Tag: resilience

Delivering the ‘Future City’: our economy and the nature of ‘growth’

Posted on by janet.crompton

In Bristol’s European Green Capital year, the University of Bristol and its Cabot Institute have been working with the Bristol Green Capital Partnership and its members to convene a series of four conversations between Bristol academics and city ‘thinkers’ from across public, private and civil society exploring how Bristol delivers the ‘future city’ –  what capacities it needs to be resilient, sustainable and successful and how it can start to develop these in times of changing governance and tightened finances. The conversations will be reflected in a series of four blogs (the fourth below) and then brought together as a policy report as well as discussing at the Festival of the Future City in November.  You can connect to the other blogs from this series at the bottom of this blog.
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Wordle of what we thought we’d talk about…

Cities such as Bristol are increasingly prominent in national growth strategies. The economic growth that Bristol helps to drive plays a fundamental role in shaping many aspects of life within the city. Different sectors, areas and social groups participate in and feel the impacts of growth in different ways. For some, the need for growth is unquestionable, particularly in an era of austerity, with the assumption that growth somehow underpins the pursuit of all other objectives. But for others, the pre-eminent growth logic is divisive socially and unsustainable environmentally. Growth therefore needs to be at least managed and possibly challenged more fundamentally. In this fourth conversation we considered what economic models make sense for the city and what capacity the city has to make changes in the context of a national and international economic system.

Growth – the elephant in the room?

In considering the future economy of the city, growth is the dominant idea but does this have to be economic growth with the associated ongoing increase of resource consumption? As we saw when discussing austerity, GDP growth is not contributing to long term stability environmentally or societally.   This debate was an opportunity to further explore growth and other measures of prosperity and how much is within the city’s control.

One participant drew an analogy with the natural environment and the way that living organisms are born, develop, mature and die – there isn’t enough space for everything to grow indefinitely. If we only talk about growth then we are only talking about half of life and missing the bit where some things die in order to make space to develop and nurture other life or something new.

There are two big reasons for needing growth, one is to service (interest bearing) debt – to pay back more than was borrowed needs growth. The second reason that growth is the mantra, particularly internationally, is that if a population is growing, you need economic growth otherwise by definition living standards are declining – and population growth is something else that is difficult to talk about. There is a common perception of growth as meaning success, an investment for your children.
What are the alternatives and how to we get to something that is more about leading happier, more fulfilled, healthier lives, something about development rather than growth?

International vs. local

One of the problems is that we are part of a global system, but there are things that a city controls and can change. The more business that is done locally or regionally, the more that power and funds move away from big corporations to something more transparent and locally based, where the organisations have a direct interest in the populations that they serve.

If the current systems seem too embedded and talk of developing alternative frames and narratives too difficult to achieve then don’t talk, just do things differently. The idea of ‘everyday making’ is that individuals just start behaving differently day-to-day, it has a cumulative effect and the end product is change. It’s an idea in academic literatures but it can be seen in real life too. Examples include buying food from local suppliers, ethically sourced clothing, and saving in green investment funds. In Bristol, the Bristol Pound is a manifestation of this idea – that by having a local currency people can gradually make more conscious consumption decisions. The new ‘Real Economy’ network has been developed through the Bristol Pound in an attempt to challenge the dominance of big business supermarkets. In the Real Economy, buying groups source food from local producers to start to create a food system that is fairer to all.

Talking about economics

Another issue is that many people feel disempowered when there is talk of economics, they feel that they don’t know enough, that somehow only the experts understand and can manage the system. It’s not really a conversation for the pub or at the school gates and that plays into the hands of the vested interests. The dominant free market right have captured the narrative with the idea that only growth can support ‘hard working families’.
There is such a dominance of growth as being the necessary outcome that it’s easy to portray everyone outside as excluded or naïve. In this narrative, growth translates as success and anything else is irresponsible.

Is it really a free market?

Could a true free market take account of climate change and value natural capital and social capital? These issues are not even really in the (mainstream) discussion yet whilst government subsidies support some industries and don’t let them die or change when they should. For example, banking; or the petroleum industry, which perhaps should be dying because of its costs – even before taking into account the environmental cost. Subsidies skew these markets.

There’s also a simplistic perception that everybody who is in the private sector (or at least the big business, multi-national part of it) must be bad but there are many entrepreneurs who act ethically and responsibly, who want to create good (local) businesses that employ people on fair wages and give back to their communities.

Part of the problem is that we’re all part of a very complex, interdependent system. This interdependency allows risk to be shared. For example if a city loses core industries, employment and income, shared resources from central government are there to help out. These interdependencies are highly complex which is why cities and businesses are not allowed to fail – for now at least, we’re all tied together in a global monetary system.

Politics, power and change

Our current political system draws some of its power from big business, paying taxes and providing employment, but also with the power to lobby to maintain the status quo. The powers in the system not only prevent things from dying but prevent change too and, although of course we need employment and tax receipts, there needs to be a mechanism whereby changes can happen more quickly. At a personal level, change is uncomfortable, so people vote for what is familiar, even if they don’t really like it, because it feels safer. It was suggested that the neo-liberal movement has succeeded in making all of us resistant to change. It’s scary, change takes us into the unknown and that feels risky, especially when we’re feeling vulnerable.

The constant growth narrative feels to some like a form of oppression. Individuals feel disempowered and that no-one else feels like they do, that they are all alone in being the good guy, all alone in arguing against the current system and narrative. There are many groups and conversations reflecting this view but they are fragmented and weak against the established power structures. Can a city bring its dissenting voices together into a more powerful collective? What is within its power to change?

…Wordle of what we talked about during the debate.

