Samoan Houses Built to Withstand Cyclones and a Tsunami

For Green Cross CEO Mara Bun, who was a judge in the World Bank Development Marketplace’s Climate Change Adaptation competition, a stand out winner was an innovative post-Tsunami initiative to put indigenous knowledge into practice through the construction of three model Samoan houses (Fale) in three coastal sites.

Mara Bun was a judge in the World Bank Development Marketplace’s Climate Change Adaptation competition in Washington DC which awarded up to $200,000 for innovative community adaptation proposals.

Innovative ideas from East Asia and the Pacific stood out this year, with 5 projects from the region being awarded funding at the 2009 Global Development Marketplace, a competitive grant program to fund innovation in development. Four of the winning projects came from the Philippines and one from the Pacific Island nation of Samoa.

The 2009 contest—‘100 Ideas to Save the Planet’— set a simple challenge: come up with one idea from your own communities to help save the planet and its people from the effects of climate change. This ninth annual Development Marketplace was co-sponsored by the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the World Bank Institute.

The event, which ran from 10-13 November 2009, featured 100 finalists from 47 countries selected from over 1,700 project proposals. East Asia & Pacific fielded 19 finalists this year, with 5 securing grant funding for their projects. Nine countries from the region including The Philippines, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Vietnam, and Samoa were represented.

“The Development Marketplace is an important part of our mission to break down funding barriers and promote innovative entrepreneurial ideas at the grass-roots level.” said Monique Barbut, CEO and Chairperson of the Global Environment Facility (GEF).

Traditional Pacific know-how in building design could become one of the most effective ways for Pacific Islanders to withstand the impacts of climate change. That’s the fervent belief and mission of one of the winners of the 2009 Development Marketplace – Tafaoimalo (Loudeen) Parsons from the Samoa-based Afeafe o Vaetoefaga Pacific Academy of Cultural Restoration, Research and Development.

Loudeen, who recently witnessed first-hand the aftermath of a tsunami which hit Samoa, says traditional Samoan houses survived the wave’s impacts where western housing did not.

“Driving around in the most affected areas, what’s really noticeable rising out of the destruction are the traditional Samoan houses and buildings – still standing beside some of the western housing that was completely demolished.”

The Samoan fale (pronounced farl-eh) is round in construction and lashed and tied together with afa – an organic sennit rope. Afa is made by twisting together the fibers of dry coconut husks. The lashing work is traditionally done by elderly men while women make the thatch for the domed roof of the fale – either from coconut palm leaves or sugar cane.

In 2003, when Loudeen’s organization wanted to renovate an old surviving fale in the capital Apia for its headquarters, it was very hard to find people with knowledge about lashing, thatch-making and traditional construction. A New Zealand-based Tongan specialist in lashing was brought to Samoa to work with a number of elders who then passed the revived techniques onto their sons and daughters.

Now, fales and traditional building techniques are becoming more sought after. “These houses are important culturally and ceremonially,” says Loudeen. “They’re also better to look at and much cooler in our climate.”

With climate risks increasing in the Pacific and cyclones expected to become more intense and frequent, there is growing interest in returning to the housing of old – not least because they are less dangerous in a cyclone. “In the cyclones we’ve seen in the past few years, people have been injured or killed by falling concrete blocks that are reinforced with steel or by flying sheets of corrugated iron,” says Loudeen.

Through the Development Marketplace award, three communities across two islands will be engaged in a program to build three model houses using traditional techniques.

“They will be places where people can learn and try out the construction methods and just be involved in the process of building. It becomes a practical place of learning and gathering – young women can re-learn how to do the thatching and how to make woven blinds and young men can learn about sennit lashing. They will be like hubs of learning.”

About the Development Marketplace
The Development Marketplace is a competitive grant program that identifies and funds innovative, early-stage development projects with high potential for impact and replication. The program is co-sponsored by the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the World Bank Institute.

This year’s contest gathered ideas around climate adaptation in developing countries placing special focus on indigenous communities dealing with climate risks, climate adaptation and disaster risk management, and managing climate risks in ways that provide multiple benefits—eliciting ideas to help people deal with the effects of climate change, especially those living in some of the earth’s most vulnerable ecosystems.

A rigorous assessment by 200 specialists from within and outside the World Bank Group narrowed the list of 1,700 proposals to 100 finalists who were invited to present their ideas in Washington, D.C. this week. Since 1998, the Development Marketplace has awarded more than $61 million to initiatives identified through global, regional, and country competitions.

