It was hard to focus on anything else these last two weeks as the Climate Conference took place in my home city of Glasgow. Although the deal isn’t perfect, I have three reasons for hope. This week on Fresh Dialogues, I’m sharing those reasons and a recent conversation I had with Vivienne Nunis on the BBC World Service. Her reporting from Brazil also gives me hope and underlines our need for an action mindset on climate.
What’s an action mindset? On a personal level, an action mindset is the belief that your actions can change your future, that your abilities are not fixed, but can be improved by a bias to action. Your action can change your future and the future of the planet. The promises made in Glasgow must now be followed up by action. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr said it best:
“An idea without action is like a bow without an arrow,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Photo credit above: Jasmin Sessler
Listen to the Fresh Dialogues podcast this week:
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Here are my three reasons for hope after Glasgow’s COP26:
Renewal of international collaboration: The cooperation in Glasgow was in stark contrast to the nationalistic trends we’ve witnessed around the world in recent years. The unexpected joint statement by the U.S. and China gave me hope, as well as the final agreement which requires countries to come back next year with even more ambitious plans.
Private sector driving change: Mark Carney’s announcement of a $130 Trillion commitment from financial institutions is significant. Enlisting the private sector to finance the transition to net zero is crucial, but it also needs to stop funding for fossil fuels. Regulation could accelerate that change by penalizing institutions for holding dirty fuel assets on their balance sheets.
The deforestation agreement: This historic pact was signed by countries that account for about 85% of the world’s forests, including Brazil. The agreement aims to conserve and speed up restoration of forests and increase investment to promote sustainable forest management and support for indigenous communities. It adds about $19 billion in public and private funds, including large contributions from the Ford Foundation and foundations led by Jeff Bezos and Mike Bloomberg.
One powerful speech in Glasgow which caught my attention was that of Txai Surui, a 24-year-old indigenous climate activist from Brazil who accused global leaders of “closing their eyes” to climate change.
“The animals are disappearing, the rivers are dying… The Earth is speaking: she tells us we have no more time,” Surui says.
She urged leaders to think of people like her in “the front line of the climate emergency”, and she shared a moving story about a dear friend who has been murdered for protecting the forest. Sadly, her friend is one of thousands.
Making forests worth more alive than dead
The three largest rainforests in the world are located in the Amazon, Congo River basin and Southeast Asia. Together they absorb about a third of carbon dioxide emissions. In 2020, the world lost a staggering 100,000 square miles of forest — a swathe of land bigger than the United Kingdom. Is there a role for the private sector to step in where governments have failed? The key to stopping deforestation is making forests worth more alive than dead.
“We’re going to work to ensure markets recognize the true economic value of natural carbon sinks and motivate governments, landowners and stakeholders to prioritize conservation,” President Biden said in Glasgow.
The BBC’s Vivienne Nunis spoke to Robert Muggah of the Igarapi Institute about the fate of Brazil’s rainforest and the urgency of documenting the destruction and taking action to reverse current trends. Although land clearing, for mining and agriculture has increased under Brazil’s President Bolsonaro, private sector action offers a glimmer of hope.
Nunis’s interview with Nat Keohane of the nonprofit, Emergent was powerful. The organization acts as a middleman between corporations and the forest’s indigenous communities:
Here’s a transcript of the discussion, edited for length and clarity. (Starts @34:43 in the BBC podcast)
Nat Keohane: We need a model that invests in sustainable green growth. This could make Brazil (one of) the world’s first green economic superpowers… We need to decarbonize and protect the forest. One of the most important tools we have to try to shift course and get on a low carbon trajectory across the economy is to align the economic incentives that private companies face or that landowners in Brazil face. You need to make forest worth more alive than dead. And that means changing the incentives and that’s what the leaf model is trying to do. But we also need to change those incentives throughout the economy so that it is more profitable to go after low carbon technologies than to continue to use high carbon ones.”
Vivienne Nunis: Alison, what do you make of this idea of creating a kind of middleman? Somewhere that big corporates can channel their cash to try and cancel out what they’re doing in terms of carbon emissions? Do you think that can work?
Alison van Diggelen: I love the idea of this market led solution. It makes a lot of sense, but I just can’t help feeling it’s a drop in the ocean. The Emergent program needs to be scaled up and fast. I love the idea of making Brazil a green economic superpower, but I think the answer might be more private sector and government programs to help local people work the land sustainably. A change in government next year in Brazil will help that. The sooner we can get Bolsonaro out of power, the better. Someone that’s more sympathetic to the environment and appreciative of the role that the rainforest plays in the global ecology and economy would help. Also, I think public-private and nonprofit partnerships like the one Google and the Igarapi Institute forged to map Brazilian deforestation will help. Maps that document evidence of illegal deforestation will help provide data points and help bolster the demand for action to protect the rainforest.