New approaches

This conversation started feeling a bit gloomy, that all the wrong people have the power, that we’re all alone in trying to make changes, that anyway we’re a bit powerless in such a globalised system and that the two big reasons for needing growth seemed unarguable.

A few good examples from around the world got us thinking about what could be done at the scale of Bristol. The examples from elsewhere included Ecuador which has legislation for the rights for nature, Sweden is experimenting with six-hour working days and Bhutan has a measure for gross national happiness. What could be the different ways of measuring economic welfare in the city – and which are not trying to put a monetary value on non-monetary issues such as quality of life or care for the natural environment?

The shift from growth to development or other forms of prosperity could involve a major change in how we see the economy and what we want from it. Rather than seeing growth as the end in itself, the economy should be seen as a means to achieve different development goals such as better public services, improved housing, increased inclusion, reduced inequality and greater levels of sustainability.  This would take a cultural and structural shift – overcoming the vested interests in maintaining the status quo.

What about Bristol?

There are already many parts of Bristol that are taking on big business and creating their own alternative economies with flourishing local enterprises and community-led prosperity coming out of them. The people of Bedminster are fighting against supermarkets and pawn shops, Knowle West are looking at pop up manufacturing and 3D printing, Lawrence Weston and Southmead have great momentum and visions for the future. Neighbourhood partnerships are working really well in some of the areas that need them most, and there are great social enterprises in many areas. BUT, there is still the dark side and, unlike some parts of the North, people across the city don’t feel like they’re all in it together, more like ‘us and them’. As we have observed before in these debates, there is significant racial tension and inequality in the city, high levels of child poverty and differences in life expectancy of 10 years between different areas – and, even more shocking, a 20 year difference in healthy years lived.

With these problems in the city it feels really important that we make efforts to work together better, to learn from the good examples and to join up this conversation outside the university and across the city. The big organisations in the city, such as the health sector, universities, council and businesses, have an important civic role in contributing to the wellbeing of the city. They have the resources and potential in their workforces, customers and supply chains to create new partnerships and city-wide change.

A new economic future?

When we talk about the allocation of limited resources there is no shared theory of value and no broader plan against which to share resources. So, for example in the health service, the budgets are boundaried and it’s easier to measure success of spending on cardiac surgery than it is to allocate resources to preventing heart disease with less predictable results somewhere in the future (that short-termism again). People across organisations collaborate in multi-agency partnerships but much of the actual resource allocation comes back to core service delivery. We need to understand where the power lies that can unlock these behaviours and allow longer term decisions to be made.

Again in this debate we talked about reducing inequality and creating a fairer system. The aim of the Bristol Pound was to support a green and fair economy – more equality and a more sustainable way of using resources. There is a wider role for business in contributing to life in the city, to have a positive impact. Local businesses and social enterprises are more connected with their communities and larger organisations have a civic role.

In the future we need to think more about what the economy is for – how to help pay for public services and improve housing, increased inclusion and greater levels of sustainability. We need to understand how to measure the real cost of environmental damage and that growth in itself is not the aim.

And sometimes we just need to do it, to make changes locally, to work together and to act on our beliefs in a way that supports the new economic system that we want to see.

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This blog is written by Caroline Bird, Future Cities and Communities Knowledge Exchange Manager at the Cabot Institute.
Caroline Bird
 
Other blogs in this series

Blog 1: Delivering the ‘Future City’: does Bristol have the governance capacities it needs?
Blog 2: Delivering the ‘Future City’: collaborating with or colluding in austerity?
Blog 3: Delivering the ‘Future City’: engaging or persuading?

The Uncertain World: Question Time

Posted on by janet.crompton
This week we are focussing on our Uncertain World, with a host of events and interactions to meet with new communities, think around new ideas and establish new solutions for what’s in store for us in the future.  We will be posting blogs every day this week on ‘Our Uncertain World’. Join the conversation with us on Twitter using the hashtag #UncertainWorld and contribute your thoughts and concerns to our (virtual) graffiti wall.  
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The current rate of environmental change is unprecedented in Earth’s history and many aspects of climate change are understood. Yet, others are not. Scientists can say with a high confidence that temperatures and sea level rise – but continue to remain uncertain on the scale and speed of such processes. Policy makers are now challenged to make decisions that possess long term repercussions on the basis of information that is deemed uncertain. However, it is not just the science that may appear incomplete – social, economic and regulatory trends also remain unpredictable.
The Question Time panel, left to right: Neha Mehta (Bristol Youth Mayor); Ann Cousins (ARUP);
Peter Macfadyen (Ex-Comic Relief & Frome Mayor); Leo Hickman (Carbon Brief);
George Ferguson (Bristol Mayor); Andrew Kelly (Bristol Festival of Ideas).
It is this relationship between policy and an uncertain environment that was the focus of the Cabot Institute’s Uncertain World: Question Time event on the 21 October 2015. Chaired by Andrew Kelly of the Festival of Ideas, the panel included: Bristol Mayor George Ferguson; Bristol Youth Mayor Neha Mehta; Leo Hickman of the Carbon Brief; Peter Macfadyen, formerly Mayor of Frome and a leader in the Transition Town movement; and Ann Cousins, a Sustainability Consultant at Arup. 
This Question Time event forms part of a wider ongoing dialogue between the Cabot Institute and the Bristol public,  based on making climate-based uncertainty real, relevant and personal for all – whilst exploring what climate change means for this city and its inhabitants.
As George Ferguson said in his opening statement, 

“the stars do seem aligned for Bristol”.  

