Floating cities a vision of the future

Katie Shaw — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 12:04:33 +0000

Two architectural companies are responding to the problem of rising sea levels, by fashioning cities that float.

Rutger de Graaf, Founder of Dutch firm DeltaSync, describes how the “excellent” combination of polystyrene for buoyancy and concrete for strength could keep low-lying nations habitable in the future [top picture]. Around 200 houses are already built on floating foundations in the Netherlands, with DeltaSync currently working on six more.

Meanwhile, Belgian firm Vincent Callebaut has designed the Lilypad [bottom picture]: a half aquatic, half terrestrial urban prototype which could accommodate up to 50,000 inhabitants in a soft water lagoon. The Lilypad would be ‘carbon negative’, integrating wind and solar power to generate more energy than it consumes. – Katie Shaw

Co-operative weaves gold from arid land

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 11:22:53 +0000

A small farmers' co-operative makes millions weaving carpets from a native agave.

Luca Allegro found himself at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, with the words “social entrepreneur” printed on his name badge. “It didn’t sound quite right because I’m just a farmer, really.”

But behind Allegro’s modesty lies a mission. He is International Business Consultant for the Association of Small Farmers of Valente (APAEB), a co-operative farming organisation founded in 1980 to support farmers working in semi-arid region of Bahia, in the northeast of Brazil. Their main crop? The native succulent agave plant, sisal.

Sisal has striking sword-shaped leaves that reach up to two metres high, and each of these leaves contains as many as 1,000 fibres that can be extracted and dried to make rope, paper, cloth, wall coverings, carpets – even dartboards. Thirty years on, APAEB works with 2,000 local farmers and has an annual revenue of over $7 million.

Allegro describes the venture as a direct trade initiative. The co-operative grows, buys and processes sisal to make high-quality finished carpets, adding value to the product before selling it on.

And, although the fibres only account for 5% of the plant’s weight, there’s little waste. The APAEB mixes the remaining vegetable matter with pulp from cactus leaves to feed to goats. The result is an integrated system that produces raw material for textiles and dairy products for the community – all on relatively infertile land that has few other agricultural uses. The money from these sales has allowed the community to set up a local radio station and a small bank, which helps fund other income-generating activities, so diversifying the local economy. – Arran Frood

Social project makes sugar mean sweet

Anna Simpson — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:12:10 +0000

The sugar cane industry defines socio-economic conditions in Aracoiaba. It hasn't always made life sweet for local workers, but things are looking up.

Four hundred years ago, the hills and plains by the Capibaribe River in Pernambuco were home to over 60 sugar cane mills, making ‘white gold’ for trade in Europe. It was a rich business, but the Portuguese elite took much of the profit, leaving local workers little to show for their labour.

Time has passed, but the sugar cane industry still defines socio-economic conditions in the small city of Araçoiaba, on the outskirts of Pernambuco’s main industrial zone and commercial centre, Recife. The availability of work, and often the wage, depends on the season and the climate, and a year of drought can mean no work at all.

By 2005, high unemployment and low wages had granted Araçoiaba the lowest Human Development Index rating in the Metropolitan Region of Recife, and an increasingly unreliable climate made for grim prospects. So why, in the few years since, has the city seen a rise in family income, more people in education than ever before, and the inauguration of five new libraries?

It’s largely down to Mais Vida (‘More Life’), a social project that’s encouraging local families to take their health, rights and quality of life into their own hands. Set up by the Unilever Institute in partnership with a number of trade, industry and craft associations in 2005, Mais Vida recruits local residents to raise awareness of new initiatives and drive change in all aspects of their lives, from health and education, to digital inclusion and handicraft. Success stories include a medical check-up for over 4,000 children, combining oral healthcare with diabetes and blood tests, all while promoting leisure activities like the Afro-Brazilian art form, Capoeira. – Anna Simpson

Transforming our cities from grey to green

Martin Hunt — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 12:28:41 +0000

It was great to see the launch of the Integrated Habitats Design Competition last week – a competition that seeks out inspiring and innovative designers who emphasise the value of biodiversity and nature in our built surroundings. A competition that places significant weight on nature contributing to healthy, low-energy, high-quality environments will hopefully help the spread and uptake of best practice in greening our cities.

Integrated design and a greater focus on green infrastructure is not just the domain of planners, the owners of allotments or the managers of our very important inner city parks. Access to high quality green space, the provision of native trees for solar shading, designing building solutions to support threatened species, or the application of sustainable drainage systems do not just help conserve or enhance local ecology - they are also vital to our health and wellbeing (and happiness). They are also vital for the long-term resilience of urban areas in the face of over-heating or flooding associated with climate change. Convinced of this, I’m very happy to support and endorse this new design competition and look forward to evaluating the submissions with my fellow judges during the summer!

The competition was launched at Ecobuild last week (see Jonathon Porritt’s blog), and it was great to see this event really gathering momentum, and size. For me, Ecobuild highlighted the need for our designers and builders to put nature before technological fixes. I was privy to discussions and debates around biomimicry, the provision of food growing space in schools, and planning for more trees in our cities. But I was also impressed by the drive and enthusiasm of the many professionals trying to deliver more sustainable homes, schools, hospitals, offices, and other forms of infrastructure. There were literally hundreds of suppliers showing off their latest green products – from natural paints and SMART meters, to micro-CHP units and recycled benches.

Please visit www.ihdc.org.uk for further information on the Integrated Habitats Design Competition. The competition is supported by CIRIA and organised by Dusty Gedge, the UK’s leading living roofs expert, Gary Grant, one of the UK’s leading ecologists, and RESET, the sustainable design training charity. Judges and endorsers come a wide range of backgrounds, including government agencies, professional institutions and NGOs.

Participants have until 30th June to enter and finalists will exhibit at the Building Centre in central London for five weeks over September, during which time the final awards will be presented at the World Green Roof Congress on the 15th September.

M&S set a sustainable benchmark for the retail world

Jonathon Porritt — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:43:09 +0000

I spoke at the annual M&S Suppliers’ Conference on Tuesday, which took place in Kensington Town Hall. This venue has a particular resonance for me as it was where the votes for the 1979 and 1984 European elections were counted – and every time I’m back there, I can’t help but recall that sense of consternation that so few people seemed to be prepared, at that time, to put their cross in the Green Party box!

Twenty-six years on and it seemed as if the M&S Suppliers were all voting enthusiastically for the updated version of Plan A! And that was not just because Sir Stuart Rose made a very powerful pitch telling them all that this was their reality whether they liked it or not. By the end of the day, they would certainly have had an unnerving sense of bars being raised all around them, in terms of production standards, transparency, reporting, innovation and so on.

Plan A was launched three years ago, and instantly captured people’s imagination. The combination of carbon neutral and zero waste to landfill pledges, the 100 Action Points, the commitment to invest £200 million, and the sense of all this being at the core of the company rather than being grafted on made an immediate impact. It also gave Plan A the kind of brand profile that took it way beyond the usual corporate responsibility strategies.

Three years on, the £200 million cost has been turned into a £50 million contribution to profit. Forty-five of the Action Points have been delivered, and another 80 have been added on. The ambition level has been ratcheted up several notches, with M&S now committing to becoming the world’s most sustainable (major) retailer by 2015.

Forum for the Future has worked closely with M&S throughout this time, so we are not exactly disinterested parties, but Plan A does provide the benchmark for the whole of the retail world. It’s visionary, it’s applied, it’s comprehensive (as in covering all the sustainability bases), and it’s succeeding in getting whole-company buy-in, through the high level “How We Do Business” Committee, chaired (and driven!) by Sir Stuart Rose.

So it’s well worthwhile checking out the new version of Plan A, available at: http://plana.marksandspencer.com/media/pdf/planA-2010.pdf

Exclusive interview with the man behind Curitiba's master plan

Anna Simpson — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:46:59 +0000

Jaime Lerner tells Green Futures how to redesign a city, what Brazil’s major metropolises have yet to learn, and why urban acupuncture is the way forward.

When it comes to urban design, here’s the rule of thumb: city = life, work and mobility.” Jaime Lerner, former Mayor of Curitiba turned green city guru, is never short on soundbites. They helped him get elected back in the 1970s, when his urban master plan did so much to transform the city. And he wields them neatly to sum up the various successes along the way – from the celebrated rapid transit system, to overcoming the city’s notorious flood problems. Or as Lerner puts it: “While other cities buried rivers in concrete, we created parks along ours.”

And the parks aren’t just for the pleasure. As natural floodplains, they offer a more effective defence against seasonal flooding than concrete barriers, and can be used as boating lakes when the Iguazu River bursts its banks. It’s a strategy now being adopted as far away as the Netherlands, as governments look to adapt to climate change.

