The Low Carbon Kid

Despair at climate change, and how (maybe) to deal with it.

noreply@blogger.com (DavidKThorpe) — Thu, 29 Jul 2021 11:48:00 +0000

I feel so sad for the future of all life on Earth, and for my children's future.

I've been involved in environmental activism, research and the business of testing and spreading solutions to environmental problems for 30 years.

I always thought we had a chance of saving ourselves and nature from the worst that could happen.

But today I am in despair.

Sir David King, a chief British climate scientist, knows that there are already enough greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to warm the planet to dangerous degree.

We've already passed scary tipping points.

We have the solutions

It's not that we don't have the solutions, we do have many of them.

I've got one here. And more here.

It's not even that the politicians and CEOs of corporations, who have the ability to do what's needed, are still in denial.

It is that they pay lip service. They want to have business as usual and fix the problems. This is not possible.

It is possible for people to have a decent quality-of-life and to solve these problems.

But this entails a change in attitude and understanding. Such a culture change must come before the system can change.

Why isn't this happening?

We can learn something from the so-called culture war going on in most developed countries nowadays.

The right wing is winning most of these culture war battles.

They win, not by saying that the so-called woke culture is wrong, i.e. racism does not exist.

They win by saying the woke people threaten your way of life. For example, immigrants threaten your jobs.

Take this approach by analogy to the subject of climate change.

Activists can say: we can create thousands of green jobs in eco-renovation. This is good news!

But it is not good news to mainstream business, or to the unions, upon whom both the Tories and the Labour Party depend in the UK.

Too many business models are threatened by the transition to a green economy. These businesses and unions have big lobbying power.

Extinction Rebellion achieved the goal of getting the government to declare the climate emergency and to have a citizens assembly.

The citizens assembly made its recommendations to the government.

You wouldn't know it, would you?

These have been ignored, because the voices of business are louder in the ears of the Tory government and the voices of the unions are louder in the ears of the Labour opposition.

This is one reason why nothing is done about making existing buildings consume much less energy.

It is why nothing is done about making all new buildings zero carbon.

It is why they still building on greenbelt land, and planning new roads, and tearing up woodlands for HS2.

It is why we have a crazy trade deal with Australia to import sheep when we have plenty of sheep here.

The list of madness is endless.

Only when the fear of the effects of climate change is greater than the fear that their business model will suffer will the main political parties show the kind of leadership that they need to show.

By then it will be too late.

We have already passed the point at which we could make cheap, reasonable changes and still save civilisation from disaster, as suggested by Sir Nicholas Stern in 2006.

This is why Sir David King is proposing drastic geo-engineering.

I can't seriously see this working. Can you?

So what can you do as an individual?

I can only suggest that you do your best to make where you live as resilient as possible, and start learning practical skills, like growing your own food.

When supply lines dry up because of extreme weather and the supermarket shelves are empty you will need all the skills you can master.

Please, if you feel the same way, I'd like to hear from you.

The 7 rules of carbon offsetting your flights

noreply@blogger.com (DavidKThorpe) — Sun, 04 Aug 2019 12:27:00 +0000

Suppose you have to fly, or you use a gas-guzzling SUV. Is there any point in carbon offsetting? Yes, and it's not as dear as you might think. But what sort should you use?

The 7 rules of offsetting are:

1. It doesn’t let you off the hook. You’ve helped global warming. And:

2. As soon as you do the thing that needs offsetting, like flying, those pesky greenhouse gas (GHG) molecules are up there helping to warm the planet.

3. Therefore: action needs to be as immediate and swift as possible.

4. So waiting around for a tree to grow is not an option esp. if you have no idea what will happen to it (fire/disease, etc.). It will take ages for it to recoup the CO2 from the skies.

5. The offsetting action needs also to be additional to what you’d do otherwise, or it makes no diff., right?

6. And it needs to start as soon as possible to start compensating for those GHGs you sent up.

7. Speed also includes the time it takes for the GHGs that would have gone into the sky if your offsetting hadn’t happened to reach the total equivalent of the GHGs caused by your flight: the faster the better.

Example: solar lanterns in Africa

I buy a single solar lantern from solaraid.org that displaces a kerosene lantern used by a family in rural Uganda for £5.

I have no idea how long it takes for that family to get the lantern, but it’s good that they do for other reasons (their health, and their kids can study after dark (6pm)).

Once they get it, I don’t know how often they’ll use it. So I don’t know how long it will take to displace the kerosene-emitted GHGs they were using to the equivalent of the GHGs caused by my flight.

But I do know that even though Jremy Leggett says that 1 lantern offsets a flight to Istanbul from London in an average of two years, the more lanterns I buy the faster the offsetting will happen.

If I buy 4, then in 6 months; 8 in 3 months. So I could buy 8 for £40. That would be a very good solution.

Example: solar roofs for community buildings in Wales

I could invest in solar panels on community buildings in egni.coop’s share issue. That's a social benefit as well as an eco-benefit.

That would be additional if I wasn’t going to do it otherwise.

Egni will put up the panels on community buildings in Wales within about 6 months, I reckon.

And you’d get a return on your investment.

Every 4kWe of PV (photovoltaic panels), will save around 1124Kg of CO2 in one year based on this: https://carbonintensity.org.uk /#regional

Ask Dan McCallum at Egni.coop how many kilowatts of PV a given amount of investment would buy if you want to know. (I made their website btw).

That would be a nice thing to do to.

Extinction Rebellion is just common sense – but what is the best response?

noreply@blogger.com (DavidKThorpe) — Thu, 18 Apr 2019 13:51:00 +0000

The related extinction and climate crises that are threatening the survival of life on earth can only be solved by reducing our ecological footprint – systematically curbing impacts and repairing nature to a level that sustains us within the planet's means.

“We are facing a climate catastrophe.” These are not just the words of tree-hugging Gaia-worshippers. They were said this week by the Legal & General insurance company, the UK's largest money manager, which last year blacklisted many companies for being unsustainable.

"As financial policymakers and prudential supervisors we cannot ignore the obvious physical risks before our eyes. Climate change is a global problem," they said in a statement.

Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, and Villeroy de Galhau, the governor of the Banque de France, said the same in an article in the UK Guardian newspaper this week, as they called upon financial institutions everywhere “to raise the bar to address... climate-related risks and to “green” the financial system”.

The wave of protests sweeping around cities across the world – International Extinction Rebellion – is simply asking for common sense to prevail in the face of the overwhelming threats facing the planet.

The plain fact is that all money spent everywhere must now be only spent sustainably: to meet our needs while also rebuilding & repairing our planet.

Not unlike the immediate French and worldwide response to the devastation of Notre Dame Cathedral, we must all, especially our leaders, pledge to take urgent action. Watching this global icon go up in flames has struck the hearts and souls of people around the world; within a few days almost €1 billion have been pledged to rebuild it.

Rebecca Johnson, a former Greenham Common anti-nuclear protestor compared this to the extinction crisis on BBC News: "Imagine millions of Notre Dames, all over the world, and not just art and history, but full of people, animals, plants and insects, the biodiversity. That is what the protesters are concerned that leaders are doing nothing about."

The movement's articulate young visionary, Greta Thunberg, told an assembly of European members of parliament this week: "We need cathedral-like thinking".

Watch this speech. She cries as she laments the rate of extinction of species. "Forget Brexit, tackle climate change," she tells the MEPs, to a standing ovation. “Our house is falling apart and our leaders need to start acting accordingly and they are not.”

As she was speaking, and all this week, the streets of European cities are being blocked by Extinction Rebellion protesters, who have pledged not to stop blocking traffic until their demands are met.

Some city leaders are already responding.

About 100 cities and towns in the UK have already passed resolutions declaring a climate emergency.

The website climatemobilisation.org is attempting to keep track of all cities in Switzerland, North America, Australia and the UK which have done so and has so far logged about 460 of them, including 18 in Australia, such as Darebin, Yarra, Vincent, Victoria, Gawler, Mariby, Hawkesbury and Adelaide Hills.

In California, Los Angeles, Berkeley, Richmond, Oakland and Santa Cruz have also done this, to name but a few.

The question for everybody, is what does a council do to follow up, having passed the resolution?

To meet the demands of the resolution they have to become carbon neutral by 2030 at the latest. They also have to include the population in their decision-making.

This will necessitate action on many fronts.

There is a solution.

All towns, regions and cities must become 'one planet'.

A campaign is beginning to persuade cities, towns and communities to declare “one planet" status that allows them to plan and track a path into the “safe and just space” defined by the work of Kate Raworth and others, where the basic needs of citizens are met without damaging the planet.

The framework proposed is a way for any town and city to work out how to #MoveTheDate of their Earth Overshoot Day (a measure of unsustainability) to become more and more sustainable over time using a framework like this.

I am beginning in my own part of the world with #OnePlanetSwansea, #OnePlanetCarmarthen and #OnePlanetLlandeilo. Work is underway to tackle Cardiff, the capital of Wales.

You can start this process in your own town, wherever you live.

The aim is to make all cities regenerative, based on circular economies and renewable energy, to ensure we live within our means. The solutions already exist. Policies to support them must be based on evidence, not upon ideology, belief systems or loyalties, because we are all in this together.

Policymaking has not caught up with the fact that humanity crossed the threshold of “one planet” living and began living in deficit way back at the beginning of the 1970s. This is why we need data, indicators and a coherent plan to relate our activities to what the biosphere of our planet can tolerate.

The six-step path towards One Planet Cities and communities

Obtain community buy-in and feedback at all levels

Hold a series of public meetings and online and off-line consultations to explain the context and aims in order to obtain feedback and community buy-in.

Decide which standards and objectives to use

These will include a methodology and accounting system and be applicable to all sectors such as soils, biodiversity, water, energy, buildings, transport, well-being, etc. They must include ecological footprinting.

Set baseline – the current situation

Use data and surveys to ascertain the starting point from which goals will be set: On the supply side, the productivity of its ecological biocapacity (greenspace and water bodies). On the demand side, the ecological footprint – assets/resources required to produce the natural resources and services it consumes.

Set targets for each sector over realistic timescales

A system similar to that applied by the UK Climate Change Act could be adopted, along with the Global Footprint Network’s Net Present Value Plus (NPV+) tool to test the results of different scenarios. A set of five year plans may result, each with a budget and a set of targets. The overall target could be, say, 30-40 years away, to meet everybody’s basic needs within planetary limits. Each short-term target will be a step closer to the overall one. Each sector (biocapacity, water, food, energy, buildings, transport, industry, etc.) will have its own schedule.

Set in place ways to measure them

This should be based on what data is easy and cost-effective to gather, and relate to the baseline situation, chosen metrics and sector targets. The data should be transparent and publicly available. Everybody should be able to view the progress being made.

Ratchet down consumption over one or two generations.

Each five-year plan will have its own evaluation period to check that all expected benefits are resulting, to share experiences, to accommodate criticisms, to potentially revise plans, and to celebrate successes.

If a population’s ecological footprint exceeds the region’s biocapacity, that region runs an ecological deficit.

...which almost all regions now do. A region in ecological deficit meets demand by importing, liquidating its own ecological assets (such as overfishing), and/or emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It must therefore identify the origins, destinations and impacts of consumption.

It would then be possible to model the effects of changes of policy and practice towards a circular economy upon the related biocapacity.

Tracking the Human Development Index (a measure of how human needs are being satisfied) against the ecological footprint over a time period can indicate the direction of progress.

Government agencies at all levels can manage their capital investments in a fiscally responsible and environmentally sustainable way by using ecological footprint accounting and the Global Footprint Network’s Net Present Value Plus (NPV+) tool.

The traditional net present value (NPV) formula used by economists adds up revenue and expenditures over a period of time and discounts those cash flows by the cost of money (an interest rate), revealing the lifetime value of an investment in present terms.

GFN’s NPV+ tool adds to this calculation currently unpriced factors, such as the cost of environmental degradation, and benefits like ecological resiliency.

All costs and benefits – even those where no monetary exchange occurs – thereby can be seen as “cash flows”, and can be evaluated using different future scenarios.

This will provide a more accurate and useful guidance on the long-term value of the investment, because it makes reference to the ecological footprint of the project in question.

The ecological footprint can therefore help to identify which issues need to be addressed most urgently to generate political will and guide policy action. It can improve understanding of the problems, enable comparisons across regions and raise stakeholder awareness.

By identifying footprint “hot-spots”, policymakers can prioritise policies and actions, often in the context of a broader sustainability policy.

Footprint time trends and projections can be used to monitor the short- and longterm effectiveness of policies.

By understanding where the best long-term value is, policies can be oriented toward better outcomes, building wealth, avoiding stranded assets and leaving a better legacy for future generations.

The standard PAS 2070 can assist with monitoring cities’ carbon footprints of consumption and production. ISO standards cover environmental management, energy management and life-cycle analysis to help put in place procedures for reducing impacts.

At the same time, all citizens and politicians need to do more to raise awareness about the issues.

More information at http://theoneplanetlife.com/

If you want support in doing this in your neighbourhood, get in touch.

We can do this. It just needs a massive, concerted effort.

David Thorpe is the author of the book The 'One Planet' Life and the forthcoming book 'One Planet' Cities.

''One Planet' Cities: Sustaining Humanity within Planetary Limits

noreply@blogger.com (DavidKThorpe) — Fri, 21 Dec 2018 10:38:00 +0000

I'm thrilled that my important new book, 'One Planet' Cities: Sustaining Humanity within Planetary Limits, will be out next May.

It addresses the crucial question of how the essential needs of the growing human population can be met without breaking the Earth's already-stretched life-support system and is the product of years of research, thinking, and conversations. It builds on the work of Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics and the Global Footprint Network.

With four out of five people predicted to be urban dwellers by 2080, ‘One Planet’ Cities proposes a pathway to genuine sustainability for cities and neighbourhoods, using an approach based on contraction and convergence.

Utilising interviews with key players, including the Global Footprint Network, World Future Council, WWF, mayors and officials, and case studies from across the globe, including Europe, North and South America, Australia, Sweden, South Africa, China, and India, David Thorpe examines all aspects of modern society from food provision to neighbourhood design, via industry, the circular economy, energy and transport through the critical lens of the ecological footprint and relevant supporting international standards and indicators.

Recommendations on managing supply chains and impacts, how the transition to a world within limits might be financed, and a deep examination of the Welsh Government's pioneering efforts follow. It concludes with an imagined vision of what a genuinely sustainable future might be like, and an appeal for 'one planeteers' everywhere to step up to the challenge.

This book will be of great interest to practitioners and policymakers involved in governance, administration, urban environments and sustainability, alongside students of the built environment, urban planning, environmental policy and energy.

I'm delighted that it has a foreword by Herbert Girardet, founder of the World Futures Council.

From January 2019 I'll be publishing biweekly extracts to generate momentum for the launch. Watch this space!

You can pre-order the title here: https://www.routledge.com/One-Planet-Cities-Sustaining-Humanity-within-Planetary-Limits/Thorpe/p/book/9781138615106

The energy and housing transitions are being led by communities

noreply@blogger.com (DavidKThorpe) — Mon, 23 Jul 2018 07:26:00 +0000

Across three continents, citizens are working with their local communities to build more sustainable futures for themselves in housing and energy.

New housing in Solapur, India.

In Solapur, India, housing cooperatives have come together to build more than 15,000 affordable homes since 2001, relocating thousands of workers from slums.

The Solapur Housing Initiative, led by the Centre of Indian Trade Unions, began construction of another 30,000 homes in January 2018, and recently took out the housing category of the Transformative City award.

Many of these homes – typically around 50 square metres in size – are for beedi workers, poorly paid cigarette-rolling women who are often the sole breadwinners for their families. These women previously rented tiny shanties in slums.

The land purchase cost was shared equally by the worker, the central government and the state government, but the workers struggled for a long time to win their demand and have previous debts cancelled.

The award proves that the sheer strength of workers’ sustained efforts, with the cooperation of governments, can deliver results.

On the other side of the world, in Bolivia, the residents of San Pedro Magisterio village used to have to fetch water from springs near their polluted river daily.

Then the San Pedro Magisterio grassroots community organisation founded a water cooperative. They drilled wells and built the basic infrastructure to bring water to their homes. The funding to solve all these problems came from contributions made by community members, who did all the work themselves.

They followed this with a long campaign to build a wastewater treatment plant to clean up the highly polluted river. The community set up a reed bed ecological sewage treatment system serving 4000 people.

