Reports from the INSS Sustainability Meeting

As readers might know this weekend I attended the Integrated Network for Social Sustainability (INSS) Meeting in Charlotte North Carolina. It was a great event, and I met a lot of great and interesting people, and over this week I would like to write a bit about them and what I learned.

The first is Adrienne Brown, a second year at Dickinson College in Carlisle Pennsylvania. She is currently participating in an application competition which involves answering a prompt with a two-hundred word essay and a two minute video. The organization orchestrating the web-based contest is the Arctic Climate Change Emerging Leaders Program Fellowship (ACCEL). This year they will be piloting an internship program with two positions, one in Washington DC and the other in Berlin, where the two student finalists will work on developing creative marketing strategies using media technologies.

The Arctic Today

The Arctic Today

Adrienne believes that there is a growing need to use technology to talk about important social issues, and as the popularity of social media platforms increase many social movements have started to use these technologies to market their cause to a particular audience. That audience tends to be young and motivated and therefore are a resource of human capital just waiting to be tapped.

To get the ACCEL internship students must gather public support for their essay and video responses. Essentially to demonstrate their ability to wield the powerful weapon of the internet to gain support and spread a particular message. Those who are stronger at encouraging people to act will theoretically get the most votes and present themselves as a good candidate for the position with the ACCEL. Once the public voting ends on April 13th the students who have collected the top ten amount of votes will move to the final round and submit a resume during an interview.

Adrienne feels strongly that the environmental field has not done enough with web-based marketing and is really excited for the opportunity to work on developing a public relations strategy for Arctic environmental issues. At the INSS conference she presented her video response and asked the network’s members to vote for her. Take a look at her essay and video and if you like the ideas presented follow the links and vote for her, and check out the other participants.

I will tell more stories about the event and people involved as the week goes on.

Has Geo-engineering Moved On?

Last year I wrote a series on this blog about the environment entitled ‘Can We Improve the Health of the Planet?’ Read all of the posts and report on the series here through the Bassetti Foundation website. The posts received a lot of comments, and one of the most commented was a post about geo engineering called ‘Engineering a Solution to Global Warming’.

To summarize the argument we are talking about ways of cooling the planet using technological intervention.

One of the modes put forward and that I addressed in the post is to remove carbon from the atmosphere in an attempt to minimize the problem of global warming due to heat retention.

This week in Nature magazine a short article appeared that described an experiment that according to the researchers that conducted it seems to be the first time large amounts of carbon have been removed from the atmosphere and stored.

In the case in question scientists have used iron sulphate and the ocean. The iron is dropped into the water which causes a chain if events that pulls the carbon from the atmosphere, hopefully for good.

Ocean Fertilization Technique

The iron in powder form stimulates the growth of algae that lives for about 3 to 4 weeks. Their growth relies on carbon from the air, drawn through photosynthesis. When the algae dies or is eaten and excreted it sinks to the bottom taking all of the carbon with it.

One of the scientists involved in the experiments states that a single atom of iron draws 13000 atoms of carbon from the air, a large proportion of which finds its way to the ocean floor.

Many scientists are skeptical however. The amount of carbon removed is quite literally a drop in the ocean compared to that produced, and critics argue that this insignificant result could open the gates for other geo-engineering experiments, some of which (as my previous post outlined) seem rather unwise.

Holding Back a Rising Sea

Last week I went to a presentation at MIT made by a group of engineers that are half way through building a high technology barrier to protect Venice from rising waters. The project goes under the name MOSE (Moses).

People standing in water in Venice

Tourists in a rather damp Venice

Venice is a city built on an island situated in a lagoon that has been artificially shaped by human intervention over the last 500 years. The problem of rising sea levels and storms has meant that the city is regularly flooded, and so the project is to build a barrier spanning the three large openings to the lagoon so that it can be sealed in times of high tide and storms.

The flooding has been exacerbated by works carried out in the 1980’s and 90’s to build an industrial zone that involved the drainage of marshland areas, leading to a softening of the ground that made the city actually sink.

This is a 50 billion Euro project, and one of the biggest of its type ever attempted. A look at the data about the Thames Barrier (the first of its type) shows that the problem of high tides is getting worse. It was closed four times in the 1980s, 35 times in the 1990s, and 80 times since 2000, but why?

Strangely enough the problem is related to global temperature rise as we might imagine but not so much because of the melting of the icecaps. The fact is that water expands when it is heated so warming even by a couple of degrees has the effect of increasing its volume. The International Panel on Climate Change state that 70% of the presumed rise will be due to this factor.

So back to the barrier. The entire project is quite an undertaking as this YouTube video demonstrates. Years of planning followed by years of preparation, reclamation of marsh lands and sea defense construction not to mention the construction of an off shore oil terminal so that the ships no longer have to enter the lagoon. But Criticism is also rife.

An aerial shot of part of the MOSE project

Part of the finished engineering works on the MOSE project in Venice

Some engineers criticize the project on purely technical terms, other groups point to the lack of environmental impact study and others the cost.

This video also on YouTube tells a completely different story to the one above. Critics are arguing (amongst other things) that we do not know all of the variables involved (which seems to be true) and that the entire ecosystem of the lagoon will change.

I am no engineer so I cannot argue about the choices made, but I do have one simple question. With all of the movement of water involved in this project (serious high tides and the passage of thousands of liters of sea water a minute) would it not have been possible to build something that produced electricity instead of consuming it in huge amounts?

Venice's flood defense plans

Details of how the flood defenses will work

The stakes are high as you might imagine, Venice is one of the most touristed cities in the world, but the high tides are flooding the monuments ever more regularly. We are talking about more than a meter of water, and footage on international TV of tourists walking on raised platforms through St Mark’s Square and fresco covered churches full of water does not go down well.

It is an old problem though, and one that is shared by many cities today. New Orleans is discussing a similar solution, and here in Boston the issue is also under debate.

They are all looking for a high technology solution to an age old problem that is getting steadily worse.