Source: www.web.worldbank.org

Melbourne Event to Attract World’s Leading Sustainability Designers

“Australia is in a great position to create world-class buildings, urban environments and communities. Green Cities 2010 will establish a common agenda to ensure we capitalise on the huge opportunity facing us and create living environments for future generations to enjoy,” said Property Council of Australia CEO, Peter Verwer.

Green Building Council release (28 January 2010):

World’s leading sustainability and property experts to tackle urban challenges facing Australia at Green Cities 2010

Property and environmental industry leaders from around the world will use the Green Cities 2010 event to tackle the issue of greenhouse gas production from Australian cities, which are estimated to account for 70% of the nation’s greenhouse gas output.

Green Cities is a joint initiative of the Green Building Council of Australia and the Property Council of Australia.

Green Building Council of Australia CEO Romilly Madew said urban greenhouse gas production was one of the greatest challenges facing Australia today.

“Sustainable, productive and healthy cities are crucial to Australia’s future success,” she said.

“With almost 180,000 people added to the urban population in the world each day, we are not alone in trying to deal with this issue. Ensuring the development of sustainable buildings is the cornerstone of the renewed push for sustainable cities.”

Green Cities 2010 will deliver the insight, tools and techniques that all stakeholders in the development process need to create sustainable environments that benefit the nation.

“Australia is in a great position to create world-class buildings, urban environments and communities. Green Cities 2010 will establish a common agenda to ensure we capitalise on the huge opportunity facing us and create living environments for future generations to enjoy,” said Property Council of Australia CEO, Peter Verwer.

Green Cities 2010 is the largest and most influential green building conference in the Asia Pacific region, and will take place in Melbourne from February 21-24.

Now in its fourth year, Green Cities 2010 will feature panel discussions, case studies and debates on how green buildings will deliver greater productivity and occupant health while using less resources and providing higher returns on investment.

Leading international and Australian experts will speak at Green Cities 2010, including:

•           urban designer Malcolm Smith, who will share his experiences in the creation of green precincts such as Stratford City (UK), Northstowe New Town (UK) and Dongtan Ecocity (China)

•           multiple award winning architect and founder of Ingenhoven Architects, Christoph Ingenhoven

•           Director of Sustainable Development for Battery Park City Authority in New York, Susan Kaplan

•           US green building specialist and expert Jerry Yudelson

•           Elsa Monteiro, head of sustainability at Sonae-Sierra (a Grosvenor Group company)

Source: www.greencities.org.au

Peel this Apple to See if it is Green to the Core

Even the very British Economist gives Steve Jobs biblical hero cover treatment for his latest revelation, while the GreenerComputing asks whether Apple’s iPad is green enough to be a “game-changer for the planet”. Green Pages points out that Apple has filed three new clean energy and energy efficiency patents, creating a new wave of speculation about the gadget company’s eco-friendly direction.

“HEROES and heroics” is one of the central themes of the current season at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, which prides itself on showcasing contemporary artists who challenge conventional ways of doing things. On January 27th the centre played host to one of the heroes of the computing industry: Steve Jobs, the boss of Apple, who launched the company’s latest creation, the iPad. Mr Jobs also has a reputation for showcasing the unconventional. He did not disappoint.

The iPad, which looks like an oversized Apple iPhone and boasts a colour screen measuring almost ten inches (25cm), promises to change the landscape of the computing world. It is just half an inch thick and weighs 1.5lb (680 grams). “It’s so much more intimate than a laptop, and so much more capable than a smartphone,” Mr Jobs said of the device, which will be available in late March.

The new iPad has important limitations, which critics were quick to point out. It does not have a camera or a phone and users cannot run multiple applications on it at the same time. But Apple should be able to correct such flaws in due course. Together with a host of other touch-screen “tablet” computers that are expected to reach shops over the next year or so, the iPad looks set to revolutionise the way in which digital media are consumed in homes, schools and offices.

The flood of devices is likely to have a profound impact on parts of the media business that are already being turned upside-down by the internet. The move from print to digital has not been easy for newspaper or magazine publishers. Readers have proved reluctant to pay for content on the web. Companies are unwilling to pay as much for online advertisements as for paper ones—hardly surprising, given the amount of space on offer. The iPad will probably accelerate the shift away from printed matter towards digital content, which could worsen the industry’s pain in the short term. Yet publishers hope that tablets will turn out to be the 21st-century equivalent of the printed page, offering them compelling new ways to present their content and to charge for it. “This is really a chance for publishers to seize on a second life,” says Phil Asmundson of Deloitte, a consultancy.

