cycling for health

In another example of moving closer to sustainable cities, health workers who used to visit patients on foot in Delft (Cape Town) were donated bicycles on Wednesday last week, enabling them to make twice as many house calls. BikeTown Africa, an international project started in 2006, donated 108 bikes to MaAfrika Tikkun healthcare workers to help them anti-retroviral medication for HIV patients and others who cannot get to clinics. Many of these workers haven't ridden bikes before, so they've been given some instruction and guidance about road safety.

What appeals to me about this initiative, apart from the improvement in productivity resulting from the use of a zero-emission transport mode, is that it's a great way to set an example that could start to transform perceptions of the lowly bicycle. Now we just need better cycling networks to make it easier, and a strong support network to make sure this isn't a shortlived success.

green bloggers unite!

If you are a "green blogger" and you're in Cape Town this Saturday, join us with Juliana Rotich, Environment Editor of Global Voices Online (she's paying a special visit to SA). This is an informal gathering, so feel free to come along this Saturday to see what the buzz is about and meet the faces behind the blogs.

When: Saturday, October 11th, 2pm
Where: Obz Cafe, 115 Lower Main Road, Observatory

Juliana thought we might like to plant some trees too, so if you have suggestions of a school or community project, then put your suggestions up on the wiki.

RSVP by putting your name on the wiki to know how many to expect.

crowdsourcing energy solutions

If we leave everything to the experts, we might never make progress. A new alternate reality game called World Without Oil has been developed to stimulate ideas on an oil-free future by engaging online gamers.

The premise of World Without Oil was simple and provocative: What if an oil crisis started on April 30, 2007 - what would happen? How would the lives of ordinary people change? Players were invited to imagine how their lives and communities would be different and how they would cope if the world’s oil suddenly dried up. The “plot” unfolded dynamically. First, the players read the “official news” and what other players were saying. Then, using a combination of blog posts, videos, images and even voice mails, they told their own stories of the challenges they were facing. As the crisis continued, players updated their stories with further thoughts, reactions and solutions.

The game ended after 32 days, having engaged thousands of players around world and woven the fabric of 1,500 stories into what [game designer] Ken [Eklund] describes as “living breathing mega narrative that presented some eerily plausible scenarios, complete with practical courses of action to help prevent such an event from actually happening.”

screw the spotted owl

Amateurs are more sincere than professionals. Rehad Desai, co-director of the film You Chuse: the future is free, reminded viewers at this month's Encounters South African International Documentary Festival, that a sex worker might deliver a technically good performance, but she will probably leave you less than satisfied. Why? Insincerity. Amateur sex - the kind that happens in the bedrooms of committed couples - might be less slick, but is likely to be more satisfying because of a greater emotional investment.

What has sex to do with the Spotted Owl? I'm coming to that, in a roundabout way.

You Chuse, which presents the case for the open source movement and restoration of the creative commons, makes the intriguing point that as intellectual property dominates more and more of modern life as a financially tradable commodity, there is less space for things to develop for reasons other than financial reward. The film suggests that science and most human endeavours advance by building on what went before. If "what went before" is copyrighted and unavailable for others to use, then advancement only takes place in the R&D departments of corporations, and is driven by financial returns alone. Individuals with little or no capital have no opportunity to contribute.

schooling fine young greenies

German firm Schucco has developed a solar project at the Deutsche International Schule in Johannesburg. PV modules generating 3.48 kW, together with a solar water heating system, are expected to save the school 22,300 kWh of electricity a year, cutting emissions by 18,000 kg a year. That's great, but what I find hard to believe is the claim that the payback period for a similar system on an industrial scale would be less than a year. If that were true, we'd all be rushing out to install these systems. Do the Germans know something we don't?

project for reduced emissions in SA

There's an online resource managed by Goedgedacht Trust, called Project 90 by 2030, with the vision that South Africans contribute to reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by changing the way they live:

Inspired by George Monbiot's thesis that global greenhouse gas emissions should be reduced by 90% by 2030, we have made 2007 to 2030 our timeframe within which to impact on individual South African citizen responses to climate change. Through organised groups, we will target the middle- and upper middle-class households, encouraging them to pay attention to the looming crises by acting urgently to ensure a sustainable future. We will challenge individual South Africans to change the way they live by 90% by the year 2030.

The site provides information on projects and programmes to help individuals in their lifestyle choices.

give a damn

There are a few homeless people in the world, but not nearly as many as some people would have us believe.

There are billions of inadequately housed, under-resourced, oppressed, crime-ridden, malnourished and disease-afflicted people. But that is not the same as being homeless. I draw the (perhaps obvious) distinction because governments responsible for the welfare of large numbers of housing-challenged people have a tendency to set themselves housing targets so that they can claim political points for providing homes for the homeless. It's time to change the paradigm; time to take the focus off the house and put it onto the services needed to support the community.

I am not for a moment suggesting that a tin-and-cardboard shack is preferable to a more robust dwelling, but given the inability of government agencies (in South Africa, at least) to deliver houses on a scale that eliminates informal shacks and in a way that keeps communities intact, I have to wonder why there isn't official recognition that conditions in squatter settlements need to be improved.

will that be for here, or to go?

This mobile solar cooker is on display at the MTN Sciencentre in Cape Town. According to the display panel,

The Sustainable Energy Society of South Africa, in collaboration with the Soweto Information Centre in Johannesburg, has initiated a project to promote the use of solar cookers in urban and rural environments of South Africa.