Continue listening to the BBC podcast (where we discuss why Tesla reached a Trillion dollar valuation and what can be done about the explosion of plastic bottles)
One final note: I was delighted to see my alma mater, Wolfson College in Cambridge organized its own COP26 conference and addressed the need for urgent adaptation and mitigation in their latest Wolfson Review.
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“People must feel that the natural world is important and valuable and beautiful and wonderful,” David Attenborough
Photo caption: MIT Professor, Carlo Ratti in conversation with Alison van Diggelen at the Future Cities Conference, Jesus College, Cambridge on July 18, 2017.
On Monday, I joined the BBC’s Roger Hearing and Delhi journalist Madhavan Narayanan to discuss future cities and the role of technology in making them more efficient and sustainable. Listen to the podcast at the BBC’s Business Matters (Future Cities segment starts at 26:34)
Or listen to the audio clip below:
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Here’s a transcript of our conversation (edited for length and clarity):
BBC Host, Roger Hearing: Alison, you’ve been having an interesting time recently. You’ve been looking at the concept of Future Cities, in fact you’ve been over in Europe I believe? Give me a picture of what you’ve been doing and what you’ve been hearing.
Alison van Diggelen: I was back at Cambridge University, in England last week, exploring the role of technology in shaping our future cities. The Cambridge Future Cities Conference assembled experts from academia, policy making and business to explore the challenges and opportunities facing cities. I interviewed Professor Carlo Ratti. He’s Director of the “Senseable City” Lab at MIT. “Senseable” as in sensors. He and his team are adding sensors to everything from trash to taxis to discover patterns, inefficiencies and opportunities to reinvent future cities, and make them greener and more sustainable. His team collaborated with Uber to test the feasibility of car-sharing and the Uberpool in New York. They found that in theory, everyone could travel on demand with just one-fifth (20%) of the number of cars in use today. He calls it the future mobility web.
Prof. Carlo Ratti: If you think about the future you can imagine something that we started calling a mobility web. A mobility web means the potential to know in real-time all the potential for transportation in the city both for people and parcels. Think about what happens today, you need to open one app, then another app…Imagine if all of them were combined… Then you can do something similar to what you do today with Kayak or Expedia, you can scan all your options – it’s like a mobile web that can radically change the way we look at mobility both for people and for goods.
Roger Hearing: Madhavan, you’re in Delhi. Can you imagine that kind of thing working in a city like Delhi? Would you be able to take transport to the point where you could be aware where every car or bus or lorry is at any given moment?
Madhavan Narayanan: Let me take a cynical view of what these guys at Stanford etc. do…I call them the Marie Antoinettes of our time. “Let them have high tech” is the new “let them eat cake.” Tech innovations have to be much more culturally sensitive and pragmatic for things to come on fast. People are not trying to reduce the carbon footprint here…people are trying to save money. High techies need to hire more sociologists and anthropologists and instead of talking to each other in an echo chamber of technologists. It will catch on in a zig-zag way…We do not need California idealism, we need Asian pragmatism.
Roger Hearing: Do you take that point on board Alison?
Alison van Diggelen: Absolutely. One of the refrains people heard at the conference was: let’s get out of our silos here: use this multi-disciplinary approach. We need collaboration, we need to think about different cultures and communities. In America 42 hours a year are lost due to traffic congestion(per commuter) and I imagine it’s even worse in Delhi. There’s a huge holy grail shining out there…we can drive towards that; there are huge gains to be made. The technology is there, we just need to implement it.
Roger Hearing: California has adopted new things very easily and quickly. Is it a place where people are already beginning to put in place the things you were talking about in Cambridge?
Alison van Diggelen: Yes, it’s definitely being experimented with. There is a project with driverless cars coming to the city of San Jose. They’re talking with ten different driverless car companies. These demo projects, these pilot projects are really important to understand how future cities can be more efficient and more sustainable.
Roger Hearing: At the back of everyones’ minds, when they think about integrated public transportsystems, future cities, smart cities is:What happens if someone hacks in? At this event, you did tackle the issue of security?