This is true – the city is European Green Capital, one of the Rockefeller 100 Resilient Cities, and possesses a vibrant sense of community that previous conversations have drawn upon. Recent surveys have shown that over two thirds of the city’s population are concerned with the effects of climate change – as a local and a global issue. This provides a clear mandate for this city, and its leaders to act. 
Yet, as Ann Cousins and Leo Hickman argued – it is not just the traditional decision makers who must make these changes. The inspiration of figureheads cannot occur in a vacuum. We are all leaders – be it via changing our own behaviour or by engaging with others to change theirs. 
What became particularly evident in discussions at the public dialogue event was the focus on the local community to meet uncertainty. It is this pooling of risk that resulted in some of our most innovative, and important, social institutions – with the NHS providing just one example. In the face of increased social uncertainty today, many have independently set up food banks and swap-shops – resulting in cooperative ventures and the circular economy becoming more commonplace. It is no secret that the effects of climate change will be first felt at the local level – and it is this pooling of risk that provides an important route to adaptation.
As Frome has shown – and Peter Macfadyen voiced – the answer lies at the community level. For meaningful change, policy must move beyond mere nudge theory and towards tipping points. Change can only occur by giving people agency – by inspiring them to embrace individual mitigation and adaptation strategies. From decreased wastage to selling the car and waiting at the bus stop. This cannot occur in isolation – it must embrace the complexity of climate change as a social issue and link it directly to the lives we live. Radical change will be necessary but it will be a quiet revolution, based on information and engagement.
 
Peter Mcfadyen (centre) tells the room that the answer to climate change lies
at the community level.
Although there may be wide agreement that climate change is occurring – there is often a popular disconnect between the phenomena and its consequences for us as societies and individuals. When the media talk about climate change scepticism, they are usually referring to people who are uncertain about the reality or seriousness of climate change. Psychologists at the University of Illinois have found an important discrepancy between how the term ‘uncertainty’ is meant in scientific reports and how it is interpreted by others [1]. This is a problem when the 2013 report of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change used the term over 2200 times – approximately 1.5 times per page of the report of the working group alone [2].
A number of the event’s questions focused on the need for radical change in Bristol – including the pedestrianisation of the M32, Oslo’s ban on cars, and a policies on inter-community recycling and reuse. This struck me – the desire for radical change was near-unanimous. But, how representative of this is Bristol as a whole? Many still posses a tunnelled vision and a drawbridge mentality in their understanding of shifting climates – “it’s not affecting me, why should I care?” Priorities lie elsewhere: securing basic needs, prosperity, health, etc. Sadly, climate change doesn’t possess the minds of many.
Seoul – pedestrianised one of its motorways. Is this on the cards for Bristol’s M32?
Image credit Better Nation.
Climate change continues to feel distant. A question for science, rather than society. We have seen the images of Hurricane Sandy and of sea level rise – but these are from a different world, a great distance from our front doors. The biggest question of the night for me will continue to plague me for a while longer: Has Bristol felt climate change enough to cause this behavioural change on an individual level? And, if not what will it take?

References

[1] David V. Budescu, Stephen Broomell & Han-Hui Poor (2009). Improving the uncertainty in the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Psychological Science, 20(3): 299-308
[2] Stephan Lewandowsky, Timotyhy Ballard, & Richard D. Pancost (2015). Uncertainty as Knowledge, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 373(2055).
 
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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Ed Atkins, a PhD student at the University of Bristol who studies water scarcity and environmental conflict.

Ed Atkins

Other blogs in the Uncertain World series:

The Uncertain World: A public dialogue

 

Resilience: The power of being bored…together

Posted on by janet.crompton

Louise and Eva belong to a London-based arts programme called Fourthland, which they describe as “A movement. An idea. A place. The handheld. A way of working. A history of projects”.  I’ve had the pleasure of working with them since Tessa Fitzjohn, a local curator, and Aldo Rinaldi, the Senior Arts Officer at Bristol City Council offered us the opportunity to host Fourthland as artists in residence. Together, Aldo and Tessa launched the ‘Resilience Laboratory’ in light of Bristol’s ‘Green Capital’ award – a project that aimed to explore the meaning of resilience from multiple disciplines and create a space to share learning.

Whenever I meet with Louise and Eva it feels like something profound has just happened, and is about to happen again, if I can only grasp the thoughts for long enough. They have provided a place and a time for us to stop. Think. And dwell on what it means to be resilient. The next few paragraphs are an attempt to capture just one of the many themes I found surprising and interesting at Fourthland’s most recent resilience workshop at the Cabot Institute – boredom (the good kind).

Louise and Eva from Fourthland. Image credit Amanda Woodman-Hardy

I have never (ever) considered boredom as a precursor to resilience, but yesterday I did. When you consider the amount of work we need to do to mitigate the effects of climate change, or tackle inequality and hunger, it’s difficult to argue that we should ever move so slowly that there’s time to be bored. The scale of the challenge is so vast that those who truly engage in the topic can almost be consumed by a constant need for progress.

In yesterday’s workshop we were set a task to work with simple materials – wax, hay, string, and eggshell – in silence. We weren’t given strict instructions on how to use the materials; just that they were ours, and we had twenty minutes to work together using silent gestures. What we learnt is that each group started the task politely – exploring the materials and gently negotiating how they might be used. We were delicate, patient, and searching for rules that might guide our behaviour. We all seemed to feel that there might be actions that weren’t ‘allowed’. After what must have been around 10 minutes there was a surge of creativity. People had become bored with their ‘safe’ tasks and began to be more provocative – breaking materials, tying furniture together, making meaningful products, or reading aloud. In this space, boredom became a catalyst for a change greater than we originally felt comfortable with. We stopped searching for rules and broke the ones we thought existed. Colleagues overcame their discomfort of physical contact, and began to share materials across their workspace. Boredom forced us to create and connect.

