Link suite overview: on recovering from disasters; the lessons of Irene, Joplin, Fukushima, Pakistan flood, Queensland flood, Christchurch quakes, Haiti quakes, Katrina; collateral damage and eco-smart design as insurance

Links become part of the TrackerNews searchable database.

It has been a banner year for disasters in the US with  a record-breaking 10 “billion-dollar-plus” knock-out punches, and still four months to go. So far: massive blizzards, epic floods, murderous tornadoes and one staggeringly large, coast-shredding hurricane. As  a grace note, an earthquake on an previously unknown fault in Virginia put cracks in the Washington monument—a wound as disturbing symbolically as structurally.

Globally, the news is no less jaw-dropping: Floods stretching to the horizon in Australia and Pakistan. Two devastating earthquakes each for New Zealand and Haiti. And a trifecta of tragedy in Japan where an earthquake triggered a tsunami that drowned a nuclear plant.

Droughts—comparatively stealthy as disasters go—only grab headlines when people start keeling over from starvation by the tens of thousands (Somalia), or crop losses are so large, sticker shock sets in at the grocery store, while global food security—which means global security—becomes notably less secure (Russia, US).

The only bright spot in this litany of gloomy news is that communication during and about disasters has improved markedly.  As Hurricane Irene buzz-sawed its way up the eastern seaboard, The Weather Channel went into overdrive, leading a media mob—both mainstream and “citizen”—reporting, tweeting, crowdmapping, photographing, making videos, texting donations, aggregating, blogging, facebooking, and sharing every last little nugget of awful news.

It made a difference. People got out of harm’s way. Although the death toll has now climbed into mid-forties, with likely a few thousand more injured, an estimated 65 million people felt some part of Irene’s fury. Most stayed safe, which is remarkable.

Yet for all the technical brilliance that made it possible to track a weather blip off the coast of Africa to its lethal landfall an ocean away, or to plan mass evacuations, share safety tips and keep track of loved ones, there was no stopping Irene. Financial losses may have been less than expected—mostly because property values are lower in Vermont than in New York City—but they are enormous and devastating. Homes have been torn apart, lives turned upside down.

The collateral damage has yet to be tallied from lost incomes, delayed school starts, exposure to toxic mold, toxic water, mosquito-borne illnesses and weakened infrastructure.

It becomes a vicious circle: Until businesses affected by the storm are up and running again, tax revenues will decline, making it that much more difficult to pay for repairs or proactive maintenance. In Japan and New Zealand, bonds and special taxes are now on the table to cope with recovery costs estimated in the tens of billions of dollars.

In fact, the high cost of these mega-disasters—often quoted a percentage of a country’s GDP—can itself become a cost. Insurance companies, faced with catastrophic losses, are hiking rates and cutting coverage. But the more businesses and home-owners are forced to spend on insurance and out-of-pocket expenses, the less money they have to expand businesses or make purchases.

There are also more people than ever in harm’s way. Much of the development in Queensland, Australia over the last 30 years, for example, was on a floodplain.

Although specific storms are difficult to link directly to climate change, our warmer world holds more moisture in its atmosphere than it did even just a few decades ago. That means there is more rain to to be rained, and more energy to interact and magnify well-known weather drivers such as El Nino / La Nina.

Whether or not this is the “new normal” remains to be seen. It certainly seems to be the “more frequent.”

IN RECOVERY

“The Days, Years After,” a new link suite story on the TrackerNews aggregator, looks at a half dozen disasters from the last few years, focusing on recovery efforts. Each disaster is tragic in its own way, but patterns emerge.

• Political gridlock (Japan) can be just as devastating as corruption (Haiti) in slowing recovery

• Good communications networks make a tangible difference (Joplin, New York)

• Donor burn-out threatens (anyone remember Jay-Z, Bono, the Edge and Rihanna crooning, “We’re not going to leave you stranded,” to Haiti’s quake victims?)

On a more encouraging note, all sorts of new and better tools for  mapping, clean-up, construction and communication have emerged since Hurricane Katrina, all made accessible, and some made possible, by the web.

Many of the technologies are eco-smart, which turns out to be a good disaster defense strategy as well.