Alison van Diggelen: We did indeed. The answer is layers of security. The technologists need to outsmart these hackers who have nefarious aims. I spoke to Professor Ratti about this and he framed the importance of security in memorable and stark terms…
Prof. Carlo Ratti: With some of these technologies we can really have cities that are more sustainable, they’re more sociable as well, but we need to look at at least two issues – one is the possibility of hacking. We all know what happens if a virus crashes our computer, but usually nobody dies. But what if that was a driverless car? So how to make sure our cities cannot be crashed? The other is what happens to the data that is generated by the Internet of Things. We’re making a digital copy of our physical space, our physical cities – then it’s very important who has access to the data, what for, and that’s one of the big conversations of our time.
Continue listening to hear our discussion:
What is Mark Kleinman at the Greater London Authority (GLA) doing to accelerate the adoption of technology in London?
Why does Madhavan Narayanan think we need a SWOT approach to privacy and security in future cities?
Find out more about Future Cities
The Future Cities Conference in Cambridge assembled some of the brightest minds in urbanism and land economy today. Find out more about their research and projects here:
Anticipation is building that El Nino will bring much needed relief to drought stricken California this winter. But will it end the drought? And how will it impact the Golden State’s impressive drive to conserve water?
In my recent report for the BBC’s Business Matters, I explored the, um, creative ways in which the water conservation message is being spread and how things might change when the deluge arrives.
However you can reach out to consumers in their language, that’s how you do it, so if sex is the way to reach the end user and it achieves a good societal goal, I have no problem, because this is a crisis. Gary Kremen, Chairman Santa Clara Valley Water District
The report aired on the BBC World Service last Thursday (Listen from 16:45 in the podcast). Here’s the original report and a transcript of the program, edited for length and clarity.
Fergus Nicoll: The last month has seen some pretty freaky extremes of weather across the U.S. We reported on the drought in California and the flooding in South Carolina…bursting dams that have been caused by torrential rain in different parts of the state. Well maybe California can expect more of the South Carolina treatment?
I’m going to bring in Alison van Diggelen of Fresh Dialogues for more on this. Set the scene for us…it seems, partially at least, down to El Nino?
Alison van Diggelen: Absolutely. The experts have called it a “Godzilla” El Nino. An enormous one is building in the Pacific right now and experts are predicting record breaking rainfall this winter. As most people probably know, we’re in our fourth year of drought (in California) and things are getting pretty desperate. But people have been pretty good about water conservation…so I wanted to explore how authorities are getting this water conservation message out and how things might change, once the rain does start falling.
I interviewed Elizabeth Dougherty. She’s the founder of Wholly H20, a nonprofit in Oakland that wants to make water conservation, as she calls it, “hip and sexy.” She says it’s not a supply issue but has to do with our relationship with water.
Here’s the piece:
Ambi: Sound of bucket being put in shower, tap turning on…water running, shower hitting tub
Dougherty: I keep a bucket in the shower…you can use that water to flush the toilet, water your outside plants, give water to your animals….
“Extreme water saver” Dr. Elizabeth Dougherty says her phone has been ringing off the hook with people looking for rainwater harvesting and graywater systems for their homes. Her California non-profit “Wholly H20” aims to make water conservation “hip and sexy.” Dougherty, an anthropologist, wants us to explore our relationship with water.
Ambi: Sound of running water in sink…
Dougherty: The water crisis in California, the world, is not a crisis of supply; it’s a crisis of connection. We are so disconnected from water, we don’t even know where our water comes from, how much we use every day.
And this crisis has produced fertile ground for water and landscape consultants. Water maybe scarce in CA, but it’s boom time for water related “green jobs.”
Dougherty argues that it’s normal to ask: where does my food come from? The energy for my home? So why not ask: where does your water come from? What’s “on tap” in your home?
Dougherty: We want the hipsters in Downtown Oakland to be thinking water conservation: Wow, hey….so where do you get your water?
This Fall, Wholly H2O is partnering with Burning Man artists on community interactive water features; and is launching a series of crowd-funded video shorts to get the message out via social media. Dougherty has Hollywood connections and hopes to get “green” celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow to take part. Is California’s Governor on her list?
Dougherty: (CA Gov) Jerry Brown skips a shower for the day. I’m thrilled, I’m glad. Would I hold him out as one of my hip and sexy people? No I wouldn’t. I’d like to see Batman…how about Michael Keaton? Let’s see you bucket your heat-up water from your shower and dump it in your garden!