In the Cabot Institute workshop, academics from social sciences, arts, engineering
and science worked with simple materials from hay to wax, string to eggshells.
Image credit: Amanda Woodman-Hardy

In the post-event analysis, Louise, Eva and I discussed the possible importance of boredom in resilience and I was taken aback by their ideas. They suggest; “when we are bored, we are seeking something – something stimulating, something interesting. In this state, we become more receptive to learning.” Shima Beiji has previously argued that in order for an agent to become resilient, it must undergo a continuous process of knowledge acquisition and learning. Is boredom a condition that makes us more receptive to learning?

Perhaps, but it’s possible that we’re also open to a different kind of learning. It’s not the reductionist type of analysis that takes place after a disaster (where did the issue originate, what specifically could we have done to make it better, how can we be more resilient next time?) It’s a far more emergent way of creating understanding that intuitively feels more innovative and preventative.
If we took more time to be bored and engage in mindless repetitive tasks, could we actually be far more mindful in the present, more creative, and more resilient in the future?

In the scientific and engineering literature, it is clear that a degree of ‘redundancy’ in a system is critical for resilience. This means having additional resources or capacity that allow you to absorb shocks without compromising productivity or safety (e.g. having a store cupboard full of beans in a food shortage will mean you can avoid hunger). It seems to me that there’s a link between boredom and redundancy.

If boredom arises (in part) from repeating a task beyond the point that we can learn more from it, or enjoy it, then is boredom a form of mental ‘redundancy’? Does it give us time to absorb the mental ‘shock’ of constantly receiving new information every day?

I repeatedly hear people say they crave ‘time to really think’ away from the daily slog of tasks, but have realised that when we create this space it’s often for a defined purpose: “Think through new paper ideas – 2 hours”, or “send thoughts on strategy document to Rich – 30 mins”. Very rarely do we schedule time for unadulterated, unstructured and exploratory learning.

So what did I learn from playing with a bowl of wax this afternoon? That in order for people and communities to become resilient, we need time to be unproductive, together. That boredom can be a precursor, maybe even a catalyst, to a different kind of creation, connection and learning. That we need to trust that the use of this time will surpass our initial expectations. And that I want to work with more artists like Eva and Louise.

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute Manager Hayley Shaw.
Hayley Shaw

 

Images from the Fourthland workshop at the Cabot Institute

 

Fourthland workshop

‘The Resilience Dividend’ – and the kind of thinking required to realise it

Posted on by janet.crompton

Way back in January I attended Judith Rodin’s lecture on resilience at the Festival of Ideas. I remember rushing through the door of a large lecturing theatre at Social Sciences Complex with my folding bike to hand and five minutes to go. Catching my breath, I came across a packed auditorium and thought that it might be impossible to seat anywhere but the steps, but thankfully I got seated somewhere at the front. I had heard of Judith, but never seen her speaking in person or read her work in detail, as it is not strictly speaking within my field of expertise. But Judith started conversing with the chair of the session and realised that everything she talked about made perfect sense for a computer scientist like me working on projects about future cities.

Judith apologised for ‘being a bit incoherent’ because of jet lag, as she had only arrived in the UK the previous few hours and had travelled to Bristol straight from London, but oh my, I can’t imagine how much more composed and sharp she is normally, if that was the case. I can’t even begin to recount the many different points that made perfect sense to me that she made that evening. But there are a few key messages that really stuck with me – taking stock of them below:

  1. Quoting Churchill (‘Never let a good crisis go to waste’), she emphasised on the learning that needs to take place after a crisis; an honest assessment of what worked and what not, accountability and preparation for the future. This is particularly important for dealing effectively with climate change as the experiences of large scale disasters, such as New Orleans and the Boxing Day tsunami among others, demonstrated.
  2. However, we must avoid the kind of bias introduced by the short-termism, usually associated with contemporary policies. Lack of funding, unwillingness to commit for the long-term to resolving climatic change and knee jerk reactions, mostly for securing short term political capital, have a biasing effect of usually responding only to issues concerning the last crisis. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11 for example a lot of people started avoiding having computer rooms and data centres in tall buildings and put them increasingly in basements; the results for such companies were obviously disastrous in New Orleans.
  3. Lastly, but by no means least, not only did she emphasise Systems thinking as a way of understanding and tackling complexity, but as a key way of thinking for realising the ‘resilience dividend’. However we define resilience, preparing for the future does pay back. In an era of efficiency drives and economic tightness, it is difficult to commit to funding the spare capacity, long termism and foresight that are required to build resilience. However, spare capacity does not necessarily mean idle wastage; the lessons from the sharing economy platforms show us how value can be realised from spare capacity anyway. But to understand this we need more study of the interactions and the interrelations, hence the Systems element in her argument.

For the interested reader, Judith’s book can be found on all on-line and high street book retailers. It’s fully titled ‘The resilience dividend: Managing disruption, avoiding disaster and growing stronger in an unpredictable world’, and you can find it at http://resiliencedividend.org/. There you’ll also find a collection of key stories from the book, about how cities around the world coped with and learned from recent crises (including. fascinating accounts from Christchurch, San Francisco, New Orleans etc.).

Listen again to Judith Rodin’s talk below.

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Dr Theo Tryfonas from the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Bristol. Theo’s research focuses around cybersecurity and smart cities.

