
The lighting, computer equipment and HVAC projects identified by Climate Corps
fellows would save 600 million kilowatt hours of electricity and avoid 440,000
metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions every year.

I spoke to Mills about the latest
results released today. She told me the program will likely expand again next
year, and is already recruiting for 2012.

“The focus will continue to
be on building the business case for energy efficiency, helping organizations
find quick wins, and low- or no-cost investments that deliver big benefits in
energy savings and carbon reductions,” she said.

But Climate Corps fellows are
also digging deeper to look at impacting organizational practices that make
energy efficiency stick, Mills said, such as helping their host organizations
create dedicated funds for energy efficiency investments or establish
accountability in the company for energy efficiency savings.

One of her biggest surprises:
“We continue to see such big benefits, even with our repeat host
companies.”

She told me some first-year host
companies admitted they were unsure about even participating because they
thought they had done everything, but came to realize they were just scratching
the surface.

While the potential savings
figure is brag-worthy, it’s practically meaningless if the host organizations
leave those opportunities sitting on the table. That’s not the case here.

“The thing I’m most excited
about is the implementation rate and the fact that when we go back and check
with companies after the fellowships are over on what projects they’re moving
forward with, we’re seeing an 86 percent implementation rate for projects
either complete or underway,” Mills said. “It’s huge to be able to
catalyze that kind investment in energy efficiency.”

Tilde Herrera is an editor at
GreenBiz Group.

Source: www.greenbiz.com

Car Sharing with Electric Leafs & Electric-powered Pods of the Future

Montreal-based Communauto, the
oldest car-sharing company in North America, has launched a pilot project with
50 Nissan Leaf vehicles, hoping to become an industry leader of the electric
loaner cars. Is this how will people get around in the cities of the future? To
listen to heads of R&D departments at Toyota and GM, people in perpetually
sunny, clean cities will zip around in electric-powered pods that drive and
park themselves while accidents and emissions become a thing of the past. That
vision was presented at Changing Cities-Changing Cars panel at the Meeting of
the Minds conference in Boulder, Colorado. Don’t forgot to hear the latest at
the Electric Vehicle Conference in Brisbane, Australia 26 October.

Ninemsn News (19 September 2011):

In a Montreal parking lot,
Jean-Francois Beauchamp unhooks a power cable from his loaner car and
cheerfully drives away, an enthusiastic user of a new service that is finding
fans in equal measure among commuters and environmentalists.

“It’s very quiet, pleasant
and and doesn’t use gasoline,” says Beauchamp, 44, a web designer and
frequent user of the electric cars made available for hourly rental by the
Communauto car-sharing enterprise.

His loaner vehicle is one from a
fleet of gasoline-free cars pointing the way forward for the increasingly
popular car-share industry, which unlike a traditional car rental, allows
customers to hire a vehicle for part of one day.

The Montreal-based Communauto,
the oldest car-sharing company in North America, in mid-August launched the
pilot project with 50 Nissan Leaf vehicles, hoping to become an industry leader
of the electric loaner cars.

Communauto also is a bargain,
charging about two dollars (1.50 euro) per hour, which includes the cost of
fuel, plus a subscription fee.

Electric cars early on met with
consumer resistance, but the chance to try out the vehicles in a low-risk
car-share has helped to greatly increase their popularity.

“I already have a car, but I
subscribed to Communauto precisely because I wanted to try out an electric
car,” said new convert Georges Charlebois.

Charlebois now dreams of when
he’ll no longer have to to rent one by the day or by the hour. That day may be
a long way off, however: there is a waiting list for the vehicles at his local
dealership.

The most ambitious electric
car-sharing plan is wildly popular, but has a downside, Beauchamp admitted.

“You have to plan ahead
because you can’t stop at a gas station to fill it up,” he said ruefully.

Communauto has tried to alleviate
that problem, installing — in partnership with the giant public utility
Hydro-Quebec — car charging stations in parking lots all across Montreal.

Devoid of a conventional combustion
engine, the loaner cars — emblazoned with the slogan “100% electric”
– are famously quiet, so not only do they not increase air pollution, but they
don’t add to the city’s noise pollution, either.

Most of the electric cars can go
about 140 kilometers (about 87 miles) before needing to be recharged –
although the batteries become partially replenished when the brakes are
pressed, or when the vehicle is driven downhill.

Benoit Robert, CEO of Communauto,
told AFP that the company is excited about the addition of the green cars to
its fleet.

“The electric car will allow
us to further reduce emissions from our users,” he said.

The popularity of the vehicles
already is having an ecological upside, he added.

“We already are having a
significant impact on reducing the rate of motorized car use by the population
and this has a direct impact on reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” Benoit
told AFP.

Catherine Morency, a professor at
the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, said the program is a marketing masterstroke
because of the synergy between the car-share and green car industries.

The arrangement also is a plus
for manufacturers of green automobiles, because a wider range of renters — and
potential purchasers — try out the cars before purchase.

But the two industries part ways
in terms of their long term goals: While makers of green cars are hoping to put
a lot more of them on the road, Communauto seeks, in the end, to reduce the
number of cars in circulation.

Car-sharing will convert at least
some motorists to the electric car, thereby increasing the demand for these
vehicles, predicted popular automobile columnist Denis Duquet.

“The production will
increase, prices will drop and people who have used the electric car in
Communauto are likely eventually to buy their own,” Duqet predicts.

Source: www.news.ninemsn.com.au

By Charles Redell in GreenBiz.com
(22 September 2011):

How will people get around in the
cities of the future? To listen to heads of R&D departments at Toyota and
GM, people in perpetually sunny, clean cities will zip around in
electric-powered pods that drive and park themselves while accidents and
emissions become a thing of the past.

