8 - Waste II

Plan for improving sanitation in the Kibera slum, Nairobi, Kenya (Question 1):

Since we have a lump sum of money to work with, the best way to spend it would be to establish some things that will last for a while, but that will also improve the situation short-term. We shouldn't use all of it to just pay wages, since it will eventually run out, and we don't know if we'll get any more after. Therefore, infrastructure improvements and training would be good investments.

Kibera residents and building owners don't have land tenure, and the future of the neighbourhood is uncertain. Any major infrastructure investments are therefore a bit risky, but to get any real improvement we have to assume that people will be staying there.

The Small-Scale Providers of Sanitation Services (SSPSS) are already established and are providing valuable services. It is important to keep them employed. The main problem is where they deposit the waste. There are only two sewer lines running through Kibera, and the manholes accessing them are often blocked. By expanding the sewer network and improving access to manholes, the waste can be properly disposed of. This is likely an expensive project and may use up most or all of our budget, but would create a lasting improvement.

An alternative would be to build more proper roads running through Kibera, so that mechanical sewage removal trucks could access more latrines. This would be in the people's interest since mechanical removal is cheaper than manual, but then again maybe it would be putting a lot of SSPSS out of business. Also, I'm not sure what would be more disruptive, building wider roads or expanding the sewer network.

To raise the status of the SSPSS in society, an office could be established which grants licenses to them, making their work more "official."

Finally, it was mentioned that there was a lack of skilled masons who can build proper latrines, therefore training more people in this field could also create some lasting benefits.

7 - Waste I

This time the subject was Municipal Solid Waste Management in developing countries. Here are some interesting points I noticed while reading the documents, and some thoughts:

- better waste removal services tend to be reserved for better neighborhoods, since there's more tax money there

- using the same technical solutions as in industrialized countries (expensive waste collection vehicles) may not work so well. Really interesting that the nature of the waste is usually very different, that whereas in industrial countries it's a lot of plastic, paper, glass and metal (relatively low density), in developing countries it's a lot of ash, sand, rocks and high moisture organic waste (high density)

- small enterprise waste collection seems like a good idea, but then there's the problem that they are only able to move local waste a short distance to some transfer point, where it may stay uncollected

- a good solution seems to be anything that's labour intesive, to employ as many people as possible. It seems that the garbage pickers and scavengers play a very important role, since they reduce the volume of waste by a lot

- I was a bit surprised that organic waste can make up over 50% of total waste, and is responsible for lots of the problems. It seems like it would be really easy to improve the situtation if everyone just composted at home

- it's hard to believe that people from industrial countries would ship hazardous materials to be disposed of in other countries where they have less stringent disposal regulations. This shows how much of the problem is corporate greed in industrial countries. Lots of these problems we're talking about can be solved right here where we live, not by micromanaging other countries

- interesting to see that e-waste was mentioned...I saw a short documentary about this a couple weeks ago

- this reminds me of some people I know back at home who challenged themselves to produce as little waste as possible for one year. They called it the Clean Bin Project (http://cleanbinproject.com)

5 - Energy I

Today's lecture was about energy resources. There were a lot of interesting points. For one, it was interesting to see the one graph of CO2 emissions per person vs. electricity consumption per person for different countries around the world, and how it was basically a continuous stream of points. Dr. Paatero said that earlier there would have been two clear groupings, of "developed" and "developing" countries, but now in terms of energy those terms don't really apply.

I was really surprised how big coal is. It looks like it will still be the main source of energy for most of the world for a long time.

I wanted to ask about the possibility of fusion energy, but there wasn't time for questions. I'm optimistic that a breakthrough in fusion will revolutionize electrical power supply in the future.

4 - Workshop on Water Resources

In this session we did a role-playing workshop about water resources around Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Various players related to water resources were represented by the groups, including villages, a clothing factory, the water managemnet board and an NGO. I was in "Village 1," an inner-city community with no piped water. I was playing the role of a father of 6. Within the village, we had conflicting interests, for example with a private water vendor who wouldn't want to see piped water coming in. I was saying that I wanted piped water, since it would be cheaper and with a large family we could hardly afford private water. In order to compromise with the private water suppliers, our plan was to request that piped water supply would be slowly phased in; i.e. first a central water depot, then after a while individual supply for each household. This would give people time to adjust to the changes. It was interesting to think that even though getting piped water seems like something everyone in the village would want, there could be still be conflicting interests.

For our "3-year plan," our first priority was to have some community meetings to make sure everyone in the village is informed about what's going on, and we also needed to find out what exactly our legal status was, i.e. if we could stay on the land long-term. This tenure consideration wasn't obvious at first but was very important, because in case we weren't there officially, we could perhaps include tenure discussions with our efforts to obtain piped water from the government.

3 - Water Management and Related Challenges

Today the lecture was about global water resources. We started out with an assessment of the commonly heard phrase that the "wars of the 21st Century will be fought over water (instead of oil)," and most of the class seemed to agree, including me. At the end of the lecture though, I had changed my mind...it seems like there really is plenty of water for everyone, despite all the alarming statistics about increased demand and consumption (doubled from 1960 to 2000); all we need to do is manage the water better.

