12 - Closing Dialogue

Today the closing talk was by Risto Laukkanen from Pöyry Engineering. It was nice to hear from a professional engineer with lots of experience in international development projects.

He started out with some work philosophy: "thinking is not something that happens inside, but what happens when people interact." Then he related this to an internal forum/knowledge sharing network they have at his company. He stressed that for a company like Pöyry, coming from a small country, to get contracts internationally they have to offer some added value, something unique.

The discussion was generally about future trends, and considerations about sustainability. Ecological footprint in "number of Earths required" was discussed. Today the global average is 1.3 Earths. Which country has the highest Human Development Index and is below "1 Earth"?...Cuba. Are we ready to adopt Cuban living standards in order to become "sustainable"? An interesting question.

The interplay between pollution, economy and population is not always intuitive. E.g. compare Eastern Europe before and after the Iron Curtain fell: the population is about the same, pollution is down, and the standard of living/economy is supposedly higher.

Some more points that were mentioned:

- The development of agriculture thousands of years ago was a turning point in human history...are the environmental challenges we now face another turning point? This is also the first time we are experiencing an exponential rate of population increase.

- The concept of "de-growth" was brought up...this is interesting, after all, pollution goes down when the economy goes down...isn't this a good thing then?

- A future prediction was discussed, that water will become a private commodity...so now is a good time to buy watershed land.

- Positive development: companies starting to take pride in meeting environmental legislation.

- Don't really have to try and predict too far ahead, can learn by testing...go in a few different directions, and continue in the ones that work.

Overall, a good lecture/discussion to wrap-up the course.

11 - ICT

This lecture was about Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for development, specifically with regards to Africa. It was interesting to learn more about Ethiopia, where UN ICT advisors are based.

Africa seems to be lagging in this area, yet there is a demand for the services that ICT can provide. People want to be connected. One great benefit could be in agriculture, by providing farmers with weather forecasts in remote locations. The idea of "leapfrogging" is interesting, i.e. by building mobile networks, a whole stage of industrial development (phone cable networks) is bypassed. Mobile phone manufacturers seem to be very interested in ICT development in Africa, as it's one of their last big new markets.

In the YouTube video "Africa Goes Digital," one lady claims that Africa missed out on the Agricultural and Industrial Revolution because it was colonized.

In the other YouTube video, the World Bank highlights the positive aspects of Rwanda's ICT development.

10 - Future Transportation Systems

Today's workshop was really interesting. We split up into small groups and each chose one of five problems to brainstorm and present a solution to. We chose "Private vs. Shared Ownership" with respect to personal transportation, and how we can reduce congestion, emissions, etc.

The strategy was to focus on two groups of people:
1) those who own and need their own car
2) those who occasionaly need a car, but don't need to own one.

For the first group, we thought of ways to encourage increased ridership and enable sharing. To increase ridership , regulations and incentives could be used to discourage "one car, one driver" trips, such as charging downtown congestions fees only if there's one person in the car. Other ways could be higher taxes on owning more than one car, to try and reduce the total number of cars.

To enable sharing, we had to touch on one of the other 5 problems, "Mobility on Demand." The idea is to have a web-based application, which could work on a mobile phone, to connect people willing to give rides with people who need a ride. People using the system would have to register before, to make it more secure, and those offering rides would receive some payment from those getting the ride. These kinds of websites already exist for longer journeys (http://www.mitfahrgelegenheit.de/), but for short inner-city trips, the system would have to work quite spontaneously. Using GPS and voice recognition, however, it could work quite seamlessly. Here's a basic scenario:

- someone decides to head downtown and wonders if anyone nearby using the system needs a ride. They open the app and speaks into the phone: "going downtown in 5 minutes." The system tries to match them with someone who requested a ride downtown recently. If someone is close enough, both people are notified and asked to confirm. The driver gets in the car and the navigation system guides them to the other person's location. At the destination, the passenger just leaves the car right away, since the payment was automatic, based on the distance driven.

After describing this, it still seems hard to imagine a lot of car owners using it. Maybe that's just in "western" countries though. In Russia, for example, it's very common to hitchhike in cities - usually some driver will stop for you quite soon on a busy street. Then you see if you're going the same way and negotiate a price. The web-application is just a high-tech version of this.

To address the 2nd group of people, there could be a "city bike" system with cars, i.e. a fleet of cars that you can use on demand in a city. I read about such a service called Car2Go, a subsidiary of Daimler, that started in Ulm, Germany (http://www.car2go.com). In this system there is a fleet of, say, Smart cars distributed in a city. They could be left parked anywhere, or there could be designated locations. You have to register to use them, then you could just take one whenever you need it, if you see one that's available, or perhaps you could also reserve it. When you're done, you again just park it anywhere or at a designated place. You get billed automatically based on how far you drove or how long you had it. Basically it's a simpler and more flexible car rental scheme.

One of the other groups discussed the "transportation system of the future." They had a good idea based on autonomous taxis - small vehicles that can take up to 5 people. To get one, you wait at a bus stop and press a button. During busy hours, long streams of vehicles could come to pick people up. During off hours, you might have to wait a little while. The autonomous driving would be aided by embedding magnetic bolts into the ashphalt which sensors on the vehicles can detect.

I think this is a great idea, and somehow I feel that something like this will develop. I remember reading how proponents of autonomous vehicles point out that they are able to drive much closer to each other than with human drivers, increasing the capacity of current roads - traffic could flow much smoother. This is a key aspect of the system - that it uses our current infrastructure. Another excellent point is that privacy is not compromised. It's more like a taxi than a bus, and people have their own vehicle during their ride, making people more likely to use it. I think the magnetic bolts might not even be necessary, as GPS, on-board radars, cameras, laser scanners and intelligent software might be enough to drive autonomously. Google has actually been testing such a car recently (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/what-were-driving-at.html).

9 - Sustainable Urban Trasportation

The e-lecture today was about urban transportation, focusing on Europe, Asia and North America.

It's hard to imagine how things will develop, since car transportation already makes up a huge majority of passenger kilometres travelled, and it looks like it will just keep increasing.

Surprising to see that the CO2 emissions of Viet-Nam, the Phillipines, Thailand, and Indonesia are projected to grow more than in India and China in the next 25 years. Also surprised to hear that Tokyo Transit has no subsidy from government(?).

It was nice to hear that Dr. Rahaman had a very positive opinion about Helsinki's public transportation system. He thought that the bus system was especially good. Regarding rail networks, he thought that Germany and Tokyo/Japan had some of the best systems.

I was interested in what Dr. Rahaman thought about how Toronto's public transportation could be improved, since I lived there for some time earlier. He said that people's habits are a big factor, since they often prefer a "door-to-door" trip and like to use their cars. He mentioned how most of the highways are free and there's no congestion charge to drive downtown, so those could be reasons why using the car seems so easy.

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.