That vision was presented during
today’s Changing Cities-Changing Cars panel at the Meeting of the Minds
conference in Boulder, Colo. Less starry-eyed dreamers on it talked about car
sharing, electric buses, lighter vehicles and reducing idling.

The panel’s tone was set by its
moderator, Bill Reinert, national manager of advanced technology at Toyota.
“… A bus with one passenger is one of the most inefficient ways to move
people around,” he said. “Cars done the right way can be an effective
way to move people.”

The vision of Chris Borroni-Bird,
director of advanced technology vehicle concepts and the EN-V program for GM,
meshed nicely with that. Cities and residents have competing needs from
transportation, he said. Cities want clean air, to use less energy, to have
fewer accidents, less congestion and less parking needs. People want to drive
in urban environments because of the comfort and convenience personal
transportation offers. (Pictured above is a concept image from GM’s rollout of
the EN-V last year.)

“There’s a reason why people
still drive cars in dense cities,” he said. “It’s a freedom of
expression. For some, it’s a status symbol.”

His team’s solution is the EN-V
or Electric Networked Vehicle. This highly maneuverable electric pod is
networked and provides autonomous driving capability so it can automatically
caravan with other EN-Vs and avoid accidents. “It retains the essential
benefits of a car without the downsides of car,” he said. (The video at
right has Borroni-Bird walking through the EN-V concept.)

Autonomous cars would not only be
more efficient from an energy perspective — the 500-pound EN-V has a 3.4-kwh
battery compared with the 34-kwh battery in a Nissan Leaf, according to Larry
Burns, director of the Roundtable on Sustainability Mobility at Earth Institute
(and one of the presenters at GreenBiz.com’s VERGE event last June) — but
freeing people from driving could give them an extra hour a day, which he
valued at $12,500 a year, or half the price of a car.

“Alternative propulsion and
energy technologies get all the attention,” Burns said. “Driverless
vehicles and the coordination of all that moves us and goods around will be the
most sustainable transportation we’ll get to experience.”

Offering a different kind of
solution was Sascha Simon, director of Advanced Product Planning for Mercedes-Benz
USA. Two years ago Mercedes started exploring the concept of car sharing
because personally owned cars sit unused about 80 percent of the time, he said.

The increased efficiency of
shared assets drove the company to launch Car2Go, first in Germany and then in
Canada and Austin, Texas — where there are currently 15,000 members. Soon
electric vehicles are planned to roll out when Car2Go launches in San Diego as
“the future of urban mobility,” according to Austin.

Even more pragmatic was the
vision of Michael Austin, vice president of BYD America, which focuses on
selling electric selling cars to fleet operators and electric buses to
governments.

The buses run 187 miles on a
charge and could carry about 40 passengers in the United States for about $8 in
energy costs. Compared with using 25 gallons of diesel, e-buses make moving
people in cities “very much about public transportation,” he said. At
a cost of about $650,000, e-buses are twice the cost of a diesel bus but save
$500,000 in fuel and maintenance costs over 12 years, according to Austin.

Wrapping up the panel was a late
addition to it: John Coleman works on fleet sustainability for Ford. His goal
is to make the 5 million cars Ford currently sells each year significantly
reduce emissions without requiring new infrastructure.

Ford is aiming to cut between 250
and 750 pounds from the weight of its vehicles and plans to make its new trucks
30 percent lighter, according to Coleman.

The company also looked at idling
technology for applications such as utility bucket trucks which idle all day
long. By adding a small battery that only runs the bucket, Ford reduced fuel
usage by 80 percent and doubled the amount of time workers could be out because
of reduced noise concerns.

“It’s not as sexy, but with
an 80 percent reduction in fuel, now we’re making a difference,” Coleman
said.

Charles Redell has been covering
renewable energy and sustainable business for the better part of 10 years at
various publications including Greenfab-media.com, Sustainable Industries, and
Energy Prospects West

Source: www.greenbiz.com

Hydrogen is a potentially valuable energy
source but production costs and environmental concerns about using fossil fuels
to produce the gas have limited its application so far. Previous studies have
shown hydrogen gas can be produced by harnessing the by-products of microbial
organic matter metabolism in a device called a microbial electrolysis cell. But
the process requires an additional input of electricity to make it work
effectively. Now, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, hydrogen can be produced in a single device by
integrating a water-based power supply into the system.

ABC Science Online’s Rachel
Sullivan (20 September 2011):

Hydrogen – a potential clean
energy source – can be sustainably generated using just seawater, river water
and bacteria, according to new research.

Hydrogen is a potentially
valuable energy source but production costs and environmental concerns about
using fossil fuels to produce the gas have limited its application so far.

Previous studies have shown
hydrogen gas can be produced by harnessing the by-products of microbial organic
matter metabolism in a device called a microbial electrolysis cell.

But the process requires an
additional input of electricity to make it work effectively.

Now, according to a study
published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
hydrogen can be produced in a single device by integrating a water-based power
supply into the system.

Exoelectrogenic bacteria are
found in ponds, streams, sediments and soils, as well as in waste water.

Because they metabolise organic
matter, they can transfer electrical energy to conductive materials such as
metal or graphite.

“[When they are used in
Microbial Electrolysis Cells] bacteria produce electrical current, but not
enough voltage to drive hydrogen gas production at the other electrode,”
Professor Bruce Logan from Pennsylvania State University’s Hydrogen Energy
(H2E) Centre said.