This respect for the pre-urban landscape helped Curitiba to hang onto a dwindling resource that many cities destroy, only to spend millions bringing it back: green space. “When we started planning, we came up with the idea of establishing a ‘grid’ for Curitiba, and occupying some of its cells with parks. But as time went on, we saw that a better idea was to save the existing – but endangered – forest remnants. With this policy, even as the population tripled, we were able to increase the amount of green areas per inhabitant from 0.5 metres squared (m2) to 52m2.”

The importance of green space to good health and quality of life is undisputed, “and if a city has quality of life,” says Lerner, “naturally it has a very strong sustainability component”. By way of example he comments that by living close to your work, or bringing your work closer to home, you’re both improving the quality of life and reducing demand for transport.Curitiba is perhaps best known for its extraordinarily cheap and effective transport system, the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). With triple-section bendy buses in dedicated bus lanes, it carries two million passengers a day, as many as some subway systems. But where an underground rail network costs as much as $100 million per kilometre, the BRT costs just $1 million per kilometre. “Creativity begins when you cut a zero from your budget,” Lerner laughs. Fares on the buses are flat, and the city’s growth has been planned along the routes, so that no one lives or works more than 400 metres from a bus stop.

A quick, precise touch

Of course, Lerner acknowledges, this system can’t just be copied and transferred to any urban area. “Every city has to make the best out of each mode of transportation it has, be it on the surface or underground. The key resides in not having competing systems on the same space, and using everything that the city has in the most effective way.”

Lerner began with a simple dream for Curitiba: health, education, childcare. But he is quick to acknowledge that he couldn’t have changed a thing if others hadn’t shared his vision. “A city is a collective dream,” he says, “and to build this dream is vital.” This is where leadership and good communication skills come in. Building the dream means creating scenarios of a possible future that are “desired by the majority”. Because unless the inhabitants share the dream and can believe in it, their “essential involvement” will be lacking.

The downside, he jokes, is that once you start the population dreaming, it’s hard to get them to stop: “The more the population gets used to advances, the more demanding it becomes. Managing Curitiba became a commitment of constant innovation”. Rather than stem the dream, Lerner recommends ‘urban acupuncture’ as a cure for all sorts of urban problems from neglect of the natural environment to poor economic management.

“It’s a quick, precise touch in a key point,” he explains. “Just as in the medical approach, strategic ‘punctual interventions’ create a new energy that will trigger positive chain-reactions, helping to cure and enhance the whole system.”

And the cure for environmental damage on a larger scale – like climate change? The same rule applies, says Lerner. “Around 75% of global carbon emissions are related to cities. And little by little, it is becoming clear that it is in the cities that we can bring about more efficient and effective changes.” – Anna Simpson and Ben Tuxworth.

Are we failing to see the wood for the gadgets?

Martin Hunt — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:45:08 +0000

I’ve recently found myself questioning whether we are becoming over-reliant on technological fixes to the sustainability challenges we face today. Are we in danger of falling for ‘techno-wash’ as a way of avoiding some more fundamental (and maybe more painful) decisions about the way we live our lives? Does technology sometimes obscure the bigger picture?

Did you see the story about one of the government’s new flagship schools pulling the plug on interactive whiteboards and other wireless components, and reverting to pen and paper? Teachers wanted to avoid wasting time when systems failed to function properly, and losing the attention of pupils.

How about this recent post on our website? It made me laugh. Apparently iPhone users can now download an app to show them whether they should stop using said app, and pocket their iPhone. The so-called ASBO app displays 'anti-social behaviour' statistics for the user's current location. My knee-jerk reaction was to assume the reason for the app was to simply tell users to “get off the thing, be sociable and actually talk to your mates”. And I know I wasn’t alone in that reaction.

Get off your Luddite high horse I hear you cry. Ok, I’ll admit to being a bit of a technophobe. I’m frequently in deep and murky waters when trying to talk about apps or Twitter and feel a killjoy when I question whether the latest fashionable gadget really does makes life a lot easier or much more pleasurable. Don’t get me wrong, there are fantastic benefits to most of our advances in technology, be that the wheel, windmill or the worldwide web. I just become a bit irrational or disconcerted about our reliance on shiny technology sometimes.

But this is a really important issue as we seek to develop a low carbon economy and society. For example, the Zero Carbon Hub’s report rightly suggests that a lot more needs to be done to market zero carbon homes. It highlights the fact that while consumers are happy to take a risk on the next cool gadget, they won’t take a punt on a zero carbon home because it is perceived to be too futuristic, hi-tech and experimental. When you consider the money involved, that’s not a surprise – the appetite for fashionable, innovative technology will obviously take the consumer only so far.

Of course in years to come, I’ve no doubt that the highly fashionable iPhone or a super duper variation will be integral to remotely managing the heating in your home, rotating your roof top renewables, or altering the tints in your windows! And I acknowledge we will not be able to deliver a truly zero carbon home that is fit for our expectations without the help of technology.

It’s all very well to try and paint a positive vision of a low-carbon future, replete with whizz bang applications (sorry, apps) and smart technology, but there is a danger that we can turn some people off (not literally) by placing too much emphasis on high-tech solutions. Indeed, from my work with building design professionals and their clients, I know that technology can be a distraction from low-tech, passive solutions that can have a bigger overall impact.

The old adage of avoid, reduce, then replace (fossil fuel sources on energy) continues to serve us well. Being clever about building form and orientation, and concentrating on the fabric of our buildings must come before the signing of cheques for ground source heat pumps or micro-wind turbines. And it is certainly time we stop hearing about buildings that have photovoltaic arrays or solar panels on north-facing roofs!

So, here’s a plea – don’t forget the simple, low-tech decisions we can all take which deliver greater benefits than that shiny item that sits on your roof, in your office or in your pocket. Technology has its place in making our world more sustainable, but our collective understanding of what our priorities should be and the changes in behaviour which will flow from that should have much more of a lasting legacy.

Martin Hunt is Head of Built Environment at Forum for the Future

No more niches – we need sustainable innovation at scale

Jonathon Porritt — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:07:49 +0000

It’s the scale of it all that is sometimes daunting. On energy, for instance, we have to transition from around 90% dependency on fossil fuels to around 90% on renewables – allowing a little bit of residual space for cleaner and super-efficient fossil fuels (aviation, amongst other things, where technological substitution is always going to be limited). If we had two hundred years to make all that happen, it would be fine. But we don’t. Between 2025 and 2050 is seen by most scientists as the outer time limit available to us.

Which will require an unprecedented level of innovation in every sector of the economy. And that means getting scale in all those sectors to get the right drivers in place to make the innovation happen. From niche to mainstream. Easy! But scale means different things in different sectors.

I spent a day last week at Ecobuild - ‘the biggest event in the world for sustainable design, construction and the built environment’. That absolutely wasn’t a claim that could have been made at the first Ecobuild, five years ago, which attracted no more than 1000 visitors. This year, there were more than 50,000 people there. Earls Court was flush with exhibitors, from some of the biggest companies in the UK to distinctly ‘alternative’ start-ups taking a massive gamble on enough people falling for their particular ‘breakthrough innovation’. There were countless meetings and debates going on the whole time, and the kind of buzz that one doesn’t always associate with events of this kind.

For the politicians who’d dropped in, and wandered around looking a bit bemused, it all said one thing: no more niches. This was about scale. New orders. Expanding markets. Innovation (in the construction industry!). And even, dare one say it, new jobs.

I won’t be churlish by pointing out that this supply-chain journey (from niche to huge, scaled opportunity) could have been stimulated by the political system many years ago – as it was in Germany, Scandinavia and so on. At least we’ve got there now, and it’s exciting.

The UK Green Building Council has been a central part of that journey, and is now providing the kind of leadership (across this complex industry and beyond) that the politicians need in order to stay in touch with the developments on the ground. The UK Green Building Council launched its new Green Building Manifesto at Ecobuild – and it’s well worth a look.

Downloading the sun in Suruacá

Roger East — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:24:50 +0000

There is no road to Suruacá. The river’s the highway for small Amazonian settlements like this. A full six hours by boat up the Tapajós from the nearest sizeable town, it’s not where you’d expect to find the model for a modern, linked community. Yet Suruacá’s 100 or so families are pioneers in a project bringing internet access to local people – via the region’s first solar powered telecentre.

Providing access to energy is one of Brazil’s great development challenges, with an estimated 12 million people currently living out of range of electricity supplies. Sunshine, though, is something the country does have in plenty. And for the last six years a 2kW photovoltaic system on the top of the telecentre in Suruacá has been turning that sunshine into electric power. It’s enough to run four computers for eight hours a day, plus a local radio service that’s on air for four hours a day, the satellite that hooks the whole thing up to the internet, and a set of associated printers, scanners and cameras.

