Month: April 2018

From meatless meat to trustless trust – can Blockchain change the way that we work together to create knowledge in smart cities?

Posted on by janet.crompton
 
Smart Cities apply technology, connectivity and data to the urban experience, but they could easily become Fake Cities. Their factories still produce things – but they are staffed by robots. Their cars still take you where you want to go – but they are driven by autonomous systems. You can hold their digital products in your hands – but only via a smart phone.
In the worst case, Smart Cities trade down authentic human experiences for something artificial, virtual and ersatz. But can the Smart City ever trade-up and improve on the original?Take food as an example. Scientists are perfecting cultured cells to grow synthetic meat in laboratories. Far from producing an unpalatable substitute, the result is said to be nutritious and tasty. As the world’s population grows rapidly, meatless meat is seen as a carbon and resource efficient alternative that could represent “the future of food”.
In their recent report partners in the UnLoCK consortium considered whether Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies could similarly transform another basic human need – by creating “trustless trust.”
But might this be needed?
The argument goes that Smart Cities join-up multiple systems, more than have ever been connected before. The scale and complexity of the resulting ecosystem means that not all participants can expect to have pre-existing relationships with each other. In this context, it is difficult to know who or what to trust.
The blockchain is seen as a way for Information to be securely shared between peers. The important point is that rather than investing trust in one privileged partner, such as a bank, the focus moves to collectively creating a trusted system; one where peers collectively own and update the Distributed Ledger as a single version of the truth.
The UnLoCK consortium partners identify numerous areas where they would like to experiment with the application of this technology, from understanding the environmental provenance of goods and services within supply chains associated with new local approaches to house building, to systems that afford ‘smart citizens’ greater ownership and control of their personal data.
The consortium partners are planning further discussions to explore how to move from theory towards a working prototype. For more details of the UnLoCK consortium contact, Lisa Kehoe Lisa.kehoe@bristol.ac.uk and Stephen Hilton stephen.hilton@bristol.ac.uk
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This blog was written by Stephen Hilton, Director of Bristol Futures Global, and a University of Bristol Cabot Institute Fellow.
This blog was reposted with kind permission from PolicyBristol. View the original blog post.

Rural energy access: A global challenge

Posted on by janet.crompton
Image credit: Amanda Woodman-Hardy

 

Energy affects all Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

A statement made at the beginning of a rural energy access session at the Global Challenges Symposium on 12 April 2018.  To give some context for those who aren’t aware, the SDGs are a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure that all people enjoy peace and prosperity (see UNDP). As the goals are interconnected – tackling affordable and clean energy will mean also tackling the issues associated with the other goals.

During the session led by Dr Sam Williamson, held in Bristol and co-organised by the University of Bristol’s Cabot Institute for the Environment, four issues were discussed with Nepal as a case study:

  1. How does a lack of energy access impact rural lives?
  2. How can technology enable access to modern sustainable energy?
  3. What are the key economic and policy interventions to ensure successful rural energy access projects?
  4. What is the social impact of having access to energy in rural communities?

I felt incredibly lucky to be in the same room as the invited guests from Nepal: Biraj Gautum (Chief Executive Officer at PEEDA); Giri Raj Lamichhane (Head Teacher of Dhawa School, Central Nepal); Sushila Lamichhane Adhikari (Regional Director, Learning Planet, Central Nepal); Muhan Maskey (Policy and Institutional Strengthening Expert, Renewable Energy for Rural Livelihoods Programme, Alternative Energy Promotion Centre, Government of Nepal); and Ramesh Maskey (Associate Dean, School of Engineering, Kathmandu University).  Listening to them speak, it was clear that the Nepalese have come through such adversity (including the 2015 earthquakes – more on this below) and have survived without access to energy like we know it in the Western world.  They are incredibly resilient and wonderful people. I was certainly in awe of them. Here I summarise their thoughts and hopefully provide you with a new knowledge of real rural lives affected by a lack of access to energy.