Dougherty’s mission to make water conservation hip and sexy has been adopted by the San Francisco Public Utility Commission. Here’s one of their video ads:
SFPUC Video: (Sultry baritone like Barry White, sound of tap running) Conservation can feel, ohhhh, so right. Turn off the faucet while soaking those…oh so dirty…hands. Get some efficient fixtures for your kitchen and bathrooms…screw them on…yeah! Beat the drought. Hetch Hetchy water is too good to waste.
This summer, the commission spent $300,000 on billboard ads with provocative demands like “Go full frontal, upgrade your washer!” and “Nozzle your hose, limit outdoor watering.”
Love them or hate them, the water conservation message is sinking in. In July, Californians reduced their water consumption by over 30% (compared to 2013 levels) in response to a state mandated reduction of 25%. But with dramatic El Nino conditions building in the Pacific and predictions of an unprecedented deluge of rain hitting drought-starved California this winter, will the “save water” mantra evaporate as the first raindrops fall?
Kremen: Water districts are conservative. We have to assume it’s not going to happen. We have a comprehensive education enforcement campaign to make sure one raindrop doesn’t cure the drought. The good news is people in Santa Clara Valley are pretty educated, they can hold two thoughts at the same time: we’re in a drought, you have to conserve, and you have to prepare for flash floods.
What does he think of SF’s sexy water conservation efforts?
Kremen: However you can reach out to consumers in their language, that’s how you do it, so if sex is the way to reach the end user and it achieves a good societal goal, I have no problem, because this is a crisis.
Kremen: What climate change could mean to us is more volatility: more floods, more droughts.
I ask Wholly Water’s Dougherty what one thing we all can do to end the water crisis. Her answer is surprising. She’s not pushing low-flow toilets, rain barrels or graywater systems…instead she says:
Dougherty: Go and sit next to a river and not talk, but simply watch the river for half an hour.
For Dougherty, the anthropologist, it’s all about strengthening our connection with water and thinking of that river every time you turn on the tap.
Ambi: sound of tap going on, water hitting sink.
Fergus Nicoll: Very nice piece, Alison. Thank you.
It’s going to be a bit of a culture shock if California goes from drought to heavy rain?
Alison van Diggelen: Yes, it’s going to be a major shocker, but as Gary Kremen from the Water District says, they can’t rely on the El Nino conditions coming. It’s been predicted before and it didn’t materialize, so we may get floods but they’ve got to store that water and make sure that it’s available for future years.
Fergus Nicoll: All options still to be considered. Great to have you with us.
140 New Montgomery is a landmark 1920’s Art Deco building in San Francisco and just became the HQ of Yelp. Last week, I took a closer look at its recent renovation with interior design expert Sara Andersen of Perkins+Will. We explored the 15th floor of the building, the home of Software AG’s San Francisco team, and she explained why wellness is a key part of green building design’s future. Would you believe, the building even features a “bike spa”? More on that later.
“Architecture interiors have a big impact on our environment and we need to do it responsibly,” says the green-enthusiast Sara Andersen, who points to the Living Future Institute and its performance-based Living Building Challenge as her inspiration.
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Here are some key design features of 140 New Montgomery:
1. The building is certified LEED Gold by the US Green Building Council and features operable windows, efficient energy and water systems.
2. The structure has a narrow floor plate, so you’re never more than 25 feet from an operable window. Each of its 26 floors has its own air handling equipment and natural ventilation reduces the need for high-energy heating and cooling systems.
3. The large windows allow maximum use of natural light and all lights have daylight sensors, so they only go on when required.
4. The building’s efficient water system includes low-flow plumbing fixtures and use of recycled (grey) water for toilets.
5. Carpets are made from recycled fishing nets created by sustainable carpet designer Interface. Check out this video for the inspiring story of a triple win: for the environment, the community and the bottom line.
6. The building has a “bike spa” in the basement, featuring a deluxe locker room and shower suite (complete with “140 New Montgomery” branded shampoos) and the snazziest space to tune up your bike for the commute home: the re-purposed historic wood-paneled executive board room, reclaimed from the original building.
7. Most doors from the original building were also reclaimed and reused.
“It’s about wellness,” says Sara Andersen. “When you have healthier happier employees, there’s less sick days, there’s more collaboration and that leads right to the bottom line.” She says that AG Software finds that the new space helps promote recruitment and retention of its tech staff. Despite its “work from home” policy option, more staff are choosing to come into the office, increasing collaboration and (presumably) creativity.
