Category: Environmental Change

How engaging citizens can help to shape green cities

Posted on by janet.crompton

In order for European territories to be more environmentally and socially sustainable the involvement of citizens is key. Experiences throughout Europe show us that developing strategies to improve the engagement, collaboration and communication with local stakeholders – across diverse realms and thematic domains – is essential to ensure an effective outcome. During European Green Week, a workshop organised by DG Environment, was conducted to showcase some inspirational experiences in terms of sustainable urban development, health and waste management from different European cities.

Speakers included Mauro Gil Fournier (Estudio SIC), Professor Rich Pancost (Director of University of Bristol Cabot Institute for the Environment), Silvia Moroni (AMAT), Paola Robalo (Centro Ciência Viva do Alviela), Sietse Gronheid (Wasted Social Enterprise) and Igor Kos (City of Maribor).

Rich Pancost speaking at EU Green Week. Image credit BristolBrussels.

[Rich Pancost contributed on a variety of issues, largely arising from Cabot Institute and Bristol City engagement, but spoke primarily about the Green and Black Conversation and Ambassadors programme.  He emphasised the importance of engaging with marginalised groups, the fact that they have much to teach ‘established’ organisations, and the fact that inclusion requires far more than good will but hard work and appropriate financial investment.]
There was much feedback from the workshop as to how citizens could help to shape green cities which included:

  • We need to consider different levels of citizens’ involvement: consultation, participation, co-creation. For this reason we always have to consider who is involved and who is excluded from every process.
  • People are involved in topics they care about, so in order to get out of our elitism we need to address issues that really matter to most people, especially those people that are often not actively engaged. This is what was experienced by the Green and Black Ambassadors during the Bristol Green Capital year, where a community radio station with a focus on the local African-Caribbean community (Ujima Radio) framed environmental discussions and training around the perspectives of local community members.
  • Topics such as air quality, circular waste management or water pollution are hard topics to get people involved in, whilst topics such as food or green spaces are often more recognised by people because the feel ‘closer’. For this reason Milan, which is taking part in the Air Quality Partnership of the EU Urban Agenda, is working on developing an Action Plan that will actively address citizens’ involvement through a concrete toolkit.
  • For people to be engaged we need to involve them throughout the process and not just at the end to show the results. This is what has been experienced in Portugal by the Science Centre in Alcanena that is involving the local community in monitoring water quality, polluted by the local industry, in order to understand the roots of the problems and develop together possible solutions.
  • In order to get people involved in long term change we need to deliver short and medium term results that they can appreciate. This is what is being done in Maribor, that is developing a long term circular economy strategy and is creating festivals, schools events and fairs to get people involved and experience some of the changes taking place in the waste, such as for the biological waste turned into compost for community gardens.
  • Participatory processes that really get people committed, beyond a consultation, require people with professional skills of moderation and community engagement, which should therefore also be economically remunerated in order to ensure long term commitment. This is what is experienced by in Amsterdam, where through the Wasted project circular waste cycles are an opportunity to create complementary currencies in partnership with local enterprises.  The same is true for engaging with marginalised groups who have to sacrifice precious time to contribute; we cannot extract free labour from anyone but especially groups that are already marginalised by structural inequities.
  • For environmental and societal transition to take place we need to ensure that it also affects economic and financial models in an inclusive and participatory way, otherwise large parts of our society will keep being left out. This is what has been done in Madrid through the MARES project that develops social economy cooperatives around sustainable mobility and energy production.
  • Skills around social media and communication tools need to be addressed in order to reach out to people, yet they might be more effective tools for consultation rather than co-creation.

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This blog was written by Daniela Patti (Eutropian) and edited by Amanda Woodman-Hardy (@Enviro_Mand) and Professor Rich Pancost (@rpancost) from Cabot Institute for the Environment.

Food Connections

Posted on by janet.crompton

Last week the Bristol Food Connections festival explored “all that is GREAT about food in Bristol (and beyond)” [1]. This made me realise that what I am exploring are the separations in our global food system. While so much of food in Bristol is ‘GREAT’ there is still much work to do about what is NOT SO GREAT. In the global food system, the separations between those who produce and those who consume what is transported around the world are many: income, origin, lifestyle, language, history, opportunities, culture, diet, microbiome – you name it there are separations in the way we eat and live.

This weekend I co-facilitated an event, Philosophy Breakfast: The ethics of global food production, with Julian Baggini, philosopher and author of the book, Virtues of the table: How to eat and think, [2]. Julian focused our thoughts on ethics and justice, and I grounded us with a case study, on tomatoes produced in Morocco, based on my recent fieldwork. We were treated, literally, to food for thought, in the form of a breakfast bap and coffee from the Boston Tea Party as well as a full house of attendees ready and willing to reflect on their role in the food systems. I was determined that this group, who had been motivated enough to get up for a 10 am Sunday start, also be given space to tell us what we should be considering in relation to the ethics of food. So, we invited each table to choose a breakfast food element to reflect upon, bread, coffee, tea, bacon, tomatoes and mushrooms, as they slowly digested its nutrients and food dilemmas.

Framing the session Julian considered our role as consumers by drawing on the thoughts of some classical philosophers from Plato to Sen: we should not, he suggested, be afraid of always getting everything right, but we should at least do our best to avoid contributing to what we find clearly morally wrong. How to go about this? I asked our participants to think of questions which might help us reflect on each of the breakfast items to help us consider these dilemmas. Furthermore, perhaps we might have questions for others; for the supermarkets, for the governments, and for the companies involved. My favourite question from this savvy group was, for meat: “was it worth an animal dying for me to eat this?” something that connects to my blog on the great value of seeing meat as sacrifice: ‘L hawli‘.

My talk related more to the question about coffee, “What labour standards (how bad would they be) would stop you buying coffee?”. What a question. International labour standards usually boil down to a mutual agreement that the countries involved in trade will apply their national labour laws. They may also be required to ensure that these national laws meet international standards, but what are these international standards? Since the 1998 ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work (ILO, 1998) [3], international labour law has been focused, or in practice narrowed, depending on your perspective, to just eight core conventions covering four areas (collective bargaining, forced labour, child labour, non-discrimination at work), out of a possible 189 conventions covering many other very important areas [4]. So this is a relatively weak starting point, which in most cases simply attempts to ensure already existing minimum standards (laws) are implemented.

What happens also, when national laws do not meet the needs of workers? Too often agricultural work is excluded from normal labour standards, or minimum wages are lower in this sector. This is not just the case in poorer countries. In the USA, the world’s richest state, many agricultural workers are exempted from minimum wage and overtime entitlements of the main national labour legislation, the Fair Labour Standards Act [5]. This is discrimination sanctioned by law.

Such discrimination between agriculture and other sectors is also the case in Morocco, where I carried out fieldwork. Whilst the legal minimum wage in other sectors is £8.29, the minimum day wage for agricultural workers is significantly lower at £5.37. OK, you may think, but life is cheaper there. Not that much cheaper. We can convert that minimum agricultural wage to a UK equivalent via the Purchasing Power Parity formula, (or PPP) this tells you what the equivalent wage would be in the UK. That equivalent of that minimum agricultural wage in a UK context with UK housing, food and other costs would be £13.51. This is not enough to live comfortably, barely enough to survive.