Imagine, for example, the difference it would have made if the electric grid in the Northeast had been based on a distributed power paradigm. Rather than large central power plants generating electricity transported over long distances on vulnerable wires, individual buildings and neighborhoods would generate their own, preferably green, power. Batteries capable of storing enough energy from solar panels and wind-turbines to power as many as 2,000 homes would be tied into local grid, which could, in turn, could be tied into a larger grid. A hurricane would still knock lights out, but not to millions of people.

Clean, green energy independence means energy insurance, too.

Additional highlights of the link suite include:

• Make It Right Foundation

• A Conversation with Cameron Sinclair, CEO of Architecture for Humanity / The Atlantic, Daniel Fromson

• Ocean Springs Cottages at Oak Park are ready for business and feature green amenities  / The Mississippi Press, Cherie Wood

• QuaDror: A New Structural System / Arch Daily, Kelly Minner

• When the Water Rises / New York magazine, Justin Davidson

• Irene Recovery Map: For Ordinary People Helping Ordinary People / Ushahidi blog, Patrick Meier

• Exploring Joplin, Missouri, Recovering from Disaster / Traveling the American Road, Paul Brady

• Virginia Quake Raises More Questions About US East Coast Infrastructure / Scientific American, Michael Moyer

• Blue Goo Sucks Up Toxic Waste  / CNN Money, Eilene Zimmerman

• The Tech to Make Buildings Earthquake—and Tsunami—Resistant / Popular Mechanics, Andrew Moseman

• How the World Failed Haiti / Rolling Stone, Janet Reitman

… and much more (all links become part of the TrackerNews searchable database)

RELATED

• The Nuke Factor: How to Make Disasters Worse and the Implications for Humanitarian Aid / TrackerNews Editor’s Blog, J.A. Ginsburg

— @TrackerNews

On 400+ aging nuclear reactors, quake-prone countries, food chains, trade networks and what this means for first responders and social entrepreneurs

TrackerNews link suite on the Japanese nuclear disaster. Links become part of the TrackerNews searchable database.

Let’s get right to the point: What happens the next time a nuclear reactor goes rogue in the wake of a natural disaster? Japan is a worst case scenario in a best case place.

But what if the earth were to quake in Iran, China, Italy or Turkey—all of which are pursuing nuclear-fueled futures? Or Pakistan, where the IEAE  and US just gave their respective stamps of approval for two new Chinese-built plants? Each of those seismically-rocking countries floats precariously at (tectonic) plates’ edge. In fact, one of two reactors planned for Turkey is just a few miles from a major fault line.

The assurances of political leaders such as Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are somehow less than reassuring: “I don’t think there will be any serious problem…The security standards there are the standards of today. We have to take into account that the Japanese nuclear plants were built 40 years ago with the standards of yesterday.”

Forty years may seem like an eternity to a politician, but is, in fact, a blink in a time-scale defined by nuclear radiation (see Chernobyl). Inspections have a way of getting missed (see Japan). Human error happens (see Three Mile Island).

In the meantime, major earthquakes striking all of these countries sometime over the projected lifespans of their reactors is a sure thing.

Beyond the issues of nuclear waste storage, the almost inevitable black market trade and surreptitious weapons programs, what happens when the “sure thing” meets the big risk? How does one keep radioactive fall-out from contaminating emergency food rations? Or find safe water? What happens when those best able to help are put in mortal danger if they try?

Is this the kind of border even doctors won’t cross?

No matter. The radiation will eventually come to them, traveling first through food chains, then trade networks. Some produce is already showing levels of radiation several times accepted limits, though authorities insist it is still safe. So far, the milk supply remains uncontaminated. But according the WHO, Japan is a big exporter of baby formula and powdered milk to China and the US. As the crisis drags on and radioactive particles work their way into cattle pastures, that could change.

In short, bad gets worse—much worse—once nuclear is part of the equation.

WAKE UP CALL

The tragedy in Japan should be a wake up call to NGOs, social entrepreneurs and all those working, as they say, “for positive change.” The nuclear issue is not an abstraction to be relegated to politicians, engineers and lobbyists. This threatens your work, potentially reversing years of hard-fought economic gains in poor countries and undoing decades-worth of global public health efforts. This isn’t just about regional clusters of radiation-related illnesses, but also of the loss of infrastructure for disease surveillance and drug distribution that would tip the balance in favor of infectious diseases outbreaks and pandemics.