It does not come as a surprise, then, that Apple has already attracted some blue-chip media brands to the iPad’s platform. During his presentation Mr Jobs revealed that the company had struck deals with leading publishers such as Penguin and Simon & Schuster. They will provide books for the iPad, to be found and paid for in Apple’s new iBooks online store. More agreements ought to be signed before the first iPads are shipped in March. Users will also be able to download applications that give them access to electronic versions of newspapers such as the New York Times, which presented an iPad app at the launch.

Source: www.economist.com

By Matthew Wheeland in GreenerComputing (27 January 2010):

The day that gadget-lovers have been waiting for with bated breath for months if not years has finally arrived.

Today, just after 10 AM, Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad — something along the lines of a blown-up version of the iPhone. Weighing 1.5 pounds, just half an inch thick, and 11 inches tall, the iPad aims to be the Next Huge Thing for technology, capable of playing music, watching movies, reading books and running all the other tens of thousands of apps available in the Apple’s application store.

At the event, Steve Jobs and various Apple execs and partners showed off the iPad’s specs, including a new iBooks e-reader application and associated bookstore, a new version of Apple’s iWork office suite specifically for the iPad, and prices run from $499 for a 16-gigabyte model with no 3G internet, and run up to $829 for a 64-gigabyte model with 3G internet.

But what we really care about is, is it green?

At the start of the event, Jobs ran down the green creds of the gizmo: In keeping with Apple’s environmental policies, the device is free of all kinds of nasty chemicals. It is arsenic-free, mercury-free, BFR-free, PVC-free, and, according to this slide, taken by the good folks (and great livebloggers) at Engadget, “highly recyclable.”

Jobs also stated that the iPad can get 10 hours of battery life — an impressive feat if it’s true. (For comparison’s sake, my brand-new MacBook Pro supposedly gets 7 hours of battery life and in reality gets around 4, unless I turn the display to near-dark and stick to processor-light tasks.)

The vagaries of its “highly recyclable” claim notwithstanding, those are all great green attributes, and another example of how Apple is leading the way with green computing.

But all that notwithstanding, I fail to see how this is really a game-changer for the planet.

First and foremost, the production of electronics has a huge environmental impact. Precious and rare metals to build the gadgets, global supply chains to bring those materials to manufacturers (and bring those gadgets to market), and the energy used during their lifetime are the beginning of the problem.

There is also the huge problem of end-of-life management for these gadgets. Electronics recycling is at best a nascent market — as we write about all the time on GreenerComputing, and which we find in our annual State of Green Business report. At worst, we’re throwing away far more gadgets than we should be, and neither manufacturers, retailers or governments have yet put in place a good way to collect even a fraction of what’s discarded.

But the biggest problem to my way of thinking is that the tablet will just be an addition, not a replacement.

Look at the “netbook” market for cheap laptops that are designed to surf the net well — they’re often highly energy efficient, and that’s a good thing, but the vast majority of netbook owners use them as a supplement to their full-sized and full-spec laptops or desktops (and their phones, e-readers, what have you), thereby multiplying the impacts per user.

I stand by this assessment. In a nutshell, the iPad is a nifty little gadget, I’m sure it will do wonders for how people engage with technology, and hopefully will give a boost to the flagging newspaper- and book-publishing industries, but it is still another resource-intensive gadget that will be an add-on rather than a replacement.

Source: www.greenercomputing.com

A Greener Apple?

According to the Green Pages three new patents filed by Apple indicate the company is getting into the clean energy business.

This month, Apple filed three new clean energy and energy efficiency patents, creating a new wave of speculation about the eco-friendly direction of the gadget behemoth.

1. The first is a software patent that enables Apple devices to “register their power usage and communicate” using HomePlug Alliance, a set of universal standards showcased at this year’s CES. The system would allow users to schedule and monitor the charging of all their “smart devices,” ensuring that charging happens during off-peak hours and that devices are not overcharged, a problem which the Department of Energy estimates could be wasting as much as 10 percent of a home’s typical electricity usage.

2. According to Engadget, Apple also appears to be working on a proprietary “smart plug” that could internally perform a conversion from AC to DC (no more bulky white bricks) and regulate the flow of electricity to match the device, eliminating wear and tear on batteries by over-charging.

3. In 2008, Apple applied for the first of its solar gadget patents, solar-augmented glass that could be integrated into any device with a screen — iPhones, Macbooks, etc.