Resident Doña Magui says they are now trying to replace the reeds with arum lilies because they perform the same function and will help keep the treatment plant going in the long-term, because residents will sell the lilies and put the profits back into maintenance.

“As far as the state is concerned, we don’t exist,” Magui says, adding that it was the residents themselves who built the first school, the church and the first roads. This community was awarded the water category of the Transformative City award.

The third and final energy category was given to the Spanish city of Cadiz for its action plan against energy poverty.

The campaign featured active cooperation between local government leaders and ordinary citizens. A group of unemployed citizens were trained as energy advisers and given an eight-month contract by the city council to tackle unemployment, energy poverty and climate change simultaneously.

The team gives families in Cádiz advice on how to optimise their energy contracts so they pay as little as possible. In just three months, the team ran 60 workshops, gave 640 people training on energy issues, and advised 70 families in their homes, reducing their electricity bills by 20-50 per cent.

There have been 224 households that have changed their contracts to a time-of-day tariff, another sign of the knowledge gained by workshop participants.

The energy transition and energy poverty

While in the South, communities face more severe problems in transforming themselves to achieve sustainability, in the North it is energy poverty which is frequently the hidden but powerful motivator for change. Energy poverty is where building design and energy supply meet.

EU energy regulation still lacks a commonly agreed legal definition of energy poverty and this prevents the setting of mandatory targets and roadmaps.

Some national governments give low income households the chance to access social tariffs:

In Flanders, Belgium, for example, each household can obtain an annual discount on bills based on its size.
In Italy, low-income households and large families are offered discounts on gas and electricity bills, – a national plan supported by all municipalities.
In France social tariffs have been replaced by 'energy cheques', which people can use not only to pay their utility bills but also to finance energy-saving works in their homes.
In Germany, Berlin’s electricity grid is up for sale approximately every 15 years. When selecting the supplier in 2016, the citizens pushed for fuel poverty to be one of the criteria of buyer selection to be factored in by the local government.

In the absence of this, community energy groups are tackling the issue:

In England, Plymouth City Council identified community energy as a potential solution to energy poverty and facilitated the creation of Plymouth Energy Community in 2013, which now includes 1200 individuals and organisations who are transitioning to an affordable and low carbon energy system by offering access to grants to cancel energy debt, free and assisted insulation and advice on the best tariff options.
And a Low Carbon Hub Community Energy Fund is tackling the looming end of the British Feed-in Tariff subsidy for locally-generated solar electricity in March 2019, by fundraising frantically to install as many solar panels as possible on schools and businesses before the deadline. It has already successfully installed a new array at a primary school and is working with Oxfordshire County Council to encourage more schools to follow their example. It is campaigning to raise £1 million by 31st of July 2018, to bring in long term equity from positive investors.
In Scotland, non-profit social company OurPower, which is owned by social housing providers, community organisations and local authorities, produces and sells its own energy. Profits are reinvested to benefit customers and their community and every member can access locally produced renewable energy at a fair price and is able to control their energy supply and distribution.
In Wales, a similar approach is achieved by Awel Aman Tawe, which owns a wind farm and has installed photovoltaic rooves on community buildings.
In the Netherlands, a new Climate Agreement was reached at the beginning of this month which includes a community energy target that requires all new wind and solar projects to be at least half owned by the local community. All 33 Dutch regions have regional energy strategies under development.

Siward Zomer, representative of ‘Energie Samen’, the Dutch sector association of sustainable energy initiatives of citizens and farmers, said that "We expect a great acceleration of the development of new renewable energy projects where communities can become owners".

The control over revenues from renewable energy projects means that citizens, farmers and local entrepreneurs can directly benefit the local community.

Zomer says that strong collaboration between the market and the community will accelerate the energy transition. "The transition to a carbon free electricity system needs to be a democratic transition, giving all citizens the opportunity to participate. As part of the overall agreement, five hundred districts off the gas pipeline will have a transition plan within three years, agreed between housing collectives and community groups, local municipalities and other parties."

In Mouscron, Belgium (58,000 inhabitants), the first community energy cooperative COOPEM was launched this year by the municipality itself, following a feasibility study and several public meetings, strong involvement of citizens and a partnership with two companies, Energiris (a Brussels citizens’ cooperative) and Aralia (a third-party investor in PV projects).

COOPEM’s equity is owned 55 per cent by citizens, 15 per cent by the municipality and 30 per cent by the two private partners.

Thanks to bulk purchasing and the government’s Qualiwatt subsidy (a feed-in tariff that runs out at the end of July) citizens benefit from a reduction on the cost of the installation. When residents use energy from the grid, their meter runs normally but when their PV panels generate electricity, the meter runs backwards.

Many such organisations are members of the European Federation of Renewable Energy Cooperatives (REScoops), a network of 1,250 European energy cooperatives and their 1.000.000 citizens who are active in the energy transition.

Villages in Transition

Luzy in France is part of another network, the Village in Transition movement. It boasts a farmers’ corner, associative café, the Horizon, the donation shed, all run by citizens, with municipality support.

Luzy is a member of POTEs (Ordinary Energy Transition Pioneers), fostered by pan-European initiative Energy Cities, whose Carine Dartiguepeyrou says "are every-day-life innovators and visionaries working in areas related to the energy transition that Energy Cities, the Bourgogne Franche-Comté Region and ADEME, the French national energy conservation and environment agency, are forming into a network.

"POTEs are efficient and innovative… they collaborate and take care of others by helping them make progress in their project and overcome difficulties."

She explains that "A good example of this is the 'hold-up' method, a collective intelligence tool used for the third place the Horizon and the farmers’ corner at Luzy. Starting with an issue faced by each project, the participants put forward solutions to help the Horizon find a new business model and the farmers’ corner perpetuate its activity.

"In order to solve concrete challenges faced by project leaders (social entrepreneurs, researchers, engineers, government, NGOs ...), the actors who participate in a Hold-Up discuss and exchange ideas."
Energy communities

The European Council and the European Committee of the Regions (CoR) are drafting models of local energy ownership and the role of local energy communities in energy transition in Europe.

Energy Cities has prepared a joint contribution together with ResCoop.EU, the European federation for renewable energy cooperatives for the European Parliament to move forward on this issue. They are arguing that "only by distributing control among local actors will we be able to get to a fair energy transition and effectively fight climate change. Furthermore, this would contribute to local development and the reduction of (energy) poverty."

They perceive an enormous interest among local authorities to take control of the energy infrastructure, but also a lot of uncertainty on the 'hows and whats', and fear of failure.

Energy communities represent a distinct market actor in the energy system. They can play many roles at the local level such as provision of clean renewable energy and technical expertise. They can also as a partner to support local economic and social objectives.

For REScoop.eu, renewable energy cooperatives are ideal partners to lead the energy transition to energy democracy.

Sharing best practices and organising exchanges between cities can fill in the current knowledge and confidence gap.

So the EU Energy Poverty Observatory has published a new Guidance on designing effective energy poverty policies in municipalities about how to implement realistic and appropriate local energy poverty policies.

The EU Energy Poverty Observatory is now inviting municipalities to apply for technical assistance with the implementation of this guidance, including insights from best practices and recommendations based on the local circumstances.

Power to the people!

David Thorpe’s two new books are Passive Solar Architecture Pocket Reference and Solar Energy Pocket Reference. He’s also the author of Energy Management in Building and Sustainable Home Refurbishment.

UK and EC drag themselves towards net zero emissions

noreply@blogger.com (DavidKThorpe) — Mon, 30 Apr 2018 16:13:00 +0000

In both London and Europe, the effort to reduce emissions summons up a picture of a person, put on a diet by a doctor, eying a cream pie: the head knows it shouldn't eat it, but the body has to be dragged kicking and screaming away from the table.

A version of this piece appeared on The Fifth Estate six days ago.

That's the picture I get after studying three recent developments – in the UK's climate change legal framework, the EU's Energy Performance of Buildings Directive, and its Climate Action Regulation.

All three developments embody the praiseworthy aspiration to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions around the middle of the century (in line with the Paris Agreement on climate change), but the fine words are not yet backed up by measures that will achieve that goal.

UK sets aim for 'net zero'

Claire Perry

The UK's Energy and Clean Growth Minister Claire Perry made a significant and unexpected announcement that she will ask the country's Committee on Climate Change (CCC) for ideas on how to adopt the goal of the Paris Climate Agreement to limit global warming to below 2oC above pre-industrial levels, with an aspiration to keep it below 1.5oC. This means achieving net zero emissions by 2050.

She made the announcement at a meeting of the Commonwealth Heads of Government last week. "After the IPCC report later this year, we will be seeking the advice of the UK’s independent advisers, the Committee on Climate Change, on the implications of the Paris Agreement for the UK’s long-term emissions reduction targets," she said.

The independent Committee on Climate Change (CCC) exists to set five year plans for the UK to meet its legally binding target under the Climate Change Act (2008) of reducing carbon emissions by 80% by 2050 compared to 1990. It then monitors and reports on the UK's progress.

Perry's announcement was welcomed by the low carbon industry and campaign groups, but they cautioned that legislation is needed soon.

Dustin Benton, policy director at thinktank Green Alliance said, "The Government has made real progress on some issues, such as diesel cars and offshore wind, but there are glaring holes in areas such as energy efficiency and onshore renewables," adding waste, housing and transport to the list.

Greenpeace executive director John Sauven said this would mean the end of plans for a new runway at Heathrow. "No new runway at Heathrow will fit inside our carbon budget. The data show that the challenges posed by emissions from transport – land, sea and air – and our reliance on gas for heating will have to be confronted as a matter of urgency."

The CCC itself recently challenged the Government’s policies, saying that they do not go far enough even to meet current targets.

They want to see "urgent action" on the Clean Growth Strategy (published in October 2017), and to see detail on a long list of ideas that have been adopted by the government to reduce emissions but which are not accompanied by substance on strategy.

These include: phasing out sales of petrol and diesel cars and vans by 2040, increasing the energy efficiency of homes by 2035 and the energy efficiency standards of new buildings, how to phase out installation of gas and oil, to generate 85% of the UK’s electricity from low-carbon sources by 2032, and deploying carbon capture and storage technology.

They highlight also a need for new policies to close the remaining ‘emissions gap’ in the fourth and fifth carbon budgets. Even if delivered in full, existing and new policies, including those set out in the Clean Growth Strategy, miss the fourth and fifth carbon budgets by around 10-65 MtCO2e – a significant margin.

The CCC says, "There is a particular risk around meeting the fourth carbon budget which begins in just five years’ time, including completion of Hinkley Point C nuclear power station". This is looking increasingly unlikely due partly to EDF's problems on completing a similar reactor at Flamanville.

Energy Performance of Buildings Directive

Meanwhile, on 17 April, the European Parliament approved the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive. This will target the renovation of buildings, and the creation of smarter energy systems for new buildings, acknowledging that around 75% of buildings in Europe are currently energy inefficient and that buildings are the largest single energy consumer in Europe, using around 40% of final energy.

The revisions to the previous version of the Directive form the first of eight proposed steps towards the EU’s Energy Union ambitions and include advocating the use of smart technologies to introduce automation and control systems which could ensure buildings operate efficiently, the use of a 'smart readiness indicator' which can measure a building’s capacity to integrate new technologies, support for the introduction of new infrastructure for e-mobility in new buildings, and a path towards zero-emissions buildings by 2050.

There are also mechanisms to create the investment needed to renovate existing buildings to make them more energy efficient: at least 40% of infrastructure and innovation projects financed by the European Fund for Strategic Investments should contribute to the Commission's commitments on climate action and energy transition in line with the Paris Agreement. There is also funding under the European Investment Bank's Smart Finance for Smart Buildings Initiative. This aims to unlock a total of €10 billion in public and private funds between now and 2020 for energy efficiency projects.

The European Commission Vice-President for the Energy Union, Maroš Šefčovič, said: "As technology has blurred the distinction between sectors, we are also establishing a link between buildings and e-mobility infrastructure, and helping stabilize the electricity grid.”

The Council of Ministers have yet to finalise agreement of the Directive before it enters into force. Member States will have to transpose the new elements of the Directive into their national laws within 20 months. If the UK eventually Brexits, it will not have to.

I have already reported here and here on how the Directive has been watered down compared to what it might have been.

New EU Climate Action Regulation

A new European Climate Law is also edging closer. The Climate Action Regulation (formerly known as Effort Sharing Regulation) covers almost 60% of all greenhouse gases and establishes annual carbon budgets between 2021 and 2030 for each EU country, covering sectors like surface transport, buildings, agriculture, small industry and waste, as follows:

How effective it is as will depend on the policies adopted by each Member State, who, in the coming months, are supposed to develop National Energy and Climate Plans to show how they expect to meet their commitments under the directive.

The European Council already has an overall GHG reduction target for the EU, of reducing emissions 40% by 2030 compared to 1990, with a subtarget for sectors not included in the emissions trading system (ETS) of 30% reduction compared to 2005. The CAR gives each country an individual target to implement that target. France and Germany have by far the highest targets. Eastern European and other less industrialised countries such as Greece and Portugal will be able to continue to increase emissions [for the full list see the table on page 5 of this analysis.

This is not as straightforward as it might seem. The CAR is meant to contain flexibilities to let nations meet targets more cost-effectively, but, according to separate analysis by three think tanks (Sandbag, T&E and Öko Institut), this means it is full of loopholes that allow countries to get out of their commitments, meaning it will only lead to 25-26% reductions compared to 2005. Furthermore, they say, it does not provide the incentives to put the EU in line to fully decarbonise these sectors by 2050.

In respect of action on reducing emissions, the UK was one of the EU's high performers. With it out of the Union, the rest will have to try harder to achieve that 40% target. However, T&E says they won't make it. "Countries that will not meet their 2020 targets will be rewarded by being allowed to emit even more".

It cites the example of Ireland, whose emissions since 2011 have steadily increased. Rather than the CAR giving it a baseline starting point for emission reductions of the 2020 target of 20% relative to 2005 levels, it is being given a 2018 level, which means, because it is failing to reduce emissions to badly, it has to achieve just 5% relative to 2005 emissions. Austria, Belgium or Finland could also be among the countries that will benefit from this starting point.

To return to the picture described in my opening paragraph, at least the head has drawn up rules; whether it can implement and enforce them effectively is another matter entirely.

David Thorpe's two new books are Passive Solar Architecture Pocket Reference and Solar Energy Pocket Reference. He's also the author of Energy Management in Buildings and Sustainable Home Refurbishment.

Has the world reached peak ecological footprint?

noreply@blogger.com (DavidKThorpe) — Mon, 23 Apr 2018 08:10:00 +0000

Humanity’s ecological footprint may have levelled off after decades of consistent increase, according to new data released last week by the Global Footprint Network.

[A version of this piece appeared on The Fifth Estate website last week.
For more information on this topic, see: theoneplanetlife.com]

Mathis Wackernagel, founder and CEO of Global Footprint Network, speaking in an interview with me from Oxford University just before the launch, said, "We may have reached peak eco-footprint, after years of expansion. For example, China underwent a rapid expansion of its footprint, and now it has flattened. This could be a real trend."

Peak consumption? In 1961 China was consuming the equivalent of 0.31 Earths of biocapacity, but since then rocketed to 2.21 Earths, where it has sat for the last two years of data.

What is ecological footprint?

Ecological footprint is a shorthand way of understanding the relationship between our consumption of resources and the capacity of the planet to provide them and absorb the pollution we cause.

Every individual, a community or nation has their own ecological footprint. It is the biologically productive space needed to renew all that we demand from nature. For the world as a whole, it was in the early 1970s when humanity started consuming more than the planet could regenerate. From then on we have been in deficit, implying that we cannot carry on consuming at this level without ever-stronger risk of ecological crises.

Global Footprint Network has been providing this country and planetary level data for many years but last week’s launch also saw the launch of a new data platform and an open source system, meaning that anyone can now freely explore and interrogate the data on global or national bases.

The new data is compiled from statistics provided by the United Nations and, being complicated to collect, is always three or four years behind the current year. The first year in which the data was collected was 1961. The new website currently provides time series of data for every year between 1961 and 2014.

This is what the world’s ecological footprint looks like over this period:

From 1961 to 2014 we have gone from exploiting 0.63 Earth-equivalents to 1.69, approximately flatlining for four years.

The horizontal line represents the total biocapacity of the planet. Before about 1970 we had ecological reserves to spare. Ever since then our ecological deficit has been rising. But it is noticeable that since about 2011 the rate of increase has levelled off.

“We don’t know whether or not this is a blip or a trend. It is too early to say,” Wackernagel said.