Theo Tryfonas

Why partnerships are so vital to the University of Bristol and the Cabot Institute (part 1)

Posted on by janet.crompton

Launching VENTURE during Bristol 2015

Nishan Canagarajah, PVC for Research at the University
of Bristol, launched VENTURE on 18 March 2015.
Image credit: Amanda Woodman-Hardy

VENTURE is a new collaborative framework for the Cabot Institute and some of our key corporate partners. Building stronger partnerships with our City has been the major theme of our engagement with the European Green Capital year. VENTURE, then, represents the latest step (including Bristol is Open, the UK Collaboration for Research and Infrastructure and Cities, and the launch of a new project on Re-Distributed Manufacturing and the Resilient, Sustainable City) in the progression of how we are engaging with Bristol and the South West Region.  This is the first of two blogs that explore the intrinsic value of partnership to the Cabot Institute, what we have achieved and our aspirations.

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On 18 March, the Cabot Institute and the University of Bristol PVC for Research launched VENTURE, a new initiative and network that will facilitate the partnership of Cabot Institute academics with key corporate partners.  The focus of VENTURE is on the risk, insurance, future cities and infrastructure sectors. Those areas do not represent the entirety of the Cabot Institute remit, but they are particularly central given the challenges of environmental change and the need for cities and society to become more sustainable and resilient. These needs are also central to our City and Region, exemplified by the Green Capital agenda but also a long history of social and technological innovation.
The first VENTURE workshop held at the
University of Bristol in May 2015. Image credit:
Amanda Woodman-Hardy

We are very excited about VENTURE – it is a chance for the Cabot Institute to build stronger links to our external partners and our City and it is will inspire exciting new ideas and solutions. Increasingly, our corporate, governmental and public partners have asked for a conduit to the more diverse, multidisciplinary and sector-appropriate communities that sprawl across multiple Schools or even Faculties.  That is one of the primary reasons that the Cabot Institute was founded, and as such VENTURE is the logical progression in supporting and nurturing those relationships.

In a subsequent blog, I will discuss the history of our partnership and some of the other initiatives that excite us as part of the Green Capital year and its legacy.  Here, however, I’d like to discuss exactly why partnerships are so important to the University of Bristol and particularly the Cabot Institute. This may seem obvious: we work together to procure funding and to conduct research.  It is taken as read that Universities must be engaged and work closely with stakeholders, and this is enshrined in the University of Bristol’s engaged University vision and Engaged University Steering Group.  However, the rationale for specific partnerships vary and they bring different types of values and motivation.  Moreover, there are legitimate questions about engagement. Who should our partners be and who should Universities serve? There is a strong push that Universities provide value for the UK, but who determines ‘value’ and how do we avoid becoming overly focussed on one stakeholder at the expense of others?

What does partnership mean to the Cabot Institute?

The Cabot Institute’s main goals are to build a vibrant and new multidisciplinary community and stimulate new ideas; in turn, these will position us to conduct novel research that addresses 21st century challenges.  External partnerships are key to all of these aims.  They are part of that multidisciplinary community and they stimulate academics to collaborate in new configurations.  They ask those studying hazards to work with those studying risk perception, and they demand that engineers consider how infrastructure is occupied and navigated by people.  In doing this, they create the environment to generate fundamentally new ideas and forge new intellectual ground; these creative, occasionally disruptive, interventions and requests stimulate, challenge and inspire new directions of research.
Bringing together experts from different disciplines to tackle
global environmental problems at the Cabot Institute.
Image credit: Amanda Woodman-Hardy

This is an aspect of collaboration and partnership that means a great deal to me, personally. I have used the challenge of working with other disciplines and with people with different skills (and more importantly different perspectives and preconceived notions) to invigorate and continually refresh my research. Those experiences have allowed me to work in teams that developed new approaches and made new breakthroughs. It is not my own special abilities but rather the cauldron of brilliant but often contradictory and occasionally tangential ideas that has led to the findings of which I am most proud. Partnership is good because collaboration is good – and not just because you need to collaborate to achieve your goals but because the very act of collaboration is intellectually invigorating.

Those new collaborations and ideas are helping us make a difference, addressing the global environmental challenges of the 21st century.  Clearly, if the Cabot Institute research aspires to solve societal challenges it has to be strongly connected to those who can make good use of it.  However, this requires more than translation; it requires close collaboration during inception and development of ideas, such that discoveries, inventions and conclusions are useful and relevant. Partnership is also crucial to ensuring the wider community co-owns an idea.  The world is facing difficult challenges that will require paradigm shifting ideas and difficult decisions. Acceptance of radical new proposals or difficult compromises requires an inclusive and engaged public – from the very beginning.  This is why we need VENTURE.

For all the rewards of a vibrant partnership, we cannot pretend that it is easy. Different organisations have different priorities, stakeholders, responsibilities and interests.  In my experience, University – Stakeholder partnerships can too easily fall into one of two, equally unsatisfying scenarios.  At one extreme, academics ‘push’ our research out into industry or government, arguing for its relevance, hoping it is used and allowing us to claim a positive social or economic impact.  At the other, industry or government partners approach us with a project or consultancy, often with an unrealistic turnaround time and not inspiring our interest.

Fostering a more creative partnership atmosphere is why the University created the Research Enterprise and Development division in 2000, and VENTURE will build on that legacy, ensuring more long-term, broader and deeper relationships.  It will develop genuine partnerships, in which we work together on challenges that represent both fundamental, intellectual advances but also have deep value to the partner. We will write grants, co-supervise students, publish, advise and share our findings together.  Specifically, VENTURE will fund and support the Cabot Institute to more effectively guide our partners to the specific knowledge, expertise and skills of our academic community. It will facilitate access to our resources, whether that be computer models, materials analysis or infrastructure resilience. It will create a network and enable a higher degree of partnership and mutual profile-sharing, as we not only work together but share common messages.

