Tag: city

E-scooters in Bristol: their potential contribution to a more sustainable transport system

Posted on by janet.crompton
Voi e-scooter parked across the pavement outside Victoria Rooms in Clifton. Image credit: Georgina de Courcy-Bower

At the end of October this year, the Swedish company Voi launched their e-scooters in Bristol as part of a pilot scheme. The government brought the scheme forward in the hope that e-scooters would ease demand for public transport and allow for social distancing during the Covid-19 pandemic. Earlier in the year, Marvin Rees said that he hoped e-scooters would help the city reduce congestion and air pollution. These are two key issues associated with a car-dominated transport system present in Bristol and many other cities around the world.

I have been investigating whether e-scooters could help Bristol to meet its sustainable transport targets. These include meeting net-zero emissions by 2030 and simultaneously reducing inequality within the city. However, between 2005 and 2017 the decrease in CO2 emissions in Bristol’s transport sector was only 9%. To reach net-zero by 2030, there will need to be an 88% decrease from the 2005 baseline.

E-scooters have been called a ‘last mile’ solution to fill the gaps between transport links and homes or offices which could draw more people away from their cars. My research has found that policies towards the new micromobility focused on decreasing transport inequalities in the United States. Conversely in Europe, there was more consideration for the environmental impact, but both continents have policies emphasising the importance of safety.

E-scooters and the environment

Despite cities frequently referencing environmental sustainability, few were found to have policies or regulations to ensure this. There was often an assumption that e-scooter users would previously have made their journey by car. However, in Paris only 8% of users would have driven if e-scooters were not an option. This was higher in the US, with cities consistently having a modal shift from cars of over 30%. However, this was explained by the lower availability of public transport compared with European cities. Therefore, US policies would not have the desired effect in Bristol.

A second environmental consideration is the lifecycle analysis of e-scooters. This shows that e-scooters still produce a significant amount of CO2 emissions, particularly when compared to active travel. E-scooters used as part of a sharing scheme are also frequently vandalised which shortens their lifespan. In UK cities which started their trials before Bristol, operators have already complained of high rates of vandalism. Many are also thrown into rivers which causes ecological impacts.

E-scooters and inequality

Many cities in the US have regulations aiming to improve access to transport for low-income communities. This has included unsuccessful discounted services. Operators have often failed to comply or the schemes have not been marketed. A more successful regulation was rebalancing e-scooters to ensure that some are placed in deprived communities. However, operators have claimed that this is economically and environmentally unsustainable. Using large trucks to move e-scooters around the city will increase CO2 emissions associated with them.

It is important that environmental goals do not come at the cost of excluding certain communities in the city, and vice versa. However, overall the most significant factor for decreasing inequality or decreasing CO2 emissions is which mode the shift comes from.

The most effective way to encourage a modal shift away from cars is to reallocate space to other modes and start designing cities around people. However, making such a significant change in the way we live our lives will be met with backlash from some. E-scooters can help mitigate this by providing an alternative mode of transport that could make the reallocation of road space to micromobilities more politically feasible.

Safety of e-scooters

What can be agreed upon by everyone is that e-scooters must be safe for users and for those around them. The main complaints about e-scooters are that they block pavements for more vulnerable pedestrians and in most cities, e-scooters are banned from pavement riding. Nevertheless, casual observation shows that this is often ignored. However, in Portland it was found that the presence of cycle lanes and lower speed limits decreased e-scooter pavement use by around 30%. In Bristol, 70% of respondents for a Sustrans survey supported building more cycle tracks even if it took space away from other traffic. The presence of cycle tracks could also lead to more active travel which has co-benefits for individual health and wellbeing.

Governance of e-scooters

E-scooters and other shared mobility technologies are part of a change in governance. There is now collaboration between public and private and it is essential that communication between the two is transparent. Local authorities must make clear their goals and set boundaries for operators without restricting them to the extent that they are unable to provide their services.

Overall, e-scooters alone are not going to solve our dysfunctional urban transport systems. However, they might provide a catalyst for more radical change away from the car-dominated city.

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This blog was written by Georgina de Courcy-Bower, a recent graduate from the MSc Environmental Policy and Management course at the University of Bristol. The blog is based on her dissertation which was supervised by Cabot Institute member Dr Sean Fox.

Georgina de Courcey-Bower

 

 

 

Rebuilding Bristol as a city of care

Posted on by janet.crompton

I was asked to speak at an event organised by the Mayor of Bristol, Marvin Rees and the City Office team that brought together academics and other interested in rebuilding Bristol. I was asked to respond to the following question and thought people might be interested in reading the full text here:

‘Bristol, along with cities all over the globe, is facing an unprecedented health, economic and social crisis. This brings both a challenge and an opportunity to rebuild our city. If we do it well, Bristol will be more inclusive, more sustainable and more resilient in the face of future shocks. If we do it without thinking, falling into old assumptions (i.e. badly), the opposite is true. How should we rebuild our city?’