Mathis Wackernagel

“But even if we stayed at the same level as last year, we’d still be in a severe global storm. So the question is, how good is your boat? For instance, even though India has a small per person footprint on average, it is still larger than what their ecosystems can renew. While this may be unfair, the reality is that this puts them at significant risk – and ignoring it at even larger.”

Individual country data compares consumption data to biocapacity data. What Wackernagel is referring to here is that India, despite having a total per capita footprint of 0.67 Earth-equivalents, is in deficit in relation to what it is able to supply itself to feed its consumption, and is therefore using biocapacity from other countries to fuel its rapid pace of development.

The data is compiled from UN information on population and the amount of built-up land, carbon emissions, cropland, fishing grounds, forest products and grazing land.

For the world as a whole, the peak was in 2011. It is interesting to compare the statistics for 1961, 2011 and 2014 to see what has changed to cause this overall peaking:

Year	Built-up land	Carbon emissions	Cropland	Fishing grounds	Forest products	Grazing land	Total
1961	0.026	1.005	0.465	0.096	0.431	0.265	2.288
2011	0.061	1.779	0.533	0.087	0.281	0.147	2.888
2014	0.064	1.707	0.550	0.093	0.278	0.144	2.835

The world’s ecological footprint per person in 1961, 2011 and 2014. The units are global hectares (gha) – these are a biologically productive hectare with world average productivity for a given year, to account for the fact that different land types have different productivities.

The amount of built-up land has steadily increased over the entire period, but carbon emissions have recently slightly decreased. While the amount of fishing grounds, forest products and grazing land have all continued to decline, the amount of cultivated land is almost back to the level of 1961.

Biocapacity is also shrinking quite rapidly per person, so even though per person ecological footprint has not changed that much, its ratio to biocapacity has become ever more unfavourable.

This implies pressures on biodiversity. It does not tell us about the nitrogen and phosphorus pollution caused by this increase in agriculture. For this we have to look for other statistics not covered by the ecological footprint metric, but covered by a different metric – planetary boundaries, collated annually by the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

As can be seen in the above diagram this is one of the four boundaries that have been exceeded.

Australia and the UK

The website allows anyone to play with the data. Let’s compare, for example, the ecological footprints of Australia and the UK.

Australia is using the resources of 4.09 Earths, down from a peak of 5.15 Earths in 2011.

The UK is using the resources of 2.85 Earths, down from a peak of 3.55 Earths in 2011.

In addition, both of these countries’ ecological footprints of consumption (in global hectares divided by population) have declined slightly since their peaks, in 2008 and 2007 respectively:

Australia's ecological footprint in terms of the number of Earths needed to sustain it, if everyone on the planet had the same level and impact of consumption as Australia does.

The UK's ecological footprint, pictured the same way. The UK's has reduced since the financial crisis of 2007.

In the UK’s case, if we drill down to the category level, the reason for the fall is solely a reduction in carbon emissions (which is largely due to a switch for gas to coal-powered electricity generation, but also due to a cut in fishing grounds due to previous over-fishing). The area of built-up land has just over doubled since 1961:

UK time series:

Year	Built-up land	Carbon emissions	Cropland	Fishing grounds	Forest products	Grazing land	Total
1961	0.068	3.835	0.803	0.396	0.297	0.751	6.150
2007	0.139	4.240	0.815	0.103	0.623	0.324	6.245
2014	0.156	2.996	0.832	0.082	0.483	0.250	4.799

UK's ecological footprints in 1961, 2007 and 2014.

In Australia’s case, again there was a decline in carbon emissions. The area of built-up land has almost tripled since 1961:

Australia time series:

Year	Built-up land	Carbon emissions	Cropland	Fishing grounds	Forest products	Grazing land	Total
1961	0.024	3.026	0.527	0.049	1.031	2.813	7.471
2008	0.047	5.867	0.872	0.127	1.206	0.872	8.992
2014	0.063	4.700	0.679	0.122	0.863	0.458	6.886

Australia's ecological footprints in 1961, 2007 and 2014.

Other trends are not improving, however.

What can be done?

Despite the levelling out, Wackernagel remains alarmed by humanity’s unsustainable activities.

“People don’t look at this stuff. Instead, they’re buoyant about labour productivity, but this came about because of cheap energy and resources. Now we need to maintain our quality of life but reduce resource use.”

But he sees a way out.

“Total and ever-lasting decoupling of economic growth from resource consumption is not possible. Some may be possible. But it takes resources to run an economy. Our data shows how the resource dependence of most countries have increased, even though we have more efficient technology. For instance, we can calculate the average resource intensity in the world – or nations or cities – by sectors. This points out which sectors are within resource intensities that are consistent with the one-planet budget, and which ones are on a collision course.”

Cities are beginning to employ ecological footprinting methods to track the demand on nature of different types of development. To do this other sources of data are added to those on the website.

“We are starting work with six cities in Portugal. We are also in conversation with the Wuppertal Institute, Germany, to run a campaign on all the larger German cities and drive up demand for sustainable solutions,” Wackernagel said.

“They recognise there is a danger of stranded assets due to having exceeded planetary boundaries.

“The framing of the argument is important. The ecological footprint calculator may come over as negative, generating a sense of sacrifice and suffering. We should ask: what is the best move to secure lasting development improvements for us? The alternative – encouraging expansionism – is dangerous.”

Cities can use their own detailed information, he says, to compile a “consumption land use matrix for a city”.

“This details how various consumption activities contribute to the overall demand. Then, using local consumption statistics, this can be extended into the past and future to evaluate trends in the city’s resource performance.”

This has been done already in Calgary, Canada, where consultants worked with a planning department to reduce the level of impact of a new housing development.

The ecological footprint is a useful tool alongside other tools. Although time will tell whether the impact of human consumption on the planet has peaked, it is still at an unsustainable level. It will take much work to actually reverse the rise of the last decades to a sustainable one, especially given the inexorable rise of human population and urbanisation.

For more information on this topic, see: theoneplanetlife.com

David Thorpe is the author of The One Planet Life, about living within planetary boundaries, Passive Solar Architecture Pocket Referenceand Sustainable Home Refurbishment.

Is this Tory Government the greenest ever?

noreply@blogger.com (DavidKThorpe) — Tue, 17 Apr 2018 19:37:00 +0000

British Conservative politicians are spearheading efforts to phase out coal and go net-zero – and that’s just the start of their Green policy-making. What's going on?

This is an updated version of an article published on The Fifth Estate on 10 April.

Claire Perry, Energy and Clean Growth Minister

Britain’s Energy and Clean Growth Minister, Claire Perry, has called for Parliament to draft new laws that will cut emissions to net-zero.

This follows her trip to New York last week when she attended the Bloomberg Future Energy Summit in New York last week where she set out the case for making coal history. “By phasing out traditional coal power, we are not only taking active steps to tackle climate change, we are also protecting the air we breathe by reducing harmful pollution. The Powering Past Coal Alliance sends a clear signal that the time for unabated coal fired electricity has well and truly passed,” Perry told her New York audience.

The Powering Past Coal Alliance was launched by Perry and her Canadian counterpart Catherine McKenna, the Minister for Climate Change, three days after the COP23 climate change conference last November. Its members number 27 countries plus a host of regions and businesses. Ireland, one of the most recent to join, has pledged to close its one remaining coal plant by 2025 at the latest.

Catherine McKenna, Canadian Minister for Climate Change

“The UK leads the world in tackling climate change – we have reduced emissions by more than 40 per cent since 1990,” Perry said.

She is not wrong. UK carbon emissions dropped 2.6 per cent in 2017 compared to the previous year, a 43 per cent reduction since 1990. Renewables powered more than coal and nuclear combined during the final quarter. Emissions are now at a level not seen since the end of the 19th century when the industrial revolution was in full swing.

Wales is fast switching away from coal to renewables (it once was the world’s biggest coal exporter) and in Scotland wind power supplied 173 per cent of Scotland’s entire electricity demand on March 1. Even on the worst day for wind during the first quarter of 2018, January 11, wind powered the equivalent of over 575,000 homes there.

Perry said she hopes Australia and more countries, businesses, and regions will soon join New Zealand, France and Italy and sign up to the Powering Past Coal Alliance.

“Australia has different choices to make, and it would be wrong of us to sit here in Britain and prescribe what Australia’s energy policy should be, what we’re trying to do is to help and to show that there is a way through this,” she said.

A statement on the Canadian government’s website states the reason for the Alliance:

"Coal is one of the most greenhouse-gas intensive means of generating electricity, and coal-fired power plants still account for almost 40 per cent of the world’s electricity today. This reality makes carbon pollution from coal electricity a leading contributor to climate change.

"As a result, phasing out traditional coal power is one of the most important steps that can be taken to tackle climate change and meet our Paris Agreement commitment to keeping global temperature from increasing by 2 °C and pursuing efforts to limit the increase to 1.5 °C. An analysis shows that, to meet this commitment, a coal phase-out is needed by no later than by 2030, in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and in the European Union, and by no later than by 2050, in the rest of the world."

Drax power station

Drax Power Station in Yorkshire, Britain’s largest electricity generator, stands as a symbol of this change. It was once dubbed ‘the dirty old man of Europe’ for being the most polluting British power station and a focus of climate change campaigners' actions. The activists have won. No longer does it burn coal; three of its six generators burn wood, albeit controversially imported from the USA.

But although she is against coal and has today said the UK government will ask its climate watchdog to consider how the UK could meet 1.5C Paris target and become net zero, Perry has also said she supports the UK oil and gas industry. In January she told the Maximising Economic Recovery Forum held by the Oil and Gas Authority in Aberdeen: “We want to squeeze every last drop at the right economic price out of the North Sea basin. I think we’ve underestimated what we still have in terms of reserves,” for which she was criticised by Aberdeen’s own MP. Does she speak with a forked tongue? Time will tell.

It’s not just action on climate change

Margaret Thatcher 30 years ago warned the world about climate change

Thirty years ago the Conservative’s patron saint, Margaret Thatcher, was one of the first politicians to warn the world about climate change. She went on to say that “no generation has a freehold on this Earth. All we have is a life tenancy – with a full repairing lease.”

Former Conservative Party leader David Cameron’s coalition government in 2010 promised to be “the greenest government ever”, although his efforts were undermined by his own Treasury and by political appointments to the Department for Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs (DEFRA).

Yet this shows that conservation is, in Britain at least, naturally a core conservative ideal, even though, the Conservative Party being a broad church, it does contain a number of vociferous climate sceptics, such as former DEFRA Secretary of State Owen Paterson and former Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson.

Whilst the environmental credibility of the current Conservative leader Theresa May is debatable, the current DEFRA secretary, Michael Gove, has been praised by Greenpeace, WWF and, albeit cautiously, Green Party leader Caroline Lucas.

Michael Gove, Defra Secretary of State

Gove has seen an opportunity to rebrand himself as a progressive since his self-inflicted downfall due to a botched bid to lead his party after his team-up with Boris Johnson drove the pro-Brexit bus to victory and kicked out David Cameron from the post. Theresa May, in a surprise move, put him in charge of DEFRA, since when he has hardly seemed to be the same person as the Gove who was once in charge of the Education Department, overseeing a return to ‘traditional teaching values’ and alienating virtually every teacher in the country.

His promises (and most of them are still promises in the form of consultations) include banning ivory sales in an effort to reduce elephant poaching, banning all petrol and diesel cars and vans by 2040 (critics want it sooner), committing to safeguarding coral reefs, introducing a deposit scheme for all drinks containers across England, support for a total ban on insect-harming pesticides across Europe, and making farming subsidies dependent on farmers proving that they are genuinely improving biodiversity and soil quality.

The Brexit factor and Trump’s trade issues

Much of the UK’s environmental policy derives from its membership of the EU, which has raised standards arguably well beyond what they would have been otherwise.

Concern has been loudly heard that, post-Brexit, these protections will be weakened. The British public overwhelmingly backs retaining these food and environmental standards. In response, Gove has promised a consultation on a new, independent body to enforce environmental law, although the future extent of its powers is uncertain.

But Trump’s White House has stressed that any new trade deal it forges with the UK cannot include current EU food standards that block the import of American products such as chlorine-washed chickens, hormone-treated beef, and crops washed with various herbicide chemicals. Further environmental battles over trade deals clearly lie ahead.

The Climate Change Act

It remains a small miracle that the 2008 Climate Change Act, a product of the Labour government, has not been repealed by the Tories. It is a phenomenal piece of legislation that enshrines in law a long-term goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent by 2050 relative to 1990 levels.

This impels the UK economy towards a more sustainable future and is the underlying reason for much of the above. Under it, every five years, the government of the day – of whatever hue – must adopt a legally-binding carbon budget that sets, 15 years ahead, limits on the economy’s total greenhouse gas emissions for the following five year period.

If that sounds ludicrous to some right-wingers, it is what businesses and investors want, because it gives them the time and confidence to plan ahead. It has been extremely successful.

If Australians seek allies in persuading Abbott to change his tune, they really need to look no further than Britain’s Tories and their business supporters.

David Thorpe’s two new books are Passive Solar Architecture Pocket Reference and Solar Energy Pocket Reference. He’s also the author of Energy Management in Building and Sustainable Home Refurbishment.

Troubling questions over Macquarie’s purchase of the Green Investment Bank

noreply@blogger.com (DavidKThorpe) — Thu, 12 Apr 2018 10:02:00 +0000

When Macquarie Bank bought the UK’s Green Investment Bank it ignited a storm of opposition. There was doubt the Aussie bankers would uphold the original ambitions of the GIB, because these ambitions are not sufficiently protected. That’s now the conclusion of an investigation by British MPs on the UK House of Commons Public Accounts Committee.

Furthermore, the MPs have not picked up the fact that it is no longer under full government control how the £200m foreign aid is spent that is supposed to support clean energy and climate change mitigation projects in developing countries under Britain's international agreement obligations.

A version of this post was first published on 3 April on The Fifth Estate.

Labelled a “Vampire Kangaroo” in 2013 by the Sunday Times, a view supported by a BBC investigation into Macquarie’s ownership of Thames Water, the sale was widely condemned at the time.

The committee of MPs, supported by the National Audit Office, was charged at looking at whether the controversial sell-off was conducted properly and whether the GIB performed well in the past and would fulfil its intended function to invest in promising new sustainable technologies in the future.

Since it was created in 2012, the UK Green Investment Bank plc (GIB) has been successful in attracting private investment into some sectors of the green economy, such as offshore wind projects, according to its former chief executive Shaun Kingsbury.

However, Alex Chisholm, Permanent Secretary for the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS), the government department which set it up, told the MPS it cannot be sure whether the GIB achieved its intended objectives of “encouraging investment in the green economy and creating an institution that lasts”.

This is because the government chose to sell the bank before fully assessing its impact. The decision was based purely on a desire to reduce public debt and secure cash for the public purse from the sale.

Macquarie bought the bank for £1.6 billion in August 2017 in a deal hailed in The Australian Financial Review as “a potential game changer for Macquarie globally because the assets, skills and connections it brings to the group will give it an edge in two of the biggest investment megatrends over the next several decades – renewable energy and impact investing”

Certain measures were attached to the sale intended to protect the bank’s original Green Purposes, which cover greenhouse gas emissions, efficient use of natural resources, the natural environment, biodiversity and environmental sustainability. However the MPs found that these are not sufficient to ensure that the bank is an enduring institution.

“It is unclear whether Green Investment Group (GIG, as it has been rebranded under Macquarie’s ownership) will continue to support the government’s energy policy, or continue to have an impact on the UK’s climate change goals,” the MPs say, declaring it as “a misjudgement” that the Department has so little assurance over GIG’s future investment in the UK and in emerging technologies, which are crucial to ensuring that the UK’s green commitments are met.

Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP, the Committee’s Deputy Chair, called the manner of the sale “deeply regrettable”. “The rebranded Green Investment Group is not bound to invest in the UK’s energy policy at all, nor to invest in the kind of technologies that support its climate objectives,” he said.

“Had the government been shrewder it could have secured a better return for taxpayers. It was a mistake to repeal legislation protecting GIB’s green investment obligations without securing firmer commitments from potential buyers.”

Ironically Macquarie actually told the MPs that such commitments did not affect the price it was prepared to pay, and indicated that the government could and should have strengthened these commitments contractually.

How successful was the Green Investment Bank?

The GIB attracted substantial private investment into some sectors of the green economy, such as offshore wind. By March 2017, GIB had committed $6.21 billion to fund or part fund 100 projects, and attracted $15.71 billion of private capital.