The Future
Andersen is currently working on the interior design of a 250,000 office tower in San Francisco that features a central atrium, bridges and an inviting open stair to encourage movement, interaction and collaboration between employees.
“It’s about getting people to move…when you get up you change your posture, your circulation gets going, your brain is fresher,” she says. “They wanted to encourage the cross pollination among their groups. It’s being embraced globally.”
Her team at Perkins+Will is also collaborating on active design guidelines with the City of New York.
Intrigued? Find out more about 140 Montgomery and its former role as HQ for Pacific Bell
I sat down with Phil Williams of Webcor Builders to find out how the building industry is responding to climate change by quantifying a building’s environmental impact (water, CO2 production, etc) using Natural Capital Accounting (NCA).
“CFOs of major corporations are saying, ‘before it was random acts of greenness,'” says Williams. “Now I can start to measure our environmental impact.”
As he explains it, a global standard of measuring and quantifying a building’s impact can provide owners, renters, architects, and builders with valuable information with which to make key decisions about buying, renting, land use, building materials, energy systems etc.
Climate Earth’s White Paper “Valuing Natural Capital” states: “The objective of this project is to develop an estimate of the environmental costs of the greenhouse gas emissions, induced land use changes, and water consumption. For land use change and water consumption, environmental costs are dependent on where the activity takes place, and we developed local cost estimates to account for those differences. Greenhouse gas emissions are a global pollutant, and the costs are roughly indifferent to where the emissions take place, and so a single global number is sufficient to account for those costs.” The paper concluded that the Stern Review’s figure of $110/metric ton of carbon and carbon equivalent is appropriate.
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“NCA takes some of those numeric evaluations – kilograms of CO2, liters of water, hectares of land – and puts them into economic evaluations that large corporations and nimble companies can look at, ” explains Williams. “These are not just environmental metrics, these are just financial metrics.”
He predicts that by the end of 2014, there will be recognized standards in Natural Capital Accounting for construction, apparel and other retail products.
Find out more about the Future of Natural Capital Accounting from the World Forum on NCA which takes place in Edinburgh, Scotland this November.
During our interview, Williams also explains the concept of making buildings “Future Ready” i.e. flexible enough to add solar, and other energy-making, energy-saving components after the building is completed.
“Future ready is a positive approach, it’s not about adding more, it’s not about ultimate flexibility,” says Williams. “It’s about providing the right amount of infrastructure to afford flexibility.”
This is part of a series on the Future of Green Building, sponsored by Webcor Builders. For more in the series, check out these videos and stories
Read more about Green Building stories featuring Meryl Streep, Susan Sarandon and Apple and by checking the Green Building tab above or clicking here
Get this: It’s not the 330 year-old Douglas fir tree, sliced open to reveal stunning time markers, or the 20 foot tall “Tinkerers’ Clock,” powered by windshield wiper motors.
No. It’s the entire Exploratorium structure itself, an audacious experiment in green building that aims to create the world’s largest “net-zero” energy museum.
What’s “net-zero,” you ask? Simple, it’s a building that creates as much energy as it consumes.
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How it works
Peter Rumsey, CTO at Integral Group led the design of the building’s net-zero components and explains to Fresh Dialogues how it all works in this video.
A complex system that brings in 74,000 gallons of water per hour from San Francisco Bay to heat and cool the building via miles of floor-embedded pipes;
A rain-water catchment used for flushing toilets.
Rumsey may be an enthusiastic advocate for green building, but what gets him most excited is the idea that the San Francisco Exploratorium will inspire kids to think net-zero is the way of the future.
“They’re going to say, ‘Wow, that’s one of the things we can do to solve this whole big climate change problem,” says Rumsey. “We can design and build buildings that make their own energy and don’t create a carbon problem.’ As kids grow up and become leaders in society, they’ll be the ones saying, ‘we should just do that zero energy thing. I saw it when I was a kid…it was no big deal.'”
Despite much talk about the state of the art green building features, Rumsey says, “There’s nothing cutting edge about the building…we’ve taken things that are ‘off the shelf’ and applied them in creative and innovative ways. We call it ‘state of the shelf’.”
Here’s the piece:
What does he think of SF’s sexy water conservation efforts?
3. The large windows allow maximum use of natural light and all lights have daylight sensors, so they only go on when required.
6. The building has a “bike spa” in the basement, featuring a deluxe locker room and shower suite (complete with “140 New Montgomery” branded shampoos) and the snazziest space to tune up your bike for the commute home: the re-purposed historic wood-paneled executive board room, reclaimed from the original building.