In 5 minutes I can only hope to raise some issues and matters of concern. There are many present here today who will know a lot more than me about aspects of social justice – especially around race, disability and class and I hope they will join in afterwards with comments and concerns. This is intended to be a provocation for ongoing conversations that bring diverse knowledges and expertise together so that we can begin to rebuild our city to be more inclusive, sustainable and resilient.

We knew before this pandemic struck that many communities and organisations were facing an ongoing crisis – a crisis in which inequalities are growing, where austerity and a desire for growth at all costs had pushed cities around the world into a situation where social, economic and environmental justice were comprised.

The pandemic has helped to make visible where people and communities are falling through the cracks in our cities and illustrated more widely that a return to business as usual is not an attractive option for those of us interested in social, economic and environmental justice. It is not an option for those families living in crowded accommodation who don’t have enough food on a daily basis, it’s not an option for those living with disabilities or ill health who rely on inadequate, time rationed segments of care delivered by care workers who are undervalued and underpaid. It’s not an option either if we want to take our responsibilities to the planet seriously.

So what have we seen during this crisis that helps us to understand our challenges as a city and the assets that we have to draw on in rebuilding them.

We have seen the incredible efforts of the community and voluntary sector in the city who have built on established and designed new alliances to tackle their communities’ needs. These initiatives have gone way beyond reactively responding to the everyday, urgent needs of their communities. For instance, Knowle West Alliance, developed over the last two years, brings together large and small community organisations- they have set up a community food bank, coordinated volunteers, communicated through digital and postal service with all community members, used the amazing Bristol Can Do platform to recruit volunteers and assign them to a brand new befriending service and committed to reflecting and learning as part of this discussion. The Support Hub for older people, set up in 2 weeks in order to bring together organisations in the city concerned with the needs of older people, were determined to draw on their collective expertise to provide a range of support for older people including practical and emotional support but also virtual activities. These examples, and many others, demonstrate how through working collaboratively across sectors and alongside our communities we can go way beyond provision of ‘crisis’ support. They have shown the value and strength of the civil society sector in the city in working alongside communities at the margins building on their ongoing, long term work and trusted relationships with the communities that they serve.

We have finally appreciated and valued the key workers who support systems of care in the city – the care workers, teachers, food delivery workers and community development workers. Raising questions around how we might change our systems of value in the city.

Our neighbourhoods and streets have fostered intergenerational and cross cultural discussion and we have made new friends – we have come together in Whats App groups and through socially distant street gatherings to share our concerns, to provide care where this has been needed and, importantly, to laugh and cry together. A question we might want to explore here relates to how we might develop ‘community’ across our neighbourhoods providing the support we all need across generational and cultural difference, in and between hyperlocal areas?

Our green spaces have provided the space for those without gardens to enjoy fresh air and exercise, whilst socially distancing. Roads, free of cars, have provided new found space for children and families to play and cleaner air, particularly in those areas of the city where poor air quality is a particular concern. Lizzi has already suggested the need to capitalize on this in bringing forward environmental change in our city and globally.

I would argue that in Bristol’s response to COVID 19 we have seen that our city is a place resplendent with learning, creativity, innovation and care.

I want to pick up particularly on this last word which I think is highly relevant. I want to suggest that if we want to tackle issues of social, economic and environmental justice we need to retain a focus on the role of care in the city. I draw on the feminist scholar Jean Tronto’s definition of care as ‘everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair ‘our’ world so that we can live in it as well as possible. Feminist approaches to care foreground our interdependencies, and encourage us to take notice of peoples’ lived experiences, their existing knowledges and expertise and the stories they tell about them. They encourage us to do what Jane Jacob’s the great American City planner suggested – to take notice of the complexity of our city, to look closely ‘at the most ordinary scenes and events and attempt to see what they mean and whether any threads of principle emerge.’ (Jacobs, 161, p.23). I think we have seen a lot of these ordinary scenes during this pandemic but that we need to work quickly to recognise the threads of principles and new values that might emerge.

My suggestion is that we need to work care-fully together to build on the wide range of vital and lively existing learning, innovation and creativity in our cities. However, a word of caution. We must not make assumptions that there is consensus on what these principles or values might be and we need to recognize that ‘rebuilding Bristol’, especially if we want to challenge concerns around social, economic and environmental justice, will not be easy. We will need to continually ask ‘who is not involved?’ We will need to ensure that we work with others who are ‘not like us’ or with whom we disagree. We will need to design new processes and methods for this and we will have to be open to building new relational capacities in the process, with each other but also with the environment surrounding us.

I want to finish by saying this is a moment that we need to grasp head on drawing on the many assets that we have in the city, many of which have been made more visible through this crisis. We have achieved so much in the city during this pandemic which will support us to work differently to challenge questions of social, economic and environmental justice in the city.

**Watch Helen discuss this subject area in more detail in our Annual Lecture 2019 below**


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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Helen Manchester, Associate Professor in Digital Inequalities & Urban Futures at the School of Education, University of Bristol and a Bristol City Fellow. This blog was reposted with kind permission from the School of Education blog. View the original blog.