This is why then, the first findings chapter of my thesis is entitled “No Money”. If a major supply chain, feeding us year round with produce that we increasingly depend upon, rests on a starting point of an unreasonably low minimum wage, we cannot consider this a socially sustainable global food connection. And it is a connection. Although we are separated by distance, language, culture and long food chains, it was not difficult to find tomatoes just on our doorstep. Even last week when the ‘counter-season’ was officially over (as we now produce more in the UK so there is less market for non-EU producers) I could easily identify tomatoes in Bristol from a major company in business just outside of Agadir, Morocco (where my research is focused). I know workers from this company’s greenhouses and packhouses and spent months in daily conversations with them about what needs to change. They are calling for increases in wages and working conditions, better childcare and better social infrastructure. The separations then, are there to be bridged.

Transparency came up a lot on the morning of our event. How is there so much information about the attributes of food itself, and so little about those that produce it? We can only find out about food if actors involved in the sector are willing to be open (governments, retailers, employers). This showed at the Bristol Fruit Market, which I also visited as part of the Food Connections festival. The openness of the owners to discuss their business and show us around their distribution centre was in very clear contrast to the supermarket distribution centres which are shrouded in secrecy. Yet this is not the case at every stage of the process and it is only by asking questions, and showing that we care, that we can have any leverage at all to shift the harshest dynamics of global food systems.

Why are wages so low in the food sector? How can we revalue food? How can we keep alternative routes to market going (such as through wholesale)? How do we know if workers are treated fairly? What does that mean? How can we improve social and labour conditions in global production? These some of the questions that I am working on at the moment.

Groups feed back from their discussions at the Philosophy Breakfast event 17 June 2018

[1] Bristol Food Connections Festival website

[2] BAGGINI, J. 2014. The virtues of the table: How to eat and think, Granta Books.

[3] ILO 1998. ILO Declaration on fundamental principles and rights at work. International Labour Conference. Geneva: International Labour Office.

[4] A list of the 189 ILO conventions

[5] See, Guide to the Fair Labor Standards Act

[6] This is known locally as the difference of the SMIG, the minimum legal industrial wage, and the SMAG, the minimum legal agricultural wage. The SMIG is set by the hour (13.46 Moroccan Dirhams). An 8-hour equivalent of the SMIG comes to the GBP of £8.29. This can then be compared to the minimum agricultural wage, set by the day at 69.73 Moroccan Dirhams, equivalent to £5.37 per day.
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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Lydia Medland and has been reposted with kind permission from her original blog.  Lydia is from the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol.

Lydia Medland

Find out more about the Cabot Institute’s Food Security research theme.

Pollination and International Development: How bees can help us fight poverty and feed the world

Posted on by janet.crompton

Animal pollinators are the industrious workers in the factory of life – transporting pollen from one flower to another to ensure successful fertilisation. 75% of our crop plants benefit from this free service which can increase the yield, quality and even shelf-life of their products. This translates to a US$235-577bn value to global agriculture each year. Many of our favourite foods – strawberries, coffee and cocoa – can end up shrivelled and tasteless without pollination. This ecosystem service is under increasing threat however, as pollinators face the potent cocktail of pressures we have laid upon them, declining in numbers across various parts of the world.

But what has all this got to do with international development? From what we can tell, communities in developing countries [1] are more reliant on pollinators than almost anyone, standing to lose important income, livelihoods, nutrition and cultural traditions if pollinators decline. And yet, although a number of researchers across the developing world have made substantial and important contributions to this field, limited resources and capacity have meant that only a small proportion of pollination research has focused on these regions. In fact, there isn’t even enough data to know what is happening to pollinators in the developing world, let alone how we can best conserve them and their values to human wellbeing.

Over two billion people in developing countries are reliant on smallholder farming and therefore indirectly reliant on pollinators, without necessarily knowing it.  Many valuable cash crops, for example coffee, cocoa and cashews, are highly pollinator dependent and almost exclusively grown in the developing world, providing income for millions of people. In fact the reliance on pollinator-dependent crops has increased faster in the developing world than anywhere else. Reliance on beekeeping for income and livelihoods has also increased and is becoming a common component of sustainable development projects worldwide.

Worryingly, declines in pollination will have deeper consequences than just the loss of crop yields and income. Because many of the most nutritionally important food groups such as fruits, nuts and vegetables are also the most pollinator-dependent, pollinator declines are likely to shift the balance of people’s diets away from these foods. As a result, many millions of people around the world, particularly in developing countries, are expected to become deficient in important micronutrients such as vitamin A, vitamin C, iron and folate, resulting in millions of years of healthy life lost.

So what is being done about all this? In recognition of the importance of pollinators to human welfare and the threats facing them, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) commissioned a global assessment of Pollinators, Pollination and Food Production, published in 2016. This triggered a great wave of political and media attention and has resulted in the incorporation of the report’s key findings into the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Many governments are now in the process of developing national pollinator strategies, including the developing nations of Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, South Africa and India. On this wave of momentum, the CBD has also requested the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) to update their International Pollinator Initiative (IPI) which aims to build greater understanding, management and conservation of pollinators around the world. This international attention won’t last forever though, so it is important that the current momentum is sustained and built upon as soon as possible, ensuring as many countries as possible – particularly in the developing world – are involved.

The UK has a valuable opportunity to contribute to these efforts. As a centre of excellence for pollination science, it is the second largest funder and producer of pollination research after the US. But only c.6% of the £95M we have contributed to pollination research in the last 10 years has any link or collaboration with a developing country (ÜberResearch 2018). As more of the UK’s Official Development Assistance budget is made available for research, there is a shift in emphasis towards research that directly contributes towards international development. New funding programmes are encouraging the UK research community to engage in collaborative projects with researchers in developing countries, building valuable research capacity. With the relevance of pollination and agro-ecology to addressing the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, these topics may fit into this new funding landscape. However, to be effective and ethical, partners and institutions in developing countries must be involved in the design of, and stand to benefit from these collaborations. See here for a UKCDS report outlining the ways in which academics and funders can help ensure fair partnerships.

As populations in the developing world expand, along with per-capita food demands, these issues become all the more pressing. Food production will need to increase by 70% come 2050 and this cannot be achieved by simply expanding agricultural land or fertilizer input. To ensure people are well-fed, in a way that is sustainable and ethical, we will have to intensify our farming in new ways. Understanding and managing pollination may be an important part of this and is something that researchers, politicians, agriculturalists and development workers will need to engage with sooner rather than later.

[1] For simplicity, we use the term ‘developing countries’ to refer to all countries listed in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Development Assistant Committee (DAC) list of Official Development Assistance (ODA) recipients. This includes countries from a range of economic classifications, from ‘Least Developed’ to ‘Upper Middle Income’ which includes the nations of China and Brazil. Whilst we group all these nations under the broad term of ‘developing country’, we acknowledge the great heterogeneity between them in terms of wealth, development and research capacity.