Initial funding came from the US development agency USAID, working alongside local NGOs with the GreenStar Corporation as technology providers. The idea was that an emerging internet enabled network should become increasingly self-sustaining by stimulating local entrepreneurial activity. So project manager Bob Bortner helped create a Community Empowerment Network to provide ongoing assistance, encourage the creation of more local telecentres, build internet awareness and skills – and facilitate relationships via the web.

For instance, the community of Xixhua, 500km to the northwest, already has some experience of how internet access can open up a market for ecotourism and local art and artefacts. So links with Xixhua can help Suruacá see some of the opportunities – and the pitfalls. For all the benefits of email and web access, the community wants the technology to sustain their way of life, not undermine it.

It’s been part of the essence of the Suruacá project that it is community driven. It was local people who designed and put up the telecentre building, right next to the school – where the children soon found out that computers were for education as well as playing games. Access to information over the internet has helped hugely with healthcare too. It has also inspired the launch of a micro hydro scheme to improve the availability of electricity for local homes. And with Suruacá’s existing generator only switched on in the evenings, local interest in off-grid renewables is surely set to grow.

Access all areas
The mean streets of São Paulo seem far removed from rural Amazonia – but lack of electric power points in poor communities is a common thread. So is the potential for solar powered internet solutions. And Professor Marcelo Zuffo at São Paulo University, a powerhouse of innovation in what he calls “interactive electronics”, has now come up with “wifi access in a box”. It doesn’t need plugging into anything, and it’s inexpensive and small enough to hang from a lamp-post or a tree, but Zuffo believes it could turbocharge such “IT for all” access initiatives as the global One Laptop Per Child scheme.

Essentially what he has done is combine a solar panel with a cheap motorcycle battery to store the charge, and some electronic circuitry to run a mini wifi access point. If a number of access points are set up in a honeycomb configuration, each one will provide relaying services to the others, giving a wide area network with the best available links to the internet. The hard part is the energy management.

It’s good enough already to keep running for two days without sunlight, says Zuffo, but he’s aiming to stretch that to ten – enough for real standalone capability even in the dark days of the rainy season. – Roger East

Sun and speed
Energy giant Petrobras is taking a first step towards solar power for the nation’s vast motorbike fleet, with a new charging station in Rio de Janeiro. The station, which uses grid power at night, is powered by photovoltaics while the sun’s up. There are currently just a few hundred electric bikes on Brazil’s roads, but Petrobras hopes to raise awareness of solar technology and the potential for change by providing infrastructure for bikes in places where it is hard to park, for example. According to the head of Petrobras’s distribution division, Edimar Machado, the solar charging stations will build “environmental awareness by showing people that it is possible to use energy without harming the environment”. – Ben Tuxworth

– Roger East

Hydro brings independence to remote farmers

Martin Wright — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 12:02:07 +0000

In the deep south of Brazil, small-scale hydro plants are bringing robust, reliable supplies of power to farming communities.In the deep south of Brazil, in the rolling countryside of the Rio Grande do Sul, there’s a revolution under way.

This isn’t about political turmoil – but it is transforming lives. It’s a very physical revolution. The kind that happens when a rush of water hits the blades of a turbine and spins it around, generating electricity.

Brazil’s big dams are a mixed blessing, but the hydro power here is on a much more human – and sustainable – scale. Two ‘mini-hydro’ plants, installed by the Cooperativa Regional de Eletrificacao Rural do Alto Uruguai Ltda (CRERAL), a co-operative owned and run by local people, are bringing robust, reliable supplies of power to thousands of farming families across the remote Alto Uruguai region.

Local co-ops such as CRERAL were set up in the 1960s and 70s in an effort to speed the electrification of remote areas. They are responsible for buying in power and selling it onto their members.

But by the mid-90s, their members were increasingly frustrated by persistent power shortages and blackouts. It made it difficult to modernise their homes and farms, and their children were starting to turn their backs on rural life to seek better opportunities elsewhere. They voted in a new leadership, under President João Alderi do Prado, with new ideas – notably that of generating their own power. It seems to have worked. Now that the two mini-hydro plants, with a combined capacity of 1.9MW, have come onstream, things are changing. More power means there’s enough juice to run everything from irons, showers, fridges and freezers, to agricultural equipment like milking machines. This has not only improved people’s quality of life, but also their income. As farmer Vilson Antonio Ascoli told me: “It was a huge difference when the hydro came. Before we were just clinging on, really. Now we’ve got the milk cooler, and the freezer for the meat, so we can store more and sell more as a result. Our income’s gone up by at least 50%. So we’ve bought more cows – we have 10 now”. His wife, Terezhina, added: “We can have different things going at the same time. I can have a shower while he’s watching the TV”.

A neighbouring farmer, Alcir Bertiol, agreed. “It’s much better now I can rely on the fridge. It means I can store the milk till the tanker comes. I had the fridge before, but you never knew for certain if there’d be power or not. If the power was out, you’d still have to milk the cows, but your work would go literally down the drain.”

At present, the two plants meet around a quarter of CRERAL members’ total electricity needs. (The rest is bought in from conventional sources.) The co-op is now investing in a further four mini-hydro schemes, which should enable it to cover most, if not all, of the demand – giving it effective energy independence. It is doing so on a purely commercial (not subsidised) basis. And it has started to attract carbon funding, as well.

There’s no reason why others can’t follow CRERAL’s example, says Alderi, as surveys show this region alone has “hundreds” of sites suitable for mini-hydro.

CRERAL’s prospects were boosted by a flood of publicity in Brazil and elsewhere when it won an Ashden Award for Sustainable Energy in 2008. As electricity prices increase, so the economic logic of its approach – and of decentralised energy in general – seems set to become ever more apparent. And now that Alderi has served as an adviser to the Government’s ‘Luz para Todos’ (Light for All) programme, there are hopes that it will influence national policy, too. – Martin Wright

Hydro worth a dam?

There’s a huge amount at stake on the Madeira river. As the largest tributary of the Amazon, it’s seen by Brazil’s energy planners as a vital resource for hydropower. Giant dams at Jirau and San Antonio, slated to deliver in excess of 3,000 megawatts each by 2013, have been described as the top priority in the drive to meet the country’s electricity needs. But the opposition, it’s clear, just won’t go away.

However much the Government tries to minimise it, the displacement of indigenous forest dwellers is one flash point. Protests have already held up construction at Jirau, where cost estimates are spiralling away from the original $5.3 billion budget. Flooding could be greatly aggravated, as the Government of neighbouring Bolivia has complained, by the accumulation of huge quantities of sediment normally carried down by the flow of the Madeira.

Environmental disruption in the construction phase could be substantial, with massive equipment and teams of workers coming in. The contractors have already incurred penalty fines over incidents of illegal forest destruction and fish killed by dynamite. More fundamentally, the dams risk upsetting the breeding cycles of catfish and other species by obstructing their way upstream.

There’s a further dimension, too, which casts differing drivers of the future of the Amazon region into sharp relief. The scheme’s opponents have nightmares about what they fear is the developers’ dream: a dammed Madeira as a massive commercial waterway. A cost-effective way of getting soybeans out to export markets would make developmental pressure on the surrounding forests and tropical savannah even harder to resist. What price, then, the protection of its native peoples, its rich biodiversity, and its vital global role as a carbon sink? – Roger East

Clean transport calls for sustainable sugar

Anna Simpson — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:53:01 +0000

Mechanisation, innovation and land limitation drive efficiency in ethanol from sugar cane.

The sun is weighing down upon the high plateaus of Goiás where the long, dry season has set in, and the sugar cane harvest – which stretches from April to November – is in full swing. But there isn’t a traditional cane cutter or a burning field in sight. Instead, large machines loom over the fields, sucking up the tall thick grass and spitting out pure cane.

This conversion of the harvest from mostly manual techniques to 100% mechanical impacts on much more than the scenery, by improving safety conditions for those who work on the harvest. It is also one of many efficiency improvements at Tropical BioEnergia – a joint venture involving the Brazilian companies Santelisa Vale and Maeda Group, and the international energy company BP – which have helped to lift yields of cane from 500,000 tonnes a year to over 2.4 million. And with the prospect of further innovations to improve efficiency – such as the use of GPS to enable more precise planting, harvesting and application of fertilizers – this production is expected to reach five million tonnes in the future. For the local community, this increased capacity means the creation of jobs demanding a more varied skill set, from managing the machines and the truck fleet, to overseeing the operations.

Four-fold increase

As the world’s largest exporter of ethanol from sugar cane, and with the second largest domestic market, it’s important for Brazil to ensure that good harvests are viable and sustainable far into the future. The Brazilian Government recently announced ‘Agrizones’ – areas where sugar cane production is to be limited, with a ban on plantations close to the Amazon and around the coast. Recognising the importance of preserving Brazil’s forests, and the sugar cane industry’s dependence on both the seasons of rain and drought, BP’s biofuels business is focusing on producing biofuels on degraded pastures that can be maintained through rain-fed irrigation. This may seem limiting, but even within these tight conditions, Brazil could increase its sugar cane planted area four-fold from the number of acres planted today.