Finally, the thorniest of ethical questions:  Who makes the call to send staff into disaster zones so dangerous that not only is personal health at risk, but that of future offspring as well? (As a 1950s military film put it: “the ultimate symptom, death itself”)

With more than 400 reactors spread across the globe—many now nearing their “sold-by” date—the next Japan is more a matter of when, not if. Power plants, of course, are not designed as weapons, but that doesn’t make their  fall-out any less lethal.

Humanitarian aid workers: Are you ready?

Global earthquake activity since 1973 and nuclear power plant locations (click through to map web page)

* Addendum 3/31/11:

Hospitals and temporary refuges are demanding that evacuees provide them with certificates confirming that they have not been exposed to radiation before they are admitted….

…The eight-year-old daughter of Takayuki Okamura was refused treatment for a skin rash by a clinic in Fukushima City, where the family is living in a shelter after abandoning their home in Minamisoma, 18 miles from the crippled nuclear plant….

…Prejudice against people who used to live near the plant is reminiscent of the ostracism that survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 experienced. Many suffered discrimination when they tried to rent housing, find employment or marriage partners…

—”Japan nuclear crisis: evacuees turned away from shelters” / The Telegraph

Discrimination based not on race, creed or color, but on a cruel twist of geographic fate: simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  It is tragedy compounded, reverberating through generations.

Perhaps we need to add a “futures wrecked” column to graphs purporting to show the comparative benignness of nuclear energy versus that produced by coal and oil. It is a lobbyist’s argument, telling a truth, but not the whole truth.

The whole truth? All of these energy sources are fraught in the present and threaten the future. A warming earth with rising seas and wilder weather will send millions of climate refugees fleeing to higher, safer ground—human migrations on a scale unimaginable.

Radioactive refugees have nowhere to go.

We need to get beyond this devil’s choice fast, to invest in renewables at every scale, macro to micro (e.g., micro-wind). We—as in “We the people,” as in our governments—need to support research and innovation and help ideas scale for practical, commercial use.

One the few hopeful stories this past week was the announcement of an “artificial leaf” that can create energy from photosynthesis. MIT professor Daniel Nocera has been working on ways that essentially cut out the middleman in energy generation. Unlike coal and oil, which are fossilized sunlight—energy banked in the past—or nuclear power, which requires vast investment to tap, Nocera’s inexpensive playing card-size solar chip can harvest enough energy from a gallon of water—stored in a small fuel cell—to power a home in a developing country for a day. The water doesn’t even have to be all that clean, either.

The latest version of Nocera’s technology is of commercial interest because, by integrating the catalyst with the chips, it dispenses with the need for traditional solar panels. That, he says, will cut costs considerably, by eliminating wires, etc. “The price of the silicon of a solar panel isn’t much,” he says. “A lot of the cost is the wiring. What this does is get rid of all that.”

“The real goal here,” he adds, “is giving energy to the poor” – especially, he notes, in rural Africa, India, and China.

Even better, he adds, the device doesn’t need ultrapure water. “You can use nature water sources, which is a big deal in parts of the world where it’s costly to have to use pure water.”

— MIT scientist announces first “practical” artificial leaf / Nature

Recently, Tata Group, an international conglomerate best known as India’s largest automaker, invested $9.5 million in Nocera’s company, Sun Catalytix.

Follow the money. The smart money.