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This blog has been kindly reposted from the UK CDS website.  It is written by Cabot Institute member Thomas Timberlake, a pollination ecology PhD researcher from the University of Bristol who undertook a three month project with the UKCDS looking at the relevance of pollination to international development.

Thomas Timberlake

To find out more about this project you can view the full report, or watch a recording of the UKCDS Pollination and International Development Webinar.

You can also listen to Tom speaking on Nature Xposed, a University of Bristol nature radio station, about the importance of pollinators in developing countries.

If you have any comments about this blog do tweet us @cabotinstitute @UKCDS.

Water City Bristol!

Posted on by janet.crompton
Foot selfie at secret swimming spot

If you don’t fix things in words, they might float away. So, briefly, a skeletal accounting —

  • 3 open-water swims
  • 2 workshops in maritime writing
  • 1 public lecture
  • 1 trip up the canal locks to Saltford
  • 2 days at #MT2018 (Marine Transgressions Conference)
  • 2 keynotes
  • ~ 12 panels
  • 1 Blue Humanities roundtable
  • 2 receptions
  • [a poetry reading that I missed]
  • And many half-garbled memories, starting in the middle —
The Llandoger Trow, where Daniel Defoe met Alexander Selkirk

Toxicity, the Ocean, and Urban Space (Wednesday)

I was trying some new things for this public lecture, knowing that the audience would swirl together academics with non-academics, be mostly composed of city-dwellers, and further include mostly those with a particular interest in the sea. Unpicking the knots of writing and thinking I’ve been chasing down in the wake of Oceanic New York, my talk splashed through some recent watery adventures, included images of Thanos the purple God of demonic Malthusianism, strayed into verse in three of my own poems, and — maybe? — crossed wild water to make landfall with hopeful gestures toward Ocean citizenship. How can our Cities and our bodies prepare themselves for and live with rising waters? I’d like to speak that as a not-only tragic story.

Public lecture at the University of Bristol

The Henleaze Swimming Club (Monday)

On Monday afternoon, jet-lagged and still-missing my baggage from the overnight flight in via Dublin, I bought a replacement suit & goggles from the hotel & Uber’d up to Henleaze, a former quarry that’s been a private swimming club since 1919. This gorgeous, narrow, fresh-watered lake now overflows with people, half with swimmers and half fisherfolk. What better anti-jet lag tonic can be?

Underwater Bristol (Tuesday)

Building on the perpetual inspiration of underwaternewyork.com, I hatched a plot with members of the U of Bristol English faculty to incubate some to-emerge-later responses to Bristol’s waterways. So many glorious things! A sailboat named Svendgar that I spotted a few days later for sale in the harbor. Brown mudflats. The kayaks that were paddled around the Bay by the Inuits kidnapped in Frobisher’s Second Voyage to Newfoundland in 1577. A football pitch next to a Cadbury Chocolate Factory that I’d seen earlier that morning while riding a canal boat up five locks to Saltford. Plastic. Breeding eels. What will they all become?

Brunel’s suspension bridge over the Avon

A secret monastic pool (Wednesday)

Having been promised a bit of true English wild swimming on the condition that I not mention the name or location of the waters in which I would plunge, I suppose I was a bit surprised to come around the corner of the quiet country lane to discover maybe sixty students lining the pool’s far bank, sunning themselves in post-exam freedom. The secluded pool, built “in the Middle Ages” to store fish for the Abbey of St. Augustine (founded 1140), now hosts lily pads, a gorgeous 15-foot tall purple rhododendron, supposedly a few tench, and — alas! — some horseflies that enjoyed landing on my bald head. It’s an excellent place for an afternoon’s swim. Thanks to my hosts for taking me there!

Bristol Harbour on the last night

Sea-themed creative writing workshop (Wednesday)

I was deeply impressed by the almost-dozen enthusiastic  Bristol undergrads who submitted maritime poetry and prose works for an post-term bonus workshop. I was joined also by Shakespearean Laurence Publicover and poet David Punter, and we spent a thrilling two hours wrestling with the joys and frustrations of writing with and into oceanic spaces. The student writing was gorgeous and wonderfully ambitious, from a narrative built from fragments of a diary from the S.S. Great Britain to a brilliantly post-Agatha Christie cruise montage, a boat-launching story, several quite lovely lyrics about blue spaces, and a hashing of Pip’s dream of drowning from Moby-Dick that spoke to my Melvillean core.

Clevedon Marine Lake (Fri)

Diving into Clevedon Marine Lake

Located as far upstream as big boats could travel the tidal Avon, Bristol today is water-filled but brackish rather than salt. Much of my time there was semi-marine, from the walks along the harbour to the floating bar the Marine Transgressions Conference decamped to after our final keynote. But though the Avon is tidal for a long distance and boasts (I am reliably assured by tide-guru Owain Jones from the Environmental Humanities department at Bath Spa) the second-highest tides in the world, there’s not a lot of open salt water in the city. I wanted to swim in the Bristol Channel (still known in Wales as the Severn Sea), so the morning of the conference’s last day I met swimographer Vanessa at an early hour that precluded other swimming companions, and we Uber’d out to the Clevedon Marine Lake. I’ve seldom or never seen a more starkly ideal swimscape. The pool is built, framed in by concrete and stone, but at high tide the swell tops the wall and fills the pool with ocean water. The tide was near the ebb when we arrived that morning, and over 100 yards of brown mudflat extended below the “lake,” reflecting the gray sky up toward us. The water was perfect — cool but not cold, salty but not bitter, manageable even though I’d forgotten my goggles in the hotel, and a generous 250m per lake-length. One of the few other swimmers who was also there on a grey misty morning was a man training for 70km in Lake Geneva. He churned in slow circles around the lake and planned to swim through dinner time. We had panels to rush back to in Bristol, but I was tempted just to keep swimming.

#MT2018 Marine Transgressions Conference (Thursday & Friday)

In front of Nancy Farmer tiles with Vanessa Daws at Clevedon

My visit to Bristol was fortuitously timed with an interdisciplinary conference on Marine Transgressions — a geologic term of art for moments in which the sea invades the land. Packed in to the last two days of my stay, the conference’s turbulent energy kept me going even when my own energy flagged. From Helen Rozwadowski’s amazing opening keynote on Jacques Cousteau and utopian fantasies of homo aquaticus in the 1950s and ’60s all the way through Tim Dee’s gorgeously lyrical evocation of the human and avian intertwinings of gulls and landfills, #MT2018 was an stirring mixture. I can’t do justice to all the great panels and papers that I heard over the two days, but I was struck by the variety of disciplinary perspectives — lots of poetics, history, and environmental humanities, but also marine law, policy, science, technological remediation, and other things. All these were joined together by a shared passion for the oceanic “blue” — though of course we all know, and we repeated as a kind of refrain over two days, that the ocean is also and meaningfully green, gray, purple, and many other colors — including gold, in the memorable image of the geochemist Kate Hendry describing the glimmer of microscopic diatoms on the salt flats of the Severn estuary at low tide.