Salt gradient

Professor Logan and Dr Younggy
Kim designed a microbial reverse electrodialysis system, containing five pairs
of seawater and river water cells separated by thin membranes, which were
sandwiched between an anode containing the bacteria, and a cathode.

The passage of salt through the
membranes down the gradient of seawater to river water generated the additional
electricity needed to produce hydrogen without the need for fossil fuels,
sunlight, or wind.

“The most significant
finding is that hydrogen production is possible using readily available and
sustainable sources, and with no need for electricity [input],” Professor
Logan said.

Because the bacteria in the
device can be fed organic waste, the system may also prove useful for
wastewater treatment.

“The implication of this
research is that waste water can become a resource from which we can actually
capture energy in the very useful form of hydrogen gas” – without any
consumption of electrical grid energy,” he said.

Dr Rene Rozendal, a former
research fellow at the University of Queensland’s Advanced Water Management
Centre and the inventor of microbial electrolysis, says this is an interesting study

“However, due to the large
amount of membranes [and electrodes] required, it is a rather expensive method
of making hydrogen gas,” he said.

“Moreover, the number of
places where salt and fresh water and large amounts of biodegradable organic
matter occur together are rather limited.”

“Still, it is a nice
proof-of-principle that demonstrates that hydrogen can be produced from natural
resources without electricity input.”

Source: www.abc.net.au

Nike & Coke Coming Clean & Investing in Start-Ups & Sustainable Projects

Nike is taking a page from
Silicon Valley’s playbook in an effort to cut production costs and foster a new
generation of green-technology businesses by setting up a venture-capital
offshoot called the Sustainable Business & Innovation Lab to back start-ups
focused on alternative energies and more efficient approaches to manufacturing.
Meanwhile, the Coca-Cola Foundation recently awarded US$9.6 million in grant
awards to more than 40 global community organizations during the third quarter
of 2011, covering a wide-range of sustainable community programs across the
globe to help develop economies, improve lives and create opportunity.

By Olga Kharif and Matt Townsend
in Bloomberg Technology News (28 September 2011):

Nike Inc., the world’s biggest
sneaker company, is taking a page from Silicon Valley’s playbook in an effort
to cut production costs and foster a new generation of green-technology
businesses.

The company is setting up a
venture-capital offshoot called the Sustainable Business & Innovation Lab
to back startups focused on alternative energies and more efficient approaches
to manufacturing. The lab also will seek out companies that promote healthy
lifestyles, according to a description on Nike’s site.

Nike is counting on innovation to
help it cope with the economic slump and supply constraints. The Nike Free, a
lightweight running shoe, helped boost sales 18 percent to $6.08 billion last
quarter, topping analysts’ estimates. The company also has sought ways to lower
expenses amid rising costs for raw materials, labor and transportation.

More companies are working on
these kinds of projects, said John Taylor, head of research for the National
Venture Capital Association in Arlington, Virginia. In the past, it was mainly
technology and pharmaceutical businesses starting venture arms, he said. With
research budgets getting cut, a wider range of companies are now looking to
startups to help them maintain their innovation.

“We are seeing consumer companies
looking at venture capital,” he said. “They feel there’s an opportunity to look
for fresh ideas.”

Early Stages

Nike declined to say how much
money it will devote to the project. The effort is in its early stages and
hasn’t made investments, which would need to be approved by management, said
Mary Remuzzi, a spokeswoman for the Beaverton, Oregon-based company.
“Leveraging innovation in sustainability can be a vehicle for growth,” she said
in an e-mail.

The risk is betting on companies
that don’t pan out. In 30 percent to 40 percent of cases, investors lose most
or all the money they put into startups, according to Shikhar Ghosh, a
professor at Harvard Business School. Seventy to 80 percent of the time,
investors don’t get their projected rate of return.

Nike’s lab will primarily make equity
investments in young companies focused on alternative energies. It will also
finance partnerships with government and nongovernment organizations, according
to the company’s website.

By pursuing new sources of energy
and sustainable production, Nike may be able to make its products more cheaply.
It also helps the company appeal to environmentally minded customers,
furthering an effort already under way. Last year, Nike introduced soccer
uniforms that use recycled polyester made from plastic bottles.

Online Exchange

In 2009, Nike helped start an
Internet project with Best Buy Co. called GreenXchange that promotes
sustainability. The idea is to let patent owners collaborate online to find
more eco-friendly ways of doing business.

Nike has tapped venture-capital
and private-equity managers to run the new operation, including Avi Sahi, who
was hired last December after working at the buyout firm Perseus LLC. John
Hull, a long-time venture capitalist, also is working as a partner. He
previously served as managing director at Marquam Hill Capital LLC and Intel
Corp.’s venture arm, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Nike is considering adding more
staff to the effort, including a principal to evaluate investment opportunities
and conduct exploratory research, according to its website.

The company isn’t the only
sneaker maker pursuing venture- capital investments. Adidas AG has backed Hydra
Ventures, a fund started this year to focus on creating new consumer brands in
apparel, footwear and sports-related areas.

The rivals are following in the
footsteps of technology giants such as Intel. Its venture-capital division,
Intel Capital, has invested more than $9.8 billion in more than 1,100 companies
since 1991.

Kharif is a reporter for
Bloomberg News and Bloomberg Businessweek in Portland, Ore. Townsend is a
reporter for Bloomberg News.

Source: www.businessweek.com

The Coca-Cola Foundation Invests
$9.6 Million To Fortify Global Sustainability Efforts

By Business Wire (21 September
2011):

The Coca-Cola Foundation, the
philanthropic arm of The Coca-Cola Company, recently awarded $9.6 million in
grant awards to more than 40 global community organizations during the third
quarter of 2011. Of the $9.6 million awarded, $3.6 million will support water
stewardship projects; $1.8 million will support educational initiatives; and
$1.3 million will support fitness and nutrition programs. Additionally, $1.3
million will support other local priorities, such as recycling, youth
development, arts and culture, and civic initiatives.