(video: Daniel Nocera explains personalized power / Poptech / 1 of 2)

• Daniel Nocera explains personalized power / Poptech / 2 of 2

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Additional links include:

• Food Contamination Concerns following the Japanese Nuclear Crisis / WHO fact sheet

• Meltdown at Three Mile Island / American Experience, PBS (video)

• Where are the world’s nuclear reactors? / New Scientist, interactive map

• From moving clouds to sowing crops, Chernobyl can help Japan / TerraDaily, AFP

• With Nuclear Power, “No Acts of God Can Be Permitted” / Amory Lovins, Huffington Post

• Long Shadow of Chernobyl (2006, 20 years out) / Gurd Ludwig, National Geographic (narrated slide show)

• China to Sell Outdated Nuclear Reactors to Pakistan / VOA

• Murky past of Japan’s troubled nuclear industry revealed / The Independent

• Infographic of the Day: The Best Radiation Chart We’ve Seen So Far / David McCandless, Fast Company

• Japan: The Big One / J.A. Ginsburg, TrackerNews Editor’s Blog

On primal forces and perspective, how climate change may make nuclear an even more dicey option and better, smarter search & rescue bots (background and link suite-story overview)

TrackerNews link suite on the Japanese earthquake, tsumami and nuclear disaster. Links become part of the TrackerNews searchable database.

The March 11 earthquake off the east coast of Japan was one for the record books. Now rated a 9.0 on the Richter scale by the Japanese Meteorological Society, up from what was still a rather gobsmacking 8.9 initial estimate, the temblor known locally as Great Earthquake of Eastern Japan is officially tied for fourth in the official record books.

But in many ways, this was an earthquake like no other.

Nearly 60 million people felt direct shaking. The breakdown as measured by the Modified Mercalli Intensity scale, which is calibrated to measure surface impact rather than seismic energy: “2.14 million (VIII – Severe), 29.96 million (VII – Very Strong), 19.69 million (VI – Strong) and 7.07 million (V – Moderate).”

Then the tsunami hit, a 30-foot killer wave weaponized with debris, racing inland with pedal-to-the-metal speed, flattening buildings, drowning fields, swamping towns, shredding lives.

This being Japan, where all phones are smart and digital cameras abound, the catastrophe was documented in staggering detail. In near real-time, images raced across the planet even faster than the tsunami. We watched in collective global horror as dark water oozed across the land, snuffing out all signs of life and civilization in its path. From Tokyo came video of chandeliers shaking, computers tumbling, books falling. We felt people’s terror in the crazy angles of videotaped escapes. We cried out as shards of glass rained down on frightened office-workers.

The images were mesmerizing: Pirates of the Caribbean-style maelstroms, boats rammed into bridges, cars and trucks bobbing in water like so many assembly line-perfect white metal rubber duckies.

By night, fires lit up the sky. By day, black smoke spewed from an oil refinery.

And then the first of two nuclear plants plant buildings exploded, unleashing the twin specters of Hiroshima and Chernobyl (whose 25th anniversary comes up in a few weeks). If the sight of a flattened landscape wasn’t enough to drive home the sobering truth of man’s limitations against primal forces of nature, hundreds of aftershocks—dozens measuring 6.0 or higher— continued to shake the ground for the slow learners.

So strong was the initial jolt, report scientists, the Earth itself was moved inches off its axis and sped up ever-so-slightly, while Japan shifted eight feet closer to the US.

The death toll, which could top 10,000, comes nowhere near the scale of the human tragedy witnessed in Banda Aceh after the tsunami there six years ago. Still, it is beyond all ken: Thousands gone in an instant. For the survivors it will be a slow, costly recovery, strewn with stark choices.

Japan relies on nuclear power to supply one-third of its energy needs. Rolling blackouts are planned for the next several weeks, a forced conservation to make up for loss of the plants damaged in the quakes. Economists predict that alone could shave off nearly a third of a percentage point of GDP: “A 25 percent cut in the power supply may hurt production in the manufacturing sector by 2.5 percent, 5 percent for the non- manufacturing sector and 10 percent for the financial, insurance, information and telecommunications sectors…”.

Around the world, over 400, mostly older, nuclear plants are online, some in areas vulnerable to natural disaster. Some 65 new reactors are under construction worldwide, with another 155 planned. Earthquake-prone Italy is banking on nuclear. So are India and China, seeing it as a way to counter carbon-spew from coal-burning power plants. The Japanese disaster has caused the Indians to reassess, but the Chinese are determined to go forward, albeit with a bit more caution.

Ironically, it may be the very carbon-spew these countries seek to curb that is making nuclear power an increasingly dangerous option.