These projects were primarily in offshore wind, and waste and bioenergy, with some in energy efficiency and onshore renewables.

Many other technologies, such as tidal power and carbon capture and storage, were judged by the bank’s board to be not sufficiently developed to be suitable commercial investments. But because the BEIS did not give clear criteria, it could not judge whether GIB was addressing failures in the green energy market or only backing projects that would have been winners anyway.

GIB investment activity between October 2012 and March 2017, by sector
Sector	Offshore wind	Waste & bioenergy	Energy efficiency	Onshore renewables	Total
Number of projects	11	37	35	17	100
GIB capital committed (£ millions)	2,211	756	292	150	3,409
Private capital mobilised (£ millions)	4,660	3,479	286	150	8,575
Average total transaction size (£ millions)	625	114	17	18	120

Will Macquarie continue its mission?

When it acquired GIB, Macquarie agreed to retain its five Green Purposes, the protection of which was the aim of the Green Purposes Company, which BEIS had established previously and given its trustees powers to veto any changes.

But this protection relies on Macquarie continuing to fund the Green Purposes Company and the powers of the trustees do not extend to approval of investment decisions.

Macquarie has committed GIG to investing or arranging over £3 billion investment in green energy projects over three years after purchase but these commitments are not legally binding and rely on a number of factors, including market conditions and future government policy decisions.

Mark Dooley, global head of green energy, Macquarie, told the MPs that GIG is not currently required or incentivised to invest in the UK, or innovative technologies, or to focus on any of GIB’s five Green Purposes.

MacBank wants government support to stick to the plan

According to Macquarie, for the majority of potential investments in the UK it would want financial support from the government. These include the proposed world-leading tidal lagoon in Swansea, which, lacking government support based on a high strike price and an environmental impact report, seems unlikely to go ahead.

Since it became the Green Investment Group, it has continued to invest in safe sectors – wind and waste-to energy projects – rather than emerging technologies.

David Fass, head of Macquarie Group’s European operations says Macquarie will use the GIG to channel “billions in renewable energy deals over the next decade”… “unless Macquarie doesn’t meet the expectations of a range of stakeholders”.

A valuable asset in green investment definition

One asset of GIG which is little appreciated, but could be worth a fortune, according to The Australian Financial Review, is its proprietary definition of green investments which is backed up with a unique database, presumably acquired at least in part from the GIB.

“This piece of intellectual property could well be sold or brought to market in partnership with financial information companies, Standard & Poor’s or Moody’s Investors Service. A product that secures investor trust in green investments could be extremely valuable,” it says.

The UK Climate Investments LLP

As a result of taking over the Green Investment Bank Macquarie now owns UK Climate Investments LLP. This was set up three years ago in March 2015 to invest the £200m commitment Britain (like most developed countries) has under international climate change agreements to donate to projects in developing economies that adapt to climate change and promote “green growth” in East Africa, South Africa and India.

For over two years no investment was made, but in autumn last year Macquarie announced £12.4m of the £200m had been pledged to Lightsource to develop and construct up to a total of 300MW of PV projects in rural India.

It’s still unclear who banks (and obtains interest from) the remaining cash.

The UK National Audit Office (who conducted some of the research for the MPs’ report) told me last September following a Freedom of Information request that their remit for this research (and therefore the MPs’ report) did not cover the UKCI. They did say that $22.65m of the total amount had already been spent – on consultants to do market surveys, of no direct benefit to developing countries.

It’s unclear how much say the UK government now has in how this money is spent, but surely it should be spent to the benefit of the poor in developing countries trying to fight climate change rather than the shareholders of a private investment company?

These countries are sick of waiting for the money to come to them.

Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown concludes his comment on the House of Commons report on the GIB by saying: “There are broader lessons here—not least for how government evaluates public assets and, when relevant, prepares them for sale.”

And the net benefit to the British taxpayer of all of the sale? Just £126 million.

David Thorpe is a UK based writer. His two new books are Passive Solar Architecture Pocket Reference and Solar Energy Pocket Reference. He’s also the author of Energy Management in Building and Sustainable Home Refurbishment.

Financing industry gears up to bankroll a more sustainable future

noreply@blogger.com (DavidKThorpe) — Tue, 03 Apr 2018 14:18:00 +0000

Emmanuel Macron, Valdis Dombrovskis and Michael Bloomberg

A version of this article first appeared on The Fifth Estate website on 27 March.

Efforts to close the urban green investment gap need to be urgently scaled up to provide access to technical support and financing for low-carbon infrastructure for thousands of cities, the European Union’s High Level Conference on Sustainable Finance has heard.

The conference saw a first-of-its-kind call made by a powerhouse of individuals and bodies: French president Emmanuel Macron; the Global Covenant of Mayors; Michael Bloomberg, philanthropic financier, former NYC mayor and UN climate change special envoy; European Commission vice-president for the Energy Union Maroš Šef?ovi?, the presidents of the European Investment Bank; the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the World Bank Group.

The aim is to raise awareness among local authorities, civil society organisations, businesses, private investors and philanthropies about the investment needs for climate action in urban areas and the available financing solutions; and to provide dedicated advisory services and foster the financing of urban climate action projects.

European Commission vice-president for financial stability Valdis Dombrovskis said: “There are two reasons why we should climate-proof our investments, and foster a broader view of risks: first, the impact of climate change can threaten financial stability and lead to major economic losses through floods, land erosion or draughts. And second, because of the risk of stranded assets. If we wake up too late to the reality of global warming, many of today’s investments could end up being redundant.”

Three months ago, at the One Planet Summit hosted by President Macron, Global Urbis was launched, which is a global initiative to provide cities with financing and technical assistance to mobilise private capital. Urbis is a dedicated advisory platform for investment support to cities. The call for interest will be piloted at the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco in September this year.

The European Commission’s Sustainable Finance Action Plan, meanwhile, will make it easier to meet the estimated €180 billion (AU$289b) a year price tag for achieving the EU’s climate goals – an investment requirement that rises to €270b (AU$434b) if energy, transport, water and waste sector are also included. The plan comes hot on the heels of a call from top European financiers to the EU to get radical on financing green projects.

The EU’s climate and energy targets are by 2030 to reach a minimum 40 per cent cut in greenhouse gas emissions compared to 1990, at least 30 per cent (pending finalisation) energy savings compared with business-as-usual, and at least a 27 per cent share of renewables in final energy consumption.

Meeting the challenge

With over €100 trillion (AU$161t) in assets, the financial sector must be part of the solution. There is huge potential for green investments. However, the EU has recognised that engaging private finance requires systemic changes to its own financial eco-system.

Following the engagement of a high-level expert group, the plans announced are for far-reaching reform to its system, reform that Mr Dombrovskis said at the launch “could set the global benchmark for sustainable finance… to support a sustainable future for generations to come”.

The Commission will also establish a new single investment fund to provide financial support for sustainable investment for all EU policies.

The action plan will address five key challenges to the provision of sustainable finance:

there is no common definition of sustainable investment, and so a universal classification for sustainable activities will be developed
to avoid a risk of “greenwashing” by banks of existing or other investment products, standard labels between financial products will be established to give investors certainty
to stop banks and insurers giving insufficient consideration to climate and environmental risks there will be a study to discover if capital requirements should reflect exposure to climate change and such risks
to reduce the likelihood that investors might disregard sustainability factors or underestimate their impact, the duties of institutions will be clarified to make sure they consider environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues in their investment decision processes and are more transparent towards their clients
to address the fact that too little information is often provided to shareholders on corporate sustainability-related activities there will be efforts to encourage non-financial information disclosure in company reports.

In total, these amount to the provision of more reliable information for investors, sustainability and risk management.

Furthermore, to combat short-termism in investment decisions, the Commission is inviting the European Financial Supervisory Authorities to collect evidence of undue short-term pressures in capital markets on corporations and consider whether steps need to be taken to combat these.

Green bonds and ecolabels

Most of this work will take about a year and so by the third quarter of 2019 the European Commission is expected to adopt acts on the content of the prospectus for issuing green bonds and produce an EU ecolabel for financial products based on the previous highly successful EU organic label and the EU product eco label.

It will also provide benchmarks for institutional investors and asset managers that are harmonised across the EU and a list of measures to be taken to require greater disclosure of non-financial information in company reports and to incorporate sustainability in prudential requirements.

An EU sustainable taxonomy would mean a uniform and harmonised classification system for green investment. This is seen as essential to determine which activities can be regarded as sustainable across the EU and to strengthen banks against economic shocks, improve risk management and ultimately ensure financial stability.

It would provide appropriate signals to economic players on which activities are considered sustainable.

This will all help to create certainty for investors who want to invest with sustainability objectives in mind.

The European Investment Advisory Hub – the EU’s gateway to investment support – is providing technical assistance to the development of projects. This helps to build capacity for projects that are often technologically, economically and legally complex. It also has a role co-operating with local partners such as promotional banks across member states to provide more match-making and increase local accessibility.

David Thorpe’s two new books are Passive Solar Architecture Pocket Reference and Solar Energy Pocket Reference. He’s also the author of Energy Management in Building and Sustainable Home Refurbishment.

Top retailers demand zero carbon building standard

noreply@blogger.com (DavidKThorpe) — Mon, 19 Mar 2018 09:45:00 +0000

A group of retailers – whose members include Aviva, BT, Cemex, Ikea, Kingfisher, M&S, Nestle, Sky and Tesco – have criticised the UK government for not doing enough to improve energy efficiency in non-domestic buildings and asked for a zero carbon building standard to be set.

This piece first appeared on The Fifth Estate on 19 March 2018

They want to see a target for the UK’s building stock to be nearly zero carbon by 2050, and the establishment of a new zero carbon buildings target to be enforced by 2020, to be followed by a truly net zero carbon buildings standard.

Known as the Aldersgate Group, they took a year to look at structural challenges in financing the creation of low carbon infrastructure, and, based on interviews with businesses and investors, found that a chief problem is a lack of clear policy goals to help unlock private sector finance in order to meet decarbonisation targets.

As part of 30 recommendations for government, business and investors in their new report, Towards the new normal: increasing investment in the UK’s green infrastructure, they are urging the UK government to commit to support the growth of green investment over the long term, set better targets and to “enforce more strictly” existing energy efficiency policies.

They want an increased ambition to upgrade the UK’s domestic buildings to EPC band C by 2035 broadened to apply to commercial buildings.

Alex White

Alex White, the report’s lead author and senior policy officer for the Aldersgate Group, said: “Over the next three decades, the UK needs hundreds of billions of private investment in green and resilient infrastructure to meet the objectives of the Clean Growth Strategy, Industrial Strategy and 25 Year Environment Plan. But investment isn’t happening fast enough on its own.

“The government must catalyse action on green infrastructure investment now to move the financial system towards a new normal if we are to meet our policy goals cost effectively while maximising benefits for UK plc.”

The group’s report suggests government could engage a wider base of investors by establishing the potential size of the market, and creating tax breaks for energy efficiency investment by businesses. It says government could help boost the uptake of service agreements with energy supply companies by offering short-term guarantees on contractual risks, such as one of the parties going bust.

Government should also lead by example and mandate greater energy efficiency across all publicly owned building stock, the Aldersgate Group says. This would create a project pipeline, increase investment flows and potentially lower costs for private sector firms.

Other recommendations include adjusting financial regulations to encourage long-term investment in green infrastructure, such as introducing a legal duty for all fiduciaries (such as pension fund trustees) to consider financially material environmental and social governance (ESG) risks.

All planned infrastructure spending should pass a “green” test with sustainability requirements in all public procurement, including supporting local government with standardised power purchase agreements and energy management services contracts, Aldersgate Group says, to avoid locking in emissions for the future and to maximise resilience against flooding and future climate-related risks.

Finally, the group wants to see the issuing of a sovereign green bond and municipal green bonds to help fund the delivery of low carbon projects and address a potential drop in financing from institutions such as the European Investment Bank.

The report is released in conjunction with four separate briefings, which explore in detail several of the specific barriers and solutions to key types of green infrastructure investment:

Increasing investment in domestic energy efficiency
Increasing investment in commercial energy efficiency
Increasing investment in low carbon power
Increasing investment in natural capital

Steve Waygood, chief responsible investment officer for Aviva Investors, welcomed the call to “use the dormant assets within the insurance and investment sectors to introduce a national financial literacy campaign to educate people about how their money is invested and how this shapes the world they retire into”.

“This would help create sustained demand for sustainable investment, helping to grow the UK economy on a longer term and more sustainable basis for the future.”

Emma Howard Boyd

Emma Howard Boyd, chair of the UK Environment Agency, commented that “some businesses are already alive to the risks and opportunities presented by climate change, but not enough”.

She said that the UK could show international leadership “with financial innovation to counter increased risks from droughts and storms”.

“The government’s Green Finance Taskforce is currently discussing how to accelerate investment in resilience, so this report is timely and helpful.”

Boyd is a member of the taskforce herself, which is a cross-departmental initiative working with industry to accelerate the growth of green finance. She says there are plenty of investment opportunities presented by climate resilience.

“Flood protection is good for the economy,” she argued recently. “It allows companies to do business in severe weather by keeping their properties open, and their supply chains moving, as well as the transport links that bring in customers and trade.”

Are pension funds ready for climate change?

But fiduciary bodies such as pension funds have a long way to go before they can appreciate the risks. A self-selecting survey carried out by the trade magazine Professional Pensions suggested continuing widespread misunderstanding. It found that 53 per cent of trustees, scheme managers and pension professionals did not see climate change as a financially material risk to their own or their clients’ portfolios.

Similar, qualitative research by the pensions law firm Sackers indicates that many trustees do not pay significant attention to ESG issues: “[Trustees]… consider ESG and external governance reviews to be low priorities. Some participants were not sure what ESG meant … Some see ESG as a distraction or potentially detrimental to achieving the scheme’s goals.”

The Financial Conduct Authority is currently considering whether to make reviews of such risks mandatory.

Mary Creagh

As part of a wider inquiry, Mary Creagh, the chair of the UK’s cross-party Environmental Audit Committee, last week wrote to the top 25 pension funds in the UK to ask how they manage such risks.

She said in her letter: “The climate change risks of tomorrow should be considered by pension funds today. A young person auto-enrolled on a pension today may be 45 years away from retirement. Over that timescale these climate change risks will inevitably grow. We are examining whether pension funds are starting to take these risks into account in their financial decision making.”

Pension funds have yet to respond to her, as has the government to the Aldersgate Report’s recommendations. Business as usual will not change without concerted effort and stimulus, and legislation, procurement strategies and tax breaks are three tools the government should deploy.

David Thorpe’s two new books are Passive Solar Architecture Pocket Reference and Solar Energy Pocket Reference. He’s also the author of Energy Management in Building and Sustainable Home Refurbishment.

In a massive sustainable investment market, energy efficiency offers huge returns

noreply@blogger.com (DavidKThorpe) — Tue, 13 Mar 2018 11:09:00 +0000

One in every five dollars invested professionally in the US is now invested sustainably. And while investment in projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions are rising globally, the market for energy efficiency remains under-satisfied compared to its potential and the market for renewable energy investment. Here’s why.

A version of this piece appeared in The Fifth Estate on 6 March 2018

The size of the market

It can be confusing for beginners. There are green bonds; sustainable, responsible and impact investing (SRI); and environmental, social and governance (ESG). But whatever you call it, more and more investors are seeing the benefit of putting their money into sustainability.

According to the last Global Sustainable Investment Review, at the start of 2016, global sustainable investment assets reached US$22.89 trillion (AU$29.47t), a 25 per cent increase from 2014. Europe accounted for over half of these assets (53 per cent) and the United States 38 per cent.

The market size of SRI investing in the United States alone was US$8.72 trillion (AU$11.23t) as of 2016 – double what it was just four years previously – representing one in every five dollars invested, according to SIFMA, an association of broker-dealers, banks and asset managers for businesses and municipalities.

How it works

Impact investing refers to investments “made into companies, organisations, and funds with the intention to generate a measurable, beneficial social or environmental impact alongside a financial return”.

The Global Impact Initiative is a global champion of impact investing, dedicated to increasing its scale and effectiveness around the world. It was founded by Giles Gunesekera in 2015. Speaking alongside last month’s Cayman Alternative Investment Summit he said he started it “to provide investors – foundations, family offices, pension funds, endowments – with bespoke solutions that would allow them to allocate to impact investing strategies”.