Mathias Weber decided to make a solar cooker more mobile by mounting it onto a tricycle, which is used by the Greenhouse Project for Recycling Programme. His 'Solar Tricycle Pilot Project' has been active in Newtown, Johannesburg, since May 2005 and has created a huge awareness of alternative cooking methods.

The tricycle-mounted solar cooker can cook porridge, pop popcorn and heat up a variety of dishes, using only the energy of the sun.

Currently, street food vendors in South Africa use hazardous, unhealthy and costly methods of cooking, such as paraffin stoves, Primus stoves and Imbaulas (perforated paraffin tins with a fire inside). These cooking methods release harmful gases and ashes into the atmosphere and contribute to the development of respiratory diseases.

Solar cookers are clean, non-polluting, efficient and cost-effective and offer a very viable alternative for street food vendors.

For photos of the cooker out in the community, and a description of Mathias' work, have a look at the Solar Energy Project. The site also describes other solar food projects in a number of countries.

financing the future

The energy issue dominating South African headlines and dinner table conversation is the electricity supply crisis and how Eskom is going to worm its way out of this one. But in homes where the dinner table is a few cartons covered with cloth, and you have to shout to be heard above the din of rain on a tin roof, and the dog just knocked over the pot that's catching the drips, the perspective is going to be ever so slightly different. Let's face it: if your dinner was cooked over paraffin or a few sticks of wood, you aren't going to be too concerned about whether pebble bed nuclear is a better option than coal with underground CO2 sequestration.

We're talking about survival, and intellectual debate doesn't feed the masses. Arguments about the need to focus on a reliable supply of electricity to maintain a healthy economy (to provide jobs for the poor) and about how the forthcoming increases in electricity tariffs will hit the poor hardest, ignore the inescapable fact that there are not now and never have been jobs for a shockingly large number of South Africans.

The unemployed and underemployed need a solution too; and don't tell them they need clean energy unless you can tell them how they are going to pay for it. The poor are masters at innovation and using resources efficiently - ask anyone who survives on a few bucks a day. It's not because they enjoy ill-health from living in smoke-filled hovels that they continue to do just that. Their crisis is chronic, and it's not new. They don't need motivation to adopt energy sources that will improve air quality and reduce time spent scrounging for cooking fuel, they just need the means.

Which brings me to my point. A post last week on WorldChanging talks about the possibilities for using microfinance to bring cleaner energy options to poor communities. Microfinance service providers have a reputation for exploiting vulnerable communities with exhorbitant interest rates and improper repayment procedures, but where poverty is widespread and microfinance is provided through a well-entrenched network, as in South Africa, it seems there may be a viable market-based approach to addressing energy needs for those with almost no resources.

MicroEnergy Credits Corporation (MEC) have developed a model that works with existing microfinance institutions to broker arrangements that promote clean energy using carbon finance.

Allderdice and Dailey [founders of MEC] have developed two credit instruments, Microfinance-originated Carbon Credits and Millennium Development Goal (MDG) credits. With the first, MFIs [microfinance institutions] can receive revenue when they lend for energy systems that create verified carbon emissions reductions, such as solar PV systems, improved cookstoves and biogas digesters. With the second, MFIs can receive MDG Credits when they lend for an intervention that enables an MDG household to meet all or part of an MDG. According to Allderdice, "There is no established market in MDG credits yet, but MEC is building the infrastructure to enable it."

The WorldChanging post talks about the benefit of this approach in rural, off-grid locations, but it would be equally appropriate to urban off-grid communities, of which there are many in developing countries. Urban squatter settlements are far more desperate, in many ways, than rural settlements, and upgrading these areas is a more promising option than state-supplied housing. If residents have a financial mechanism to provide their own energy more sustainably, even better.

the brutal art of persuasion

I grew up feeling suspicious of the marketing industry. Admen tried to convince me that I wanted something that I'd never heard of, and needed something I thought I only wanted. Levi's and Coca Cola have left their mark on my psyche. Like Freddie Mercury, I want to break free. These days I'm more accepting that branding is not all bad, but I still bristle when it's about the cult of personality, or a company image that has nothing to do with the product or service on offer.

Despite lingering fears of manipulative messages and subliminal stereotyping, if I am honest about my own field of transport planning, I have to ask: Why is it OK to change behaviour by building a new road, but not by persuading people to change their transport habits by convincing them that it would be better for everyone? Rory Sutherland poses the question in the April 12, 2008 edition of The Spectator. He suggests that if 15% of people drove to work later, we might discover we don't have a transport problem, we just have a timing problem. As long as problems are defined by civil engineers, we find that the solutions are - surprise! - more civil engineering.

That's an oversimplification, to be sure, but as much as the transport planning industry is starting to grasp the concept of integrated planning as a way out of unsustainable urban growth patterns, it has failed to recognise the extent to which current transport problems are a direct result of the way we plan.

Transport planners have deliberately and systematically created a transport system that favours private vehicles, at the expense of other transport modes. The result is that we have actively changed the way people move from place to place - we have manipulated societal norms of behaviour, and done so almost without question, without admitting that we have engineered an unsustainable situation. We can talk about improving public transport or creating better walking environments, but these plans will only bring about the necessary change if we alter our planning mindset, and undo the travel patterns we have created.

Should we enlist the admen to make it happen? Many will argue that it is not the job of government (or anyone else) to change public opinion, but the other way around. But such arguments fail again to recognise that traffic engineers have been doing that for decades. Is it worse to make people aware of the impacts of their behaviour than to force them to change, as engineers have done? Government might not always know best, but neither, apparently, does the general public. So who is going to step up and turn things around? (If you're interested, the comments below the Spectator article provide an intelligent debate on the issue of persuasion vs. coercion.)