”The Coca-Cola Company is doing
its part to help communities thrive,” said Ingrid Saunders Jones, Chairperson
of The Coca-Cola Foundation. “We are supporting a wide-range of sustainable
community programs across the globe to help develop economies, improve lives
and create opportunity.”

Those global organizations
receiving funding from The Coca-Cola Foundation during the 3 rd quarter of 2011
include:

Water Stewardship

Cambodian Women for Peace and
Development, “Communities Clean Water Supply and Sanitation,” Cambodia, $45,000

CARE USA, “Rapid Glacier Retreat
in the Tropical Andes,” United States, $70,000

Nature Conservancy, “North
American Partnership,” The United States, $200,000

Research Center for Family Health
& Community Development, “Clean Water for Communities,” Vietnam, $70,000

Tree Utah, “Ecological
Restoration Program: Jordan River Watershed,” United States, $20,000

Umweltorganisation WWF
International Danube-Carpathian Programme, “Wetland Restoration in the
Danube-Drava-Mura Area,” Austria, $90,000

United Nations Foundation,
“Community-based Water Management and Adaptation to Climate Change Project,”
United States, $2 million

World Wildlife Fund, Inc.,
“Community and Ecosystem Resilience to Climate Change,” United States, $600,000

World Wildlife Fund, Inc.,
“Restoration of Monday River in Parana Watershed,” United States, $60,000

WWF Spain (Adena), “Restoring
Alto Guardiana,” Spain, $441,000

Education

Apollo Theater Foundation, Inc.,
“Apollo Theater Academy,” United States, $200,000

Asian and Pacific Islander
American Scholarship Fund, “Coca-Cola First Generation College Scholarship
Program,” United States, $100,000

China Youth Development
Foundation, “Project Hope Teacher Training Program,” China, $50,000

National Urban Fellows, Inc.,
“Public Service Leadership Development and Diversity Program,” United States,
$50,000

Philippine Business for Social
Progress, “Little Red School House,” Philippines, $200,000

Save the Children Honduras,
“Building Communication and Capacity Opportunity for the Prevention of Child
Labor in Sugar Cane Farms,” Honduras, $100,000

United States Hispanic Chamber of
Commerce Foundation, “BizFest-Youth Entrepreneurship Training and Competition,”
United States, $25,000

University of San Francisco,
“Coca-Cola First Generation Scholarship Program,” United States, $500,000
multi-year grant

Urban League of Greater Atlanta,
Inc., “Think UP! Unlimited Possibilities: The Career Life Empowerment Program,”
United States, $50,000

Active Healthy Living

Gameday Healthy Kids Foundation,
“The Gameday/Coca-Cola Live Positively Initiative,” United States, $50,000

ISB vzw, “Street Action,”
Belgium, $651,000

Loughborough University
Development Trust, “Sporting Performance and Promotion of Physical Activity,”
United Kingdom, $464,000

Marcus Jewish Community Center of
Atlanta, Inc., “Health and Wellness Programming for People of all Abilities,”
United States, $50,000

Palestine Association for
Children’s Encouragement of Sports, “Using Sports to Promote a Healthy Future,”
United Kingdom, $50,000

Special Olympics Israel, “Sport
Competition for Individuals with Intellectual Disabilities,” Israel, $50,000

Special Olympics Ukraine, “2011
Special Olympics European Basketball Week in Ukraine,” Ukraine, $20,000

Recycling

Keep America Beautiful, Inc.,
“Collegiate Recycling Bin Grant,” United States, $150,000

Ukrainian Society for the
Protection of Birds, “Fresh WATER (Wise Approach to Environment Resources),”
Ukraine, $60,000

Disaster Relief

American National Red Cross,
“Disaster Relief for New York,” United States, $25,000

United Way of Vermont, “Statewide
Disaster Relief,“ United States, $25,000

HIV/AIDS

The Coca-Cola Africa Foundation:
Africare, United States, “The Injongo Yethu Comprehensive HIV and AIDS Services
Project,” $1 million

Chinese Foundation for the
Prevention of STD & AIDS, “Aid Project for AIDS Affected Vulnerable
Groups,” China, $200,000

Youth Development

JA Worldwide, “INJAZ – Coca-Cola
Civic Engagement Initiative,” United States, $500,000

Maynard Jackson Youth Foundation,
“Leadership Academy to Serve Metro Atlanta High School Students,” United
States, $50,000

Latin American Association,
“!Inspira! Youth Academic Achievement Initiative,” United States, $25,000

Community/Arts & Culture/
Environment

24/7 Gateway, LLC, “Gateway
Center Homeless Outreach and Services,” United States, $50,000

Hispanic Association on Corporate
Responsibility, “HACR Corporate Executives Forum,” United States, $50,000

La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club
Inc., “La MaMa Culturehub Educational Initiative,” United States, $100,000

Please Be Kind to Cyclists,
“Victim Relief Effort (Cyclists VIP),” United States, $25,000

Estonian Fund for Nature,
“Regeneration of Mires,” Estonia, $20,000

Fundación Junior Achievement
Ecuador, “Aprender a Emprender en el Medio Ambiente AEMA” (Learn to be an
Entrepreneur in the Environment), Ecuador, $10,000

H. John Heinz III Center for
Science, Economics and the Environment, “Biological Dynamics of Forest
Fragments,” United States, $150,000

Vsemirnyi Fond Prirody,
“Community-Based Polar Bear Conservation in Chukotka,” Russian Federation,
$100,000

Source:  www.thecoca-colacompany.com

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire: Asia & Air Pollution

Author of a recent study on the
global effects of fire, says this “could lead to a dangerous feedback as more
burning releases more carbon into the atmosphere, further driving climate
change. Meanwhile, Asian countries fare poorly when it comes to air pollution,
although Bhutan, Japan and Singapore rank among the better places, according to
the World Health Organisation’s first global survey.