CONNECTIONS & CONSEQUENCES

Last April, a group of scientists specializing in climate-modeling called for “wide-ranging research into whether more volcanoes, earthquakes, landslides and tsunamis could be triggered by rising global temperatures under global warming.” This came after years of small studies suggested the likelihood of such links.

In polar regions, melting ice releases pressure on land, allowing it to bounce back to its pre-glacial state (a process called isostatic rebound). That, in turn, alters pressure on tectonic plates, increasing the odds for volcanic and seismic activity. Meanwhile, drip by drip, the water from the melted ice raises sea levels, which alters stress levels elsewhere on the planet.

Fourteen years ago, a study published in Nature looked at the rate of sea level rise and volcanic activity over an 80,000 year stretch in the Mediterranean. “When sea level rose quickly, more volcanic eruptions occurred, increasing by a whopping 300 percent.”

Speed, then, plays a role. Worryingly, the rate at which the ice in Greenland and Antarctica is melting is accelerating, according to new research published this month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

1) North American Plate 2) The Eurasian Plate 3) The Philippine Sea Plate 4) The Pacific Plate

Japan sits at the juncture of four tectonic plates, making it particularly vulnerable to volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis (tsunami: from the Japanese words tsu, meaning port, and nami, meaning wave). Even sans the extra water weight, 20% of all Richter scale 6.0+ earthquakes happen here.

A large quake—7.5 or above—was, in fact, predicted to occur sometime over the next 30 years for the fault that gave way so spectacularly last Friday, but no one expected, or was prepared for, a 9.0. Indeed, no major earthquake for which there is any record or reference over the last 1,300 years in Japan has been that powerful.

Could tectonic pressures linked to climate change have played a role?

When we think of climate change, we tend to think of droughts, floods, extreme weather and ocean acidification. But the atmosphere and the lithosphere have had an eons-long relationship, full of subtleties beyond current human understanding. Researchers just now are beginning to tie specific weather events to climate change. We still cannot predict seismic events, much less make connections to specific triggers.

The past, however, does offer some disturbing clues. And one way or the other, as greenhouse gases continue to build up in the atmosphere, warming the planet at record speed, melting its ice and changing its weather patterns, we are bound to find out.

BOTS TO THE RESCUE

In the meantime, in a lemonade-from-lemons sort of way, at least there has been some progress on the Search and Rescue bot front. Two in particular caught our attention:

• Survivor Buddy sports a Max Headroom-style screen “head,” programmed with friendly animations created by a Pixar artist. The point? To create a socially appropriate robot to more effectively help the victims it finds.

“We need to design a robot that knows social graces and can garner trust and show respect and expertise. If you send down a robot that seems like a moron, that’s not going to help. It’s not going to make you like it. If it’s going to be a companion, a buddy, then you’d better like it. Think of all the things you need to be an effective search and rescue buddy. The robot has to likeable, seem smart, be trustworthy and seem caring, optimistic—but not overly optimistic.”

—Clifford Nass, Stanford University

• The Kinect bot, developed by a student team at the U.K.’s Warwick University, using Xbox technology to detect survivor moment and distance—a clever hack that delivers tremendous functionality for little cost.

Also, some background on Disaster City, a 52-acre pile of rubble deep the heart of Texas, not far from the campus of Texas A & M in College Station, and the go-to place for putting rugged little robots through their paces. Designed to mimic a real disaster area and described as “Jerry Bruckheimer set,” the nearly $100 million testing ground was built in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing to train emergency responders. It looks strikingly like Sendai, Japan, full of collapsed building debris.

• Next Gen Search & Rescue Robots Tested at ‘Disaster City’ (KBTX)

• Disaster City: Inside the World’s Largest Search-and-Rescue Training Facility (Popular Science)

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Additional Links include:

• Charity Navigator’s Guide: Japan Earthquake and Tsunami

• Open Street Map 2011 Sendai earthquake / tsunami wiki

• Susan Casey talks tsunamis and the mysteries of wave science (Poptech / video)

• Worldwide Monitoring Network Allows for Rapid Tsunami Warnings (Scientific American)

• Interview with David Brenner, Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University (Rachel Maddow / video)

• “The Scariest Earthquake Yet to Come” (Simon Winchester / Newsweek)

Hydraulic fracturing - fracking. Click through to the "Gasland" website for more detailed explanation

The devil really is in the details: Fine print can kill. In 2005, as part of Bush/Cheney Energy Bill, a then obscure natural gas mining technique -  hydraulic fracturing – was given an exemption from the Safe Drinking Water Act. Corporations were now allowed to keep the chemical contents of fracking fluid, used to break up shale deposits, a proprietary trade secret. Since Halliburton, where Dick Cheney had been CEO prior to becoming vice president, was one of the few producers of fracking fluid, the exemption became known as the “Halliburton loophole.”