1. How does a lack of energy access impact rural lives?

Hearing from Sushila it was clear that a lack of energy access affects rural lives in ways I could not have imagined – cooking is not possible unless using indoor stoves which cause lots of pollution and health issues especially in women and children.  The burning of firewood, cow dung and kerosene on these stoves is used for lighting and cooking.  Can you imagine breathing in the fumes from kerosene whilst sat cooking indoors?  What is also true is that it is mainly women and children who are affected by indoor air pollution and as a result suffer many negative health effects.  It is clear that more research needs to be done to customise the cooking technology for Nepal and other areas so that it moves away from indoor stoves.  Interestingly, a member of the audience from Ghana mentioned that the electricity there can be so unreliable that people don’t always want to invest in electric cookers, they’d rather go out and collect firewood for their stoves.  Unfortunately rural Nepalese villages cannot get electricity when they need it for cooking or lighting so many are in a similar situation.
Things we take for granted in the UK – like using our mobile phones, using social media and getting search engines to answer our burning questions in life (#firstworldproblems!) – are limited in Nepal.  Access to communications like the internet and to the news is one of the most valuable things to come out of having access to energy.
Apparently the government of Nepal say giving access is one part of the energy problem, the other part of the problem is transformational access.  I.e. not just providing access to power but making sure it is provided everywhere, that it is clean and sustainable and that there is a support network in place to maintain it.  There is a lot of work to be done globally to address this issue.

I didn’t get chance to interact much with my mum when I was growing up as she was out early in the morning collecting firewood so wasn’t there when I woke up and was busy cooking in the evening.

One of the things you forget about lack of energy access is how it affects the social side of people’s lives.  The quote above was given by Biraj (as seen in the picture above, stood up).  It is common for women to spend four hours collecting firewood for their stoves so they are on when the children wake. I can’t even imagine getting up four hours early every single day to do this, let alone spend an hour collecting 20 litres of water and hiking it up a steep mountain every time I need water for cooking, washing and drinking.  After hearing this I am in awe of rural Nepalese women.  They are superhuman to me, pushing the boundaries of what a woman does for her family.  I am embarrassed that I have so many luxuries in my life resulting from having access to energy, whenever I require it.  I just need a plug and a socket.  It is time for us in the Western world to help support areas without access to energy, we have a duty to families the world over.

2. How can technology enable access to modern sustainable energy?

The market is very small in Nepal for research and development in new energy technology. It is cheaper to get technology from China. There is a real lack of finance, knowledge and government support which means that rural Nepalese have not been able to fully exploit the natural resources available to them for sustainable energy e.g. through installing hydro-power. There is also the problem that to the average rural person in Nepal, lifting water which can be used for drinking, cooking, washing and chores, is a more important focus for development than energy access.  It seems a catch-22, having energy access would actually improve water lifting from source up to areas of need in the Nepalese mountains, since a lot of water pumps require energy to run.

Another great challenge is to make Nepalese energy technology for rural areas easy to maintain and robust.  Remote areas are often hard to get to and it could be a long time before anyone could come and fix any issues and obviously the cost of doing so may be prohibitive.  Therefore technology needs to be simple and locals need to be trained in maintenance.  It was also suggested in the room that tech should be developed so that it can be fixed remotely if needed. It is also important for researchers to check new energy technology is actually working after they have developed and installed it in rural areas.

3. What are the key economic and policy interventions to ensure successful rural energy access projects?

It was good to hear during this session that the energy grid in Nepal is starting to approach the rural areas of Nepal which means that it is possible for the micro-hydro-power that currently exists in rural areas to be injected into the grid and payouts can be made to rural people who own them. However a lack of available funds means the rural Nepalese cannot build micro-hydro-power plants. Most micro-hydro-power plants are instead run by the government, whole communities or private individuals and there is a policy imbalance between government-owned power and community-owned power in Nepal.