It's interesting to note that even in some of the world's most arid places, like the Middle East, water may not be a big problem. This is because countries may be wealthy enough to have large-scale sea water desalinization plants if necessary, or perhaps have developed ancient know-how for acquiring ground water. The biggest problem globally seems to be megacities and slums, not only supplying them with enough water but also feeding their growing populations, as agriculture requires so much water (70-90% of water consumption is for agriculture). Droughts must still be a big problem though, and famines can also hit rural populations.

The concept of "Virtual Water" was mentioned, which means indirectly using large amounts of water by importing water-intensive products, for example rice from Cambodia.

2 - Right to Land

Today's lecture was a case study of Lagos, as an example of a new Megacity in the developing world. The focus was on the huge slums there and the problems that they face. The city has a population of about 13 million, and some 30-40% live in these unofficial slums in substandard conditions, where they can be evicted by the government.

In the role-playing exercise I was in the "NGO/Community Leaders" group. We assumed that the government would take over some or most of the land where our people were living, so we focused on trying to enable all the people to stay in their reduced area. This would require higher-density housing, built by the government, and would give them official status. This was probably an unrealistic demand, however we thought it was in the community's best interest, since they've been living there for the last 22 years.

One problem was where the people would live during construction. They would probably need some temporary place, and the Sociologist Group suggested moving them outside the city, and providing them with new opportunities to try and encourage them to stay there. This would then help to reverse the trend of mass migration to the cities. The City Planners group seemed to think our idea for building new higher density housing in the original slum area was o.k. The Government was willing to re-consider their original plan and not take any land away, and also to start building new housing for the slum-dwellers. The main issues were then what kinds of services and infrastructure we would need (e.g. medical clinics, schools, sanitation).

We heard about an interesting case in East Africa where something like this actually happened. New apartment blocks were built for people residing in slums, but in the end many didn't want to move because they felt attached to their homes, and the apartments did not conform to everyone's needs.

1 - Natural Hazards and Urban Risks

At the lecture today, some of the points raised were:
- how to define "urban risks"? - the concentration of people, industry and infrastructure in urban areas combined with potential natural hazards happening in those areas creates risk
- vulnerability and risk as purely human considerations. Otherwise hazards don't matter, life will continue
- more than half of the world population now lives in cities (first time ever)
- after disasters, people tend to keep rebuilding on the very same site
- some old ways of adapting life to deal with hazards were very clever, but can get forgotten or are incompatible with urban life (e.g. migrating between 2 villages in Indonesia, to avoid volcanic hazards)
- current trend is to protect from hazards - very expensive and technologically driven
- dilemma facing towns: allow development on risky land, or play it safe and lose potential revenue?

The "weighting task" was to assign the relative importance to Europe of 10 different types of natural hazards. Our group of 6 agreed that they weren't all equal, that some of the hazards seemed more important than others. My own way of judging them was to recall which kinds of hazards I had heard about in the news over the last few years. The ones that came to mind included: forest fires in Greece, a big earthquake in Italy, heat waves in central Europe (summer 2010), and numerous river floods in central Europe. We only had a short time to quantify all 10 hazards, so we ended up averaging everyone's individual assessment. Floods ended up being the highest, which seemed right to me. When we switched with another group, we found out that they had somewhat different estimates than us, since they considered mainly immediate risks to urban areas, while we considered general risks over all time scales. The biggest difference was that we ended up ranking "drought" quite high, as it's a long-term concern, while the other group gave it 0%, since a drought wouldn't pose any immediate threat to a city.

Here is a table of the results:

Hazard	Me	Our group	Other group
droughts	5	13	0
extreme temp's	15	10	13,3
earthquakes	15	13	3,33
floods	25	19	16,6
forest fires	15	14	8,8
landslides	5	8	15,5
storms/cyclones	5	10	16,6
storm surge	5	7	13,3
tsunami	5	3	6,6
volcanic eruptions	5	3	5,5
Total	100	100	100

Considering a similar assessment for my hometown (Vancouver, Canada), there would definitely be some different concerns compared with a general assessment for all of Europe. The most dangerous natural hazard there would be earthquakes, as Vancouver is located on the "Ring of Fire" around the Pacific Ocean. There's always talk of when the Big One will hit, just like in San Francisco. In school we regularly had earthquake drills in addition to fire drills. It seems like the city mostly addresses this risk through building codes and public awareness and education, for example encouraging households to maintain a stock of drinking water, canned food, flashlights, etc. Another important natural hazard would be forest fires, as the region is heavily forested and can get very dry in the summertime; also landslides, as the area is also mountainous and some suburbs are built on the slopes, and landslides have occured after heavy rains. Windstorms are a more recent and unexpected concern, following a devastating storm a few years ago. A big problem with these is that trees get knocked over and take down power lines. Tsunamis don't seem to be too important since the city is protected by Vancouver Island. Flooding may be a concern as the city is on the mouth of the Fraser River, and one large suburb (Richmond) is largely below sea level.

Here is what I think the results would look like:

Hazard	Weight
droughts	3
extreme temp's	3
earthquakes	25
floods	10
forest fires	20
landslides	15
storms/cyclones	15
storm surge	3
tsunami	3
volcanic eruptions	3
Total	100