BP is also looking at the lifecycle of the ethanol production process to help to minimise waste. For example, ethanol refineries often generate power from bagasse, the residue left behind when the sugar cane is crushed, and sell any excess to the grid. It is measures like this which mean that ethanol produced from sugar cane can reduce greenhouse gas emissions (when compared with conventional petrol) more than other biofuels made today.

Secure, scaleable, competitive

The challenge, according to Philip New, CEO BP Biofuels, is “to bring together humanities’ two most important value chains – agriculture and energy”. Ethanol has been a major source of energy in Brazil since the 1970s, when the key driver was to overcome dependence on imported oil. Now, sustainable transport is the primary motivation. “Biofuels are the only viable solution for secure, scaleable and competitive low carbon energy for transport in the short to medium term,” says Mario Lindenhayn, President of BP Biofuels in Brazil. “That is not to say that electric cars will not play a role in the future, but to get the material reduction of GHG emissions, we think that biofuels are the best option. And they are a reality today.”

Flex fuel future

Flexibility will be the key to keeping ahead of the game. Already, BP is looking beyond ethanol to more efficient biofuels, such as biobutanol, which has properties closer to petrol than ethanol and can also be produced from sugar cane, and cellulosic ethanol, which can be made by using the entire plant, including non-edible wastes.

Today, over 90% of the cars produced in Brazil are ‘flex fuel’ – able to run on any combination of ethanol and petrol – and they are expected to represent 75% of the total fleet by 2020. Honda has already introduced the first flex fuel motorbike, and there are hopes to convert agricultural equipment, now powered by diesel, to biofuels in the future. The combination of even more efficient flex fuel vehicles with advanced biofuels will help to drive a lower-carbon future for transport in Brazil and worldwide. – Anna Simpson

Major embargos mean new hope for 'protected' forests

Anna Simpson — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 10:38:11 +0000

In Brazil, a rare combination of supermarkets, banks and determined government action is giving teeth to forest protection laws.

Between the Xingu and Tapajós rivers in the Terra do Meio, or Middle Land, lie 7.4 million acres of protected forest. The conservation areas were created in 2005, following the assassination of Sister Dorothy Stang, who spoke out against illegal logging and in defence of peasant farmers trying to make a living without deforestation. But authorities are struggling to protect the mahogany-rich land and its people. According to a report compiled by the Amazonian non-profit research institute Imazon, with the support of the British Embassy in Brazil, poor administration and chronic delays in judicial proceedings mean that illegal exploitation of the land often goes unpunished.

The report found that, due to a shortage of attorneys and inefficient use of their time, only 3% of cases reached any conclusion, with the vast majority held up in never-ending appeals. Moreover, out of the few rulings that were made, only 10% of fines were collected – with environmental protection agency IBAMA totting up R$11.8 billion in outstanding penalties.

These failures have allowed an estimated 40 million hectares to be seized illegally, making deforestation much more profitable for exploiters than investment to improve the productivity of land outside the protected area. In June 2009, the Government put its foot down with a bill to regularise landholdings, and a programme to implement it. But an analysis of the bill by Imazon raised concerns that the low price offered for the rights to smaller areas – with some even given away free – could drive deforestation rather than put a stop to it.

And yet, in spite of the legal minefield, there’s hope. A number of effective incentives for compliance are beginning to shine through the shadows. Among them, embargos agreed by three major supermarkets, Wal-Mart, Carrefour and Pao de Acucar – and three footwear giants, Adidas, Clarks and Timberland – on meat and leather from ranches on illegally deforested land. Perhaps buoyed by such commercial action, government authorities are starting to get tougher, too. Cattle found grazing on protected land have been seized, and sold at auction. The confiscation of 3,000 heads of cattle in 2008 led to the voluntary removal of 30,000 more. And credit restrictions have been imposed by the federal government for anyone with more than 400ha of untitled land. As a result of these measures, deforestation rates have begun to drop – even as commodity prices rise.

According to Imazon, there’s now a clear way forward. The organisation hopes to drive public pressure on landholders to adopt more sustainable practices, through embargos, procurement regulations and public prosecutions. If this civil force goes hand in hand with a higher conviction rate for offences and the proper application of penalties to fit the crime, then the ‘protection’ offered to Terra do Meio on paper could take effect in practice, too. – Anna Simpson

The science of uncertainty

Sara Parkin — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 15:25:23 +0000

What are we to make of the furore around climate science? There are implications for environmental campaigners, government and businesses currently agonising over the implementation of low carbon strategies, as well as for scientists - climate scientists in particular - and the whole scientific community in general.

To start with thee and me. Most of us won’t have a degree in science, and may not even have a GCSE in one of the natural sciences. So we tend to trust what the scientists say without considering too closely what they mean. Consequently, we are rubbish at understanding the uncertainty that is intrinsic in all scientific inquiry. Climate science is no different. A hypothesis was made: that the most recent warming is mainly due to greenhouse gases added to the atmosphere by human activity. This hypothesis developed from the fact that we’ve known since the 19th century certain gases warm the climate, and that humans now generate a lot more of these gases. Despite a lot of effort over the last 40 years, this hypothesis has not been disproved.

As a consequence, climate scientists consider the likelihood that human emissions of greenhouse gases are contributing to a warming climate to be very likely – i.e. 90% certain. The figures below gives the degrees of certainty the IPCC gives to its conclusions. The big step between labelling something likely or very likely means the latter appellation is not given lightly.

Virtually certain  > 99%
Extremely likely  > 95%
Very likely  > 90%
Likely  > 66%
More likely than not  > 50%
Unlikely  > 33%
Very unlikely  > 10%
Extremely unlikely  > 5%

Source: IPCC Report (2007) Summary for Policy Makers p53

Nothing in the ‘climategate’ scandals undermines this conclusion. Where thee and me need to get sharper is in comprehending the various levels of uncertainty attached to the projected consequences. In policy and decision-making terms uncertainty translates into risk management strategies – and something with a 90% chance of being true would surely top the risk register. As David Mackay, DECC Chief Scientific Advisor puts it: “since 1750 we have burnt ½ trillion tonnes of carbon, and are on track to burn the second 1/2 trillion in less than 40 years. The cumulative consequences of that first 500 billion tonnes suggest the next 500 billion (and the rest) ought to stay underground.” (Mackay, 2009)

It would be astonishing if that scale of intervention in the natural cycles of the earth would be without adverse consequence.

So, ‘climategate’ does not let any of us off the hook of responsibility for serious action – by governments, organisations and individuals.

And no more excuses for us becoming anything but much more intelligent consumers of science. Promoting selected conclusions of climate science as irrefutable facts has long been the vice of media, but environmental organisations really ought to know better. Now, bereft of a trusted interlocutor to help them understand the science, the public is unsurprisingly withdrawing ‘belief’ that climate change is actually happening. Both climate scientists and campaigning organisations have a lot to do to rekindle that trust. As do governments. Even though we may (rightly) whinge at their muddled prevarication, governments have not (yet) faltered in their risk analysis that there is enough certainty around climate change to justify action. Businesses that have reached the same conclusion need to ramp up the evidence that they too are of serious intent. Mutuality of benefit in the business-government-public triangle of climate change action depends on the thread of trust not being broken.

So what about the climate scientists? As I suggested in my last blog on climate science there are only very small reasons to question the methodology of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that right now is soliciting evidence for its fifth report. When IPCC chief, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, he returns from his Communications 101 course, he will be making sure his organisation’s perfectly good methodologies are rigorously implemented. Paradoxically, trust in climate science could be enhanced by the whole sorry tale.

One positive outcome should be more discipline and aptitude for communication amongst senior climate scientists. The few who became caught up in the excitement of it all and sacrificed dispassionate presentation of evidence to campaigning fervour have risked the reputation of all science. Science funders know it must not happen again.

Bob May, one time government Chief Scientist points out that science progresses through organised scepticism – continual challenging of research outcomes to both extend knowledge and improve certainty. He’s really cross that the word ‘sceptic’ has been recruited, not by genuine challengers of research outcomes (and methodologies) but by what I have dubbed the malicious naysayers. Very different from those who deny something out of fear or misunderstanding, these naysayers are driven by knowingly wrong motives, and are often paid by organistions with the most to lose should low-carbon policies be implementated with any seriousness.

Separating the useful sceptics and contrarians from the malicious naysayers is vital. They need to be challenged head on. And the best way to do that - something all science needs to take on board - is transparency and far more involvement of the public in science – upstream where research projects are designed as well as downstream where the outcomes are debated.