These energy inequalities seemed to be echoed by a delegate from Ghana who said that some wealthy people in Ghana are able to get enough power from solar power to not have to rely on the governments unreliable electricity. They can sell their energy back to the grid and get richer in the process, causing further inequality in energy access.

4. What is the social impact of having access to energy in rural communities?

As mentioned earlier, there is a big social impact of not having access to energy in rural areas of Nepal. By having access it means that cooking is easier and not having to collect fire wood means time is freed for maintaining gardens to produce your own food. Three to four hours a day can be saved from not having to collect firewood which can improve women’s social lives and involvement in their communities.

As is the case in most societies, you will always get people who are resistent to change. In Nepal it was said that there may be some Nepali men who may not want women to have extra time available to them (from not collecting firewood) and may want them to stick to traditional roles instead.

Having access to energy can revolutionise rural lives without destroying traditional roles.  A Somali delegate said that energy is expensive but available in rural Somalia. Mobile phone access means nomads can find for e.g. the price of a goat and where the nearest one is so they don’t waste time and physical energy trekking to find one. Phones can be charged in the cities. There is also micro-insurance available in Somalia (I had not heard of it either!) being used by nomads with mobile phones to protect for example, against the impact of drought on food availability. A novel idea, being used currently and shown to work.  It is a system which could be copied and replicated in other rural areas lacking energy access.  It was clear that there is a lot of scope for African nations and Nepal to learn best practice from each other in regards to rural access to energy.

The 2015 earthquakes – and energy

It was asked of the Nepalese visitors, what role did energy play in the 2015 earthquakes in Nepal?  Their answers were grim…villages were flattened, there was no power supply, no place to cook, and it was difficult to contact relatives who were far away and may have also been affected by the quakes. Micro-hydro-power plants were destroyed and the national grid was down. There was a governmental dilemma as to what to do – whether to revive micro-hydro-power plants or extend the national grid? As it happened the national grid was a first priority and it is being rebuilt with a view to extend it.

Throughout all of this adversity, the resilience and positivity of the Nepalese visitors really shone through when they said that all the families, communities and pets came together in one space (shelter) regardless of wealth or who they were and that this was a great experience to come out of the earthquake. The earthquake also forced Nepal to become more self-sufficient in energy post-recovery and they are installing more renewables as a result.

Damaged house in Chaurikharka – by Sumita Roy Dutta – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

Academics can research and write about rural energy access issues, but attending this Symposium showed that there is much we can learn from people who are actually living day in day out with these issues.  We need to collaborate and bring minds and experiences together to solve the issues around the Sustainable Development Goals.  I am happy to say that the Symposium was a great step in doing this and we hope that there will be many relationships and research interests developed from this Symposium that can apply for funding from the Global Challenges Research Fund to further research, and to improve and save lives globally.  Watch this space!

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This blog was written by Cabot Institute Coordinator Amanda Woodman-Hardy @Enviro_Mand.  You can find out more about the Global Challenges Symposium on the official website.  You can read more about reliable and sustainable micro-hydro-power in Nepal in a blog by Caboteer Joe Butchers.

Dadaism in Disaster Risk Reduction: Reflections against method

Posted on by janet.crompton
Much like Romulus and Remus, we the academic community must take the gift bestowed unto us by the Lupa Capitolina of knowledge and enact progressive change in these uncertain and complex times.

Reflections and introductions: A volta

The volta is a poetic device, closely but not solely, associated with the Shakespearean sonnet, used to enact a dramatic change in thought or emotion. Concomitant with this theme is that March is a month with symbolic links to change and new life. The Romans famously preferred to initiate the most significant socio-political manoeuvres of the empire during the first month of their calendar, mensis Martius. A month that marked the oncoming of spring, the weakening of winter’s grip on the land and a time for new life.