Helen Manchester

Three history lessons to help reduce damage from earthquakes

Posted on by janet.crompton

Earthquakes don’t kill people,’ the saying goes. ‘Buildings do.’
There is truth in the adage: the majority of deaths during and just after earthquakes are due to the collapse of buildings. But the violence of great catastrophes is not confined to collapsed walls and falling roofs. Earthquakes also have broader effects on people, and the environments we live in.

The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP)’s second Disaster Resilience Week starts in Bangkok on 26 August 2019. Practitioners and researchers have achieved great progress in reducing disaster risk over the past few decades, but we must do more to save lives and protect livelihoods.

Can history help?

Building against disaster

Buildings are a good, practical place to start.

Material cultures offer paths to resilience. A major example is traditional building styles that reduce the threat from seismic shaking. A building is not only a compilation of bricks and stones, but a social element that reflects the cultural life of a community. This is the powerful point made by the Kathmandu-based NGO, National Society for Earthquake Technology (NSET), in a recent report on traditional Nepalese building styles.

NSET, and others working in the field, have identified features of traditional building styles that limit damage during shaking. For example, diagonal struts distribute the load of a roof and limit damage during earthquake shaking.

Historic building with diagonal struts at Patan Durbar Square, Kathmandu, Nepal. Photo: Daniel Haines, 2017

This is important because parts of falling buildings often kill people.

Nearby, in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, the royal government is investigating the earthquake-resistant features of traditional rammed-earth buildings.

An old (c. 400 years?) rammed-earth residential building near Paro, Bhutan. Photo: Daniel Haines, 2017

In fact, seismically-appropriate building styles have evolved along similar lines across a huge Eurasian arc of tectonic unrest, from Italy to Kashmir.

But in most countries, population pressure and the use of cheap, unreinforced concrete construction in growing towns and cities has crowded out traditional construction methods.

Reducing disaster risk always means weighing costs in the present against potential protection in the future. Recovering or encouraging traditional methods is potentially cheaper than enforcing modern seismic engineering.

Long-term health impacts

Focusing only on buildings, though, neglects other important aspects of large earthquakes. These shocks do not only shake buildings down, but can dramatically re-shape landscapes by causing huge landslides, changing the level of water in rivers and leading to flooding.

History shows that these changes can hurt people for months or years after the rubble of buildings have been cleared and reconstruction has begun.

For example, a giant (8.4 Mw) earthquake struck northeast India in 1897. Its epicentre was near Shillong, in the borderlands between British India and China. Luckily, the quake happened in the afternoon, so most people were out of doors. The official death toll – the number of deaths that the colonial government attributed directly to the earthquake – was around 1,500.

Yet officials also thought the poor health conditions that followed the earthquake and the substantial floods that it caused were largely responsible for a major cholera epidemic which killed 33,000 people in the Brahmaputra Valley during the same year. That is twice as many as the previous year.

From the available evidence, it is not yet clear how directly the earthquake and the cholera deaths were linked, but other examples saw similar scenarios. In 1934, another major (8.0 Mw) quake devastated parts of Nepal and North India.

This time, the official death toll in India was around 7,500, but again many more people died from related health complications over the following years. In one district in northern Bihar province, an average of 55,000 people died of fever every year over the next decade. In other areas, malaria was unusually prevalent over the same period.

Government reports held secondary effects of the earthquake responsible for the high death rate.
Events that happened long ago therefore demonstrate the complexity of earthquakes’ impacts, even on the relatively straightforward question mortality. Studying them highlights the need to focus present-day disaster responses on long-term health implications.

Of course, this says nothing of earthquakes’ less concrete, but very important, impacts on social structures, community life, governance or the economy.

History in action

In some cases, historical researchers are contributing directly to initiatives to reduce risk from natural disasters.

Hurricane Katrina showed in 2005 that low-lying New Orleans is terribly vulnerable to storm surge and flooding. Craig Colten, a historical geographer at Louisiana State University, is working with a team of scientists to find solutions by raising the height of the ground in parts of the city while adding forested wetlands on its north shore. Colten is studying analogous historical efforts in other American cities – flood-control measures in nineteenth-century Chicago and responses to hurricanes in Galveston, Texas, around 1900 – as well as examining previous proposals for creating buffers between New Orleans and the sea.

These historical examples provide evidence of what works and what does not. They also highlight the politics of decision-making that help determine whether local communities will support landscape engineering projects.

The international frameworks governing disaster risk reduction such as the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and the Sustainable Development Goals understandably focus on the present, not the past. Historians need to join the conversation to show practitioners that lessons from the past can help build resilience in the future.

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Dr Daniel Haines, an environmental historian at the University of Bristol.