Crucially, VENTURE will be the nucleus of the wider portfolio of partnership required to face the environmental and sustainability challenges facing Bristol, the UK and our planet.  The corporate members of VENTURE will be integrated with our other partners: the civil organisations that want to govern their own energy futures or instigate new social movements; government agencies, like the Met Office or the Environment Agency, who have their own expertise; Bristol City Council but also the Bristol Green Capital Partnership with whom we are working to ensure a resilient and sustainable future for our city; and many others. VENTURE will focus on our key corporate partners but it will be part of a wider, University subsidised portfolio of civil and government partners in the city and region.  It will be a network whereby these corporate partners develop stronger relationships with Cabot but also the City and in which our community can challenge and champion interventions.

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

Prof Rich Pancost

Read part two of this blog
For further information on VENTURE please email cabot-business@bristol.ac.uk

Manufacturing in Bristol – Bridging the gap to a more sustainable and more resilient future

Posted on by janet.crompton
University of Bristol

The University of Bristol and partners announce the launch on 22 of April of a new collaborative research project to determine how highly adaptable manufacturing processes, capable of operating at small scales (re-distributed manufacturing), can contribute to a sustainable and resilient future for the city of Bristol and its hinterland. 

The next few years have the potential to be transformative in the history of our society and our planet.  We are faced with numerous choices in how we live our lives, and our decisions could either embed the practices of the last two centuries or empower new paradigms for the production of our food and energy, our buildings and transport systems, our medicine, furniture and appliance, all of those things on which we have grown to depend. It could be a transformation in what we own or borrow, how we use it…. And how we make it.

Bristol is one of the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Global Resilient Cities.  Unlike many of the other cities (and somewhat unconventionally), Bristol, the University of Bristol and its Cabot Institute have adopted a holistic definition of resiliency that includes not just adaptation to future change but also the contemporary behaviour that minimises the chances of future shocks.  Recognising that, the launch of the Bristol 2015 European Green Capital year focussed on the need to bridge the gap  between our resource intensive and environmentally harmful current behaviour and a more sustainable – and resilient – future.

This combination is key.  Increasingly we recognise that our non-sustainable behaviour could bring about dangerous climate change and resource stress. But we are also obtaining a sharper understanding of the limits of our knowledge. Unfortunately, our behaviour is not just threatening the security of our food, water and energy but is inducing a profound uncertainty in our ability to forecast and adapt to future change.  Not only does such radical uncertainty demand mitigative rather than adaptive action  but, where we fall short or the damage has already been done, it will require an equally radical emphasis on resiliency.

Part of Bristol’s path to achieving these goals of sustainability and resiliency is localism, including local production of food and energy, exemplified by the recent launch of a municipally-owned energy company  but also community-owned energy and food cooperatives.   Localism can only go so far in our highly interconnected and interdependent world, but it is undeniably one of Bristol’s strongest tools in empowering local communities and driving its own sustainability agenda while making us more resilient to external factors.  But why stop at food and energy?

Manufacturing has undergone a suite of radical transformations over the past decade, the potential of which are only now being harnessed across a range of manufacturing scales from high-value (such as Bristol’s aerospace industry) to SMEs and community groups.  Crudely put, the options for the manufacturer have traditionally been limited to moulding things, bashing things into shape, cutting things and sticking things together.  New technologies now allow those methods to be downscaled and locally owned. Other technologies, enabled by the exponential growth of computer power, are changing the manufacturing framework for example by allowing complex shapes to be made layer-by-layer through additive manufacturing.

Crucially, these new technologies represent highly adaptable manufacturing processes capable of operating at small scales.  This offers new possibilities with respect to where and how design, manufacture and services can and should be carried out to achieve the most appropriate mix of capability and employment but also to minimise environmental costs and to ensure resilience of provision.  In short, manufacturing may now be able to be re-distributed away from massive factories and global supply chains back into local networks, small workshops or even homes. This has brought about local empowerment across the globe as exemplified by the Maker movement and locally in initiatives such as Bristol Hackspace.  These technologies and social movements are synergistic as localised manufacturing not only brings about local empowerment but fosters sustainable behaviour by enabling the remanufacturing and upcycling that are characteristic of the circular economy.

There are limits, however, to the reach of these new approaches if they remain dependent on traditional manufacturing organisations and systems into which we are locked by the technological choices made in two centuries of fossil-fuel abundance.  As well as the technologies and processes that we use, a better understanding of how to organise and manage manufacturing systems and of their relationship with our infrastructure and business processes is central to the concept of re-distributed manufacturing and its proliferation.  It requires not only local production but a fundamental rethinking of the entire manufacturing system.

This is the focus of our exciting new RCUK-funded project: it will create a network to study a whole range of issues from diverse disciplinary perspectives, bringing together experts in manufacturing, design, logistics, operations management, infrastructure, engineering systems, economics, geographical sciences, mathematical modelling and beyond.  In particular, it will examine the potential impact of such re-distributed manufacturing at the scale of the city and its hinterland, using Bristol as an example in its European Green Capital year, and concentrating on the issues of resilience and sustainability.

It seems entirely appropriate that Bristol and the SW of England assume a prominent leadership role in this endeavour.  In many ways, it is the intellectual and spiritual home of the industrial use of fossil fuels, responsible for unprecedented growth and prosperity but also setting us on a path of unsustainable resource exploitation.  Thomas Newcomen from South Devon produced arguably the first practical steam engine, leading to the use of fossil fuels in mining and eventually industry; in the late 1700s, coal-powered steam energy was probably more extensively used in SW England than anywhere in the world.  Continuing this legacy, Richard Trevithick from Cornwall developed high pressure steam engines which allowed the use of steam (and thus fossil fuels) for transportation, and of course Brunel’s SS Great Western, built in Bristol, was the first vehicle explicitly designed to use fossil fuel for intercontinental travel.