Freed of any legal constraints, the fracking gold rush was on. It didn’t matter how many dozens of carcinogenic, mutagenic and toxic compounds environmentalists discovered and documented in the “secret sauce,” the energy companies had the law on their side. Indeed, they had the law in the bag.

Within a matter of months, drilling began on the first of what would soon be tens of thousands of wells, mostly in the West -  including wells on public BLM lands opened up under the patriotic banner of energy independence. Thousands of millions of gallons of water – 3 to 7 million per well – mixed with sand and fracking fluid were then injected under high pressure to create mini-earthquakes designed to release natural gas that had been sequestered in the rocks for millennia.

It worked. Released from its underground stone matrix prison, the gas surged to surface. And immediately began bubbling up in all sorts of unintended places, producing some pretty spectacular special effects such as flammable tap water. More spectacular, though harder to see, were the effects on humans and other animals.

DEVILISHLY DUMB BARGAIN

Beyond the breathtaking speed at which this environmental nightmare roared forth, is the gobsmacking stupidity that put energy company interests over clean water safeguards. While there are alternative sources for energy, there are none for clean water.

Josh Fox, whose much-acclaimed documentary, Gasland, galvanized public outrage against fracking, offered fracked water to the few energy company executives he managed to interview. There were no takers. Perhaps legislators should be required to do without clean water for a few days before voting on any legislation relegating it to expendable status.

Yet as heroic and laudable as Fox’s personal investigative foray may be, it is also deeply unnerving to realize that this is what it took. The mainstream media was years late to the story. And though public outrage recently led to a temporary fracking moratorium in New York state, the practice, along with its proprietary poisons, has gone global.

• 

  Australian "60 Minutes" segment on shale gas drilling in Queensland

  In Australia, “gas is the new gold.” Mining contracts are potentially worth $100 billion, with government royalties estimated at $850 million (less than 1% of the profits), while landowners receive a one-time payment of $1.500 per well. Australian law favors mining interests, allowing drilling without landowner permission.

• Poland sees fracking as the route to energy independence – and independence in general  – from Russia, which currently supplies more than 50% of the country’s natural gas needs. Also, in an effort to meet European Union greenhouse gas emission standards, Poland needs to reduce its reliance on coal. Fracking recently began in a region near the Baltic Sea. (On the flip side, Russia’s enormous investment to develop its vast natural gas reserves may prove a bust, with would-be buyers “fracking their own – which has raised some concern about geopolitical ramifications.)

• In India, the government can’t wait to get fracking, seeing it as the answer to the country’s soaring energy demands. Gas filled shale has been found in Gujarat, Assam and Jharkhand. Mining lease auctions may begin as early as 2011.

COST / BENEFIT

Industry supporters insist that fracking can be done cleanly and aquifers kept safe. But like the BP Deepwater Horizon debacle in the Gulf of Mexico, even if the risks are small, the costs, should something goes wrong, are incalculable. No amount of money can undo all the damage to the environment or repair blighted futures.

With fracking, the price is pretty steep when all goes right. Any gains that natural gas may offer as a cleaner fossil fuel are lost in the collective exhaust of the thousands of tanker trucks hauling millions of gallons of water to drill sites.

Leaky wells also release methane -20 times more potent a greenhouse gas as CO2 - directly into the atmosphere. Nobody keeps track of these rogue emissions. If just 1% of the wells are leaky (and the rate is likely far higher), the tally quickly spikes to hundreds, if not thousands, of wells.

So: Jobs, royalties, bountiful natural gas supplies, fat profits for energy companies and reliable dividends for investors versus polluted water, sick people, mounting medical costs, dead wildlife, bankrupt farms and ranches, lost income, depressed real estate values, lost income and real estate tax revenues and rich corporate lawyers churning out non-disclosure agreements.