Will Brazil's oil bonanza drown out renewables?

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:07:44 +0000

In 2007, Brazil struck gold with the discovery of vast oil reserves. Two years on, Tom Philips explores the impact on the country's much vaunted 'renewables revolution'.

0n 9 November 2007, Brazilian authorities called a press conference and finally confirmed what most natives had long suspected: that God was Brazilian.

After years of deep water testing and drilling, the state oil giant Petrobras had announced the discovery of vast new reserves of light crude, located thousands of kilometres under the Atlantic Ocean, beneath a thick layer of salt. These reserves were so big that they would change the country forever, politicians said. So big, in fact, that Brazil’s President insinuated that divine intervention, as well as geology, must have played a part.

Immediately after the find was announced, President Lula da Silva’s Chief of Staff, Dilma Rousseff, claimed the find could elevate Brazil’s oil wealth “to the level of Saudi Arabia and Venezuela”, and help lift millions of Brazilians out of poverty. Carnival had arrived early.

Two years on, and the excitement is undiminished. Petrobras’s CEO, Jose Sergio Gabrielli, recently declared: “If we reach 5.7 million barrels per day, we will be producing more than half of all the other companies in the world put together”.

He’s not alone in dreaming big. “Conservatively, I’d say that we will become the eighth biggest [oil producer in the world],” says Mauricio Tolmasquim, President of Brazil’s state-owned Energy Research Corporation (EPE) and one of the main architects of national energy policy.

Yet amid the euphoria there are many voices of concern. Some fear that new legislation currently being debated in Congress, designed to ensure oil wealth is distributed fairly across the country, will stifle Brazil’s pre-salt exploration campaign by reducing the opportunities of foreign companies.

Others, though, are more alarmed by the environmental implications of the find. For Roberto Smeraldi, Founder-Director of Amigos da Terra – Amazônia Brasileira, the pre-salt drilling represents “a true carbon bomb, releasing four times the amount of greenhouse gas per unit than conventional drilling”. Along with new planned investment in coal power, he argues, “this would offset the gains that might be obtained by achieving zero deforestation”.

Sergio Leitao, a Director at Greenpeace Brazil, agrees. “It is estimated that the total emissions from the pre-salt reserves could reach 56 billion tonnes of CO2. This means that over the next 40 years Brazil will be emitting around 1.3 billion tonnes of CO2 annually through refining and burning oil. [This would] double its total emissions…making Brazil one of the top three CO2 emitters in the world.”

Then there is concern as to what this oil bonanza might mean for the country’s much vaunted renewables revolution. Recent years have seen Brazil held up as an international example, leading the way in the use of low carbon sources of energy – principally large-scale hydro and ethanol from sugar cane.

Brazil’s huge dams supply around 90% of the country’s electricity, not without controversy [see ‘Hydro worth a dam?’]. As a result, its power generation is largely fossil fuel-free – even though hydro’s wider impacts, in terms of drowned forests and displaced indigenous peoples, raise serious question marks over its sustainability.

It’s much the same story with transport fuel. Large-scale investment in the country’s ethanol programme on the part of the military regime of the 1980s laid the foundations for future development. Now, of all cars produced in Brazil, 90% are ‘flex fuel’ – designed to run on both ethanol and petrol. Investment in biofuels remains buoyant, and industry leaders are working alongside NGOs and Government in an effort to ensure that increasing demand for suitable cropland does not drive deforestation or limit food production [see ‘Sugar shack’].

Other sources of renewable energy have yet to play a major role. There’s a small, but growing, wind economy, with five new farms taking total capacity to 341MW. Solar photovoltaic (PV) installations are also beginning to tap Brazil’s 280 days of sunshine a year, bringing electricity to remote off-grid communities, particularly in the Amazon. But the potential far exceeds achievements to date. A 2009 industry analysis identified a $25 billion future renewable energy market, involving biomass, solar PV, solar thermal, hydro and wind.

It is possible, of course, that new-found oil wealth will unlock more funds for renewables. Petrobras is making much of its commitment to cleaner sources of energy, including biofuels.

But environmentalists are sceptical. Leitao argues that the Government’s focus on new legislation covering the pre-salt oil has already “taken attention away from attempts to draw up a new regulatory framework for renewable energy”. This, he fears, “will prevent Brazil from making a technological jump in its energy matrix by investing in clean and renewable sources, which [could] revolutionise the patterns of consumption and production around the world”.

Tolmasquim disagrees. “Brazil will continue with a high level of renewable fuels... In terms of transport, ethanol will still play a key role in the market,” he insists, pointing out that 75% of flex fuel car owners choose to use ethanol. But he admits that, when it comes to global demand, ethanol is “not a substitute” for oil.

Gabrielli of Petrobras also envisions “no significant shift” in global energy consumption patterns over the next 30 years. “Coal, oil and gas” will be used in the same proportion, he predicts, adding: “Any change will be long term. But this doesn’t mean there will not be more sustainable energy, more biofuels”. “Oil will be fundamental to humanity for a long time,” agrees Brazil’s Minister for Energy and Mining, Edson Lobao.

And it is this reluctance to envisage a world without oil that some see as holding Brazil back. “Just as the Stone Age didn’t come to an end because of a stone shortage, the oil age won’t end because of a lack of oil, but as a result of the technological race to substitute it,” comments Leitao.

By putting all of its energy eggs in one basket, Brazil could fall behind other countries in research, investment and infrastructure for sustainable energy. And that would not be good news for Brazilians – even with God on their side.

Power planting
The Brazilian Government is to impose targets on power stations – for planting trees. The Environment Ministry is proposing that stations burning oil, gas or coal should plant huge numbers of trees to earn their operating licenses. This would both help to offset their emissions, and contribute to the national re-forestation effort. The scheme could result in a further three million trees by 2017. But critics argue that even this would not mitigate the 14 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emitted by the existing fleet of power stations each year, never mind the emissions of another 82 new coal-burning plants planned for construction over the next eight years. – Ben Tuxworth

Tom Philips is a British journalist and documentary maker who lives in Rio. He writes for The Guardian.

Can the public sector lead us to sustainability?

Ben Tuxworth — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 13:32:37 +0000

As the recession ends in the private economy, it is just beginning for the 5.8 million public servants in the UK, and the millions more around the world. Faced with swingeing budget cuts (several percent per year for the foreseeable future) can public sector organisations stay true to their commitments to carbon reduction, sustainable regeneration, ethical procurement, greener healthcare and a wealth of other new practices and initiatives?

In theory, yes. If sustainable development thinking is no use to you in times of austerity, it is no use at all, and hard times should be when it proves its worth. Sustainable development was developed as a concept to address the pressing problem of environmental degradation and its impact on human welfare – the mother of all recessions. But for municipalities, health trusts, police authorities and the many other providers of public services, it’s very tempting to cut spending on expensive-looking ‘green’ activity when you have to slice 5% off the salami – whether that means abandoning projects or closing down the teams and strategy units set up to run them.

It’s a much braver choice to use sustainability principles to guide where to wield the knife, and, more to the point, to use the same thinking to find efficiency gains, new ways of working, and deliver greater public value.

Doing that means understanding how sustainability relates to the core business of the organisation and its success in the long term. So it’s a paradox that whilst the business case for sustainable development is regularly articulated and used as a justification for corporate investment – and as a kind of strategic security blanket – the public value case for similar action is seldom expressed. This leaves public bodies with only patchy and partial arguments for their sustainability commitments in tough times.

Well, not any more. A new Forum report highlights how sustainability principles hold the key to creating public value in austere times. In ‘Stepping up: a framework for public sector leadership on sustainable development’ we set out how forward-looking public bodies can go beyond the business case to address market failure, build resilience and reinforce the crumbling social contract when they use sustainability thinking to create public value.

What does that mean in practice? Stepping up sets out a nine-point plan for public sector organisations wanting to take the lead in using sustainability to deliver better services. It starts with ‘making the case’- setting out that basic argument - examines linking policy and delivery, and goes all the way through to building a learning culture and running demonstration projects. And there’s a self-assessment tool to check where you are on the journey – from ‘At Risk’ (of failing to comply with legal obligations and suffering financial and reputational hits) to ‘Systemic’ – one of those rare paragons using sustainability principles to maximise efficiency and public value creation over time.

Some are well down this road. Others have barely begun. Stepping up picks out some of the best examples of progress from around the world, whether public or private. Swedish city Vaxjo’s use of bioenergy, innovative food procurement by PCTs in Cornwall, Vodafone’s stakeholder engagement process, the GLA’s approach to policy integration, and InterfaceFLOR’s investment in staff capacity show how early adopters are pointing the way.