But that legacy is not limited to energy production.  Abraham Darby, who pioneered the use of coke for smelting iron in Coalbrookdale, i.e. the use of fossil fuels for material production, had worked at a foundry in Bristol and was funded by the Goldney Family, among others.  He married fossil fuels to the production of materials and manufactured goods.

These are reasons for optimism not guilt.  This part of the world played a crucial role in establishing the energy economy that has powered our world.  On the back of that innovation and economic growth have come medical advances, the exploration of our solar system and an interconnected society.  That same creative and innovative spirit can be harnessed again.  And these approaches need not be limited to energy and materials; our colleagues at UWE been awarded funds under the same scheme to explore redistributed healthcare provision. The movement is already in place, exemplified by the more than 800 organisations in the Bristol Green Capital Partnership.  It is receiving unprecedented support from both Universities of this city.  This new project is only one small part of that trend but it illustrates a new enthusiasm for partnership and transformative change and to study the next generation of solutions rather than be mired in incremental gains to existing technology.
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This blog is written by Cabot Institute Director Prof Rich Pancost and Prof Chris McMahon from the Engineering Department at the University of Bristol.

Prof Rich Pancost

More information

For more information about the issues covered in this blog please contact Chris McMahon who is keen to hear from local industries and other organisations that may be interested in the possibilities of re-distributed manufacturing.

The grant has been awarded to the University of Bristol, supported by the Universities of Bath, Exeter and the West of England and Cardiff University, by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The network, one of six being funded by the EPSRC for the next two years to study RDM, will also explore mechanisms by which interdisciplinary teams may come together to address societal grand challenges and develop research agendas for their solution. These will be based on working together using a combination of a Collaboratory – a centre without walls – and a Living Lab – a gathering of public-private partnerships in which businesses, researchers, authorities, and citizens work together for the creation of new services, business ideas, markets, and technologies.

EPSRC Reference: EP/M01777X/1, Re-Distributed Manufacturing and the Resilient, Sustainable City (ReDReSC)

The Cabot Institute

The Cabot Institute carries out fundamental and responsive research on risks and uncertainties in a changing environment. We drive new research in the interconnected areas of climate change, natural hazards, water and food security, low carbon energy, and future cities. Our research fuses rigorous statistical and numerical modelling with a deep understanding of social, environmental and engineered systems – past, present and future. We seek to engage wider society by listening to, exploring with, and challenging our stakeholders to develop a shared response to 21st Century challenges.

How much money should we spend to protect ourselves from climate change?

Posted on by janet.crompton

Investing in climate change resilience

 
The February floods left many asking how the damage could have been avoided and why we weren’t better prepared. The government came under attack from all sides; David Cameron said “money is no object” for the relief effort, but angry residents asked why this wasn’t the case when funding was cut to flood protection a few years before.

 

Peter Gist, an economist and Director of Arup Management Consultancy, visited the University of Bristol this week to give a lecture asking why we aren’t more resilient to climate change and what we can do about it.

It is a complicated question. Spending millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money is not without its risks. In April, a report was released showing that the £473 million stash of Tamiflu was essentially useless.  It was stockpiled against the risk of a flu pandemic that never happened.  Was this money wasted?  Only because the problem didn’t arise.  The risk to public health was too high to leave to chance.

The same can be said of resilience to climate change. You’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. Gist nailed it when he said, “the huge costs of not getting it right tend to lead to people acting like rabbits stuck in the headlights”.

Investment returns

Diverting resources to resilience measures is an investment, and Gist explained that this means trying to get the best return for your pound, in this case by limiting losses. It’s extremely difficult to calculate this for climate change, thanks to a lack of information, inherent uncertainties about the frequency and impact of the problem, and a decision process divided between numerous groups with different priorities.

An important economic technique when calculating the cost:benefit of different resilience methods is discounting. A price paid in today’s money cannot be directly compared with the future benefit of the scheme, so the value of the future benefit (prevention of loss) is transformed into today’s prices. An event predicted to occur far in the future will be severely discounted, making it unlikely to seem worth the cost to us today.

The problem with discounting is similar to that of politics; the focus is on short-term pressing concerns not future problems, even if they are predicted to have a huge impact. Gist explained, “in the case of severe weather events, we are almost always bound to discover that we haven’t done enough”.

Uncertainty

 

The Dawlish train line was damaged in winter storms.
Image credit: BBC News

Even if the risks were quantifiable, it would still be difficult to know where to channel resources because of the uncertainty in forecasting models. Would it be better, for example, to improve the resilience of the Dawlish train line to flooding, or to build an entirely new route to avoid the problem entirely? We need to know how often the line is likely to flood in the future, especially with regards to climate change, but Gist noted how difficult it is to confidently link global warming to specific extreme weather predictions.

Improving the decision

Value for money is still the aim of the game. How can we make better decisions on climate change resilience in the future?

Reducing the discount rate for long term effects is vital. Gist agrees with Lord Nicholas Stern that we should hold the impacts on the next generation with greater or equal importance than our own, rather than passing the problems on to them.

To counteract the uncertainty, of course we must keep collecting data and improving the models, but Gist believes we should go further. We need to consider more “no regrets” options, for example trees in a new development provide shade and enhance water run off, as well as making the area a more desirable place to live. He urged, “uncertainty should be an imperative to act, not an excuse not to”.

Consulting the wider public is vital in improving spending decisions. Gist described how difficult it is to factor in non-monetary benefits into the investment planning models. An area of moorland or forest might have incalculable value to people living nearby, but the property developers in the next town might see it as cut price real estate. Only by talking to a large range of people, institutions and regulatory bodies can you understand the different priorities in play and begin to factor in benefits that aren’t measured in pounds and pence. Pragmatically, Gist believes that all politicians should consult the people involved, whether in local councils or at the national level, because everyone takes part of the responsibility for the consequences and by removing the blame it clears the path to making decisions.