Dr Daniel Haines

 

 

Bristol and the Sustainable Development Goals

Posted on by janet.crompton

 

Image credit: @Bristol Design, Bristol City Council
The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are often referred to as “the closest thing the world has to a strategy.” The 17 Global Goals,  agreed at the United Nations General Assembly in 2015, set out 169 targets to be achieved by the year 2030. These targets cover a wide range of issues, such as poverty, inequality, gender equality, education, health, infrastructure, energy, climate change and more. Underpinning the Goals is an ambition to reduce our impact on the planet and reduce divisive inequalities in society without making anybody poorer or worse off.
 
Progress towards meeting the SDGs is normally monitored and reported at the national level through the production of Voluntary National Reviews which are presented to the United Nations at an annual event known as the High-Level Political Forum.
 
However, there has been a surge of interest in ‘localising’ the SDGs in cities around the world by promoting their use, integrating them into city plans and policies, and monitoring progress at the city (rather than national) scale by undertaking Voluntary Local Reviews (VLRs). In July 2018, a handful of cities around the world reported on their own progress by submitting VLRs to the United Nations.
 
Inspired by these city-level pioneers, researchers at the Cabot Institute secured a grant from Bristol University’s UK Economic and Social Research Council Impact Acceleration Account to produce the UK’s first VLR, Bristol and the SDGs: A Voluntary Local Review 2019
 
 
 
This report was produced through a partnership between the Cabot Institute for the Environment at the University of Bristol and the Bristol City Office. It reflects a whole-city approach to tackling the SDGs and includes information on the activities of 90 Bristol based organisations working to make the city more economically, environmentally and socially sustainable. The report covers all 17 SDGs and includes data from over 140 statistical indicators.
 
In many areas Bristol is performing well. There have been very significant improvements in the quality of education in the city, particularly in early years attainment. Bristol’s economy has grown consistently in recent years while unemployment has fallen. Energy consumption and local carbon emissions have fallen, and a strong civic commitment to climate action is clear: Bristol City Council was the first city in the UK to declare a climate emergency, followed shortly thereafter by the University of Bristol. While these trends and initiatives are positive, we cannot be complacent. Bristol’s stated ambition to achieve carbon neutrality will require sustained efforts at scale by a wide range of stakeholders across sectors and levels of government.
 
In other areas Bristol has performed less-well. Child poverty has been rising in the city and food insecurity is deep in some areas. The gender pay gap in the city has barely changed despite rising wages for women. Where it is possible to disaggregate indicators, it is clear that inequalities persist across neighbourhoods, income groups and ethnicities. Poverty, food insecurity and youth opportunities are spatially concentrated. Despite falling mortality rates overall, the life expectancy gap between the most deprived and least deprived citizens has grown. And the unemployment rate among some ethnic minorities is nearly double that of white citizens.
 
Bristol’s One City Plan, which was developed through extensive engagement with citizens and stakeholders and is mapped onto the SDGs, already reflects many of these challenges, which will not surprise most Bristolians. Fortunately, as our report shows, organisations across the public and non-profit sectors, as well as the city government, are tackling these issues in creative ways, from the neighbourhood scale to the city scale. Many others are seeking to make positive impacts further afield.
 
In producing this report we encountered a range of difficult questions, data issues and new insights. The functional area of Bristol is much larger than the City of Bristol—the subject of this report. This difference between the de facto urban area and formal administrative boundaries create challenges in both implementing and monitoring the Goals at sub-national level. Beyond this, there is a clear need for an indicator framework that is tailored to the urban scale and suitable across income contexts. We faced a number of data gaps particularly in monitoring poverty, food insecurity, gender equality, domestic material consumption, aquatic life and life on land. A subnational perspective also highlights the importance of disaggregating data if we are to take the ‘leave no one behind’ ethos of the goals seriously. Many indicators showed positive trends at the city level but held hidden inequalities held when disaggregated. If cities are to effectively work towards the ‘Leave No One Behind’ agenda then more ward level data is needed.
 
Looking forward, cities have an important role to play in tackling global challenges, including influencing how the concentrations of capital in cities are channelled beyond their boundaries. Where and how the capital generated in cities can have enormous consequences on achieving the SDGs within cities and elsewhere and it is vitally important that large investment and pension funds consider how they responsibly use their resources.
 
But cities cannot do it alone. City governments need support from private sector and non-profit actors, as well as higher tiers of government and international organisations. It will not be possible to achieve the SDGs locally without increased devolution of local powers. The SDGs and the One City Plan both provide the kind of shared vision needed to forge strategic cross-sectoral partnerships to achieve a sustainable future. Cities are increasingly taking the lead in confronting global challenges, but they need support to follow through.
 
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This blog is written by Allan Macleod, SDG research and engagement associate working across Bristol Green Capital Partnership, Bristol City Council and the University of Bristol Cabot Institute for the Environment.