“We map these bespoke impact investing strategies to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and utilise professional investment managers alongside social impact investment firms to ensure the strategies we build for clients meet their financial and social impact targets.”

Schemes often use the ESG framework:

Environmental: How is the company disposing of hazardous waste? Is it managing carbon emissions? To what extent is it meeting environmental regulations?
Social: Does the company support philanthropic and community-focused initiatives? Are employees provided with access to health care and other key benefits? Is leadership promoting diversity?
Governance: Are company leaders appropriately qualified for the role, and are they communicating a coherent strategic vision? Are their compensation packages appropriately aligned with performance? Is the C-suite communicating effectively, and transparently, with shareholders?

Gunesekera says that pension funds hold the key to doing impact investing at scale. Australian and US pension funds are behind those in Europe and Canada when it comes to embracing impact investing because their trustee boards behave very conservatively due to their size. But he adds that “it will only be a matter of time before they catch up”.

His colleague Don Raymond of Alignvest Investment Management believes that “impact investing should be integrated across all investments, and not just part of a separate portfolio.”

Increasing demand and the problem with energy efficiency

While all are in agreement that impact investing is increasing, it must be driven by demand, part of which is the issuing of green bonds by, for example, municipalities to promote investment in energy efficiency.

According to Steven Fawkes of the Investor Confidence Project (Europe), this too is increasing, but he says that “more investing in energy efficiency is going on outside of the green bonds market because green bonds themselves are limiting in terms of what you can use the money for”.

There are also greater transaction costs, principally in terms of verification. Fawkes cites by way of example the fact that in the US “many more buildings are constructed according to the LEED gold standard (the highest certified standard for new energy efficient buildings) than are publicised because while the standard in itself is open access certification is expensive and it is easier for developers not to bother to certify”.

Investment in these projects would not be recognised by impact investment or green bond statistics because they would likely be financed in a more conventional investment market.

For the market to grow, therefore, transaction costs need to be reduced and offerings become more investor-friendly.

It is presently much easier for investors to invest in a renewable energy project than an energy efficiency one because the capital investment, project management, technology and return on investment (ROI) are much more easily accountable. This is partly because the ROI on energy efficiency is less predictable due to the influence of human behaviour on the outcomes.

This is exemplified by the following graphs:

The growth of the portfolio of the GCPF and the types of projects invested in. Renewable energy investments have secured more than double the CO2 savings of those in energy efficiency (buildings and industrial processes), according to their annual report for 2016, (although this is by outcomes not by investment type, which the report does not quantify).

Moreover, especially in developing countries, which are typically way behind in terms of understanding and implementing energy efficiency, the early rewards for implementing an energy efficiency program typically yield between seven per cent and 50 per cent returns in just a few months – without any capital investment at all. The savings come from changes in behaviour. Fine for the company, but of no interest to investors.

Yet this is where the greatest potential lies. Non-OECD economies have a higher energy intensity than OECD economies, partly because they tend to be more focused on growth at all costs, and on energy-intensive industries such as the manufacturing sector.

Returns can be even better than 50 per cent. According to Bettina Schreck, a project manager for the South American industrial energy efficiency program of the United Nations (UNIDO), in Ecuador “a government macroeconomic study assessed the cost-effectiveness of its monetary contribution to an industrial energy efficiency program in terms of direct energy savings by analysing the average savings for all sizes of industries”. This was based on her organisation’s experience in other countries.

The conclusion?

“Whether the viewpoint was from private or public sector, and calculated over the three years of the project or the lasting benefits beyond, the internal rate of return ranged from 50 per cent to 170 per cent and the payback period was approximately one year. The conclusion was that investment was beneficial from both social and private enterprise perspectives.”

For any investor, that would be a massive benefit.

The size of the market for energy efficiency

The potential size of the market for energy efficiency is huge compared to other sectors in impact and climate finance. The global energy efficiency opportunity will require global investments of around US$50 billion (AU$64.4b) a year over the next few decades according to the Global Climate Partnership Fund (GCPF). It also represents a lower cost investment for the same emissions reduction than other types of investment such as renewable energy.

There are many global trends requiring such investment: the increase in energy demand management, storage, renewable and on-site generation, and net metering; the development of value chains in climate-friendly technology; sustainable cities; reducing wastage in the water sector; the growth of the circular economy; and the growth of digitisation – cheaper metering and sensors, the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing and big data analytics.

But there is a huge challenge to make unlocking energy optimisation easier than it currently is. It is not always investor-friendly.

In a recently conducted survey, the Global Climate Partnership Fund investment manager responsAbility asked green lending experts from the developing world about their expectations and experiences in the area of green lending. They found that the main drivers were client demand and international support – green branding and regulatory incentives.

Awareness has also improved.

“The most important change is in the knowledge of clients. Previously, most of them had no idea what energy efficiency financing is. Now they know a lot more about it,” head of green lending Luke Franson said.

A lack of green lending expertise was perceived among survey respondents as the greatest threat to scaling-up energy efficiency finance – not, surprisingly, low fossil fuel prices.

“The mindset of entrepreneurs who see capital expenditure as a waste and not a measure to drive efficiencies is a challenge,” said Gustavo Adolfo Calderón Palma of Banco Pomerica.

Impact investment tools are constantly being refined and developed to make these transactions and their attractiveness easier and easier to see.

UNIDO, for example, is working on a more standardised assessment method for projects with cost-benefit analysis at national and business levels, and ways of measuring the non-economic benefits of EnMS implementation at both levels to build the business case. This will include a software tool for companies to identify multiple sources of added value.

The benefit of an EnMS

For energy efficiency, it is vital that a company or organisation has an energy management system (EnMS) in place that uses the ISO 50001 standard.

ISO 50001 was designed “to enable an organisation to establish the systems and processes necessary to improve energy performance, including energy efficiency, use and consumption”.

It is applicable to all types and sizes of organisations irrespective of other conditions and can be applied in all sectors. It dovetails with other management standards such as ISO 9001 (quality management) and ISO 14001 (environmental management).

Although the introduction of EnMS always leads to no-cost and low-cost savings, long-term and larger energy savings will come about through investment projects. According to Marco Matteini, another UNIDO project manager who also worked on developing this standard, “Adopting ISO 50001 can help boost investment by better preparing firms to receive external investment as well as optimising capital expenditure. The use of EnMS also improves the ongoing monitoring of project performance after investment.”

This is because having an EnMS helps management to recognise the value of energy efficiency, therefore making approval of energy saving capital projects more likely.

Presently only 10 per cent of energy efficiency projects are externally financed, and industrial companies often find difficulties with decision making in areas beyond their core business. According to UNIDO’s Rana Ghoneim this means that a desirable tool for investment in the future will be “some kind of underwriting toolkit and templates for energy efficiency investment”.

One new tool is a new version of the European SRI Transparency Code, which is geared towards guiding asset managers to meet relevant requirements for their products in SRI. It’s been developed by Eurosif to be in line with the recommendations made by the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosure.

A free, online database for investors and financial advisors has also just been published by Impact Assets, a subsidiary of Calvert Impact Capital, listing 50 private capital fund managers that deliver social and environmental impact as well as financial returns. If you’re new to this, then it’s a good place to start to begin research on the impact investing sector.

Impact investment is clearly growing, from being a small kid on the block to a major player.

David Thorpe’s two new books are Passive Solar Architecture Pocket Reference and Solar Energy Pocket Reference. He’s also the author of Energy Management in Building and Sustainable Home Refurbishment.

Barcelona: The world’s most radical city?

noreply@blogger.com (DavidKThorpe) — Thu, 08 Mar 2018 13:10:00 +0000

Spain’s Barcelona is spawning a new era of citizen-led activities that rely on co-operatives organising a range of activities, often based on barter markets and including a network of common stores, an alternative currency called the “eco”, a cooperative social fund for financing community projects and a “basic income program” for paying members for their work – all while heading down the smart city/low energy route. What does it mean to be a self-proclaimed “fearless city”?

[First published on The Fifth Estate on 27 February 2018]

Barcelona has a long and radical tradition going back to the anarchist collectives documented by George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia, his book about his experiences fighting alongside anarchists against the fascist forces of General Franco. It is unsurprising, then, that, following the particularly severe effect upon Spain of the banking crisis of 10 years ago, creative grassroots responses to austerity have emerged.

Grassroots mayor

Barcelona's mayor Ada Colau

Barcelona is home to a radical grassroots and citizen-led movement that coalesced in June 2014 under the “Yes we can” (Podemos) slogan into the platform Barcelona en Comú, an organisational structure for individuals, activist groups and political parties. This linked networks of local assemblies allowing people to engage in policy decisions.

Ada Colau, a former housing activist, astonished everyone when in June 2015, as part of Barcelona en Comú, she was elected mayor – the first woman to hold the office.

“Democracy was born at local level, and that’s where we can win it back,” she declared.

She had been a founder of the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (Platform for People Affected by Mortgages) that was set up in 2009 in response to the rise in evictions caused by unpaid mortgage loans and the collapse of the Spanish property market (she co-wrote a book, Mortgaged Lives, based on her experiences).

In one of her first speeches Colau called for “an end of the political class removed from the people”.

She was not alone: the same year saw radical mayors elected in Madrid, Valencia, Zaragoza and La Coruña and together they announced the Rebel Cities network – a group of cities confronting central government, devising their own policies, and making a worldwide plea for other cities to join. A handbook is available for other cities to follow.

The Catalan Integral Cooperative

From the same movement that gave birth to Colau came the Catalan Integral Co-operative (Integral is perhaps best translated as holistic). Its goal is to build an anti-capitalist co-operative structure not just for the benefit of its own fee-paying members but for the commons as a whole.

“The main objective of the CIC is nothing less than to build an alternative economy capable of satisfying the needs of the local community more effectively than the existing system, thereby creating the conditions for the transition to a post-capitalist mode of organisation of social and economic life,” writes George Dafermos, author of a new report on the co-operative.

The AureaSocial building

Since its formation seven years ago, headquartered in the AureaSocial building, it has been actively involved in developing infrastructures as diverse as barter markets, a network of common stores, an alternative currency called the “eco”, a cooperative social fund for financing community projects and a “basic income program” for paying members for their work.

Its activities are not confined to Barcelona, but extend across Catalonia.

The CIC is a collection of about 10 committees with responsibilities for different topics. For example, the economic management committee, the legal committee, the IT committee and so on. Each works largely autonomously but to coordinate their activities, the co-op holds “permanent assemblies” once a month where members make collective decisions based on consensus.

It has about 600 “self-employed members”. There are also 20 self-managed pantries run by local consumer groups wishing to purchase products made locally or by producers associated in other parts of Catalonia, chosen through an online list of over 1000 items supplied by currently 70 producers and distributed by vans.

According to Dafermos, the co-op is “based on direct exchange and the use of alternative community currencies”.

“The way this ecosystem operates represents the model of the autonomous public market envisioned as a means of satisfying the needs of the local community… a model for the transition to a post-capitalist economy.”

A minimum income scheme

This radicalism extends to the official level. The city is one of several places in the world that are trialling a minimum income scheme – B-MINCOME – in two of the city’s poorest barrios. Here, citizens receive a guaranteed minimum level of income. Receipt for some of them is conditional upon agreeing to some level of community work, by volunteering. Others have other conditions, or none at all, and the results of the trial will be evaluated to determine the most successful model.

The designers of the scheme – which is supported by a grant from Urban Innovative Actions, a European Commission initiative that supports projects investigating “innovative and creative solutions” in urban areas – took experience from the governments of Finland, the Canadian province of Ontario and the Dutch municipality of Utrecht, all of whom have designed guaranteed income experiments in their own areas.

Barcelona is going smart city as well

Barcelona is also smart in the digital and eco senses of the word. As one of the leading smart cities worldwide, 50 per cent of street lighting are LEDs fitted with sensors to switch on when they detect motion and dim when streets are empty, saving 30 per cent of previous energy.

Around 19,500 smart meters monitoring and optimising energy consumption have been installed across the city, including a sensor system helping drivers to locate available parking spaces, reducing congestion and emissions.
There is a Bicing app, providing updated information on the location of public bike stations and bike availability, and the city has one of the biggest free public WiFi networks in Europe.

Smart technology is also used to improve the speed and efficiency of the city’s new orthogonal bus network, and digital bus shelters are also in place. The proposed new bus network is based on an orthogonal grid scheme, which has emerged as the most efficient in urban systems. This network ensures the isotropy of the territory – equally covering all parts of the municipality. This improves connectivity between the lines and accessibility for all users.

The new scheme is not only functional but also more “readable”, and is structured similarly to the metro and a network becomes easily understandable. Furthermore, the great majority of targets are achieved with a single transfer, simplifying use of the bus network and avoiding the current need to know each line individually.

Superblocks road de-trafficking scheme in Barcelona

Superblocks cutting traffic

All of this is helping with the superblock project, to be piloted in four areas in the city.

This will remove traffic from city streets to create pedestrian-centric neighbourhoods that improve health and sustainability, and reduce pollution. It was adopted as a centrepiece of the city’s mobility plan in 2015 to remove cars from within the superblocks, “liberating” 70 per cent of the city’s land for public use, according to Salvador Rueda, director of the Urban Ecology Agency of Barcelona.

Focus for change

Now calling itself a “fearless city”, Barcelona is positioning itself as a focus for a movement, hosting a Fearless Cities summit in June and a Smart City Expo in November, on defining cities as radical, citizen-empowering places.
According to Dr Bertie Russell, research fellow at the Urban Institute in the University of Sheffield in the UK, Barcelona and Madrid’s decidim process of citizen involvement in decision-making is good because it allows citizens to set the policy agenda, not just react to it.

He supports the trend to “establish non-market, non-public sector initiatives – urban commons – and recognises their right to self-determination”, citing as another example, “Naples’ decision to create a Department of the Commons and provide a legal status for previously squatted social centres.”

A mayor who has reduced her salary and invites other mayors to visit

Local activist Edu Salvador also thinks this is a good approach: “Through her leadership in international conferences of cities, Colau has been active in bringing to Barcelona mayors from main progressive cities of the world. She is a responsible mayor, and has reduced her salary – the salary of the previous mayor was outrageously high.”

Barcelona – home of Antoni Gaudí – is continuing to be every bit as revolutionary as that unique man’s architectural style, pioneering 21st century solutions that address the kind of citizen disillusionment with power that has fuelled reactionary movements elsewhere in the world in the past few years. But by positioning itself within an alternative movement, it is determined that its ideas can be replicated and supported elsewhere.

Read David Thorpe’s surprisingly uplifting post apocalyptic short fiction work set in Barcelona here: For The Greater Good.

David Thorpe’s two new books are Passive Solar Architecture Pocket Reference and Solar Energy Pocket Reference. He’s also the author of Energy Management in Building and Sustainable Home Refurbishment.

Weekend course in Sussex on One Planet Development

noreply@blogger.com (DavidKThorpe) — Thu, 01 Mar 2018 09:36:00 +0000

Interested in #oneplanet living? Want to find out more? Come on a weekend residential course in April in the beautiful retreat of @Emerson_Colleg in Sussex.

Find out about the most sustainable ways to live and nurture yourself and the planet.

More info: http://www.emerson.org.uk/events-at-emerson/item/weekend-workshop?category_id=8

Financiers tell EU to get radical on financing green projects

noreply@blogger.com (DavidKThorpe) — Sun, 25 Feb 2018 17:05:00 +0000

A high-level group on sustainable finance has advised European regulators to incentivise a more favourable treatment for energy saving loans and mortgages, which could unlock billions in lending for green building renovation programs and other green projects.

Note: This article first appeared on The Fifth Estate on 19 February.

The group’s final report says that almost three-quarters of the EU’s 2030 clean energy investment gap – estimated at around €130 billion a year (AU$204b) – is accounted for by energy efficiency in buildings, most of which is concentrated in central and east European countries where the leakiest buildings are found.

It calls on policymakers to support efforts to “exploit potential links between energy efficiency savings and mortgage loan performance”.

Some banks are already looking at ways of providing better approaches to financing energy saving programs, such as building renovation loans to homeowners. For instance, the European Mortgage Federation is developing a standardised “energy efficient mortgage”, which links efficiency improvements with a lower probability of default of borrowers.

Europe already has an energy efficient mortgages action plan.