Straits Times (28 September 2011):

GENEVA: Asian countries fare
poorly when it comes to air pollution, although Bhutan, Japan and Singapore
rank among the better places, according to the World Health Organisation’s
first global survey.

Cities in Canada and the US were
rated among the best, while those in the Middle East were among the worst. The
south- western Iranian city of Ahwaz in fact walked away with the unfortunate
distinction of having the highest measured level of airborne particles smaller
than 10 micrometres.

WHO released the list on Monday,
to highlight the need to reduce outdoor air pollution, which is estimated to
cause 1.34 million premature deaths each year.

The global body said investments
to lower pollution levels quickly pay off because of lower disease rates and,
therefore, lower health-care costs.

The list, which relies on
country-reported data over the past several years, measures the concentration
of airborne particles smaller than 10 micrometres – so-called PM10s – for
almost 1,100 cities.

WHO recommends an upper limit of
20 micrograms for PM10s, which can cause serious respiratory problems in
humans. They are mostly sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide from power plants,
vehicle exhausts and industry.

The world average for PM10 was
estimated to be 71 micrograms per cu m.

Singapore’s outdoor air pollution
level was significantly lower at 32 micrograms per cu m, for 2009, the latest
available figures. And this was an improvement over the pollution five years
ago, when it was estimated to be 48 micrograms per cu m.

Still the Republic was behind
Bhutan – which at 18 micrograms per cu m had the lowest levels of pollution in
Asia – and Japan, with 22 micrograms per cu m.

Cities in Pakistan and India,
such as Quetta and Kanpur, and the Mongolian capital Ulan Bator fared among the
worst on the pollution scale.

Mr Mohammad Hasan, 39, of
Karachi, Pakistan, said attempts to improve air quality in the port city of 18
million – such as by replacing heavily polluting buses with vehicles using
compressed natural gas – are being undermined by bigger polluters which are
‘playing havoc with the lives of Karachi’s populace’.

‘Industries and factories are
emitting thick clouds of smoke, and no government agency is out there to check
them or correct them,’ the bank employee said.

Elsewhere in the region,
pollution in heavily populated China, at 98 micrograms per cu m, was way above
the world average.

China’s Environmental Protection
Ministry said in a report last year that a third of the nation’s 113 cities
surveyed failed to meet national air standards. And a World Bank report said 16
of the world’s 20 cities with the worst air are located in China, which relies
heavily on coal to meet its energy needs.

Myanmar, with 94 micrograms per
cu m, and Indonesia, with 55 micrograms per cu m, figured among countries with
the most pollution in South-east Asia.

The WHO said the reasons for high
pollution levels varied, but that often rapid industrialisation and the use of
poor quality fuels for transportation and electricity generation are to blame.

In India, major metropolitan
areas such as New Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata have banned the construction of new
power plants within city limits, while existing ones are being shut down or
relocated.

But at the same time, a lack of
public transport has led to an explosion of privately owned cars and SUVs as
the economy booms, with the number of heavily polluting diesel vehicles
increasing 10-fold, as diesel is highly subsidised by the government.

At the other end of the list are
cities in Canada and the United States, which benefit from lower population
density, favourable climates and stricter air pollution regulation.

Estonia topped the list with the
best air quality, at 11 micrograms per cu m, Mauritius ranked second, with 12
micrograms, and Australia tied with Canada for the third spot, on 13 micrograms
per cu m.

Source: www.wildsingaporenews.blogspot.com

Michael Richardson in the Straits
Times (26 September 2011):

Although Singapore and Malaysia
have escaped the worst effects of the 2011 “haze” pollution from fires in
Indonesia, this will not be the case in future if the average global
temperature continues to rise as many scientists predict.

The annual dry period in
Indonesia is ending. The Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency in
Jakarta said recently that the rainy season has started in Aceh and North
Sumatra, and will spread to other areas by the end of the year, dousing fires.

But this is likely to be just a
breathing space. As the world gets hotter, the risk of more and bigger fires
increases.

2010 was the hottest year on
record, with global temperatures 0.53 degrees Celsius above the 1961-1990
average. This year is not as hot so far. But serious drought has still gripped
parts of the Americas and Africa.

Blair Trewin, an Australian
climatologist, says that warm extremes are increasingly outnumbering cold
extremes as the influence of the background warming trend strengthens.

David Bowman, Professor of
Environmental Change Biology at the University of Tasmania and lead author of a
recent study on the global effects of fire, says this “could lead to a
dangerous feedback as more burning releases more carbon into the atmosphere,
further driving climate change.”

He and his international team of researchers
are concerned at the total impact of four kinds of fires, and the way they are
combining to intensify climate impacts.

The four are natural fires that
occur regardless of humans, for example by a lightning strike; tame fire used
by hunter-gatherers to manage landscapes for game and wild food production; agricultural
fire to clear land cheaply, and grow food and plantation crops – a widespread
practice in Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia; and industrial fire to
power modern societies that have switched from using living to fossilized
plants in the form of coal, oil and natural gas as the primary fuel.