Get involved

Limited resources mean that we can’t always have the perfect solution for every problem. Money must be spent in the most beneficial way possible, so we can’t avoid making these investment choices. Gist urged the audience to get involved in decisions, make your voice heard and for the scientists among us to keep up the research that might yield more information. On the other hand, it is vital that we don’t fall victim to “analysis-paralysis”. If you’re waiting for the perfect data set before making a decision, you’ll be waiting a long time.

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

Climate Change: Security, Resilience and Diplomacy

Posted on by janet.crompton

Chatham House 15-16 October 2012


The 16th Chatham House Climate Change conference, this year themed around questions of security, resilience and diplomacy, took place in a mixed atmosphere of urgency, hope and frustration. It is a striking fact that global greenhouse gas emissions have remained on a steep upward trajectory since 1990. Global energy demands are increasing and a growing global population looks set to intensify these pressures still further. In this context, there was consensus on the need for drastic action to control emissions if there is to be any chance of limiting global temperature increase to 2°C above pre-industrial rates.  There was hope of the promise offered by new technologies such as carbon capture and storage; hope too of a new determination amongst states to tackle emissions through the UNFCCC process by 2020, but also a tangible sense of frustration at the further lost years this timescale implied and a lingering fear that it might already be too late to make a difference. As one speaker put it, ‘the boat left a while ago’, but the sheer scale and urgency of the challenge is such that we still cannot afford to get left behind.

Rising global temperatures will have a profound impact on the security of many populations and countries in the world. Certainly, climate change has the potential to open up new areas of competition and dispute between state actors, with several presentations making reference to the potential for geopolitical competition for newly accessible arctic resources. Others suggested the emergence of novel governance challenges and the inadequacy of existing international regimes and structures to deal with them. The consequences of sea level rise for the 200 mile exclusive economic zones which exist off states’ coastlines is just one example of these new challenges, with coastal retreat and the submergence of low lying islands threatening to reshape the geopolitical and geoeconomic contours of maritime sovereignty and the resource claims (fisheries, oil and gas) which go alongside them.

Yet the global insecurities that seem likely to be impacted by climate change are necessarily – and perhaps fundamentally – about much more than competition between states for resources, or even armed conflict per se. Extreme weather events have already caused global increases in food prices in 2008 and 2011, exacerbating underlying human insecurities amongst vulnerable populations; most likely contributing to famine in East Africa and perhaps even to the events of the Arab Spring. These vulnerabilities seem likely to intensify in the coming decades and similar challenges seem probable with regard to fresh water resources and increased migration away from unviable areas as existing coping mechanisms prove unable to adapt to new circumstances. While such insecurities may be intensified by the pressures of climate change, the challenges they induce are ultimately rooted in the social and political context of the countries in which they unfold. Not all states and political systems (or groups within these states) will be equally exposed to and able to cope with climate change-induced insecurities, with the greatest impact likely to fall those regions and populations which are already most vulnerable and face the greatest challenges of development and governance.

Indeed, for many speakers, issues of governance were at the heart of the climate change challenge, both in terms of national and local preparedness, vulnerabilities and resilience, but also internationally in terms of the steps required to restrain it. There was consensus that the geopolitical context has also changed profoundly since the signing of the Kyoto protocol in 1997. Most significantly, the continuing rapid economic development of the BRIC states (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and of others such as Indonesia, have not only intensified the drivers of global emissions through their rapid industrialisation, but also introduced significant new and influential interests into global climate governance. The dilemma of how to deliver on the twin goals economic growth on the one hand and emissions controls on the other has thus if anything become more complex and contested than in previous years, as the failed UN climate negotiations in Copenhagen so clearly illustrate.

Even so, a number of presenters warned against making simplistic distinctions between so-called developed and developing worlds in this respect. China may now be the largest greenhouse case emitter, but the interdependence of the global economy means that so much of the manufacturing activity which drives its industrial growth is itself a response to consumption in the United States and Europe. While some western countries (such as the UK) may have been able to reduce their own greenhouse gas emissions, in many cases, this has been a consequence of effectively transferring polluting activity elsewhere. The UK still consumes plenty of steel for example, but most of this is now imported from China rather than manufactured indigenously in south Wales.  In this spirit, a number of speakers called for a shift from targets based on greenhouse gas production to targets based on consumption, a more punitive global carbon pricing scheme on the same basis, the pressing need for investment both current and future renewable energy technologies and energy efficiency and the hope that developing countries may be able to leapfrog the mistakes of the west in their own industrial growth.

Tim Edmunds
Yet throughout the conference, there was a sense of a ghost at the table. Despite all the political and financial efforts that have been put into tacking climate change and all the political exhortations to change, consumption continues to rise,  global emissions continue to increase and firm global commitments to change remain elusive. In this context, there remains a real question over the extent to which technical solutions to climate change – rather than more fundamental changes in global patterns of consumption – will be able to arrest these changes in time to make a difference.  In the absence of more deep-seated change in the underlying drivers of global emissions and in the face of continuing structural inertias in the global governance of the climate, an increase in global temperatures of over 2°C  seems to be shifting from possibility to likelihood, and the consequences of this are both uncertain and potentially vast in scale. In this context, efforts to mitigate climate change remain more pressing than ever, but the pressures of more radical adaptation may soon become overwhelming too.  

Professor Tim Edmunds
Global Insecurities Centre, University of Bristol

16 October 2012

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