But we believe any organisation can be a leader on sustainable development, and those that grasp the challenge in difficult times will emerge strongest from the recession, with more efficient services, more productive relationships with their communities and partners, and better prepared for the environmental shocks that lie ahead.

Genetically modified fetishism

Jonathon Porritt — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 12:14:03 +0000

The assembled great and the good of the NFU must have been absolutely delighted to hear Chris Smith, Chairman of the Environment Agency, extol the benefits of GM technologies earlier in the week.

He stressed that he was speaking in a ‘personal capacity’, despite the fact that he was invited as Chair of the Environment Agency, and presumably had plenty to talk about in that capacity which might have been of more immediate interest to farmers.

Reflecting on this, it seems to have become a mandatory test of credibility for people like Chris to declare their enthusiasm for GM. The pro-GM lobby has done a fantastic job in persuading the media and politicians that even the most modest GM-scepticism is tantamount to extreme science-hating emotionalism.

To express any reservations about the notional sustainability benefits of current GM crops, let alone about the massively hyped potential benefits of future GM products, is to open oneself up to the charge of debilitating technophobia. Shades here of George Bush beating up his NATO allies over the Iraq war: “If you’re not with us, you’re against us”.

Sorry, Chris, but that’s really not the deal. Interviewed on Radio 4’s Farming Today, he suggested that anti-GM campaigners would really have to ‘move on’ in terms of their opposition on both environmental and health grounds – given that the balance of the available evidence would appear to indicate a relatively clean bill of health for GM on both counts.

If only it were that easy. One’s judgement about ‘the balance of the evidence’ depends largely on where that evidence comes from, and even pro-GM advocates are very uneasy about the stranglehold that the big biotech companies have over access to data and transparency of the data used by regulators. I wonder how content Chris is, as Chair of the Environment Agency, about the quality of that evidence, and the credence that should be attached to it?

Furthermore, I wonder what Chris means by ‘environmental concerns’ in this context? I’d be astonished if he is not worried about the biggest environmental concern of all: the fact that even the next generation of GM ‘solutions’ promise little if anything in terms of reducing the dependence of modern intensive agriculture on fossil fuels and hydro-carbon-based inputs.

On broad sustainability and governance grounds, GM-scepticism still seems to me to be the most appropriate response to the latest surge of evangelism for all things GM.

But balance in this debate seems to be entirely lacking. As the IAASTD (International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science, Technology for Development) Report in 2008 so eloquently pointed out, there are so many things that can and should be done right now to address issues of food security and increased yields without casting all our eggs in the GM basket. (Don’t ask, incidentally, what happened to the IAASTD Report, which has, to all extents and purposes, been ‘disappeared’. Some would say precisely because it was so sceptical about GM.)

But for reasons I still can’t fathom, people like Chris get hugely over-excited about GM whilst remaining resolutely underwhelmed by all those other aspects of sustainable food production and distribution that would make a far bigger difference to an infinitely greater number of people in a far shorter period of time.

This is clearly not a rational process, whatever GM advocates may say. Indeed, I’d go so far as to suggest that Chris is just the latest ‘big name’ to have given into the phenomenon of what I can only describe as ‘GM fetishism’.

President Sarkozy recently accused his fellow world leaders of having given in to ‘GDP fetishism’. By which he meant (I assume!) that their obsessive preoccupation with GDP at the expense of every other measure of prosperity, wellbeing and quality of life, was seriously impairing their judgement.

By the same token, it is clear to me that the elite of today’s farming establishment (plus a few misguided Greenies) have clearly given in to a form of GM fetishism, which overshadows every other measure of innovation, sustainable yield improvement and resource efficiency in farming today.

I am sure Chris doesn’t see himself as a GM fetishist. But then he has also converted to the pro-nuclear cause over the last few years, and I have noticed that this is rich ‘two for one’ territory: go nuclear and throw in GM evangelism for good measure. Or vice-versa. That, it would seem, is the only way to demonstrate one’s serious scientific credentials these days.

Or so some sad people say.

Rainforest revival: has Brazil turned the tide on deforestation?

Martin Wright — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 18:24:54 +0000

After years of seemingly unstoppable destruction, Brazil appears to be winning some ground on the Amazon frontier. Is this just a recession-induced calm before the storm, asks Martin Wright – or the start of a rainforest revival?

In Europe, it’s rare to be able to drive for an hour through solid, unbroken forest. In the deep countryside of northern Sweden, perhaps, or on a particularly slow and winding road through the Carpathians.

In Brazil, by contrast, 747s fly for at least that time above an apparently endless sea of forest. If you’re lucky enough to have a window seat, you can look down and see a solid slab of green, from horizon to horizon. A green cut only by the winding loops of vast rivers, and the occasional tiny circular clearings, with no roads leading to or from them, which mark the Amerindian villages.

Until you reach the forest fringes, where the roads, and the fires, begin. Through the haze of smoke, you can see how the forest is being steadily frayed, torn into patches, and eventually destroyed altogether, apart from the odd remnant strip running along a gully.

The sheer visible scale of both the destruction, and of what remains, is breathtaking. It’s one of Brazil’s greatest hopes, and greatest challenges.

Roberto Smeraldi, Founder of Amigos da Terra – Brazilian Amazonia, and one of the most influential of the country’s environmentalists, sums it up: “Brazil ranks third in the list of global contributors to climate change – and two-thirds of its greenhouse gas emissions over the last five years result from land use changes – principally deforestation.”

The simplest cut

After energy, the destruction of tropical forests is by far the largest contributor to climate change – emitting ten times as much as aviation. As has been pointed out elsewhere in Green Futures, (see 'Can finance save forests?') produces a particularly nasty ‘double whammy’ of warming. As they burn, they send vast swathes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And once they’re gone, they can’t soak up the carbon emitted from other sources, like industry, cars and power plants.

The other side of the coin, though, is that conserving forests is one of our most effective tools for staving off runaway climate change. And, since it doesn’t involve making major cuts in industrial or transport emissions, it can be one of the simplest, too. In Brazil’s case, says Smeraldi: “This means that our past and current emission record is not strongly associated with activities which are essential for jobs and economic growth – at least in comparison to the other ‘greenhouse gas superpowers’. This is excellent news for anybody struggling [to mitigate] climate change, since it might prove cheaper for us to engage in radical emission reductions [than it will for other countries].” Some specific good news came with the announcement in November 2009 that Brazil had cut deforestation to its lowest level in more than two decades. Just 2,705 square miles of the Amazon were lost between August 2008 and July 2009, almost half that of the previous 12 months, and the lowest annual total since reliable records started being kept in 1988. Among the factors behind the success, officials said, was the 2004 decision to make the Government as a whole responsible for enforcing forest laws, rather than it being ‘ghettoised’ in the Environment Ministry alone. This led to dramatic improvements in real-time satellite monitoring, which allows forestry police to respond immediately to evidence of logging or burning.

Significant swathes of Amazonia are coming under official federal protection. In the four years to 2008, some 50 million hectares were turned into forest reserves or national parks, and another ten million became indigenous reservations for Amerindian communities.

The news was welcomed by environmentalists. “We have to recognise the great efforts of the federal government, together with state governments, that brought about this drop in deforestation”, said Cláudio Maretti, Head of Conservation at WWF-Brasil. But he warned that there was still a pressing need to firm up the enforcement of forest conservation laws – and to expand other government programmes aimed at offering those living near the forest viable economic alternatives to forest clearance. “That is essential if Brazil is to assume clear commitments in relation to carbon emissions, and if we are really going to take a leadership role in the new green economy.”

Economic factors may well have played a role in the dramatic drop, says his WWF-Brasil colleague, Conservation Director Carlos Alberto de Mattos Scaramuzza. “We have to recognise that it’s related to the [global recession], particularly to the reduction in demand for commodities, which has meant there is less pressure” on standing forest. As that demand picks up, it will test the Government’s commitment to make further reductions, he warns.

A vital step now, say environmentalists, is for the Government to properly apply – and strengthen – the Forest Code, which dictates that landowners must preserve as forest 80% of any Amazon land they hold. The law is notoriously poorly enforced, and hopes were depressed when the Government recently delayed until 2011 a plan to start prosecutions of those not complying with the law. Conveniently perhaps, this transfers responsibility to President Lula’s successor, who will take office in January of that year.

Tasso Azevedo, Senior Adviser to the Minister of the Environment on Forest and Climate Change, agrees that the hard work lies ahead. “We have actually done most of the cheapest and straightforward things – basic law enforcement, restructuring of the monitoring system, and so forth… Now we’re onto the second level – placing constraints and disincentives in the way of any investment which involve deforestation.”