Allan Macleod

 

Belo Monte: there is nothing green or sustainable about these mega-dams

Posted on by janet.crompton

 

File 20180807 191041 1xhv2ft.png?ixlib=rb 1.1
Google Maps

There are few dams in the world that capture the imagination as much as Belo Monte, built on the “Big Bend” of the Xingu river in the Brazilian Amazon. Its construction has involved an army of 25,000 workers working round the clock since 2011 to excavate over 240m cubic metres of soil and rock, pour three million cubic metres of concrete, and divert 80% of the river’s flow through 24 turbines.

 

The dam is located about 200km before the 1,640km Xingu meets the Amazon. kmusser, CC BY-SA

Costing R$30 billion (£5.8 billion), Belo Monte is important not only for the scale of its construction but also the scope of opposition to it. The project was first proposed in the 1970s, and ever since then, local indigenous communities, civil society and even global celebrities have engaged in numerous acts of direct and indirect action against it.

While previous incarnations had been cancelled, Belo Monte is now in the final stages of construction and already provides 11,233 megawatts of energy to 60m Brazilians across the country. When complete, it will be the largest hydroelectric power plant in the Amazon and the fourth largest in the world.

Indigenous protests against Belo Monte at the UN’s sustainable development conference in Rio, 2012. Fernando Bizerra Jr / EPA

A ‘sustainable’ project?

The dam is to be operated by the Norte Energia consortium (formed of a number of state electrical utilities) and is heavily funded by the Brazilian state development bank, BNDES. The project’s supporters, including the governments of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party) that held office between 2003 and 2011, have justified its construction on environmental grounds. They describe Belo Monte as a “sustainable” project, linking it to wider policies of climate change mitigation and a transition away from fossil fuels. The assertions of the sustainability of hydropower are not only seen in Brazil but can be found across the globe – with large dams presented as part of wider sustainable development agendas.

With hydropower representing 16.4% of total global installed energy capacity, hydroelectric dams are a significant part of efforts to reduce carbon emissions. More than 2,000 such projects are currently funded via the Clean Development Mechanism of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol – second only to wind power by number of individual projects.

While this provides mega-dams with an environmental seal of approval, it overlooks their numerous impacts. As a result, dams funded by the CDM are contested across the globe, with popular opposition movements highlighting the impacts of these projects and challenging their asserted sustainability.

Beautiful hill, to beautiful monster

Those standing against Belo Monte have highlighted its social and environmental impacts. An influx of 100,000 construction and service workers has transformed the nearby city of Altamira, for instance.

Hundreds of workers – unable to find employment – took to sleeping on the streets. Drug traffickers also moved in and crime and violence soared in the city. The murder rate in Altamira increased by 147% during the years of Belo Monte construction, with it becoming the deadliest city on earth in 2015.

In 2013, police raided a building near the construction site to find 15 women, held against their will and forced into sex work. Researchers later found that the peak hours of visits to their building – and others – coincided with the payday of those working on Belo Monte. In light of this social trauma, opposition actors gave the project a new moniker: Belo Monstro, meaning “Beautiful Monster”.

The construction of Belo Monte is further linked to increasing patterns of deforestation in the region. In 2011, deforestation in Brazil was highest in the area around Belo Monte, with the dam not only deforesting the immediate area but stimulating further encroachment.

In building roads to carry both people and equipment, the project has opened up the wider area of rainforest to encroachment and illegal deforestation. Greenpeace has linked illegal deforestation in indigenous reserves – more than 200km away – to the construction of the project, with the wood later sold to those building the dam.

Brazil’s past success in reversing deforestation rates became a key part of the country’s environmental movement. Yet recently deforestation has increased once again, leading to widespread international criticism. With increasing awareness of the problem, the links between hydropower and the loss of the Amazon rainforest challenge the continued viability of Belo Monte and similar projects.

Big dams, big problems

While the Clean Development Mechanism focuses on the reduction of carbon emissions, it overlooks other greenhouse gases emitted by hydropower. Large dams effectively emit significant quantities of methane for instance, released by the decomposition of plants and trees below the reservoir’s surface. While methane does not stay in the atmosphere for as long as carbon dioxide (only persisting for up to 12 years), its warming potential is far higher.

Belo Monte has been linked to these methane emissions by numerous opposition actors. Further research has found that the vegetation rotting in the reservoirs of dams across the globe may emit a million tonnes of greenhouse gases per year. As a result, it is claimed that these projects are – in fact – making a net contribution to climate change.

Far from providing a sustainable, renewable energy solution in a climate-changed world, Belo Monte is instead cast as exacerbating the problem that it is meant to solve.

The ConversationBelo Monte is just one of many dams across the globe that have been justified – and funded – as sustainable pursuits. Yet, this conflates the ends with the means. Hydroelectricity may appear relatively “clean” but the process in which a mega-dam is built is far from it. The environmental credentials of these projects remain contested, with Belo Monte providing just one example of how the sustainability label may finally be slipping.