Why is this even a debate?

FRACK NOT: AN ALTERNATIVE FUTURE

Despite the literally earth-rattling arguments of pro-fracking interests that insist global energy demands and emissions targets can only be met in the near term with natural gas (no matter how costly in GHGs it may be to get it…), breakthroughs in solar, wind and wave power, along with improvements in efficiency and conservation, suggest otherwise.

In just the last week, researchers at Stanford announced a way to triple solar efficiency using cheap, easy to obtain materials, while scientists at Cornell and China’s Northwestern Polytechnical University used biomimicry to reinvent the urban wind turbine.

The technologies dazzle with potential, yet the transition to broad commercial adoption has been difficult, in large part due to policies such as the Halliburton loophole that “un-even” the playing field.

The answer to energy supply is not the 20th century paradigm of one-size-fits-all (coal, oil, gas, nuclear), but a mix and match of macro and micro technologies that can be adapted to local needs. Imagine if the $100 billion in Australian shale gas deals were diverted to such technologies: Jobs, tax revenues, unpolluted natural resources, healthier people…

MODULAR, SCALABLE, AFFORDABLE, REPLICABLE & GREEN: WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM BANGLADESH

A few months ago, Eduardo Jezierski, a colleague from InSTEDD, was interviewed for The Space Show. Although Ed spends his days developing technologies to improve disease surveillance, humanitarian response and local resiliency here on planet Earth, there is considerable overlap between working in the developing world – often the aftermath of a natural disasters – and the kinds of challenges facing space exploration. How do you make the most of limited resources in difficult environments?

When the conversation turned to energy, Ed talked about his about a trip to Bangladesh to visit Grameen Shakti, the microfinance pioneer’s “green” spin-off, where he watched their solar program in action:

They bring in the separate parts for solar panels, converters, adapters,  etc.,  Local village women come in and gather the resistors and capacitors and cables and LEDs and boxes and panels which they put into baskets to take homes to assemble. They bring them back at the end of the day assembled, and for each solar converter they create, for example, they get 8 cents.

They get some training in soldering and the converters get tested. Even though you might not think it is an efficient way of doing the manufacturing, it is very self-sufficient. Now you have a work force in every village where the women can actually fix solar converters, where the school girls are trained in trouble-shooting the solar systems. It creates a local economy, a local self-sufficiency to the point that sometimes the grid vendors – the electricity grid – might reach a village and the people say, “No. We’re fine. We have electricity. It’s essentially free. We’ve paid off all the microloans for the panels. We have light. We can charge our cell phones. We’re fine.”

Well over 100,000 solar panels have been installed through the program.

Clearly this is not the answer to energy supply and distribution, but an answer tailored to a specific need and place. Still, it shares characteristics of many other good answers: It is modular, scalable, affordable, replicable and green.

These are the kinds of answers we need to encourage. These are the ones that lead to real energy independence.

RELATED READING / VIEWING:

“Gasland” on HBO, produced and directed by Josh Fox

“Hydro-fracking and earthquakes? Uh oh…” by Kate Mackenzie, FT / Energysource

“A Colossal Fracking Mess” by Christopher Bateman/ photographs & video by Jacques del Conte, Vanity Fair

Pro Publica coverage on fracking (search list)

As You Sow, organization that promotes corporate environmental and social responsibility through shareholder advocacy, grantmaking and innovative legal strategies 

“Post COP15, Part 2: Five Ideas That Could Help Save the Climate (Really)” by J. A. Ginsburg, TrackerNews Editor’s Blog

 

Haiti Timber Re-Introduction Project (HTRIP)

On the link between environmental health & public health; Rebuilding Haiti from the soil microbes up; A humanitarian aid petri dish; Jared Diamond’s checklist for collapse & Haiti as vision what could be in store for the rest of us; Charcoal cartels, Amy Smith’s better answer & Nicholas Kristof’s compost toilet tour

 

Small farm plots on hilly terrain had been stripped bare of soil-stabilizing cover (2/3 of the the country is on land that slopes 20% or more). No soil means no food means malnutrition means disease, illness, death.