Dr Bowman warns that the
excessive combustion of fossil fuels to generate electricity, power heavy
industry and run modern transport is driving climate change and may completely
overwhelm human capacities to control fire.

Fire has been around since
shortly after plants colonized the surface of the Earth over 400 million years
ago. Humans learned how to use and control it.

However, a group of specialists
commissioned by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO)
reported in May that in many parts of the world, the number of large wildfires
has been increasing at an “alarming” rate, causing ever-higher suppression
costs, property losses and environmental damage.

The biggest and most damaging,
which the report calls “mega-fires”, overwhelm efforts to extinguish them, even
in developed countries that have made major investments in fire-fighting
capacity, better predictive systems, improved technology and cooperation, and
larger fleets of aircraft to drop water and fire-retardent chemicals from the
air.

Mega-fires exceed all efforts at
control until fire-fighters get a favorable change in weather or the fire runs
out of combustible fuel to burn.

China’s 1987 Great Black Dragon
Fire may mark the start of the mega-fire phenomenon in the modern era. It
killed over 200 people and burned about 1.2 million hectares of virgin pine
forest.

The specialists commissioned by
the FAO focused on eight megafires since 1997, in Indonesia, Brazil, the United
States, Greece, Botswana, Australia, Russia and Israel. They found that nearly
all had human causes. They were either lit intentionally or by negligence.

The Indonesian fires in 1997-98,
raged out of control for months, burning over 9.7 million hectares and
releasing approximately 700 million tonnes of greenhouse gases into the
atmosphere, making them one of the world’s largest pollution sources. The smoke
engulfed Singapore and other parts of Southeast Asia, disrupting transport and
acting as blanket that trapped other pollutants harmful to human health.

Wildfires release a range of
chemicals into the atmosphere, similar to those from fossil fuel burning. They
include the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane, but also other air
pollutants such as carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, volatile organic
compounds, aerosols and fine particles of soot.

The gaseous pollutants also
influence tropospheric ozone formation, a pollutant as well as a potent
greenhouse gas.

Gabriele Pfister, a scientist at
the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, has
investigated how smoke from forest fires travels and its impact on air quality
far from the fires.

She says that about half the
world’s air pollution comes from wildfires and that a bad fire year can result
in pollution from the fires circling the globe.

Dr Bowman says that managing
flammable landscapes is one of the big climate change adaption challenges,
equal to the challenge of sea level rise in densely populated, low-lying
coastal zones in Asia and elsewhere.

This is a warning ASEAN countries
should heed. They should work more closely together to improve land management
and fire prevention.

- The writer is a visiting senior
research fellow at the Institute of South East Asian Studies.

Source: www.iseas.edu.sg

Learning from & Preserving the Past: A Sustainable Approach in Future

A Sustainable Cities 2011
highlight was from Dr Saaed Zaki, who said we should not only learn from past
mistakes but preserve historic cities and structures as they might well be more
sustainable, longer-lasting and useful than many of our modern “green”
buildings. Big is not necessarily best when it comes to cities and buildings,
as Nigel Grier from Sustainable Townsville pointed out, while Singapore shows
how to achieve a balanced, sustainable and greener approach to buildings and
transport.

Ken Hickson reports on the Sustainable
Cities in Singapore:

Attending conferences and expos
can be time-consuming and mind-numbing, but every now and again one is entirely
stimulated and energised by listening to and meeting some of the best brains
and sustainably-connected people. That was the experience at Singapore’s third
Sustainable Cities Conference 27-30 September and organised by IBC.

Every speaker made a platform performance
to be remembered, and participated freely in formal and informal discussion.
Therefore, selecting the best to highlight is not the easiest or the wisest thing
to do. But I will.

My biased assessment is by no
means final, but impressions count, whether first or last.

I cannot go past Dr Saaed Zaki
for a most stimulating and thought-provoking presentation on “Learning from the
Past to Plan Sustainable Cities of the Future”.

He saw historical cities as
examples of resource conserving urban development, citing Indian locations he
knows survive and thrive: Jaipur, Jodhpur, Jaiselmer and Surat.

What lessons can be learned? Many
of course, but he made the point repeatedly that we should be preserving what is
best because it might well be more sustainable that what it is replaced with.

We also need to bring about a
closer amalgamation of urban economy, environment, technology and architecture
to create sustainable cities of the future

Dr Saeed is the Managing
Director, dwp, Thailand. He possesses over two decades of extensive experience
with local and multinational firms in property and real estate development,
with over ten years of which in a senior management role. An architect, urban
designer and urban planner by trade, Saeed has a proven track record of
successful project planning design, development and implementation, throughout
Asia. In 2007, Saeed joined dwp, responsible for the overall operation and key
commercial strategies and initiatives, across the Thai market. Directing
multiple design studios, Saeed collaborates closely with design directors to
ensure that individual project requirements and client business objectives are
met, while maintaining design integrity and quality.

For more go to: www.dwp.com

Coming before Dr Saaed on the programme
was Robbert Van Nouhuys, Director , ACLA, & Hyder Consulting Hong Kong on “Think
Cities!: Addressing the Global Consequences of Urbanisation in Asia”.

He drew attention to the adverse effects of current
sustainable architecture and urban thinking particularly as it relates to megacities,
urban efficiencies and ‘quality of life’. He also joined Dr Saaed and others in a very stimulating and
lively panel discussion.

For more go to: www.hyderconsuting.com

Dr Uma Maheswaran, Vice President,
Sustainable Development, Jurong Consultants Pte Ltd, Singapore gave some
insight into “Deriving a Carbon Assessment Framework for Cities”, including a
total sustainable solution approach to cities and some relevant cases from his
experience in Singapore and elsewhere. More here: www.jurong.com

Arup is well known as a very
sustainable business leader and scene setter in design, so Elad Eisenstein,
Associate Director and Design Leader, Integrated Urbanism  for Arup, in United Kingdom acquitted himself
well on the subject of “Integrated Urbanism: Making Places in an Ecological Age”.