The need for change

Having very recently attended the March UKADR conference, organised by the Cabot Institute here in Bristol, I did so with some hope and anticipation. Hope and anticipation for displays and discussions that conscientiously touched upon this volta, this need for change in how we study the dynamics of natural hazards. The conference itself was very agreeable, it had great sandwiches, with much stimulating discussion taking place and many displays of great skill and ingenuity having been demonstrated. Yet, despite a few instances where this need for change was indirectly touched upon by a handful of speakers and displays, I managed to go the entirety of the conference without getting what I really wanted, an explicit discussion, mention, susurration of the role of emergence in natural disaster and resilience.

Understanding the problem

My interest in this kind of science is essentially motivated by merit of my Ph.D. research, here at the School of Geographical Sciences in Bristol, broadly concentrating on modelling social influence on, and response to, natural perturbations in the physical environment, i.e. urban flooding scenarios. From the moment I began the preliminary work for this project, it has steadily transformed into a much more complex mise-en-abyme of human inter-social dynamics, of understanding how these dynamics determine the systems within which we exist, both social and physical, and then the broader dynamics of these systems when change is enacted from within and upon them externally. A discipline known broadly as Complex Physical and Adaptive Systems, of which a very close theoretical by-product is the concept of emergence.
An enormous preoccupation throughout my research to this point has been in developing ways to communicate the links between these outlying concepts and those that are ad unicum subsidium. Emergence itself is considered a rather left-field concept, essentially because you can’t physically observe it happening around you. Defined, broadly, as a descriptive term whereby “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts”, it can be used to describe a system which is characterised by traits beyond those of the individual parts that comprise that system, some examples include a market economy, termite mounds, a rainforest ecosystem, a city and the internet. Applying this concept to human systems affected by natural disasters, to interpret the dynamics therein, is quite simple but due to the vast inter-disciplinary nature of doing so is seen as being a bit of an academic taboo.
A schematic representing the nature of a complex system. Vulnerability, Risk and hazards would co-exist as a supervenient, complex hierarchy.
So then, I remind myself that I shouldn’t feel downhearted, I saw clear evidence that we, the academic community, are certainly asking the right questions now and more often than ever before;
  • “How do we translate new methods for vulnerability and risk assessment into practice?”
  • “Are huge bunches of data, fed through rigid equations and tried and tested methods, really all we need to reduce the impacts of vulnerability and exposure, or do we need to be more dynamic in our methods?”
  • “Are the methods employed in our research producing an output with which the affected communities in vulnerable areas can engage with? If not, then why not and how can this be improved?”

Moving forward

Upon reflection, this pleased me. These questions are an acknowledgement of the complex hazard systems which exist and indicate that we are clearly thinking about the links between ourselves, our personal environment and the natural environment at large. Furthermore, it is clear, from the themes within these questions, that academia is crawling its way towards accepted and mainstream interdisciplinary method and practice. I am pleased, though not satiated, as I witnessed a discussion in the penultimate conference session where “more data and community training” was suggested as a solution to ever-increasing annual losses attributable to natural disasters globally. I am inherently pessimistic, but I am as unconvinced by the idea of Huxleyesque, neo-Pavlovian disaster training for the global masses as I am unmotivated by the value of my research being placed in the amount of data it produces to inform such exercises!
“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.” – Robert Louis Stevenson (image is of The Sower, from The Wheat Fields series by Vincent Van Gough, June 1888 – source: Wikipedia.)
Thus, it is as we now enter the month of April, mensis Aprilis, a month that is truly symbolic of Spring and one which embodies a time where new seeds are sewn carefully in the fields, where thorough work can take place and the seeds may be tended after the long wait for the darkness and cold of winter to pass; that we must consider the work that needs to be done in eliciting progressive change. Consider this volta, allow the warmth of the April showers to give life to the fresh seeds of knowledge we sow and may Ēostre assist us in the efficient reaping of the new knowledge we need to answer the most pressing questions in this world. At least before the data is stuck in a biblical excel spreadsheet and used to inform global anti-tsunami foot drills, or some such!
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This blog was written by Cabot Institute member, Thomas O’Shea, a 2nd year Ph.D. Researcher at the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol. His interests span Complex Systems, Hydrodynamics, Risk and Resilience and Machine Learning.  Please direct any desired correspondence regarding the above to his university email at: t.oshea@bristol.ac.uk.
Thomas O’Shea