Some action is underway here, too. The Government has invested in sustainable logging initiatives, and some states are even paying people a small stipend to keep their land forested. And there’s noticeably less reticence on the part of the federal government to getting stuck in at the local level. In a new initiative called Mutirão Arco Verde, Brasilia sent hundreds of officials to the 43 municipalities responsible for more than half the region’s deforestation, to help farmers and authorities there “better understand” and comply with environmental legislation. While this may not have exactly been welcome intervention (shades of “I’m from head office – I’m here to help!”), the Government insisted the aim was to help the municipalities plan for economic growth – albeit of a sustainable kind.

Consumer groups, too, are starting to ratchet up the pressure [see box, ‘Backing the backlash’]. But meanwhile, there’s growing focus on the Cerrado – the vast swathe of savannah-woodland that borders the jungle to the east and south. Deforestation there is increasing, and is thought to be running at twice the rate of that in the Amazon. According to Smeraldi, it’s accounting for around 30% of the emissions resulting from all Brazilian forest destruction, so “it needs to be better measured and taken into account”. Scaramuzza agrees: “The Cerrado is actually much more endangered than Amazonia, because [it’s the focus of] a huge expansion of soya, corn and other commodities”.Setting tough targets for one while ignoring the other could make matters worse, says Smeraldi. “It could create perverse incentives, encouraging developers to switch their destructive activities to the Cerrado.”

Incentives of a positive kind are increasingly seen as the key to forest preservation. Andrew Mitchell, Founder of the Global Canopy Programme and one of the world’s most experienced forest policy thinkers, summed up the challenge when he spoke to Green Futures in 2009 (see 'Can finance save forests?') “At the moment, you can only make money out of forests when you convert them to something else – timber or beef, soy or palm oil... So in global markets, forests are worth more dead than alive. This is what we need to turn around. Philanthropy and governments won’t do it. You have to look to markets to overturn what is in fact a market failure… What we’ve got for free, we don’t pay for.”

As Azevedo put it, unless you pay people not to do something, they’ll carry on doing it. “Say you want to close down an illegal logging site. You can do so in 15 minutes. You just send in the police or the army and lock everything down. But 50 people will lose their jobs.” And unless you create better paid alternatives, they’ll soon be back cutting trees, there or elsewhere. “We have to put something else in place to keep the money flowing and to create a new economy.”

He believes that sustainable forest management – in which timber concessions are awarded and renewed on the basis solely of social and environmental good practice, rather than money – could be at its heart. In Acre state, WWF is working with local communities to implement such a scheme. It would allow the harvest not only of carefully selected, high-value timber, but other products such as Brazil nuts, rubber and essential oils – so long as it could demonstrate that the overall forest remained in good health.

All such schemes, of course, are potentially eligible for carbon funding, too – hence Brazil’s growing enthusiasm for international agreement on the issue. And there may also be ways in which the other huge regional benefits of standing forests, particularly sustaining the water cycle on which so much of Latin American agriculture depends, can be ‘monetised’. (see 'Can finance save forests?')

Azevedo advocates a simple system in which areas which reduced their rates of deforestation would be rewarded on a ‘payment by results’ basis. Brazil could use international carbon funding to invest in a whole range of initiatives to help forest preservation, and he’s particularly excited by the potential of satellite monitoring. This is fast reaching such a level of sophistication that someone with a laptop or even an iPhone could use a Google Earth-style tool to get detailed images of forest cover down to as little as half a hectare. Radar will help ‘see’ beneath cloud cover, so overcoming one of the obstacles to effective monitoring. The results, he promises, “will be totally publicly available. People will be able to download the information”.

None of this will succeed, though, cautions Smeraldi, without successfully engaging those on whom the forest most depends to survive: the people who make a living from it, and live within it. “This is especially true here in Brazil, given the very limited governance in forest areas and on their fringes”, he says, and he identifies two key challenges. First, set up practical financial mechanisms for rewarding local stakeholders directly. Second, sort out the tangle of land titles – or in many cases, lack of them. It won’t be straightforward. “In those cases where you have a clear legitimacy (i.e. legally established indigenous land, extractive reserves and so on) there is usually political reluctance, if not outright resistance, to remunerating local communities. Where you have ranchers and settlers with strong political support, it’s rare to have established land rights.”

Smeraldi acknowledges the recent progress that has been made on curbing Amazon deforestation, but warns that overall it remains fragile. And in terms of Brazil’s performance on climate change more generally, it could still be undercut by the recent oil discoveries [see ‘Oiling the future’]. “We need to keep a close eye on the overall consistency of national policies”, he says – and that means setting clear caps for total carbon emissions. “São Paulo state has set a positive example here, with its goal of a 20% cut in total emissions by 2020.”

For his part, Scaramuzza is cautiously optimistic that Brazil might indeed have pulled its vast forests back from the brink of destruction– and he thinks politics has played its part. “The Government wants to take a strong leadership position; it wants to really establish itself as a major player in the UN. [So President] Lula is assuming a lot of public commitment on this area – we already have a national climate change policy which includes an 80% reduction in deforestation as a target.”

Tasso Azevedo, too, thinks a corner has been turned. “I think that in Brazil, people are finally waking up.”

Cattle crunch
Intensive farming may have a bad press in Europe, but in Brazil, it could be key to saving swathes of forest. Intensive in relative terms, that is. As Roberto Smeraldi points out, “in the Amazon, we have 71 million heads of cattle on 74 million hectares of pasture” – over one hectare per cow, in other words. Increasing stockage rates to three hectares per cow would still provide ample grazing land, while taking pressure off the forest.

Smeraldi argues that “investments in increased yield productivity should be matched by investment in forest restoration”. Carbon finance could play a role here, he says, helping fund agricultural intensification which, by allowing the forest to recover, would indirectly result in increased carbon sequestration.

Products such as beef or leather which were produced from such ‘intensified’ ranches could be certified as such, he suggests. This would give them a market advantage among purchasers who are increasingly seeking to avoid products associated with rainforest destruction.

Backing the backlash
Consumer power is starting to slow forest destruction. Environmental groups led by Greenpeace have carried out damaging campaigns against major soy bean, beef and leather producers. Under an agreement signed in 2006 by Abiove, the Brazilian Association of Vegetable Oil Industries, and several environmental groups, major soy bean traders – including food giants such as Cargill – agreed not to purchase soya from areas inside the Amazon Biome deforested after July that year.

WWF is working with these and other companies on a monitoring system to ensure they can live up to their commitments. “It’s been a really positive outcome, building new relationships between NGOs and the private sector”, says Scaramuzza. But he warns that a focus on ‘Amazon-free soya’ might be helping drive destruction in the Cerrado. “It was relatively easy for companies to make this commitment, because only 8% of soya comes from Amazonia”, he says. “So now it’s time for them to raise the bar: to show the same commitment for other regions that they have for the Amazon.”

Meanwhile, the ‘soy moratorium’, which has been extended until at least July 2010, is being held up as a possible template for the beef sector. It’s the combination of the demand for Brazilian beef, soy beans and ethanol, say campaigners, which is behind much of the country’s deforestation. Cattle farmers sell land in the south to soy and sugar cane growers, and use the money to buy cheaper land in the Amazon which they then cut down for cattle pasture.

A Greenpeace study released in June 2009 claimed companies including Wal-Mart, Carrefour, Nike, Adidas, Clarks and Tesco bought beef and leather from Brazilian firms that raised cattle on deforested land. On occasion, it said, forced labour was even involved. The report caused a furor, and wary of a consumer backlash, those and other blue chip firms gave their suppliers until 2010 to implement a serious traceability system that enables them to identify where their beef and leather is coming from.

Just how effective the boycott will be is questionable. There are an estimated five million cattle ranchers in Brazil, and only a tiny percentage have any reliable traceability systems in place. Experts estimate it will take two years just to set up proper monitoring systems for beef. For leather, the issue is even more complex, as it is sold on the open commodities market and so is much harder to track. Nevertheless, the so-called beef moratorium is being heralded as another step in the right direction. “These companies are committing by telling their suppliers they expect to see zero deforestation or they will stop buying from them,” said Tatiana Carvalho, Greenpeace’s Amazon campaigner. “That is a big leap forward.” “The beef sector had been very resistant to change”, says Scaramuzza, “but now they are starting to come to the table.” WWF is working with a sustainable cattle-ranching group – a phrase that would have been an oxymoron just a few years ago. “There is a lot or room for improvement, but they’re starting to recognise the problem – and they want to be part of the solution.” – Andrew Downie / Martin Wright
Atlantic ambition

Not all business waits for a backlash before taking action. On the eastern coast, several companies, including Michelin and Veracel, are taking action to preserve and expand the last remnants of the Atlantic Forest, home to the golden lion tamarin (pictured). They are combining sustainable plantations of eucalyptus, rubber and cocoa trees with ecological corridors linking surviving fragments of woodland. The once vast Atlantic Forest has shrunk to 10% of its original area, but has an unrivalled capacity for regeneration. So projects such as these can make a real difference, say experts.