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Ed Atkins, Senior Teaching Associate, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol.  This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Ed Atkins

The planet in our hands: Bristol talks climate change with Sir Mark Walport

Posted on by janet.crompton
Sir Mark Walport
Source:Wikimedia Commons

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to participate in a round table discussion at At-Bristol with Sir Mark Walport, the UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser.  It was part of his tour of UK Science and Discovery Centres, during which he has been summarising our understanding of climate change science: The Planet in Our Hands – Responding to Climate Change.

The round table that preceded his talk was initiated and chaired by Dr Penny Fidler, CEO of the UK Association for Science and Discovery Centres.  It was an invigorating conversation about what Bristol is doing to transition to a greener, more resilient and sustainable economy.   I have lived in Bristol for thirteen years but my research leans toward the global and it is easy to lose sight of the bold initiatives and grass roots campaigning occurring in our city.  We live in a city that thrives on a cocktail of technological innovation, thriving digital and creative industries, artistic multiculturalism and political radicalism. It produces interesting tensions and opportunities, such as the Bristol Solar City, with an ambition to install 1 GigaWatt of solar PV by 2020.

These are the reasons why Bristol has been named the European Green Capital for 2015  – the first and currently only UK Green Capital – an honour that should make us feel proud but also an obligation to act and to lead. Consequently, Sir Mark devoted additional time for his Bristol visit to learn about our ambitions and ask questions about how we will achieve them.  For example, we discussed the role of the Cabot Institute in Bristol European Green Capital 2015, our efforts to inform and catalyse change, and the mechanisms by which we can better engage with our City.

It was also a fantastic opportunity to learn from Bristol’s civic and community leaders who were also in the room. Alex Minshull (Sustainable City Manager of Bristol City Council) spoke of the successes they have had in community energy and home insulation.  He and Darren Hall (Director of Big Green Week and now the Partnerships and Legacy Manager for Bristol 2015) also spoke about the limits to that approach – how we have led the UK in the uptake of loft and cavity wall insulation but now face the steep challenge of installing solid wall insulation.  This could transform our homes, but it does cost a bit more money and causes a bit more disruption.  What role does the Cabot Institute have in identifying the social, economic and personal barriers and catalysing the step change required?

Kris Donaldson, the recently appointed Director of Bristol 2015, charged with delivering Bristol European Green Capital 2015, spoke about his plans.  Kris and I had yet to meet and I was deeply impressed by his enthusiasm for the project.  He understood the cultural aspects of the project, and given his previous role as leader of the Liverpool Culture Capital 2008 Company it is no surprise that he was enthusiastic about that.  However, we shared an ambition that Bristol 2015 must also encompass political and social change, if we are to make the best of this opportunity and transform the city.

Kris is also keen that Bristol serves as an exemplar to Europe and the rest of the world. This is particularly timely because 2015 will end with climate negotiations in Paris to determine the successor to the Kyoto Protocol. This is an area ripe for collaboration with the University of Bristol and the Cabot Institute, as we work with the City of Bristol to share knowledge of climate change and forge solutions. Prof Colin Taylor, leading our Future Cities and Communities activity, has proposed a new framework for exploring and learning from the continuous and ongoing ‘experiments’ occurring in a city as dynamic as Bristol: The Collaboratory.  It is a way to energise societal transformation – and to learn from it.

Also present was Claire Craig, who leads the Government Office for Science and has recently joined the Cabot Institute’s External Advisory Board (itself chaired by Sir Mark’s predecessor, Sir John Beddington).  Others in attendance included the Cabot Institute Manager, Dr Philippa Bayley, there in her additional and new role as co-Chair of the Green Capital Partnership; Martin Bigg (Director of the Environmental Technologies Innovation Network (iNet), University of the West of England); Phil Winfield (CEO of At-Bristol); and Chris Dunford (Informal Learning and Sustainability Manager of At-Bristol).  It was a dynamic discussion, spanning a range of policy, education and engagement issues.  But it was all too brief, and I am looking forward to continuing conversations with everyone who was there.

The talk itself was excellent, clearly and firmly reprising our current understanding of climate change.  Appropriately, it largely arose from the IPCC report and briefings from the Met Office.  Being familiar with the science, I found the discussion, chaired by Professor Alice Roberts (Professor of Public Engagement in Science at the University of Birmingham, and Patron of ASDC), to be more illuminating.  As you might expect from a Bristol audience, Sir Mark was repeatedly challenged about specific government policies, such as subsidies for shale gas extraction, that will likely exacerbate rather than mitigate climate change.  It showcased the challenges and opportunities of advising government.  Sir Mark obviously values the opportunity he has to inform and influence policy decisions, but he also clearly defined his role as an advisor and not an advocate.

And inevitably, of course, that led the discussion back to the rest of us.  Experts advise; the public votes.  And we must decide as voters how to treat politicians who ignore or disrespect their own experts.   Within that frame, the Cabot Institute sits in a unique position.  We can and should comment on the consequences of specific political decisions. We have an obligation not only to serve as another expert working behind the scenes but as a partner with the media and public to develop and share knowledge.  In Bristol, the lead-up to 2015 and beyond will be an exhilarating time to do so.