Blue Humanities Round Table (Friday)

The best parts of a small conference come from listening to new things, and also from catching an extension of someone’s work over a beer at the floating bar after the day’s sessions. But in addition to many great discoveries, I’ve seldom had more fun at an academic presentation than I did chairing a Blue Humanities Round Table near the end of the second day. The amazing panel of disparate thinkers and makers included Owain Jones, whose hydrocitizenship project connects Bristol’s to its people and its past; Vanessa Daws, swimographer and immersive artist; Kate Hendry, a biogeochemist whose fields work takes her to both the Arctic and Antarctic ice fields; and my friend from the CT Shoreline Helen Rozwadowski, historian of science and founder of the Maritime Studies Program at UConn Avery Point. I started us out with a general question — “What can you do because of your focus on the sea that you could not do otherwise?” — and our conversation waterfalled down through several memorable twists and turns into a fantastic question period. With thanks to Alexandra Campbell and her twitter-agility, here’s a partial reconstruction of the ship we built as we sailed along:

  • The sea is not a metaphor (quoting Hester Blum) — except that sometimes it is, and sometimes its metaphors rub against and into the real salt water.
  • The sea is history (not-quite-remembering to quote Derek Walcott) — and given a few generations of blue humanities historical scholarship it should hopefully become more richly historicized.
  • The sea disorients and distorts, always and relentlessly, even as humans respond partially to that disorientation.
  • Is water alien? Does it come from outer space or from inside the earth’s core? Why might it matter? (in dialogue with Lindy Elkins-Tanton)
  • The sea’s lack of visibility redoubles its its moral challenge, informs the cultural history of its monstrous depths, and increases the force of its alien elements. (I rambled here about the “Creature from the Black Lagoon” poster art on the walls of Catch-22, the fish & chips place where I ate my first Bristol meal.)
  • Does the weakness of human eyesight underwater attenuate our moral connection with sea creatures? (A Levinas-ian question, though we didn’t mention his name)
  • Can science “illuminate” (Kate’s word) the sea in ways that increase its ethical claims on human subjects?
  • What are the politics of the interdisciplinary ocean? How can the sea speak to social justice, especially remembering the twin horrors of the slave trade and transoceanic capitalism (which two things might actually be parts of the same thing)?
  • Can the sea be a space of hope? (Last question, I think? We said yes. But I’m not sure that we’re sure.)

 

Selfie with mermaid and Vanessa Daws in Clevedon

“Under the sea everything is moral”

The hardest and most evocative phrase of the conference came when Helen quoted Cousteau or one of his fellow sea-utopians in her opening keynote. What might it mean for “everything” to be “moral” beneath the waves? “It’s all subtle and submarine,” says Walcott, thinking about Atlantic slavery and Caribbean beauty. Owain quite rightly objected that the underwater industriousness for which Cousteau was a booster has fouled our waters. The panel speculated together about the morality that emerges from the shared vulnerability of terrestrial human bodies in deep waters. I thought about, but did not share, a terrifying vision of drowning and struggle from Macbeth —

Doubtful it stood / As two spent swimmers that do cling together / And choke their art (1.2)

There’s another way, it occurs to me now as my big green metal bird arcs past the southern tip of Greenland, in which the undersea might be “moral.” It’s not that all undersea activities are permitted or approved, but that the questions we face — what we talk about when we talk about oceans — become starkly and painfully ethical. As mer-scholars, academic selkies, blue humanists, we swim into hard questions about disorientation, about buoyancy, about living-with alien lives. We face questions of social justice and tragic history, of oceanic dislocation and ongoing violence. Moral urgencies splash into marine lakes in the West Country and haunt overcrowded refugee boats in the Eastern Med.

The sea supports and threatens human life. What moral dilemmas fix us from the cold glaze of a fish’s eyes?

Floating bar

Thanks to all who were there this week, and in particular to my hosts at the University of Bristol, the Perspectives on the Sea cluster run by Laurence Publicover, the Brigstow and Cabot Institutes, and all the people who made Marine Transgressions possible! I’m looking forward to my next visit to Bristol already.

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This blog has been written by Professor Steve Mentz, St John’s University, New York. The blog has been reposted with kind permission from Steve’s original blog.

Regulatory defection in electricity markets

Posted on by janet.crompton
Graphic by Sarah Harman. Taken from energy.gov.

Electricity systems are undergoing rapid transformation. An increasing share of previously passive consumers is defecting energy demand and supply from the public electricity network (grid) as active ‘prosumers’ while technological and business model innovation is enabling demand-side resources to provide reliable and cost competitive alternatives to supply capacity.

Yet, centralised supply-focused market structures dominated by legacy infrastructures, technologies and supply chains associated with path-dependencies and technological lock-ins continue to dominate. Regulation has been designed around these existing supply-focused markets and structures rather than networks of the future capable of integrating and facilitating smart, flexible systems. Current systems and their regulatory frameworks are struggling to engage and integrate a range of technological, economic and social innovations promising consumer-oriented solutions to environmental problems.

In the UK, the Office for Gas and Electricity Markets (Ofgem) regulates the electricity and gas markets to protect the interest of existing and future consumers. Ofgem acknowledges that ‘moving from a largely centralised, carbon-intensive model to one which will be increasingly carbon-constrained, smart, flexible and decentralised is creating challenges which can only be addressed by innovation’.

In practice, the rapid diffusion of emerging digital technologies such as smart grids, smart meters and the internet of things is disrupting market structures and business models. Progress in automated and machine learning is producing exponentially growing amounts of data which facilitates the deep learning required for more accurate time series predictions. At the same time, distributed ledger technologies such as blockchain provide combined digital accounting and measuring, reporting and verification infrastructures as well as a means of developing and executing smart contracts.

Regulators such as Ofgem are confronted with the need to ‘keep the lights on’ while balancing their primary focus of regulating centralised electricity supply and trading markets with engaging with disruptive innovations. This is reflected in Ofgem’s monolithic, centralised structure, despite its commitment to facilitating smart systems, flexibility and non-traditional business models.

The question is, how can the regulator square grid code written for large-scale generators and wholesale traders with an increasing understanding of and desire to facilitate smart, flexible systems?

Disruptive technologies and business model innovation

In practice, smart, flexible systems imply the bidirectional flow of information which relies on a combination of on storage, demand-side responses, interconnection and energy efficiency increasingly facilitated by emerging digital and distributed ledger technologies. It is evident that existing legal frameworks will need to change to accommodate emerging digital and distributed ledger technologies, but regulators need to proceed with caution and change is inevitably a slow process that needs to take a very wide range of statutory and non-statutory requirements into account. Up to that point, however, the regulators’ discretionary and exempting power can and should be applied (with caution).

In Europe, Ofgem is at the forefront alongside the Dutch regulator (Authority for Consumers and Markets – ACM) in providing ‘regulatory sandboxes’ for microgrids and peer-to-peer trading which facilitates buying and selling electricity locally. These sandboxes facilitate experimentation and innovation without companies incurring or being subject to established regulatory requirements.