The high-level group believes that directing investment into long-term, sustainable projects will also improve the stability of the financial system as a whole. It proposes:

a classification system, or “taxonomy”, to provide market clarity on what is “sustainable”
clarifying the duties of investors’ when it comes to achieving a more sustainable financial system
improving disclosure by financial institutions and companies on how sustainability is factored into their decision-making
an EU-wide label for green investment funds
making sustainability part of the mandates of the European Supervisory Authorities
a European standard for green bonds, with the establishment of a new Green Bonds Technical Committee in 2018, to develop a long-term governance structure for the EU Green Bond Standard

It also recommends:

supporting the growth of social enterprises and the financing of social-related projects
revaluing natural and environmental capital in economic and financial decisions
re-orienting agriculture to a way that is more sustainable for the economy, the environment and public health

Radical advice

It’s quite radical for a bunch of high-level financiers.

The EU executive is to follow up on the report’s recommendations during the first half of March with a comprehensive action plan on green finance that will include more steps to encourage investments in energy efficiency. This will include a “harmonised taxonomy” for banks to classify different types of financial products according to their environmental performance and to prevent “greenwashing”.

Christian Thimann, head of sustainability at French insurer AXA, who chaired the group, said: “There is no claim that everything green is necessarily less risky. But the group does make the claim that taking account of environmental and climate risk and long-term sustainability may have – and in some cases must have – a positive impact on your risk analysis.”

Energy efficiency investments affect the value of a building or industrial facility “by more than just the present value of the expected energy savings”, the authors note, saying banks should be able to better identify these multiple benefits. Measuring those “would help de-risk energy efficiency investments”.

EU can easily miss its 2020 energy efficiency target

The report is timely because the EU is in sore danger of missing its target of a 20 per cent reduction of energy consumption by the year 2020 compared to baseline projections, according to the latest figures.

EU28 primary energy consumption: progress towards the energy efficiency target between 1990 and 2016

Meeting the target would mean achieving a primary energy consumption of no more than ,483 million tonnes of oil-equivalent (Mtoe) and a final energy consumption of no more than 1086 Mtoe in 2020.

But, in fact, primary energy consumption, while going lower in the interim, has decreased between 1990 and 2016 by just 1.7 per cent.

Consumption of solid fossil fuels (coal and coal products) decreased by 47 per cent and oil (including petroleum products) decreased by 12 per cent. Renewable energy use increased by 200 per cent, natural gas and manufactured gases by 31 per cent and nuclear by six per cent.

Overall energy efficiency gains in European countries since 2000

Final energy consumption in 2015 was approximately the same as in 1990, but in 2016 it had risen to 2.1 per cent above that level.

The actual final energy consumption in year 2014 was lower than the 2020 energy efficiency target level of 1086 Mtoe, but it’s gone up since then. This temporary dip was most likely due to the economic recession.

Overall energy efficiency gains in European households since 2000

Figures also show that 8.7 per cent of Europe’s 28 countries’ population on average is in fuel poverty, down from a 10.8 per cent peak in 2012, but this varies wildly by nation, with Greece being amongst the worst performers, and Norway and Switzerland amongst the best.

As a result, the high-level financiers’ report recommends that the new Sustainable Infrastructure Europe body should have a particular focus on the Central and Eastern Europe area, and have Eastern European offices.

David Thorpe’s two new books are Passive Solar Architecture Pocket Reference and Solar Energy Pocket Reference. He’s also the author of Energy Management in Building and Sustainable Home Refurbishment.

Lendlease London project on hold after “social cleansing” claims

noreply@blogger.com (DavidKThorpe) — Sun, 25 Feb 2018 16:53:00 +0000

Demo against the Haringey Development Vehicle project

A £4 billion urban renewal project in north London that was to be developed by Lendlease is now unlikely to proceed following fierce political opposition.

NOTE: article first appeared on The Fifth Estate on 13 February

The developer has fallen victim to a sea-change in attitudes to private sector involvement in urban renewal projects, which has come to the fore amidst a growing affordable housing crisis in London.

The project, called the Haringey Development Vehicle (HDV), was a 20-year joint venture between Lendlease and Haringey Council that would have led to the creation of 6400 homes built at a value of £4 billion. Forty per cent of homes were set to be “affordable”.

But the project has become stuck at the centre of an ideological war about the delivery of public housing, which this month led to the resignation of Haringey council leader Claire Kober, who had campaigned to push through the Lendlease deal.

Claire Kober, the former leader of Haringey Council

Kober is a Labour leader whose laudable desire to improve living conditions in some of the capital’s worst estates led her to make a deal with Lendlease. The deal, though, was criticised by tenants and activists for encouraging “social cleansing” – because many occupants of homes to have been demolished for the project could not have been rehoused in the borough following completion of the new scheme.

Kober’s dilemma, which faces all councils in London and elsewhere, was how to finance such massive regeneration schemes when central government does not offer sufficient support and land prices are so high.

Councils usually turn to the private sector, but the trade-off is typically the loss of publicly owned land to the private sector and the loss of homes for social rent.

The loss of affordable housing

According to figures on London’s delivery stream of housing regeneration schemes obtained by the London Green Party in early 2016, were all projects to go ahead, it would lead to a net loss of 7326 social rental homes – those with the lowest rent levels.

They are disappearing in favour of so-called “affordable rent” homes, where tenants can be charged up to 80 per cent of private market rents. Even these are disappearing: the Greens calculated a net loss of 1389 across London.

“With a few exceptions, estate regeneration has been a complete disaster in London and has made our housing crisis worse,” Green’s London Assembly member Darren Johnson said.

Now this historical trend, led by private developers, is being challenged.

The tide is turning

Since the collapse of government-contracted services outsourcing giant Carillion and the protests in Haringey, the tide is turning against public-private partnerships.

On 18 December 2017 London mayor Sadiq Khan refused permission for an estate regeneration in the borough of Barnet that would have seen the loss of 257 social homes.

Khan said: “This is a classic example of how not to do estate regeneration. I fully support improving social housing on this estate and across the capital, but this scheme falls far short of what I expect of London boroughs.”

The developer in this case was a housing association, Genesis, who is also the developer and resident social landlord for the scheme.

“As I have made clear in my new London Plan, estate regeneration projects must replace homes which are based on social rent levels on a like-for-like basis,” Khan said.

“Londoners so urgently need more high-quality housing, not less, which makes this scheme completely unacceptable in its current form.”

The mayor’s newly-launched draft London Plan (published in December) requires applications for housing estate renewal to include the replacement of existing affordable housing on a like-for-like basis, and no net loss of existing social housing.

It envisages the following split of affordable homes being applied to new development:

a minimum of 30 per cent low-cost rented homes, allocated according to need and for Londoners on low incomes (social rent/London affordable rent)
a minimum of 30 per cent intermediate products that meet the definition of affordable housing, including London living rent and London shared ownership
40 per cent to be determined by the relevant borough based on identified need, provided they are consistent with the definition of affordable housing.

If a development supplies this it is eligible for being “fast-tracked” through the planning process.

A London-wide strategic housing market assessment (cited in the plan) has identified a need for 66,000 additional homes a year, of which 43,500 should be affordable.

Balloting residents

Khan has also announced plans to force councils to ballot residents on housing estates earmarked for demolition as a condition of obtaining funding for the work from City Hall. He said the broad support of tenants, leaseholders and freeholders living on estates is a necessary requirement.

There are estimated to be about 25 estate regeneration schemes underway at any one time in London involving funding from City Hall, and under the mayor’s plans all such schemes would, in future, require a successful ballot outcome before their funding could be approved.

Where demolition is proposed, the mayor wants to see councils and housing associations follow his “Better Homes for Local People” principles by providing:

an increase in affordable homes – and, as a minimum, no loss of social housing
full rights to remain or return for tenants
a fair deal for leaseholders and freeholders

“We need more social housing in London, not less, which is why I will use all my powers to make sure that any plans for estate regeneration protect existing social housing and take every opportunity to build more,” Khan said.

“My guide sets out how I will use my investment powers in a way they have never been used before, by requiring resident support through a ballot for new plans involving demolition where City Hall funding is involved.

“I want to make sure people living on social housing estates, who have the greatest interest in their future, are at the heart of any decisions from the outset.”

Living Rent scheme

This week Khan also announced the London Living Rent scheme, an intermediate affordable housing product with low rents that vary ward by ward across London. Eligibility is restricted to households that are currently renting, with a maximum income of £60,000 and who are not currently able to purchase a home in the local area.

It will help middle-income earners who would otherwise typically be struggling in the private rental sector to save for a deposit by offering rents based on a third of local average wages and makes home ownership in the capital a realistic prospect for the many Londoners who feel priced out of the property market.

Rents in the first such project, The Sugar Works at Royal Wharf, Silvertown, are up to 50 per cent cheaper than local market rents, and range from £730 a month for a studio flat and £821 a month for a one-bed flat up to £1094 a month for a four-bedroom property. They are provided by housing association London & Quadrant.

Meanwhile, back in Haringey, residents of the sub-standard homes Kober wanted to replace, where sometimes three generations are living in the same crowded conditions, face an uncertain future until after local elections in May, where a new administration will be challenged with finding a more equitable solution to residents’ plight.

David Thorpe’s two new books are Passive Solar Architecture Pocket Reference and Solar Energy Pocket Reference. He’s also the author of Energy Management in Building and Sustainable Home Refurbishment.

What is one planet living? - VIDEO

noreply@blogger.com (DavidKThorpe) — Fri, 02 Feb 2018 11:42:00 +0000

What is one planet living? Watch a video of my talk at the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience!

UN and IEA tell building sector: 'go zero carbon'

noreply@blogger.com (DavidKThorpe) — Mon, 18 Dec 2017 09:02:00 +0000

Near-zero energy, zero-emissions buildings must become the global construction standard within the next decade for the world to have a chance of adequately fighting climate change, a joint statement by the International Energy Agency and UN Environment has warned.

“While the energy intensity of the buildings sector has improved it is not enough to offset rising energy demand,” International Energy Agency executive director Fatih Birol said at the launch of the Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction’s Global Status Report 2017 this week.

The floor area of buildings worldwide was 235 billion square metres in 2016. By 2060 a staggering further 230 billion square metres will be added – roughly the floor area of all of Japan’s buildings each year.

Global floor area additions by 2016 by key regions

The report said the urgent task was making these buildings energy efficient to stop them leaking cash and carbon for decades.

“The building sector is seeing some progress in cutting its emissions, but it is too little, too slowly,” UN Environment head Erik Solheim said.

“Realising the potential of the buildings and construction sector needs all hands on deck – in particular to address rapid growth in inefficient and carbon-intensive building investments.”

The increase in demand is caused by population growth but also greater demand per capita for floorspace and a greater demand for energy services.

Erik Solheim

Fatih Birol

The report said more than half of buildings that will be around in 40 years time will be constructed during the next 20 years, and two-thirds of those will be in countries that don’t have adequate building energy codes in place.

“Over the next 40 years, the world is expected to build 230 billion square metres in new construction – adding the equivalent of Paris to the planet every single week,” Dr Birol said. “This rapid growth is not without consequences.”

Pledges by individual countries to meet the ambitions of the Paris climate change agreement are still not sufficient to meet the 4.9 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide (GtCO₂) annual emissions reduction that could be achieved if countries were to pursue strategic low-carbon and energy-efficient building technology deployment.

CO₂ emissions from buildings and construction rose by almost one per cent a year between 2010 and 2016, with the report saying a dramatic increase in energy intensity was necessary to arrest this.

Energy-carbon intensities for the building sector by country in 2015

The bottom line is that near-zero energy, zero-emissions buildings need to become the construction norm globally within the next decade.

In addition, the rate of energy renovations for existing buildings also needs to improve from one to two per cent per year to over three per cent a year in the coming decade, particularly in developing countries where around 65 per cent of all of the building stock expected to be around in 2060 has already been built.

What is to be done

The report goes on to demonstrate many opportunities to install energy efficient and low carbon features and buildings, supported by many examples across the globe.

Four things are needed to achieve these goals, the report said:

Ambitious and transparent commitment with policies and market incentives that encourage the construction sector to meet the sustainable development goals
Much better building energy codes and certification, labelling and incentive programs, everywhere, with rigorous enforcement
Wide-scale adoption and investment in high-performance, low-carbon, energy-efficient solutions
A major shift in financing and investments, with a solid business case for investors, information and financing tools that minimise risk and uncertainty

The report also identifies nine areas for priority action:

Urban planning policies for energy efficiency and renewables
Improve the performance of existing buildings
Achieve net-zero operating emissions
Improve energy management of all buildings
Decarbonise building energy
Reduce embodied energy and emissions
Reduce energy demand from appliances
Upgrade adaptation for climate-change related risks
Increase awareness with training and capacity building

Achieving the 2°C-limit for global warming scenario requires a major shift to put global buildings on a highly energy-efficient and net zero carbon pathway to 2060, as seen in the graphic below:

Final energy consumption by scenario and fuel type for the building sector between 2016 and 2060

About half of the emissions reductions will come from decarbonising the power sector. But equally vital are improvements to the building envelope, such as energy renovations that improve energy intensity from inefficient to efficient technologies such as LEDs and heat pumps.

How to reduce emissions in the global buildings sector up to 2060

Energy efficient and low-carbon heating and cooling technology investments would reduce final energy demands in buildings by 25 per cent over current levels, the report said. Air conditioning performance is a crucial area to improve.

And although LED sales are now massive, in the residential lighting market less efficient technologies still prevail.

Guidance is available for a global strategy for the buildings sector for high-efficiency product deployment and fossil-fuel phase out, in the GABC Global Roadmap.

One of the buildings highlighted as an example for others to follow is the Edge building in Amsterdam, which uses digital technologies to maximise energy efficiency.

The zero energy building was designed to maximise natural light intake as well as solar electricity production. Smart technologies such as intelligent ventilation systems and connected LEDs allow people to interact with the building and for it to respond to real-time data sensors or occupants’ commands. This means that lighting levels, humidity and temperature can be adapted to the preferences of the occupants while at the same time improving building energy performance.

Many other examples are in the report from different climate zones.

The report – prepared by the IEA and published by the Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction for UN Environment – can be downloaded from http://bit.ly/2jwEjZ7.

David Thorpe’s two new books are Passive Solar Architecture Pocket Reference and Solar Energy Pocket Reference. He’s also author of Energy Management in Building and Sustainable Home Refurbishment.

How can cities reduce their ecological footprint?

noreply@blogger.com (DavidKThorpe) — Thu, 14 Dec 2017 12:01:00 +0000

Is this the future of cities?

The last post in this series looked at the vital role of ecological footprinting in ensuring that our individual actions are truly sustainable – i.e. within the limits of what the Earth's resources can provide. This is called 'one planet' development.

This post will begin to look at how communities of varying sizes might transition to one planet living, in other words, how towns and cities can reduce their consumption levels.

The challenge

The world's citizens must reduce their collective footprint to one planet equivalent or face various catastrophes: out-of-control climate change, mass extinctions, famine and the death of the oceans to name but four on the agenda.

The global population is now 7.5 bn. and is predicted to peak at 11.2 bn by 2100 (UN). By this time up to 84% of us may be dwelling in cities. A frightening thought.

Yet all around the world, many different projects and initiatives to tackle their impact – both top-down and bottom-up – are evolving, especially in urban areas, as cities gain more confidence. They are supported by a plethora of pan-global organisations such as C40, ICLEI and the World Future Council.

These initiatives cover most fields from energy and water to transport, buildings and industry, with the latter being particularly tough to tackle.

Cities hoover up resources from the rest of the world. Unless those resources are both replenished in their place of origin and reclaimed for reuse in closed loop systems within cities, then cities cannot survive indefinitely.

So it is in cities where the battle for the future will be most harshly fought.

>Standards? What standards?!

To help us fight this battle effectively, we need assured processes. Enter the role of standards.

Standards are essentially manuals containing a set of guidelines and metrics to be followed and met in pursuit of whatever goal you're setting yourself.

There is a new standard to measure the sustainability of cities: Indicators for City Services and Quality of Life (ISO 37120). It is being piloted as part of an integrated suite of standards for sustainable development in communities by such as Mexico City.

There are many other indicators and standards for measuring sustainability: for example the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals contain a goal specifically about cities, and there is the New Urban Agenda, not to mention the Global Footprint Network's Ecological Footprint Standards 2009

Which standards should we use?

Standards can be relative or absolute. In other words, they can set a target of, say, a (relative) 50% reduction from a certain baseline, or an (absolute) target of, say, zero waste to landfill.

Absolute targets enable comparison and ranking between different cities or projects; we can compare the performance of communities by dividing their consumption by their population.

Absolute targets can also be linked to the (absolute) resources of the planet. In fact, standards must refer to planetary boundaries.