Watch Mark Walport’s talk at Bristol.

This blog is by Prof Rich Pancost, Director of the Cabot Institute.

Prof Rich Pancost

 

Bristol Green Doors: Measuring the impact of retrofitting

Posted on by janet.crompton

Energy has recently dominated the news, with headlines proclaiming that household costs (as well as company profits) are on the increase.  Overshadowed in this discussion are the environmental impacts:  over a quarter of the UK’s carbon emissions come from a domestic context, primarily through energy use.  Over the past decade, the field of HCI (human-computer interaction) has become increasingly concerned with issues of sustainability, and a number of researchers have chosen to focus on energy reduction strategies.  Many of these efforts have resulted in technology that aims to persuade the user to use less gas and electricity by providing them with personalised information, whether in the form of facts and figures (e.g. home energy portals) or through ambient displays like the Power Aware cord.

However, there is one method of reducing home energy use that has received little attention: retrofitting.  Installing measures such as double glazing, wall insulation, or a more efficient boiler can not only reduce carbon emissions, it can also reduce a household’s energy bills and make it more comfortable to live in.  Yet unlike the incremental behavioural changes tackled by persuasive technology, retrofitting is a one-time intervention in which the focus of energy saving shifts from an individual’s behaviour to the physical fabric of the building itself.  As a result, it sits at the curious intersection of sustainability through product consumption, requiring present expenditure for future monetary savings, and trades current disruption and inconvenience for the hope of future thermal comfort.  Retrofitting is further complicated by its very nature: there is no one-size-fits-all solution.

Enter the community initiative Bristol Green Doors.  Founded in 2010, the organisation runs an eco-homes open house event approximately every 18 months.  Householders who have already installed retrofitting measures open their opens to the public to share their experience, the pros and cons of different measures, the benefits that the retrofitting has brought, or what they wish they had done differently.  This allows those who are interested in retrofitting to see the measures in action and learn more from trusted sources: their own neighbours.

Yet measuring the impact of such an event is difficult.  Anecdotally, there were indications that visitors would be inspired by the open weekend to contact local companies who provided retrofitting services, but no easy way of directly tracking activity back to the event.  Without this quantitative data, it is difficult for Bristol Green Doors to secure additional sponsors and become self supporting.  Dr. Chris Preist’s involvement as a Bristol Green Doors householder helped him identify that technology could play a role in bridging this gap, and a successful funding application allowed the Digital Green Doors project to proceed.

A series of brainstorming sessions were held with key stakeholders to determine what features would be most useful to both Bristol Green Doors visitors and to the organisation itself.  A number of intriguing ideas were put forward, with several chosen to be made into a smartphone application.  The Greendoors app was developed by researcher Daniel Schien around a basic mapping application that shows the location of the participating Bristol Green Doors houses.  Users can then delve further into the houses to learn what features each has installed, take notes on the individual houses, and some householders have agreed to be contacted by email after the event.  This allows visitors to get questions answered beyond the weekend itself.  Other features include being able to filter houses by measure and save houses to a shortlist, e.g. showing just the houses that the user plans to visit.

The final feature of the app is a QR code scanner, which the Digital Green Doors team has chosen to deploy in an unusual way.  QR codes are the square barcodes that have proliferated on advertisements and products.  QR typically stands for Quick Response, with a user scanning a code and their smartphone immediately linking to a website or displaying the encoded information.  However, in this case it’s a matter of “delayed response”.  A specific QR code was produced for each retrofitting measure in each Bristol Green Door house, and when scanned by the app it is saved to the user’s account.  This is then used to produce a personalised report of information about the measures the user is interested in, grouped by measure type to allow for easy comparison.  The report is in emailed to the user after the event.  In addition to providing a numeric view of each measure (i.e. the cost and the level of disruption as rated by the householder), the householders also share a few words of advice, such as this blurb about loft insulation:

“This measure is cheap yet effective.  Do spend the extra and use environmentally friendly insulation such as sheeps wool. Double up rafters to board out afterwards. We have topped this up further ourselves — very simple so long as you follow the guidelines about leaving ventilation space at the eaves.”

 

The suppliers, products, and general sites of interest contained within the report are all hyperlinked.  The purpose of this is two-fold.  First, it intends to assist the user by giving them the information they want in one place, making it easier for them to conduct research about the measures they wish to install.  It is hoped that this will help turn intention to retrofit into action.  Second, by allowing basic tracking to occur via click throughs, it allows the initial goal of the project to be fulfilled by directly measuring interest that has occurred as a result of the event.  While it cannot yet determine whether a user has gone ahead with the purchase of a retrofitting measure, it is a step towards helping Bristol Green Doors become self supporting.  For the Digital Green Doors team, it allows research to be carried out on a novel way of using QR codes, and also allows retrofitting to be introduced to within the discipline of HCI by showing how it is possible to move beyond persuasion and behaviour change.
IKEA solar panels. Image from Witchdoctor.co.nz

It is too early to report on the effect of the app and the reports, but the initial responses have been positive.  This is encouraging news as it will allow the Greendoors app to be used at other eco-homes events in the future, with the possibility of a nationwide rollout.  With IKEA selling solar panels and now an app designed around retrofitting, it is hoped that the process of retrofitting, and its associated carbon reduction, will become more mainstream.