The challenge of making places
from anew and how can cities and communities be developed and retrofitted to
increase resource efficiency were key topics he covered. He also gave examples
from new cities in Europe, the Middle East and China. More from Elad and Arup
here: www.arup.com

The panel discussion on Future
Cities was lively affair with Nigel Grier of Sustainable Townsville and
Zingspace, plus Emma Strain, Head of Environment, Greater London Authority,
United Kingdom, joining the three aforementioned speakers:

What does the city of the future
look like? How are governments, urban planners, sustainability experts, and
other stakeholders facing up to the threat of climate change, population
growth, natural disasters and the need to regenerate the world’s aging cities?
What more can be done to current green building tools and ratings to prepare
cities for an energy efficient future?

Moderated by chairman of the day
Nicholas Brooke of Professional Property Services Group, Hong Kong, it covered
the ground effectively and produced a sense of the urgency required to deal
with the challenges of climate change and the need for more sustainable development
to deal with both mitigation and adaptation elements.

It was refreshing to hear from
Nigel Grier with his perspective as an ecologist and environmental planner.
Townsville, a relatively small tropical city in Queensland Australia is leading
the way in sustainability in its planning and development. Described as a small
city with a big voice, it is a recognised solar city in Australia and was the
only Australian city in the IBM Smarter Cities Challenge.

Tropical Sustainability is a
challenge and an opportunity, as Townsville is also positioned in the heart of
Australia’s growth of mining and fossil fueled energy production. It is also
the site for one of Australia’s most advanced clean energy projects – MDB carbon
capture project involving algae and is the “end of the line” of the Copperstring
project which incorporates renewable energy into the national electricity grid.

More on Townsville here: www.carbontownsville.org and on Nigel at
www.zingspace.com.au

From small and tropical to big
and cool, we went from Townsville to London, when Emma Strain took to the
stage:

Emma Strain is Head of
Environment for the Greater London Authority in United Kingdom and gave real
insight into “Developing a Low Carbon Capital – a Holistic Approach Towards
Energy Efficiency, Renewable Energy and Waste Management for London”. It was
eye-opening to hear of the practical application of policies with funding from
European and the UK Governments.

Securing investments,
implementing energy efficiency, decentralised energy and energy from waste and defining
roles and responsibilities in the partnership between public sector, private
sector and knowledge institutions were well covered by Emma.

She spelt out the Mayor of London’s
low carbon zones programme, called  RE:CONNECT, which is supporting a community
approach to cutting the capital’s carbon footprint. The programme was designed
to show the potential of a complete approach to reducing a community’s CO2
emissions by involving local residents, communities and businesses.

RE:CONNECT has been running since
winter 2009. Its aim is to cut carbon emissions locally, helping London meet
its target of reducing CO2 by 60% by 2025 and contributing to the Mayor’s
vision to make London the greenest, big city in the world.

Ten London boroughs were chosen
to receive funding and support from the Mayor and the GLA to create local low
carbon zones (LCZs). Each of the zones has a target to reduce carbon emissions
by 20.12% by 2012 and is developing innovative delivery models to do so.

RE:CONNECT’s ambitions have been
quickly copied by central government and the programme has attracted interest
from academia, energy suppliers, trade bodies and government officials from
cities in Belgium, France and Japan.

A local approach to carbon saving
has many advantages. It offers communities a real freedom to tailor-make plans
to fit with the specific challenges and opportunities of their neighbourhood.
Giving communities the chance to design and manage their plans to reduce carbon
emissions means they can better integrate services and deliver more meaningful
behaviour change in their neighbourhood. A local approach also provides
economies of scale in terms of raising funds and speeding up delivery by
partners.

More on this: www.london.gov.uk

If the first day was something to
crow about, the pressure and interest didn’t let up on Day Two, when Paul
James, Director, UNGlobal Cities Institute, Australia, gave an excellent
introduction as well as a thoughtful summary at the end. More from Paul at www.cities.programe.org

Moving Sydney to a Low Carbon
Future was the topic for Chris Derksema, Sustainability Director, City of
Sydney, Australia. He pointed out the critical role of “leading
by example”, helping others to do the same
and the implementation of green infrastructure across the city. While not as
advanced as London in terms of carbon-cutting and energy efficiency funded programmes,
Sydney seems intent on leading the pack of Australian cities into a more sustainable
future. For more go to: www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au

South East Asia is not too far behind
in the rush to achievement in the sustainability stakes as Peter Stueck of
Aedas showed with his case study of the BSD City Green Office Park in West
Jakarta.

Singapore had more than one
chance to show its sustainability face and Dr George Sun, Deputy Director, Land
Transport Authority did this well with his paper on “Green Mobility and
Integrated Land Transport Systems for a Sustainable City Master Plan”.

Jeff Robinson, Principal Engineer
and Sustainable Buildings Leader, Aurecon Group, Australia gave a thoroughly
coherent look at “Regenerating Asia’s Existing Cities through Green Retrofits”.
More on this at: www.aurecongroup.com

It was a very green end to the
second day, when the very eloquent architect  Jason Pomeroy, Director,
Broadway Malyan, Singapore presented on “Considerations into a New Vertical
Urbanism: Balancing Social Space with Greenery in the Urban Habitat”. In
visuals and in words, he showed the benefits of greening buildings inside and out,
going beyond just looking green, to putting it into effect throughout the
structure and its environment. There’s more at
www.broadwayMalyan.com

I couldn’t do more than congratulate
all speakers, chairmen and panellists on doing a sterling, sustainable job. And
look forward to the next IBC event on Building Retrofits Asia 2011 when yours
truly has to take the stand as chairman and presenter. Go to: www.ibc-asia/buildingretrofits
for more.