Standards should also be simple to communicate and implement – especially in relation to the gathering of the necessary data.

They might be designed to make it easy automate the gathering of data from existing data collection methods.

According to John Delaney of the British Standard Institute, "What option is chosen depends on what suits a city and/or what they are most comfortable with."

Mathis Wackernagel, president of the Global Footprint Network, says that, “Perhaps the driving question becomes – what do places need to know in order to operate safely in an ecologically ever more constrained world. Cities need to have the critical information.”

Back to Wales

Back in Wales, the home of One Planet Development, its Well-Being of Future Generations Act is its very own charter to make Wales sustainable within a generation or two. It uses various metrics and standards to measure this and some have yet to be decided at the local level.

The seven Well-Being Goals in the Well-Being of Future Generations Act

It is essentially about spending. The Act means to ensure that the spending of public money is done in a sustainable way. That is to say, it does not jeopardise the ability of future generations both to live well and within planetary limits. The list of metrics includes:

Economic output – Gross Value Added
Social Justice - percentage of the population in relative low-income households
Biodiversity conservation – status of priority species and habitats
Ecological footprint – national EF against the UK and global average
Wellbeing - a standard set of 36 health questions which ask respondents about their own perception of their physical and mental health.
UN’s Sustainable Development Goals
Carbon footprinting.

To try and ensure this is done, procurement strategies still need to be thrashed out.

And there is an independent Commissioner for Future Generations, who acts as a government watchdog.

(In England, the Tory Government abolished this role, which was held by Jonathan Porritt, in 2011).

The path towards One Planet Towns and Cities

So here is my deceptively simple six-step process for a town or city that decides it wants to reduce its ecological footprint to a fair and sustainable level:

Decide which standards to use
Obtain buy-in from citizens and all branches of government and obtain feedback at all level
Set the baseline – identify the current situation for each of the impacts (energy, water, food, minerals, biodiversity, carbon, pollution, health, income inequality, etc.)
Decide the objectives to be set for each aspect of the footprint over realistic timescales. These should ratchet down consumption in stages over one or two generations.
Set in place ways to measure them and to independently enforce them.
Celebrate all your achievements!

This makes it sound easy. But the task ahead is momentous. Above all it requires skills, knowledge and leadership.

You know, anyone can become a leader. You just have to decide to do something.

If you doubt this, look for a moment at the enormous difference a small group of people in Todmorden have made. They started the 'Incredible edible' guerilla food-planting movement now copied all over the world.

One Planet Towns vs. Transition Towns

I believe that 'one planet' towns should be what 'transition towns' transition towards.

Transition towns do not generally measure the efficacy of their actions. While they may very well be doing lots of good work, it may be that the efforts of some are only scratching the surface of what needs to be done, and at worst, wasting their time.

They would have to account for the whole picture of consumption of their community in order to be sure, and then check what difference their actions are making over time. This is hard for voluntary organisations to do, and indicates why it is crucial to work with the authorities.

But the authorities often do not want to know. In such cases they need to be trained to see the benefits that would accrue to their communities. Success depends on both top-down and bottom-up co-operation.

The need for training

In 2018 I am setting up a new body called The One Planet Institute that will contribute to this work. Contact me for more information or to get involved.

Measurement and verification may be boring. It may be hard work. It might even seem a waste of time to some people. But I know from my experience in energy management and in the post-occupancy evaluation of buildings that were intended by architects to be low-carbon, that it is the only way to be absolutely sure we are NOT wasting our time.

In short, that we are targeting our efforts in the most worthwhile directions.

The next article in this series will look at the hardest component of the ecological footprint to reduce – food production and consumption.

One Planet Living is about showing the way:

To buy The One Planet Life, click here.
To enquire about hosting a workshop or training in One Planet Living, or anything else, email David.

Europe inches closer to strong energy efficiency target

noreply@blogger.com (DavidKThorpe) — Tue, 12 Dec 2017 16:22:00 +0000

Members of the European Parliament’s industry and energy committee have voted by a narrow margin for a legally binding 40 per cent energy efficiency goal and a 35 per cent renewable energy target for 2030.

{Note: a version of this article appeared one week ago on The Fifth Estate]

The energy efficiency vote was won by only one vote (33 in favour and 32 against). German conservative Markus Pieper (above) sided with the ECR Group, a 74-strong Eurosceptic alliance of European conservatives and reformists, and the far-right Europe of Nations and Freedom group, which includes France’s National Front and the coal-favouring Visegrad Group.

Pieper’s compatriot, Socialists and Democrats Group member Martina Werner, siding with the committee’s rapporteur Adam Gierek, hailed the vote as “a great political victory after a fierce battle between the political groups”.

“We had to face serious attempts to water down the Energy Efficiency Directive. Even the Commission acknowledged that their amendments, for example on the annual savings rate, would amount to 0 per cent, for the period 2021-2030. This is not acceptable.”

With the European Council having already agreed on its approach on the Energy Efficiency Directive, the three European institutions must now agree on one joint position under the Bulgarian presidency next January, after the adopted report has been passed by a full plenary session.

Renewable energy sails through

By contrast, the Renewable Energy Directive vote was backed by 43 in favour and only 14 against. However, this motion already contained compromises. Although Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) wanted to increase the Commission’s 27 per cent target to 35 per cent, many, including the Greens, believe that 35 per cent is “the strict minimum” needed to let the EU meet its commitments under the Paris Agreement.

WWF Europe renewable energy expert Alex Mason slammed the proposal as “toothless” and claimed that the inclusion of a 10 per cent “flexibility margin” sent a signal to investors that “the EU is scaling back on renewable energy”.

Adair Turner, chair of the Energy Transitions Commission (ETC), a coalition of leading organisations from the worlds of business, energy and finance, said the ETC had come to the conclusion that a 100 per cent renewable energy system was now clearly within reach – probably sooner than we think.

“We are pretty confident that in 10 or 15 years you would be able to do a near total renewable system – 85 or 90 per cent – based on intermittent renewables. We said 2035 but this is probably ludicrously conservative.”

Energy efficiency remains controversial

But opponents of the target vowed to fight on to prevent it from becoming law. Opposition to the target is based on the belief that energy efficiency is not cost-effective.

Van Bossuyt, chair of the European Parliament’s internal market committee and member of the ECR Group, after the vote said: “We all want to see an ambitious strategy for improving efficiency, but there is no point introducing targets and policies if countries and companies are unable to implement them.

“A policy that is affordable and works in one country may be completely inappropriate and expensive in another. Governments and local authorities need to step up efforts to renovate their building stocks but this is expensive and places huge pressure on budgets that are already stretched.”

But this belief is not shared by industry. Philippe Dumas, secretary general of geothermal heating association EGEC, said: “The vote … puts the heating and cooling sector on track to be freed from fossil fuels. Decarbonising the heating and cooling sector can only be done by exploiting synergies between energy efficiency and renewable policies in terms of actions, technologies and ambitious policies.”

French energy group Engie’s CEO, Isabelle Kocher, said she supported the 40 per cent target: “We are very supportive of setting energy efficiency targets that are both very high and which are binding.”

So did members of the European Alliance to Save Energy, who include Veolia, Siemens, Philips Lighting and Danfoss, who had said that any target below 40 per cent energy savings “would set policy goals below the business-as-usual energy efficiency improvement trajectory and will have no impact on the ground”.

And the CEO of the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change, Stephanie Pfeifer, said the 40 per cent target would “send a clear and positive signal to investors swiftly enough to ensure a smooth transition to a low carbon economy”.

The Coalition for Energy Savings welcomed the energy efficiency vote. Its secretary general Stefan Scheuer said: “Energy efficiency policies have been the bedrock of the EU’s common energy policy, and a major tool to address environmental, competitiveness, social and geopolitical challenges.

“MEPs across the political spectrum who acknowledge these benefits should overcome their divisions and agree on a solid common energy efficiency policy post 2020 in view of the negotiations with the Council.”

He said the EU could achieve this energy efficiency target cost-effectively, according to research findings presented in the impact assessment for the Energy Efficiency Directive revision proposal.

The need for investment

Seventy-five per cent of the EU’s building stock is inefficient and buildings account for 40 per cent of the EU’s primary energy demand. Even if the target becomes law, a major obstacle to increasing the rate of renovation is access to finance, an issue for both businesses and households.

The Energy Efficiency Financial Institutions Group (established by the European Commission Directorate-General for Energy and United Nations Environment Program Finance Initiative) says that to reach the EU 2030 energy and climate targets about €379 billion (AU$591.7b) is needed each year between 2021 and 2030.

Where could such a massive amount come from? Part of the answer might be from energy companies themselves, who stand to save hundreds of billions of dollars from the easing of network constraints and of the need for new infrastructure that is being caused by the ongoing digitalisation of the energy sector.

Those savings are highlighted in a recent report from the International Energy Agency, which puts the savings to be achieved from a more connected, intelligent, efficient and reliable energy system at around US$80 billion (AU$105b) – approximately five per cent of total annual generation costs worldwide.

Furthermore, it says that as much as US$270 billion (AU$355b) in necessary infrastructure costs could be saved by realising up to 185GW of worldwide flexibility via smart demand response.

These savings could usefully be translated into investments in energy efficiency programs, which would achieve a return on investment over similar long time frames.

Another, admittedly much smaller, type of solution is to be found in places like Bucharest, where EU investment programs have contributed to the renovation of around 1200 flats. The Dutch approach of “Energiesprong” undertakes housing retrofits and installing photovoltaic panels and boilers in order to create Net Zero Energy houses, focusing on the social housing sector. In the Netherlands there have so far been about 1800 refurbishments with a further 15,000 in the pipeline.

If the European Union does finally succeed in setting the 40 per cent energy efficiency goal in law next year, that will only be the beginning. It will be up to the market to step up to the challenge of meeting the requirements.

David Thorpe is author of Passive Solar Architecture Pocket Reference and Solar Energy Pocket Reference.

What is One Planet Development?

noreply@blogger.com (DavidKThorpe) — Fri, 24 Nov 2017 10:26:00 +0000

Something special is happening in Wales. The country is using legislation to shift itself into a very different direction from England. It wants to be more sustainable. It wants to reduce its ‘ecological footprint’ to a level that’s fair compared to the rest of the planet’s population and resources.

Spearheading this approach is the notion of One Planet Development.

What is One Planet Development?

Through its Technical Advice Note 6 (TAN 6) and Planning Policy Wales (PPW) the Welsh Government sets out land use planning policies to support sustainable communities. Planning Policy Wales (2016) says:

4.5.11 Closely aligned to the commitments to tackling climate change is the Welsh Government’s approach to reducing the ecological footprint of Wales. Our Sustainable Development Scheme sets out an ambition for Wales to use its fair share of the Earth’s resources, where, within a generation, our ecological footprint is reduced to the global average availability of resources – 1.88 global hectares per person. The current footprint shows that, if everyone on the Earth lived as we do, we would use 2.7 planets worth of resources. Reducing Wales’ ecological footprint will require a large reduction in the total resources used to sustain our lifestyles. The policy and guidance set out here in PPW will make an important contribution to reducing our footprint, whilst delivering sustainable development and tackling climate change.

Section 4 of TAN 6 defines One Planet Developments (OPD) as being exemplars of sustainable development:

4.15.2 One Planet Developments may take a number of forms. They can either be single homes, co-operative communities or larger settlements. They may be located within or adjacent to existing settlements, or be situated in the open countryside.

In other words, anywhere.

However planning guidance exists currently only for OPD in the open countryside. The criteria include:

An initial ecological footprint of 2.4 global hectares per person or less and clear potential to move towards 1.88 global hectare; the Welsh Government provides an Excel-based calculator on its website to help you work out your own footprint
Buildings being zero carbon over their lifetime;
Carbon analysis and improvement plan for the plot;
Biodiversity and landscape improvement;
A community impact improvement;
Transport assessment and travel plan to minimise carbon impact of travel;
Sustainable water supply;
Zero waste (including biological waste – sewage treatment)
100% renewable energy.
Over a reasonable length of time (no more than 5 years), to provide for the minimum needs of the inhabitants in terms of income, food, energy and waste assimilation from land-based employment.

No criteria of this nature have yet been determined for urban or peri-urban developments but something comparable is anticipated at a collective community level. I believe it is therefore urgently necessary for planning guidance to be set for making both new and existing settlements satisfy, collectively, the criteria to be measurably ‘one planet’ within a generation.

Meanwhile, I run courses on how to do this, based on my book, The One Planet Life, which is a kind of manual and ‘big book of everything’ for sustainable living.

The One Planet Council, of which I am a co-founder and patron, is also a great source of help, both on its website and Facebook page for anyone wanting to do this or find out more.

How to do it

Anyone wanting to pursue this life in Wales, in the open countryside, where one is not normally permitted to build a home, must satisfy the above criteria. In England, sometimes a Local Development Plan can have similar criteria, or an authority can use a Section 106 agreement to permit it, as with Hockerton Housing Project.

To prove their claim in Wales, applicants must submit a planning application containing a ‘management plan’ that sets out their plans to meet these criteria. This includes detailing the land-based businesses they will run to support themselves.

When you have secured planning permission you have five years to meet the criteria. You can also use the ‘one planet’ label on your products that has been developed for marketing purposes by the One Planet Council.

Measurable and provable

The great advantage of this approach, and its ‘unique selling point’, is that it is measurable and provable. There is no doubt that your life will be a little more sustainable. Many times you hear claims about the sustainability of lifestyles or products and developments, but there is no way of knowing how true they are.

Above: a screenshot of the Excel-based calculator. It uses your expenditure as a way of working out your ecological footprint (click to enlarge).

What is an ecological footprint?

The global population is now 7.5 bn. and is predicted to peak at 11.2 bn by 2100 (UN). But the ability of our lovely planet Earth to support life depends on us staying within a number of ‘planetary boundaries’. Humanity passed this ‘biocapacity’ limit way back in the early 1970s. Our collective footprint has been rising ever since:

As defined by the environmental charity WWF, there are nine ‘planetary boundaries’. Every couple of years WWF produces a brilliant survey called a ‘Living Planet Report’. The last one, in 2016, said that of these nine limits to growth, four have passed safe levels: climate change, biosphere integrity, biogeochemical flows and land-system change.

WWF says that humanity now needs the regenerative capacity of 1.6 Earths to provide goods and services we collectively use. But the per capita ecological footprint of high-income nations dwarfs low- and middle-income countries. What will happen if 11.2bn people want North America’s standard of living?

Ecological footprint is measured in ‘global hectares’. It divides the ‘biocapacity’ of land (supply) by human consumption levels (demand). The biocapacity is a measure of the pollution land can absorb and the services and resources it can provide. The demand is the population level times the consumption level. The result is an average of hectares per person, if it were distributed equally between everyone alive. A hectare is 2.47 acres or 10,000 square metres or 0.01 square kilometers.

According to the last report, the fair level is 1.7 global hectares per person.

Not very much. It is the level of the world’s lowest consuming countries, in Africa and the Indian sub-continent.

So we in the UK must move from an average level of three times this (as if, if everyone were living this way, we had three planet Earths – if only!) to one.

Back to Wales

To go back to Wales, the law there contains a goal to make this shift in one generation.

One Planet Living is about showing the way. It is the start of an immense and difficult journey.

To buy The One Planet Life, click here.

To enquire about hosting a workshop or course in One Planet Living, email David.

The next post in this series will be about moving from individual to collective one planet living, in other words show towns and cities can shift their consumption levels.

Everything you want to know about using Solar Energy is here!

noreply@blogger.com (DavidKThorpe) — Wed, 22 Nov 2017 17:00:00 +0000

Knowledge – as well as solar energy – is power! I'm very proud to announce the publication of not one but two new titles that I've been working on for a long time.

These distil much of my learning over this period about two essential topics that will help us fight climate change:

Get 20% off! E.g. paperback or e-book would be £20.79! Just enter code FLR40 on checkout. Order here:

Passive Solar Architecture covers: the principles of passive solar building and passive house, a ten-step design and build strategy, calculating solar irradiance, factors affecting the choice of building materials, passive heating and cooling principles and techniques in different climates, the Passivhaus Standard and natural and augmented lighting and notes on technology and building occupation.

The book also includes conversion factors, standards, resources and is peppered throughout with helpful illustrations, equations, explanations, and links to further online resources.

Passive Solar Architecture is ideal for practitioners, architects, designers, consultants, planners, home builders, students and academics, and those working in development contexts.