Apple has now filed for a second solar-augmentation patent in which the entire device is covered by solar cells. The solar cells are networked to allow power to continue flowing to the device even if one’s hand obstructs some of the cells. When the battery is fully charged, the user can change a setting that puts the solar cells in a “second operational state” and if the battery gets low, switch to the solar cells as the primary source (which one assumes would reduce the performance and brightness of the device).

It appears that Apple may lead the pack once again, this time in terms of product-integrated solar power and smart charging for personal electronics devices.

Source: www.thegreenpages.com.au

In the end….somewhere over the rainbow

From US President Obama and lesser known UK green investment guru Peter Young, there’s some good advice for the taking. But is Australia ready to move beyond being a giant quarry to a hot house of sustainable, low carbon innovation? We let you decide for yourself after reading the Green Chip column (The Australian 1 February 2010), where Giles Parkinson poses some questions and answers.

PRESIDENT Obama said it again in his state of the union address last week. Clean and renewable energy got more mentions than god, healthcare, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as Obama repeated his contention that the nation that led the clean energy economy would lead the global economy in the 21st century.

Right now, the US is worried. It’s not keen on second place, let alone third or fourth, but after a decade of inaction, it fears being overtaken by China in the cleantech sector, if that has not happened already, and maybe Germany and Japan as well. That was one of the reasons Obama was more anxious than his Chinese counterpart about striking a deal in Copenhagen. China, being a command economy, does not have to worry about the niceties of an international treaty or market reforms to shovel investment where it wants it.

The US is stuck in a state of inertia, watching the manufacturing jobs of the future go overseas. “China is not waiting to revamp its economy,” Obama said. Neither are Germany or India. “They’re not standing still. They’re putting more emphasis on math and science. They’re rebuilding their infrastructure. They’re making serious investments in clean energy because they want those jobs.”

Other countries share Obama’s anxiety, or at least should do so. Particularly Australia, if it has any ambitions beyond being a giant quarry. It certainly troubles many in Australian government and business leaders, even if many struggle to articulate their concerns.

Peter Young, chairman of British-based Aldersgate Group, and strategic director of consultancy Enviros, is visiting Australia and has an interesting perspective on how business and government, along with educators, professionals and scientists, can work together towards a common end.

Aldersgate is a coalition of high-level business and professional groups, government authorities, politicians, green groups and individual corporations. It sounds like the type of organisation Australia desperately needs.

Aldersgate stands on the simple premise that no economic policy that sacrifices environmental quality can succeed in the long term. Young says his main goal is to find “commonality” and once that is done, it proves very effective, “because the government has nowhere to run”.

The coalition was instrumental in the creation of a combined climate change and energy ministry in Britain — which brings all the expertise in climate and the environment, energy and finance under one roof — and the subsequent introduction of the Climate Change Act.

Young says finding ways to unlock finance is pivotal, be it for clean coal, nuclear energy, renewables, smart grids, or electric vehicles. In Britain, it is estimated that the cost of the Low Carbon Transition Plan will be about pound stg. 250 billion ($452bn) by 2020. Globally, the annual cost is estimated at about $US500bn ($565bn) to meet the carbon reduction targets agreed, at least in principle, in Copenhagen.

Young says capital will not be released unless the political risk of such investment is considerably reduced, something Obama recognises and few countries are managing to achieve. Australia, with delays to the emissions trading scheme and problems with the renewable energy target, can bear testimony to that.

In Britain, Aldersgate has recommended that the initial financing gap be filled by government, perhaps in the form of loan guarantees now popular in the US. The benefit of this is that investors can focus on market risk rather than policy risk.

Other ideas in Britain include government-supported “green banks”, the use of green infrastructure bonds, targeted tax breaks, and the encouragement of community ownership of renewable energy installations, a concept now being championed in Australia by Simon Holmes a Court.

Indeed, Young says, this engagement needs to be spread to “green jobs”, a concept that means nothing to most people and probably sounds to many like empty promises and a threat to current employment. Young urges governments to work more closely with universities to ensure that skills in new technologies are developed — electrical engineering for instance — and that training in current professions such as building, plumbing and electrical supply is expanded. It is those areas that may be the source of much of the green job expansion.

He also points to what he sees as the next big growth in renewable technology: marine power. In Britain, it is thought marine power could supply up to 25 per cent of overall energy needs, and it is creating huge incentives to attract marine energy companies to bring their technologies to Britain. Portugal and Chile are following suit.

That should be a clarion call to Australia, which has more marine energy resources than most countries, and some of the smartest marine technologies. It’s just that we’re not doing a heck of a lot to keep them here.

Source: www.theaustralian.com.au