Source: www.sustainablecitiesasia.com
and www.sustain-ability-showcase.com

It is very difficult to
dramatically reduce greenhouse gases and to lessen the chances of global
warming when the world’s population remains on such an upward trend.
Additionally there is the problem of increased standards of living all over the
world. That compounds the use of resources and the production of carbon, writes
Stephen Dobson, Managing Director of Ramtec, Australia’s first rammed earth
building company in Perth, Western Australia, and an advocate of a sustainable
population policy in ine with that launched by Dick Smith in Australia.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon launched
the 7 Billion Actions campaign in by saying, “The seven billionth citizen will
be born into a world of contradictions. We have plenty of food yet millions are
still starving. We see luxurious lifestyles yet millions are impoverished. We
have great opportunities for progress but also great obstacles.”   UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund,
is an international development agency that promotes the right of every woman,
man and child to enjoy a life of health and equal opportunity. www.7billionactions.org

National Geographic says: Population
is a complicated topic. With the worldwide population slated to top 7 billion
in 2011, we decided it was one we needed to tackle. But we wanted to do it in a
way that gives readers room to think. We spread out our coverage over a year,
with articles that take deep dives into specific issues—demographics, food
security, climate change, fertility trends, managing biodiversity—that relate
to global population. www.ngm.nationalgeographic.com/7-billion

UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, is an
international development agency that promotes the right of every woman, man
and child to enjoy a life of health and equal opportunity. UNFPA supports
countries in using population data for policies and programmes to reduce
poverty and to ensure that every pregnancy is wanted, every birth is safe,
every young person is free of HIV, and every girl and woman is treated with
dignity and respect. Source: www.unfpa.org

Contribution from Stephen Dobson.

Here are my further thoughts on the
world population issue:

I genuinely believe that your
newsletter is very informative and doing a lot of good but the issue of world
overpopulation is bigger than ALL of the matters mentioned in your newsletter.  Overpopulation is so very connected to global
warming.

It is VERY difficult to
dramatically reduce greenhouse gases and to lessen the chances of global
warming when the world’s population remains on such an upward trend.
Additionally there is the problem of increased standards of living all over the
world. That compounds the use of resources and the production of carbon.

It is unreasonable to deny anyone
in any country a lower standard of living but I consider it VERY reasonable for
countries to control their populations.

This is best done by education
and empowerment of women. Some of the VERY developed economies have stable or
falling populations eg Japan.

The massive increases in
population are in the poorer and less educated countries eg. India, Africa,
Philippines where due largely to the influence of Roman Catholicism, women are
not permitted to use birth control techniques (to limit the numbers of their
children) and the population is increasing dramatically and poverty is
expanding massively.

More generally:

The world’s population reaches 7
billion in 2011.

The general scientific opinion is
that the sustainable level of population with a European standard of living for
all is about 2 million.

There are some who argue strongly
that for true sustainability and not depleting the worlds resources then the
world can carry a population of only 100 million people.

Australia has been inhabited by
the Australian Aboriginals and they have the world’s longest surviving culture.
They have lived for some 30,000 or more years in a truly sustainable way. Their
population was very low.

In Perth, a city now of over 1
million, it supported less than a few hundred aboriginals in a truly
sustainable way. Perth has all the problems of overpopulation.

Pretty well all of the world’s
problems and issues are made worse by or caused totally by overpopulation.

Problems of overpopulation :

1. Food shortage

2.Water shortage.

Well water levels falling and
turning to salt worldwide.

Perth and Melbourne and more
Australian cities are now getting more and more of their water via seawater
desalination. This is a trend worldwide. Such plants produce good drinkable
fresh water but use massive amounts of energy.

So Australia has now run out of
natural water (in the attractive populated areas) and is moving to man-made
water via desalination. When energy prices rise, water prices must too.

3. Species extinction

4. Over-use of fossil fuels.

5. Over clearing of rainforests
and other land areas.

6. Working the land hard to
produce the needed food, leading to land degredation.

7. Arable land being used for
housing in the endless quest to build houses for all.

8. Over production of carbon,
CO2, greenhouse gases etc

It is interesting that there is
no talk of global population levels at Copenhagen or at the summits on Global
warming.

It is wrong that if humans have
produced this climate change then why can we not talk about the numbers of
humans. Why are all the leaders so fixed in avoiding the subject of
overpopulation? They seem to accept that there is no chance to slow or limit
population growth, but that is not true.

Many leaders seem to believe that
the carrying capacity of the world is infinite. It isn’t. It needs discussion.

It is so basic that massive
increases in population make CO2 reductions so much harder.

Why cannot the “elephant in
the room” of climate change be discussed?

Ramtec’s Managing Director,
Stephen Dobson.

Ramtec was formed as Australia’s
first rammed earth building company in Perth, Western Australia, in 1979 to not
only promote the art and science of building in rammed earth but to get out
there and design, engineer and build it cost-effectively. To bring rammed earth
from the status of a “forgotten art”, no longer practised in
Australia, into the mainstream of the building industry. Ramtec rammed earth is
now a modern, structural, load bearing, durable, waterproof, beautiful,
artistic, breathing, green, cost-effective, environmentally-sound building
material. It is widely used and respected.

Source: www.ramtec.com.au