This blog is written by Dr Elaine Massung, Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Engineering, University of Bristol.

Dr Elaine Massung

Sustainable landscapes for the future

Posted on by janet.crompton

On the 18th of July, the Cabot Institute at the University of Bristol hosted a one day conference for academics, landscape designers, industrial partners and policy makers to discuss how to create sustainable urban landscapes for the future. The event was organised to promote the exchange of ideas and to combine expertise from all stages of the process to determine how to create spaces that would maximise biodiversity and environmental benefits whilst remaining somewhere that people love to use.

City Academy Meadow, Bristol

A common theme throughout the conference was whether green spaces in cities can be designed to accommodate the needs of both local wildlife and people. Professor Nigel Dunnett from the University of Sheffield was one of the principle designers of the Olympic Park landscape, where he created a stunning biodiverse pictorial meadow with a long flowering season. His presentation highlighted the importance of creating a landscape that wildlife will benefit from, but critically that people will use and love. Professor Dunnett argued that we take more joy from seeing a beautiful expanse of flowers than a lawn monoculture and that “beauty in biodiversity is about people in ecology”.  Landscape architect Kym Jones echoed this, describing landscapes that people don’t want to use as “socially unsustainable”, no matter how many environmentally-friendly boxes they tick.

Professor Dunnett’s urban meadows are controversial because he often uses non-native plant species in his design to increase the flowering period. Professor Jane Memmott of the University of Bristol Urban Pollinators research group presented data collected at nature reserves, farms and urban green spaces around Bristol that suggest most pollinators don’t really mind whether native or non-indigenous plant species are used, as long as they produce a lot of flowers. She reported that whilst pollinators are more numerous in nature reserves than urban sites, the cities retain a high level of species diversity that it is important to protect in the future. This called into question the BREEAM system of measuring sustainability in new developments, which does not usually allow non-native species to be incorporated into a design.

Professor Graham Stone

The debate about whether people would accept more biodiverse landscapes continued by questioning public opinion. Many established parks are attached to historical expectations of that place; typically well-manicured lawns and pruned trees. The group agreed that it was time to try and change the public’s  perception to accept a little wilderness in parks and gardens as a habitat for local wildlife. Urban meadows begin to look neglected after flowering, however Professor Graham Stone of the University of Edinburgh mentioned that it is important to let the plants produce their seeds to provide birds with an important food source in the autumn. Bristol City Council have been trialling annual meadows in central reservations around the approaches to the city, and reported that they had not had any complaints from local residents about plants looking untidy when dying back at the end of the season. With sustainable landscaping becoming more popular in UK schools and communities, it is hoped that the public perception towards ecologically friendly designs have already begun to change.

Dr. Sarah Webster presented DEFRA’s hopes for sustainable urban developments. The 2010 Making Space for Nature report outlined new guidelines for reducing the huge pressures on wildlife, which state that new landscapes should enhance the UK’s ecological network by being bigger, better and more connected to existing habitats. DEFRA is currently trialling “biodiversity offsets”, where companies restore an equivalent area for every habitat that is unavoidably lost during a development. It is currently undecided whether or not these offsets will be mandatory if introduced, and it remains difficult to quantify the importance of a habitat in order to produce a new site of equal value to the environment. If this scheme goes ahead, careful planning could ensure that urban landscapes become more connected and form ecological networks within cities.

One of the major difficulties facing the landscape industry is how to measure the economic benefits of sustainability. Howard Wood presented his work with Lyon Parks Department in France, an ambitious project that saved hundreds of thousands of Euros over a year using ecologically-friendly design and maintenance. His team made their own compost from green plant waste and horse manure, killed weeds using hot water, used bio-control methods to remove pests, planted annual meadows to reduce mowing and maintenance of lawns, and used wood chippings as mulch to reduce weeds and improve soil water retention. The group decided that one of the key aims for the future is to improve the baseline knowledge of how much money different types of sustainable landscape cost to create or maintain, and whether they will cost councils and developers less in contrast to the traditional landscape designs.

The day ended with a request from the landscape industry partners for academics to make new sustainability research more easily accessible and understandable. Kym Jones mentioned that sustainability is now an integral part of landscape design, but landscape architects need to have the facts about its importance and value to be able to sell it to their clients. The overwhelming feeling was that green lawns alone are not enough; urban meadows promote biodiversity whilst producing beautiful displays of colour for people to enjoy. Professor Dunnett summed the day up best for me when he said, “we need to mix aesthetics and beauty with the science”. We are building places for people and local wildlife, and innovative new approaches

This blog is written by Sarah Jose, Biological Sciences, University of Bristol
Sarah Jose
 
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