Martin Wright is Editor in Chief of Green Futures. Additional reporting by Andrew Downie.

Why Levi’s blue jeans are turning green

Anna Simpson — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 13:56:06 +0000

Michael Kobori, Vice President of Social and Environmental Sustainability at Levi Strauss & Co., tells Anna Simpson why the iconic brand is convinced sustainability is the future of fashion. Consumers are getting a lot more demanding

The consumer will want sustainable fashion – it will be an expectation just like quality and styling and pricing. I think we’ll also see consumers much more knowledgeable about sustainability. Take something that was not so obvious five years ago: the embedded carbon in a garment. Now, it’s something that we’re actually testing, so that we can offer the information to consumers. So, just imagine what kind of information and transparency they’ll be looking for in 10, 15 years’ time.

We can’t do it alone

The key to sustainability is getting the rest of the industry involved – which is why we’ve launched the report ‘Fashion Futures’ with Forum for the Future, calling for collaboration across the industry. Take cotton as an example. Levi’s uses a lot of cotton, but [it still only accounts for barely] 1% of the total grown. Moreover, we don’t actually buy the cotton ourselves. Our contract manufacturers buy the fabric from the mill, and the mill buys it from the gin [where the fibres are separated from the seeds], and the gin from the growers. So we’re about three steps removed in that process. The only way that we’re going to influence that long supply chain is to get others in the industry to send the signal upstream – to say to the farmer, “Yes, we want cotton grown in a different way”. We need everybody that buys cotton to be saying that, alongside leaders like Marks and Spencers, Ikea and Gap.

Business has to keep changing, not just the catwalk

For us to survive, Levi’s has had to be classic – but it’s also had to evolve. ‘Fashion Futures’ looks at everything that could influence the future of the industry, with scenarios to tell us how it could respond to resource shortages, localisation, high energy prices, and so on. Our senior executives are using these scenarios to make sure our business strategy takes all the possibilities into account. And we’re also sending them out to our designers, because it’s this kind of innovation – clothes that generate energy, or biodegradable clothing – that we’d like to encourage.

The water’s cleaner when we’ve finished with it

Our vision is to build sustainability into everything we do – so that our profitable growth actually helps to restore the environment. An example? For all the 100 plus laundries that wash our jeans before they are sold, we have water quality standards at an international level. This means that the laundries have to build a water treatment facility. So, in developing countries where we work, like Bangladesh and China, the water we put back into the river is cleaner than the water we take out. Likewise, if we can work with farmers to reduce their chemical and pesticide use, and improve their profitability, that would be a great thing.

Two big challenges: growing the cotton, doing the laundry

The two areas that stand out for us as future challenges are the way cotton is grown and the way our consumers behave. Take the overall environmental impact of any one of our garments. If you look at the water embedded in a pair of jeans – that’s 3,480 litres in the full lifecycle – growing the cotton accounts for 49%, and consumer care (ie washing) for a further 45%. On energy, the breakdown is 30% in cotton, and 60% in consumer care. We’re working with M&S, Ikea, WWF and others, including a number of farmer organisations, on the Better Cotton Initiative (BCI), which trains farmers to use fewer chemicals and less water, makes sure they’re achieving certain labour standards, and that their businesses are economically viable. We’re planting the first crop of what we hope is going to be BCI certified cotton this spring, to be harvested in the autumn – and then we’ll be able to get it into our fabrics.

Closing the loop One of our recent initiatives is ‘A Care Tag for Our Planet’ in the US, which tells consumers to wash their jeans in cold water, tumble dry at low temperatures, and when no longer needed give away for reuse or resale by a charity. We really want to go cradle to cradle, which means ‘repurposing’ (using recycled material in new jeans) as well as recycling at the end of their life. We’re on the way with our ecoline which uses up to 20% recycled denim. It can’t be more than that at the moment because of quality considerations – but we hope to go further towards closing the loop in future. Resources are finite: we can’t keep using cotton in the way we have done.

It’s about business survival

What’s in it for us? Well, we’ve been around for 150 years, and we want to be around for another 150. We can’t just think about the sustainability of our products. What we need is a more sustainable world: it’s all part of our survival. We’re not going to be able to survive, as a business, using cotton the way it’s currently grown, for example – or with consumers currently washing the products the way they do. And we have to work with industry to change all of that.

Michael Kobori, Vice-President of Social and Environmental Sustainability at Levi Strauss & Co., was in conversation with Anna Simpson.

Fashion's sustainable future brought to life in new Forum project

Fiona Bennie — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 11:32:30 +0000

Coco Chanel once said, “Fashion is made to become unfashionable.”
So how can an industry become sustainable when the ‘we loved it, but now we shun it’ cycle is embedded so deeply? Do we have to change everything we love about fashion to make it a sustainable, fair industry? Not necessarily.

Last night, amid the glamour and excitement of London Fashion Week, we held a drinks party with Levi Strauss & Co., to launch our joint report Fashion Futures which explores the world of 2025 and the role of the fashion industry within it. More than a hundred fashion industry folk turned up to hear about our four vivid scenarios and view the animations, which bring them to life.

Follow this link to find out what kind of worlds might see cities inundated by second-hand department stores; high-street brands competing on sustainability credentials; people partying in biodegradable, spray-on outfits; and regions where grow-your-own clothing is popular.

We created the scenarios to help companies around the globe navigate the ever-changing challenge of developing sustainable businesses. They compel us to mull over big questions we wouldn’t usually consider when thinking short-term. Like how the industry will react to shortages of cotton and other raw materials – or how people will care for their clothes in a future of water shortages and high energy prices – which raises deeper questions like whether current business models will survive in a retail market that’s very different from today.

We have deliberately avoided making Fashion Futures a read-it-then-shelve-it report. We want companies of all shapes and sizes, from all corners of the globe, to use the four scenarios. We want them to be inspired, perhaps even a little scared by some of them, but hopefully motivated to think differently about the future and excited by the idea that a sustainable fashion industry is achievable.

To this end, we’ve published some workshop materials on our website with advice on how to use the scenarios to shape strategy, push for sustainable design and innovation and generate the skills needed for a sustainable industry.

And we’ve brought the scenarios to life with four powerful two-minute animations, which show just how different they are, and how much a sustainable future depends on us taking bold action today.

Fashion Futures has already been put to practical use. Our project partner, Levi Strauss & Co. is using the scenarios internally, to inform strategy and innovation. As Michael Kobori (pictured), LS&Co’s Vice President of Social and Environmental Sustainability said at the launch party yesterday, "These scenarios are so stimulating, we will be sharing them with senior management to inform our broad strategies, with designers to spur them to create more sustainable products, and with all employees to unleash the power of our entire company to think about sustainability."

And we’ve used them to help fashion students understand how to design for the future, working with the great team at the Centre for Sustainable Fashion at the London College of Fashion. Four groups of students from the 2009-10 MA Fashion and the Environment – a diverse and enthusiastic bunch from all over the world - spent their autumn term living and breathing one of the Fashion Futures scenarios, creating new ideas and businesses that would thrive in such a world. They not only produced some great, thought-provoking concepts, which are illustrated in our report, but they also helped us shape the scenarios at one of the critical stages of development.

So this is the beginning of an exciting journey. We’re looking forward to helping our partners and others use the scenarios and we’re excited to hear how other organisations will use them in innovative ways.

Find out more about the Fashion Futures project here: http://www.forumforthefuture.org/projects/fashion-futures

Rio 2016: a catalyst for social change

Lottie Butler — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 11:02:16 +0000

In the lead up to Rio's Olympic Games, sport is driving initiatives for economic and social transformation.

What began as a volleyball training initiative in the state of Paraná has become a far-reaching programme for sustainable social transformation across Brazil’s major cities. With 46 centres in São Paulo, Paraná and Rio de Janeiro, the Rexona-AdeS Sports Citizen programme has trained over 4,000 school teachers, and encouraged 72,000 children to develop social values and skills through sport and team activities. The programme began in 1997 through a partnership between Unilever’s Rexona brand and the Government of Paraná, led by the Brazilian volleyball team coach Bernardo Rocha de Rezende, better known as ‘Bernardinho’. It uses sport to promote the social value of teachers, and to create a sense of community and responsibility amongst young people from low-income families in urban areas. With Rio to host the 2016 Olympic Games, sport is acting as a powerful catalyst for economic and social change. The goal to transform a city with a reputation for drugs and violence into a safe and flourishing place was the winning aspect of Rio’s bid. As Mayor Eduardo Paes said during the official presentation: “Rio 2016 will deliver…many years of inspiration, social change and sports development that will make a difference for generations to come”.

–Lottie Butler