Despite Ofgem’s commitment to providing space for experimentation and innovation, missing market rules and high entry barriers encourage innovators to seek alternatives through regulatory defection. Two reports by the Rocky Mountain Institute, one on load defection and one on grid defection sensitised research and policy communities to economic aspects of electricity market defection. Regulatory defection is another aspect of the same issue but it deals with the broader opportunity (and concern) of economic activity shifting beyond particular regulatory spaces and boundaries. Arguments have been put forward that the trend of government withdrawing from energy policy rewards regulatory defection in electricity markets.

Concrete examples of regulatory defection in the electricity market include engaging in behind the meter generation, private wire supply and microgrids. Behind the meter generation is facilitated by a rapid fall in electricity storage costs. Batteries are now available for home installation with promises of 60% savings on electricity bills if appropriately scaled to match on-roof solar PV generation. Behind the meter generation also includes anything else that can be done to limit engagement with the grid, including energy efficiency improvements and reducing demand.

Private wire supply and microgrids require the installation of dedicated physical electricity transmission infrastructure. Private wire enables generators to sell electricity to neighbouring premises without transmitting electricity through the grid. Microgrids take private wires a step further to include a private network across multiple sites and end consumers. These arrangements are complex and require considerable skills and capacity to engage with appropriate network design, infrastructure, installation costs, land and planning requirements and operation and maintenance.

Despite this complexity, regulatory defection is underway through behind the meter generation, private wire supply and microgrid development. For example, Easton Energy Group in Bristol is at the forefront of developing a community microgrid combining solar PV generation with battery storage and dedicated transmission infrastructure as part of their TWOs project.

Energy Service Company (ESCO) business models facilitate defection by shifting the emphasis on the delivery of energy services. Rather than delivering energy in the form of grid electricity or fuel, ESCOs deliver final energy services such as lighting, ventilation or refrigeration. By shifting profitability towards the efficient provision of these services at low energy and environmental costs, ESCOs shift economic activity beyond the scope of electricity market regulation.

Combined, behind the meter generation, private wire supply and microgrids on the one hand, and ESCO business models on the other, require a rethink of how electricity is regulated. Fairness and equity need to be prioritised to ensure that the costs of running the existing infrastructure (which will still be necessary no matter how rapidly distributed systems evolve) will not be borne by fewer and less fortunate consumers that lack the capacity to defect. Therefore, new regulatory approaches are required to ensure that clean energy will be available to all at affordable costs.

Embracing disruption

One way of engaging with change is by embracing the innovations that threaten to usurp the current system. The Chilean regulator, Commisión Nacional de Energía (CNE), considers Blockchain an essential element of fair and sustainable energy markets. Its web portal Energía Abierta, the 1st open data website in South America, uses Blockchain as a digital notary. It allows CNE to certify that information provided on the web portal has not been altered and modified while also leaving an immutable record of its existence.

To this end, CNE issues ‘certificates of trust’ to give greater credibility to the portal. The aim of the portal is to increase levels of trust among stakeholders and the general public that have access to and consume the portal’s data. Another aim is that by using blockchain, greater trust in the citizen-government relationship can be created through more open and transparent governance. Ultimately, CNE expects blockchain to increase traceability, accountability, transparency and trust.

Chile has taken the lead in using blockchain as part of its regulatory framework and other countries should learn from this experience, especially if blockchain is to fulfil its potential in reducing transaction costs and managing complexity. Combining distributed ledger technologies such as blockchain with emerging digital technologies such as smart grids, smart meters and the internet of things can provide a new platform for electricity market regulation with data embodied in electricity at its core rather than electricity by itself.

The problem with regulation, however, is that it is based on experience from the past. Regulating emerging technologies and facilitating beneficial outcomes while limiting potential negative ones requires a fine balance and technological agnosticism. In this context it is necessary to bear in mind that it is not Ofgem’s sole responsibility to alter regulation. The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), District Network Operators, the National Grid and combined industry code panels governed by the Competition and Markets Authority and determined by the Secretary of State also have a role to play.

Regulatory defection in electricity markets will continue progressing in the absence of new market structures. Maybe it is time to rethink electricity market regulation in this space along the lines of platform regulation?

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This blog has been written by Cabot Institute member Dr Colin Nolden, Vice Chancellor’s Fellow researching in Sustainable City Business Models (University of Bristol Law School).

Colin Nolden

Privacy paradoxes, digital divides and secure societies

Posted on by janet.crompton

More and more, we are living our lives in the online space. The development of wearable technology, automated vehicles, and the Internet of Things means that our societies are becoming increasingly digitized. Technological advances are helping monitor city life, target resources efficiently, and engage with citizens more effectively in so-called smart cities. But as with all technological developments, these substantial benefits are accompanied by multiple risks and challenges.

The Wannacry attack. The TalkTalk data breach. The Cambridge Analytica scandal. Phishing emails. Online scams. The list of digital threats reported by the media is seemingly endless. To tackle these growing threats, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) was established in the UK in 2016 with the aim of making ‘the UK the safest place to live and do business online’. But with the increasing complexity of online life, connected appliances, and incessant data collection, how do people navigate these challenges in their day-to-day lives? As a psychologist, I am interested in how people consider and make decisions regarding these digital risks and how we can empower people to make more informed choices going forward.

The privacy paradox

People often claim that privacy is important to them. However, research shows that they are often willing to trade that privacy for short-term benefits. This incongruence between people’s self-reported attitudes and their behaviour has been termed the ‘privacy paradox’. The precise reasons for this are uncertain, but are likely to be a combination of lack of knowledge, competing goals and priorities, and the fact that maintaining privacy can be, well, difficult.

Security is often not an individual’s primary goal, instead being secondary to other tasks that they are trying to complete. For instance, accessing a particular app, sharing location data to find directions, or communicating on the move with friends and colleagues. Using these online services, however, often requires a trade-off with regards to privacy. This trade-off may be unclear, communicated through incomprehensible terms and conditions, or simply unavoidable for the user. Understanding what drives people to make these privacy trade-offs, and under what conditions, is a growing research area.

The digital divide

As in other areas of life, access to technology across society is not equal. Wearable technology and smart phones can be expensive. People may not be familiar with computers or have low levels of digital literacy. There are also substantial ethical implications about how such data may be used that are still being debated. For instance, how much will the information captured and analysed about citizens differ across socio-economic groups?

Research has also shown that people are differentially susceptible to cyber crime, with generational differences apparent (although, not always in the direction that you would expect). Trust in the institutions that handle digital data may vary across communities. Existing theories of societal differences, such as the Cultural Theory of Risk, are increasingly being applied to information security behaviour. Understanding how different groups within society perceive, consider, and are differentially exposed to, digital risks is vital if the potential benefits of such technologies are to be maximised in the future.