This book is intended to act as an aide memoir, a reference supplement, a resource and an overview of the field. Rich in background detail, the book also includes at-a-glance tables and diagrams, equations and key definitions.

Solar Energy covers: solar radiation and its detailed measurement, the emissivity and absorption properties of materials, solar thermal energy collection and storage, photovoltaics (both at all scales), solar cooling, and the use of solar energy for desalination and drying.

The book also includes conversion factors, standards and constants and is peppered throughout with helpful illustrations, equations and explanations, as well as a chapter making the business case for solar power.

Solar Energy is for anyone with an interest in solar energy, including energy professionals and consultants, engineers, architects, academic researchers and students.

They will find a host of answers in this book – a practical assimilation of fundamentals, data, technologies and guidelines for application.

They're available in hardback, paperback and as ebooks.

Get 20% off! E.g. paperback or e-book would be £20.79! Just enter code FLR40 on checkout. Order here:

World Green Building Week and the campaign for net zero buildings

noreply@blogger.com (DavidKThorpe) — Wed, 04 Oct 2017 08:47:00 +0000

Aktiv-Stadthaus, a net zero residential building in Frankfurt, Germany of 11,700 m2, built in 2015.

It was World Green Building Week last week, with Green Building Councils from across the world campaigning for all buildings to be “net zero” by 2050.

Originally published on The Fifth Estate.

The week promoted the aspirations of the World Green Buildings Council's (WGBC) report earlier this year, From Thousands to Billions – Coordinated Action towards 100% Net Zero Carbon Buildings By 2050, which calls for a dramatic and ambitious transformation towards a completely zero carbon built environment.

The aim is for all new buildings to be operating at net zero carbon from 2030. The WGBC advocates that net zero carbon buildings must become standard business practice as soon as possible, to avoid the need for future major retrofits and prevent the lock-in of carbon emitting systems for decades to come.

It wants to see not just an acceleration of current renovation rates, but these renovations to be completed to a net zero carbon standard so that all buildings are net zero carbon in operation by 2050.

Image: Canada Green Building Council

The route to net zero

Ten national GBCs are already working with stakeholders in their markets to create or adopt voluntary net zero carbon building rating systems and support training. These include Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, India, Netherlands, South Africa, and Sweden, and UK.

Each national council is developing a program suitable for their markets, and each will respect the following principles:

to use carbon as the key metric
to promote deep energy efficiency
to establish a hierarchical preference for onsite renewable energy, off-site renewable energy, and then offsets
to transparently disclose how each building achieves a carbon balance and promote continuous improvement of the building sector

Achieving the targets would help to ensure that the worst impacts of climate change are avoided, and bring about a number of other political and economic benefits, says the WGBC. These include future-proofing investments, resilience against energy prices, education, technology development and innovation, and new jobs.

The report goes on to describe several net zero buildings in existence today, and suggests that businesses can help by committing to invest in, build or occupy only properties that will achieve net zero carbon.

NGOs have a part to play here. They can help to develop certification programs for net zero carbon buildings for businesses to adopt and support governments to create roadmaps, incentives and tracking systems.

Governments can help by committing, perhaps as part of their work to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement on climate change, to develop national and/or sub-national regulations for new and existing buildings to achieve net zero carbon standards, as well as themselves occupying only certified net zero carbon buildings before 2030.

One thing governments or NGOs could also do is to keep track of the rates of “deep energy renovation” of buildings in their country.

To achieve the 100 per cent net zero carbon by 2050 goal, this global average rate of renovation must reach three per cent a year if we start in 2017, or higher if we start later.

The current market

But that is currently a distant dream. The best estimates from building inventory studies are that there are approximately just 500 net zero energy commercial buildings and 2000 net zero energy housing units worldwide.

The Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction reports that current average renovation rates around the world are just one per cent or less of the existing building stock each year.

The European Union has the highest number of net zero buildings, due to government-sponsored retrofit programs and a history of progressive policies and market interest.

North America is estimated to have the second-largest concentration of net zero buildings. These include many smaller commercial buildings and single-family homes, especially in the western and northeast states.

Residential buildings comprise the highest number and type of net zero projects built to date, but many are single-family homes built as demonstration projects. Office blocks come second by type.

Some public-sector projects built to net zero standards in India, South Africa and the US have floor areas of over 30,000 square metres, but most buildings are under 900 square metres.

Barriers

There’s an urgent need to identify and overcome the barriers preventing more net zero carbon buildings from being built.

There’s still widespread ignorance that such buildings are possible and, even if a client may have heard of them, a perception that they are either technically difficult, risky or expensive.

This is coupled with uncertainty about which technologies should be deployed and whether energy efficiency or renewable energy should be prioritised.

As a result, client demand is still low and technical know-how rare. Most of the research and evidence has focused on net zero energy buildings – which is much harder and likely more expensive to achieve than net zero carbon buildings.

For example, a 2013 report by International Living Future Institute, New Buildings Institute and Skanska stated that the average cost premium for three net zero energy buildings in Columbia, US was between 5-12 higher.

In practice, investor and owner return on investment in a net zero building can vary greatly, depending on they building type and where it is built, taking into account energy costs, incentive programs and climate policies, such as a tax on carbon.

The need for certification schemes

The WGBC believes that only by introducing voluntary net zero certification can the necessary market transformation occur.

For example, in Australia green building certification schemes promote holistic approaches to sustainable development beyond energy performance (such as water, waste, ecology, materials), and increase global awareness.

The green building market has grown over the past 15 years, including through the introduction of rating tools. Green Star has provided a common language for the property and construction industry to use when describing best practice.

Now, 30 per cent of Australia’s CBD office space has Green Star certification, up from 23 per cent at the end of 2014 and, on average, certified buildings produce 62 per cent less greenhouse gas emissions than average Australian buildings.

The benefits to investors are that as the real estate investment market responds to the call to combat climate change, net zero carbon assets will have the lowest operating costs and be the most de-risked and, therefore, highest-quality assets.

David Thorpe is the author of Energy Management in Building and Sustainable Home Refurbishment.

Does opening the Northern Sea Route give Russia a vested interest in not tackling climate change?

noreply@blogger.com (DavidKThorpe) — Mon, 25 Sep 2017 10:39:00 +0000

Icebreaker Kapitan Khlebnikov in Arctic Waters along the NSR. Photograph by: TheBrockenInaGlory, distributed under CC-BY 3.0.

The Russian Federation is driving the development of the Northern Sea Route through Arctic waters – becoming more and more ice free due to global warming – in order to exploit fossil fuel extraction, which it sees as a major economic opportunity. Could it be that Russia has a clear vested interest in not helping to tackle climate change?

By 2022, the volume of traffic on the Northern Sea Route (NSR) is projected by consultants Frost and Sullivan (see below) to reach 40 million tons. In 2016, the volume was already a record breaking 7.3 million tons, representing an annual 35% increase.

Russia is commissioning new facilities for the production of fossil fuel liquefied natural gas (LNG) and the development of infrastructure in the Arctic. This is planned to help significantly increase traffic through the NSR – therefore increasing global warming – and therefore improving the ability of shipping to use this route as the ice melts faster.

The dashed arrow shows the Northern Sea Route (NSR) along the Siberian Coast from Murmansk (Russia) to Cape Dezhnev in Bering Strait.

In his speech to the Eastern Economic Forum, which was held in Vladivostok September 6–7, 2017, President Vladimir Putin talked of the "rich natural resources – coal, oil, gas and metals, as well as low energy prices, which are lower in Blagoveshchensk, Vladivostok and Khabarovsk than in Busan, Seoul, Osaka, Tokyo or Beijing" as being chief among the advantages of opening up the region and developing the Forum.

Putin with President of the Republic of Korea Moon Jae-in at the Forum.

Putin spoke of how the Russian long term plan to make NSR attractive is being developed: "New transportation corridors are being built and ports capacities are being increased to give companies an opportunity to deliver their goods from Asia Pacific to Europe and back, as well as to other regions, as quickly and as cheaply as possible. We are scrutinising the opportunity of building a railway bridge to Sakhalin.

"Taken together with the development of the Northern Sea Route, modernisation of BAM and Trans-Siberian Railway and implementation of other projects, this will help us make the Russian Far East a major global logistics hub."

Industrial output in the Russian Far East has, at 8.6 percent, been more than double the average growth rates in the Russian Federation – the gross regional product grew by 4.2 percent indicating its value to the Russian economy.

Shrinking ice

The Northern Sea Route is the shortest sea route from Asia to Europe. According to experts, because of global warming, after 2050 it will be available for year-round passage of conventional vessels with no ice reinforcement.

The sea ice is shrining fast. At the end of the northern summer this year, the ice surface is down to 4.7 million square kilometers. In the 1970s and 1980s it was roughly seven million square kilometers.

This is why Russia is driving development of the route – not only for pure export of natural resources from the Arctic zone or for the "Northern Supply", but also for container transportation.

According to Dmitry Purim, CEO of PJSC Sovfracht, "the main driver of the Arctic development, the undisputed mainstream, is the realization of hydrocarbon projects".

As the ice retreats, the Arctic routes will become shorter and faster. With the current trend, by 2030 the Arctic will completely get rid of ice in the warm season. So, cargo ships will be less likely to require the help of icebreakers, and navigation will be open at least 6 months a year.

Russian plans

The container traffic on routes where the use of the NSR can potentially give a significant payoff to carriers, is about 455 thousand TEU.

The commercial operation of the NSR is in full swing now, especially in the western part (from Murmansk to the port of Sabetta). The traffic volume can already be compared to the European numbers, say Frost and Sullivan (report sent by email, not yet online).

Evgeny Ambrosov, the First Deputy General Director of PJSC Sovcomflot and Vice-President of the Arctic Economic Council, said at the Forum: "The further growth in freight turnover will be due to the commissioning of new LNG production capacities (Arctic-LNG, Pechora-LNG) and the development of oil and gas fields. By 2025, the NSR will transport about 65 million tons of hydrocarbons."

Commenting on the results of the panel, Leonid Petukhov, the General Director of the ANO "Far East Investment and Export Agency", stressed that: "The development of the NSR is moving in all major directions—the icebreaker fleet is gradually growing, the infrastructure is being upgraded, work is being done to remove administrative and trade barriers; on the whole, conditions are being formed for increasing the volumes of container transportations in the medium term, private (including foreign) investors are involved in the projects."

LNG-powered ships

The fleet of Russia's largest shipping company, Sovcomflot, has recently been supplemented by three new MR vessels (6 in total), and in August 2017, Christophe de Margerie (reinforced ice class Arc-7) gas carrier made its first commercial flight delivering LNG from Norway to the South Korea.

The vessel went through the NSR for a record 6.5 days without the help of an icebreaker. "Christophe de Margerie" is the first gas carrier in a series of 15 vessels of this type planned for construction.

There are some climate benefits for the construction of new vessels using LNG as fuel. According to E. Ambrosov, it will reduce the volume of carbon dioxide emissions by 15%, nitrogen emissions by 80%, and sulfur emissions by 90%. The construction will start in 2019 at the Zvezda plant, and the first ship will leave the shipyard in 2022.

Foreign companies are demonstrating high interest in using the Northern Sea Route. "Japan has two main interests related to the NSR. The first one is the diversification of transport routes between Asia and Europe and the second is the development of the energy base," said Shinichi Ishii, senior consultant at Nomura Research Institute, Ltd. "The Hokkaido government has a program to participate in the NSR, and in the future, Hokkaido intends to become a gateway to the NSR."

Reduction in the ice area in summer and autumn makes the NSR more attractive for sea container transport. "On the average, over a decade the ice thickness is reduced by 13%" said Riccardo Valentini, professor at the Tuscia University (Italy) and head of the European Mediterranean Climate Change Center. "We need to improve the accuracy of sea forecasts, ice conditions and seasonal risks."

Note:
The thematic panel "Development of the Northern Sea Route. From words to action" was held September 6, 2017 within the framework of the 3rd Eastern Economic Forum with the assistance and support of ANO "Far East Investment and Export Agency".

The discussion gathered a number of industry professionals—representatives of Russian and international scientific organizations, as well as functional and top managers of oil and gas, shipbuilding and transport companies from Russia, Japan, South Korea, China, the Netherlands, etc. Among them was Evgeny Ambrosov, First Deputy General Director of PJSC Sovcomflot, Tero Vauraste, Chairman of the Arctic Economic Council, Vladimir Korchanov, First Vice-President of FESCO, Rene Berkvens, CEO of Damen Shipyards Group NV, Riccardo Valentini, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and Head of European Center for the Mediterranean Climate Change, and others. Alexander Dyukov, Chairman of the Board and General Director of PJSC Gazprom Neft, also visited the session.

After the discussion, the session moderator, Managing Director of the Russian Frost & Sullivan office Alexey Volostnov and the Director General of the ANO "Far East Investment and Export Agency" Leonid Petukhov signed an agreement on coordination of activities to improve the conditions for the implementation of the socio-economic development strategy of the Far East until 2020, and on the effective assistance to the development of the Northern Sea Route.

The source for many of the quotes above is the Russian Frost & Sullivan office.

British homes could cost-effectively halve energy demand by 2035

noreply@blogger.com (DavidKThorpe) — Wed, 20 Sep 2017 09:31:00 +0000

British homes could cost-effectively halve energy demand by 2035, according to a new report.

A version of this article appeared on The Fifth Estate on 18 September.

In Britain, as a result of efficiency savings in products and efforts to make homes more efficient, homes now use 23 per cent less gas and 17 per cent less electricity than in 2008. Moreover, the average dual fuel household bill was £490 lower in 2015 than it was in 2004, according to the report from the UK Energy Research Council (UKERC).

The report says homes could save a further average of £270 a year at current energy prices, totalling about 140 terawatt-hours (TWh) – or the rough equivalent of the output of six Hinkley C-sized nuclear power stations – in heat and electricity.

This implies that the UK government would be much better off rekindling its home energy efficiency program – moribund for six years – than investing in new nuclear power stations – although much more electricity will be needed to charge the growing number of electric vehicles.

The report (using the government’s own guidance for policy appraisal) says that such investments would deliver net benefits worth £7.5 billion to the UK economy. This could rise to £47 billion if benefits such as health improvements and additional economic activity are counted.

The UKERC is therefore calling for the government to set a long-term target for energy efficiency – as it did on 26 July with a target to ban petrol and diesel cars by 2040 (a target beaten by eight years by the Scottish Government’s announcement to phase them out in 2032, made five days later).

The Committee on Climate Change believes that as much as 85 per cent of potential carbon emission savings in buildings are at risk of not being realised due to poor take-up of measures, implementation or standards enforcement.

The UKERC report makes an estimate of which of these savings are achievable under three scenarios of increasing ambition:

This makes clear that more efficient appliances and boilers are easy wins – mostly thanks to EU policies (we won’t mention the ironies of Brexit here) driving greater efficiency in household appliances and boilers, and a new EU Regulation setting a framework for energy labelling, which simplifies and updates the energy efficiency labelling requirements for products sold in the EU.

The tough ones are help with insulation – particularly of walls and floors – and heat pumps. It is here where government support could therefore be most usefully targeted.

This graph shows where savings could be made over the next 18 years, and how much impact savings in different areas will make, compared with making no savings at all (the top dotted line):

Source: CCC dataset

What is the cumulative value of this investment in the energy efficiency of the housing stock? The report analyses this in the “cost-effective” scenario. In the graph below, anything below the horizontal line is a cost compared to current levels, and anything above is a saving.

It shows that while the core savings come from energy use and a reduction in emissions and pollution, this has a knock-on benefit in health savings and GDP.

Source: produced from BEIS, 2016 using outputs from CCC dataset model

The headline takeaways are that “one quarter of the energy currently used in UK housing could be cost-effectively saved by 2035”, and that, “allowing for falling equipment costs and including the wider benefits of energy efficiency improvements, it should be possible to cost-effectively halve energy demand in UK homes.

“With innovation in technology and delivery, appropriately supported by government, it is likely we can go significantly further than this too.”

But to do so there needs to be significant policy change and public investment. The report points to the forthcoming opportunity in the expected (and delayed) Clean Growth Plan and National Infrastructure Assessment. Plus, to fill the current policy vacuum a new white paper on heat and energy efficiency is urgently required.

Two years after the government scrapped its Green Deal energy efficiency loan scheme, it has yet to announce a replacement. The company which bought the Green Deal Finance company (and some of the Green Investment Bank's investments from Macquarie) is also yet to announce a new scheme.

David Thorpe is the author of Energy Management in Building and Sustainable Home Refurbishment.

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