CAP should be replaced by a sustainable land-use policy

Posted on by janet.crompton
Wheat harvest by Jim Choate

Whatever your thoughts about Brexit, one thing most agree on is that it offers an opportunity to rethink how we in the UK look after our agricultural land.  The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has long been a source of resentment. It accounts for 40% of the EU budget yet has systematically failed to address, in some cases even exacerbated, the biggest concerns in European agriculture. Unlike most transnational sectoral market correction schemes, even much of the general public are aware of its shortcomings.

CAP is formed of 2 pillars. Pillar 1, which accounts for the 70% money spent, is simply a payment for land owned. The more land you own, the more money you get. This promotes large-scale mono-cropping, and acts as a rigid barrier to entry for young would-be farmers. Pillar 2 makes up the rest of CAP’s budget and consists of agri-environment schemes. Whilst well intentioned, Pillar 2 promotes an agricultural divide, where some land is responsibly stewarded while other land is intensively farmed. It is not the most efficient or effective means of improving the state of our land.

Public money for public goods

Michael Gove made a lot of enemies whilst at the Department for Education. However, since being appointed Minister for the Environment, he appears to have bucked the trend of expert-bashing. The government’s 25 Year Green Plan talks a very good talk – it’s a re-affirmation of the government’s laudable aim of leaving the environment in a better state than they found it, following on from the Lawton principles – but fails to walk the walk. There is much rhetoric, but very little explanation as to how goals will be met.

One consistent theme is that of spending public money on public goods. What this means is that tax-payers money should only be used to pay for the goods and services which are ‘consumed’ but for which there is currently not market. It is a way of addressing the tragedy of the commons argument, whereby, in pursuit of personal gain, individuals neglect that which they rely on for that gain, to the detriment of all.

Lake District by Les Haines

The Lake District as we know it has been shaped by generations of upland sheep farming. This practise offers extremely marginal returns, but many would agree there is a huge (but hard to quantify) value to the landscape of the Lake District. Public money should be spent to support such farmers.

In a post-Brexit landscape, there will be many competing demands on the public purse. The challenge, then, is to find alternative sources with which to finance the provision of these services provided by natural ecosystems.

Payments for Ecosystem Services

It is exceptionally difficult to put a value on nature. A market is needed through which farmers can ‘sell’ the services the land they own is able to provide, and beneficiaries of these services can purchase them. In many cases, one service may be provided by many land-owners, a single piece of land may provide many services, and there may be many consumers of each of these services. Clearly, this represents a complicated market structure.

But we can’t shy away from the task. The West of England Nature Partnership, as well as Green Alliance and the National Trust, have conceptualised a system through which such transactions can take place. Functioning as a sort of Green Investment Bank, an institution will package the suggested provision of a consortium of land-owners (for instance, the planting of woodland) for sale to a consortium of buyers. This might include water companies who benefit from cleaner water, Wildlife Trusts with a remit of improving the local access to nature, and developers with a requirement to offset/mitigate the impacts of their development.

In a similar light, Wessex Water have an online platform via which farmers can bid for money in return for adopting more sustainable farming practices. This system directly reduces the cost of water purification for the Water Company, acts as an incentive for good practice to the landowner, and provides landscape and wildlife benefits for the local population – a win-win-win.
Clearly its easier to pay farmers per hectare of land owner. But with the growing demands placed on our environment, and an increasing understanding of our reliance on it, such a system as described here could radically alter the terminal decline of Britain’s natural capital.

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This blog was written by Matthew Whitney who is currently studying an MSc in Environmental Policy and Management at the University of Bristol.

Matthew Whitney

 

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