Secure societies – now and in the future

Regulation: The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into force on the 25 May 2018. Like me, you may have been receiving multiple emails from companies informing you how they use your data, or asking your permission to keep it. This regulation is designed to help people manage their privacy and understand who has access to their data, and why. It also allows for substantial fines to be imposed if personal data is not managed adequately or if data breaches are not reported to authorities in a timely manner.

Secure by default: There is a growing recognition that products should have security built-in. Rather than relying on us, the human user, to understand and manage security settings on the various devices that we own, such devices should be ‘secure by default’. Previous considerations of humans as the ‘weakest link’ in cyber security are being replaced with an understanding that people have limited time, expertise and ability to manage security. The simplified password guidance provided by the NCSC provides a good example of this (7). Devices,  applications and policies should take the onus off the user as much as possible.

Education and communication: People need to be educated about online risks in an engaging, relevant and targeted way. Such risks can be perceived as abstract and distant from the individual, and can be difficult to understand at the technical level. I was recently paired with an artist as part of Creative Reactions 2018 (an art exhibition running in Hamilton House 11 – 22 May 2018) to portray my research in this area to members of the public in a different way. Understanding how best to communicate digital risks to diverse audiences who engage with the online world in a range of different contexts is crucial. In this regard, there is much to be learned from risk communication approaches used in climate change, public health, and energy sectors.

Overall, there is much to be optimistic about. A renewed focus on empowering people to understand digital risks and make informed decisions, supported by regulation, secure design and considerations of ethical issues. Only by understanding how people make decisions regarding online activities and emerging technologies, and providing them with the tools to manage their privacy and security effectively, can the opportunities provided by a digital society be fully realised in cities of the future.

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This blog has been written by Cabot Institute member Dr Emma Williams, a Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow in Digital Innovation and Well-being in the School of Experimental Psychology at the University of Bristol.

Sweet love for planet Earth: An ode to bias and fallacy

Posted on by janet.crompton
1. Apocalypse, Albert Goodwin (1903.) At the culmination of 800 paintings, Apocalypse, was the first of Goodwin’s works in which he introduced experimental techniques that marked a distinct departure from the imitations of Turner found in most of his earlier works. [picture courtesy of the Tate online collection.]
‘
Ask for what end the heav’nly bodies shine, 
Earth for whose use? Pride answers, “Tis for mine: 
For me kind Nature wakes her genial pow’r, 
Suckles each herb, and spreads out ev’ry flow’r; 
Annual for me, the grape, the rose renew 
The juice nectareous, and the balmy dew; 
For me, the mine a thousand treasures brings; 
For me, health gushes from a thousand springs; 
Seas roll to waft me, suns to light me rise; 
My foot-stool earth, my canopy the skies.” ’
2. A section of the fifth (V) verse in the first epistle of Alexander Pope’s unfinished Essay on Man, (1733-34.)

Alexander Pope, 18th Century moral poet, pioneer in the use of the heroic couplet, second most quoted writer in the Oxford dictionary of quotations behind Shakespeare and shameless copycat. Coleridge suggested this is what held Pope back from true mastery, but It is beyond question that the results of this imitation cultured some of the finest poetry of the era. Yet still, Pope, the bel esprit of the literary decadence that proliferated within 18th Century written prose and inspiration for the excellence of Byron, Tennyson and Blake, to name but a few; spent a large amount of his creative life imitating the style of Dryden, Chaucer, and John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. The notion that Pope (2), and Albert Goodwin (1), such precocious and natural talents, would invest so much time in mastering the artistic style of others is curious indeed, it too, provides a broad entry-point for a discussion on the roles of imitation, mimicry and mimesis in human growth, social and societal development.

You live & you learn

Having now formulated a suitable appeal to emotion, which very narrowly avoids the bandwagon, it is worth noting that imitation, and it’s cousins repetition and practice too, represent the way in which an infant might copy its parent’s behaviour, how a young artist may seek a suitably influential model as a teacher or a musician may seek to imitate sounds and transpose these as a compliment to their own polyphony, are a fundamental component in epistemology; the building of knowledge. This understanding has become increasingly important for my own research, whereby repetition and practice have not only become a primary process in developing my own knowledge but have also been important methodological heuristics for establishing imitation and mimicry as primary, collective responses for human survival during exigent situations.

These responses and the systems within which they exist are inherently complex. In developing a robust framework to analyse and evaluate them in relation to flood scenarios for my research (3 and 4) I have utilised the agent-based model to emulate the human response to hydrodynamic data. If you have ever dealt with a HR department, any form of customer service, submitted an academic paper for publishing or bore witness to the wonders of automated passport control then you will be privy to the sentiments of human complexity, as well as our growing dependence on automation to guide us through the orbiting complexity of general life. Raillery aside, these specific examples are rather attenuated situations on which to base broad assessments of human behaviour. The agent-based model itself, a chimera rooted in computational science, born from the slightly sinister cold-war (1953-62) era overlap between computer science, biology and physics and so by implication possessing the ability to model many facets of these disciplines, their related sub-disciplines and inter-disciplines; can provide a panoptic of the broader complexities of human systems and develop our understanding of them.

3 (above) & 4 (below). Examples of the agent-based model designed for my own research. The scenario shown is for human response to flooding in Carlisle. The population at risk (green ‘agents’) go about their daily routine until impact from the flood becomes apparent, at which point individuals can choose to go into evacuation mode (red ‘agents’.)

Academically, you may suggest that “these are bold claims!” (others certainly have!) tu quoque, I would retort “claims surely not beyond the horizons of your rationale or reasoning?” Diving deeper into the Carrollian involute of my research to underpin my quip (and readily expose myself to backfire bias) 12,000 simulations of the Carlisle flood case study with the aid of various choice-diffusion models to legitimise my computerised population’s decisions, have yielded a 66% preference for the population of Carlisle to interact with their neighbours and base their decision making on that of their social peers as opposed to following direct policy instruction. Broadly, this means that most of the computerised individuals respond to the flood by asking those around them what they are going to do, following their lead, imitating their evacuation decisions, mimicking their response to the flood.

Extrapolating beyond the confines of Carlisle, there are a great number of agent-based models that have explored the syncytia of human behaviours relative to systematic changes in their environment. Contra-academe and being a big fan of the veridical, I am happy to proclaim that my own model is a much wieldier alternative to the majority of those ‘big data’ models and so aims to demonstrate behavioural responses to events at a suitable point of balance between realism and interpretability. The agents represent individuals as close to reality as possible, they are defined by characteristics that define you, they and I – age, employment status etc. they are guided by self-interest and autonomously interact with a daily routine of choice that Joe public might undertake on an average day; they are (deep breath) meta-you, they and I as far as possibly mensurable, they do the same things, take the same missteps; even make the same mistakes* digitised and existent in an emulated environment replicant of ours.


(* not those kinds of mistakes.)

The cut worm forgives the plough

Veering this gnostic leviathan of an article away from the definite anecdotal and the convolvulus of complex system analysis, to what may well turn out to be a vast underestimation of reader credulity; the meat and water of this article has essentially been to provoke you into asking:

  • To what degree can choice, imitation, mimicry, influence be separated out from one another?
  • If the above is possible then how might they be measured?
  • How can these measurements be verified?
  • If verifiable then what implications do the outcomes carry?

Oliver Sachs suggested that mimicry and choice imply certain conscious intention, imitation is a pronounced psychological and physiological propensity universal to all human biology, all are traceable to instinct. In ‘The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis, Alan Turing suggested how the various patterns of nature, spots stripes etc. could be produced from a common uniform state using reaction-diffusion equations. These equations are an important part of the algebraic family that form fractal geometry (patterns!) and the very basis of the agent-based model is a simple pattern equation known as the cellular automaton. Indeed, if you were to feed a chunk of algebra, let’s say to represent the geometric dimensions of an arbitrary but healthy and fully-formed leaf, into a graphic computer program and press go, a recursive pattern will form, and that pattern would represent the algebraic dimensions of the leaf (5.) These kinds of patterns are considered complex, the automaton, despite its rather complicated name, is a mathematically simplified way to represent complex patterns on a computer.

5. From nature to Timothy Leary in 3 small steps.

The patterns of agent diffusion within agent-based models could then be inferred as being
inherently representative of nature, natural process guided simply by the rules that naturally define our daily existence as defined by the automata and the demographics assigned to the agents within the agent-based model. The implications of all this fluff is that agent-based models can provide a good analogue for just that, natural process in addition to acting as an analytical tool to determine factors that may deviate those processes, providing an insight into the possible effects of affecting these processes with attenuating circumstances such as intense urbanisation, varying political climates and resource shortages; all key in the progression of human vulnerability and risk.

In terms of verification, envisage the situation where a flood is impending. You are broadly aware of flood policy and in the immediacy of impending situation you become aware of your neighbours beginning to leave their own homes or locale. Do you ask them why? Do you follow them? If so, why? If not, why not? Whatever your answers to this heavily loaded scenario may be, they will doubtlessly be littered with ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ and this is fundamentally the obstacle policy faces in trying to ameliorate the fact that it is bound by more ‘ruban rouge’ than the Labour party directive on Brexit, is as apprehensible as the Voynich Manuscript and is as accessible as those two references compounded. Tools are required to test and visualise the compatibility interface between humans and policy before it is implemented. This will diversify and dilute it, making it more accessible; else it will forever be voided by its own hubris and lack of adequate testing. Whether the agent-based model can provide this panacea I am unsure, though one hopes.

An ode

So then, as this ode approaches the twilight of its purpose, having made it through the tour d’horizon of my research and personal interests, turgid with their own bias and logical fallacies (indicated at points, primarily to serve the author’s thirst for poetic liberty) I propose, a middle ground between pessimistic and optimistic bias, to the reader that you might embrace, and consider critically, the bias and fallacy that percolates through the world around you. In a world of climate change denial, where world leaders sharp-shoot their theses to inform decisions that affect us all and where it seems that technology and data has begun to determine our values and worth, it has never been more important to be self-aware and question the legitimacy of apathy for critique.

The ever-prescient Karl Popper suggested in his ‘conjectures and refutations’, that for science to be truly scientific a proposed theory must be refutable, as all theories have the potential to be ‘confirmed’ using the correct arrangement of words and data. It is only through refutation, or transcending the process of refutation, might we truly achieve progressive and beneficial answers to the questions upon which we base our theories. This being a process of empowerment and a sociological by-product of the positive freedom outlined by Erich Fromm. The freedom to progress collective understanding surely outweighs the freedom from fear of critical appraisal for having attempted to do so?  à chacun ses goûts, but consider this, in the final verse (7) of his Essay on Man, the final verse he ever wrote, Alexander Pope originally wrote that “One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.” By Popper’s standards, a lot of what ‘is’ today, shouldn’t be and this should ultimately leave us questioning the nature of our freedom, what exactly are we free to and free from? à chacun ses goûts?

‘All nature is but art, unknown to thee; 
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see; 
All discord, harmony, not understood; 
All partial evil, universal good: 
And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite, 
One truth is clear, whatever is, is right?’
7. A section of the tenth (X) verse in the first epistle of Alexander Pope’s unfinished Essay on Man, (with edited last line for dramatic effect (1733-34.))
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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

Read Thomas’ other blog in this series:


Dadaism in Disaster Risk Reduction: Reflections against method

Grey Britain: Misery, urbanism & neuroaesthetics

Under her eye: Communicating climate change more effectively

Posted on by janet.crompton

My name is Adriana Suárez and I’m a 3rd year PhD Student at the School of Geographical Sciences. I am working on community based water management in rural areas in Chile, where I am from.

I came back from fieldwork two months ago and in a way, I am still getting used to being back in Bristol as it is easy to feel a bit lost when you are swimming in a sea of data.  It was an intense fieldwork experience as I spent five months in Chile doing interviews with different participants, collecting documents and texts, and doing participant observation. The method I am using is called Institutional Ethnography, a method of inquiry developed by feminist sociologist Dorothy Smith and which has not been used yet in natural resources management.

My aim is to learn from rural communities who are involved in water management as a way to explore a form of management that is different to the usual way in which water for human consumption and sanitation is provided in urban areas. For example, in most cities like Santiago and Bristol, water is provided by sanitary companies which capture, purify and deliver water to our households. They also collect waste water and treat it to then return it to rivers so it can be used again in other activities. Usually, sanitary companies are for profit corporations that make a profit out of this service.

However, the way drinking water is organised in rural Chile is very different as in these areas the State works in partnership with the community. In this model, the work is done with a social aim and not as a way to make a profit, as opposed to the work of sanitary companies involved in the provision of water to urban areas. On the one hand the State is in charge of investing in the construction and provision of the infrastructure needed to capture, accumulate and distribute water, such as water tanks and a network of water pipes that distribute water to each household. On the other hand, the community is responsible for managing the system. This work includes repairing any breakages, leaks and charging water tariffs to keep the system running.

Coming back from fieldwork is not an easy task and I felt like I had many questions and concerns I needed to discuss with others. I realised I also needed to engage with my data in as many ways as possible, and that meant not only in academic ways. This is why I have been looking for opportunities to engage in conversation with other PhD students as well as with people who are not doing research or are not involved in academia. The ‘Research without Borders’ festival has offered me an opportunity to do this in a non-academic way, and to think of ways of talking about my research I had not considered before.

I also committed to preparing a stall at a public engagement event in Colston Hall on the 9 May 2018, in which I would develop an activity about my research. Someone had suggested me to use a cut out of James Bond to exemplify the gendered patterns of water management in my research. However I wasn’t entirely convinced I could develop a meaningful activity with a real-size cardboard image of Daniel Craig.

So, as I was getting – or not – ready to present my project in an engaging and fun way, I received an email from the Cabot Institute inviting me to participate in the Under Her Eye fellowship program which involved participating in a conference taking place on 1 June 2018 in London. I quickly went on their website and did a bit of research and I soon realised this was an opportunity I could not miss! This conference is about communicating climate change effectively by encouraging collaboration between scientists and artists. Moreover, Margaret Atwood will be the ambassador of this conference! I applied immediately and was thrilled to hear I had been chosen to participate.

Scarborough. Image credit Adriana Suarez.

Last weekend we met in Scarborough with the Invisible Dust team, who are organising the conference and I met the rest of the participants who were from different universities across the country. It was an incredible experience and it opened my eyes to new ways of collaborations I had not considered before. It was an intense and productive weekend, dedicated to improve our presentation skills, to think about engaging different audiences, about communicating and about how to affect change. It was inspiring and thought provoking, and it was a sharing experience among people I had never seen before, but with whom I shared values, dreams and concerns with.

We were invited to think about an activity we would like to develop during the conference and we came up with an idea to involve the public in a sensory experience that would take them all the way to Chile, to explore how avocado production is competing with a rural community and their human right to access water. I had never thought I had a creative facet, but now I’m starting to think I might not know everything about myself yet, which is quite refreshing. The whole weekend in Scarborough was a discovery, an exploration of our own research and of ways in which to look at it from different angles, from creative approaches and involving others in reflecting about it too, which was an invaluable gift.

I did not realise how meaningful the connections made with the other young women participating in this fellowship would turn out to be. We introduced ourselves with a nice ice-breaking activity in which we started drawing connections that would then help us develop conversations around topics that mattered to us such as climate change, gender, vegetarianism and curry. Our love for chocolate and coffee also came up, together with our concern about the risk of losing them as we found out from Sarah Mander’s presentation. Sarah works @TyndallManc and explained the ways in which the UK is working to meet the commitments it has taken to reduce carbon emissions and help combat climate change. She mentioned that if the global temperature rises to 4C we would be losing chocolate and coffee.

Later, we had Laura Harrington’s presentation which I thought was very personal and generous. She talked about her research in landscapes and her interests in geomorphology, especially in the peat bogs of Cumbria/Northumberland. She showed us a video with different takes on the landscape she was working on and I could feel I was there, almost a part of it.  She was doing art by recording sounds on a wet day, filming the dripping and melting of snow and the drenched soil which made me feel cold. It was interesting to see the amount of patience and endurance she had to have to be able to film these scenes for hours, waiting, looking and absorbing the landscape through all her senses. I was surprised she enjoyed being there as I thought I would have only been able to stay in those conditions for a little while, comforted by the idea of soon going back to a warm and dry place. She put sensors, cameras, and films under the ground to see how they became part of the landscape after some time there, being exposed to these harsh conditions. It felt intimate as she was telling us what went through her head and what she wanted to do with the equipment. I admired Laura’s conviction and the way in which she would not listen to scientists’ advice when telling her “there is nothing to see here”. These suggestions did not prevent her from going to Finland in winter time and experiencing the landscape for herself.

She praised procrastination, as it is a place where imagination and creativity can emerge, which made me think about how much I fear procrastinating, without really valuing the precious gifts that leisure time can offer.

After this intense afternoon, we went for a nice walk into the TEC Campus, a beautiful place where we would get our own room, and space to walk, to meet, a great Canteen and friendly staff who were all the time accommodating to our needs. On the Friday, we worked on different ideas, especially about what makes as curious and thoughts we wanted to develop. We had an interesting talk by Julie Doyle, professor of media and communications at Brighton University. We worked on a critical reflection on media types, and on examples of effective and ineffective ways of communicating climate change. We also discussed the gendered aspects of some media depictions, we saw ways in which irony was used to spark discussions and we talked about different art forms and exhibitions that can reach audience’s attention while entertaining them and also offering a hopeful message. We mentioned the importance of responsibility when communicating climate change impacts, especially when talking to younger generations, so that we avoid making people feel disempowered.

We then had a Skype workshop with Gayle Chong Kwan in which we talked about the changes people can make in food consumption, and how we can all relate to food, which was one of the things that came up in our first ice breaker exercise. This was a great workshop in which we became active participants in the preparation of the Microclimate Banquet taking place at the Conference in June.

Gayle showed us pictures from the late XIX century were ice was brought from Norway to London as customers demanded ice for food preservation, for making ice cream, and for medical use. She also showed pictures of cattle in jails, as a way for us to imagine how meat production and food supply was organised in the past. This was a great prompt for starting a conversation on the impacts we have on the environment by consuming fruits that are grown in faraway lands, or products that travel long distances to get to our tables, like the avocados from Chile.

After lunch, we had the valuable input of Sarah Cartwright who taught us several tips for communicating effectively and present our ideas with confidence. We learned about the importance of breathing, of concentrating in our body and grounding ourselves so that we can be assertive and authoritative. Many of us were impressed with the fact that the content of our presentations is only 7% of what counts to make an impact. The rest of attention is related to our body language, the way we speak, and the tone of our voices. We learned tips for warming our vocal cords, making eye contact and on what to do with our hands. It is surprising that we hardly ever get advice on how to communicate our research, which makes me think of the important challenges that academia faces when researchers try to connect with people located in other spheres of knowledge such as the arts. These so called “soft skills” are generally overlooked and we spent more time working on our content than on the way we deliver it and the impact we make.

After this we split into two groups and we developed in 15 minutes, a 5 minute presentation in which we would use these suggestions to structure our talk. We all received very valuable feedback on our presentation style and were able to see what we were doing well and what things we could improve.

That night we watched the short film ‘Pumzi’ by Kenyan filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu, a sci-fi short film that pushes us to think about alternative futures. We also watched/heard Sabrina Mahfouz’s potent poem on climate refugees ‘‘The Environmental Refugee Holding Centre (ERHC)’.

Under Her Eye group of fellows.

Towards the end of the weekend we worked on learning how to make our ideas happen by applying for funds, doing a proposal pitch and looking for funding sources. This was practical advice on how to concretise our ideas.This weekend has boosted my curiosity and my practice of reflecting on the what, why, how and why of climate change action and communication. Moreover I made 14 new friends who I will be working with in the next six weeks leading up to Under Her Eye. It has been inspiring and a luxury to take time off to explore and celebrate the role of women taking action on climate change, and I appreciate the opportunity to have been part of this experience.

This weekend was a gift, as I could dedicate three full days to pause, reflect, write and share ideas and dreams with like-minded women. This time, when experienced, becomes an avenue for exploring our own abilities but also for creating in collaboration with others possibilities for transformation and hope, which are essential when communicating and engaging audiences in climate change action.
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This blog was written by Cabot Institute member Adriana Suarez, who is a PhD Candidate in Environment, Energy and Resilience at the School of Geographical Sciences. She is exploring community based water management in rural Chile through Institutional Ethnography, a feminist method of inquiry into social relations.

Adriana Suarez

Twitter: Adri_H2o
Email: as15606@bristol.ac.uk

‘Under Her Eye’ is curated and produced by award-winning arts science organisation Invisible Dust and supported by the Wellcome Trust, Euston Town BID, Creative Scotland, Mooncup and Arts Council England.

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.

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