“Practically every medical problem in Haiti is poverty-related,” notes Dr. Vehnita Suresh, the hospital’s CEO. “The never-ending cycle of deforestation lead(s) to more ecological damage, more compromised farming, more poverty and more hunger. It goes on and on and on.”

Public health and environmental health are so tied together, you simply can’t have the former without the latter. “We can go on giving health-care forever,” says Dr. Suresh, “It would never really touch even the brim of the problem here.”

So they plant trees. The Haiti Timber Re-Introduction Project (HTRIP) has begun to reverse centuries of devastation that literally skinned the country alive, leaving hillsides such as the ones surrounding the Artibonite Valley where the hospital is located barren and bleak.

Documentary on The Haiti Timber Re-Introduction Project, the Hopital Albert Schweitzer's reforestation effort

In the aftermath of the earthquake, reforestation has taken a back seat to the urgency of treating the injured (you can donate directly to support the hospital’s work). But over the long term, any real “Hope for Haiti” means planting trees – literally rebuilding the country from its soil microbes up.

AVOIDING COLLAPSE: LAB HAITI

Haiti has been teetering at brink of breakdown for as long as anyone can remember, but it took the quake to focus  global attention, sparking an unprecedented outpouring of support and a largely spontaneous explosion of technical can-do innovation. From CrisisMappers and Crisis Commons hackers to the collaborative Haiti Rewired network, Twitter hashtag-enabled mash-ups and teams of volunteer architects, engineers, doctors,  veterinarians and other professionals, this has been an all-hands-on-deck emergency.

In a sense, Haiti has become a sort of petri dish for humanitarian action. The stakes couldn’t be higher. If, somehow, this “Exhibit A” for all that Jared Diamond says spells doom for a culture/country’s prospects is rescued from the abyss of complete collapse, the implications go far beyond Haiti.

Haiti, in all its deforested, polluted, cartel-corrupted, disease-riddled impoverishment, is a vision of our planet’s future if we continue to devour natural resources beyond replenishment, downplay the seriousness of climate change, spike efforts at family planning and ignore the integral importance of environmental health. As goes Haiti, so go we all.

“The most important thing we need to do about the world’s environmental problems,” says Diamond, “is trying to forget about there being any most important thing we need to do. Instead, there are dozen things and we’ve got to get them all right.”

EDEN WRECKED

The Haiti/Dominican Republic border; Completely deforested on the Haitian side; "Charcoal cartel" beginning to make inroads on the Dominican side

Where did all the forests go? The stats are as numbing as the satellite photos are stark:

• 1492: Columbus stops by. 75% of what would become Haiti covered in trees

• 1664: The French West India Company formed. Millions of trees chopped & harvested to create massive plantations. African slaves by the tens of thousands are imported to provide labor.

• 1825: French agree to recognize Haiti’s freedom, won in 1804, in exchange for 150 million francs (later reduced to 90 million). This puts the country in deep debt from which it never recovers. Much of the country’s timber wealth (mahogony) ships out for a song.

• 1940: An estimated 30% of country still forested

• 1970: Only 10% forested. People depend on charcoal made from wood for cooking. By contrast, government subsidizes gas stoves in the Dominican Republic

• 2010: Less than 1% forested. “Charcoal cartels” start chopping down trees across the Dominican border. Eroded land silts up lake, floods key road to Port-au-Prince. $40 million need to build alternate road.

LOW TECH / LOW COST: SOLUTIONS IN PROBLEMS

In a twist of dust-to-dust poetry, some of the answers to Haiti’s most intractable problems can be found in the one thing that Haiti has in abundance: waste.

About 10 years ago, MIT D-Lab founder Amy Smith, took a group of students to Haiti, where they were inspired by a local entrepreneur who had developed a way to make charcoal briquettes from scrap paper.  Smith’s team improved the process, using agricultural waste as feedstock. In 2006, she presented the results at the TED conference.

The upsides are stunning: No trees cut. A better product. Makes money for the producers. And since charcoal generates less smoke than wood, fewer cases of cooking fire smoke-induced acute respiratory illness, the leading cause of death for those under 5 years old in developing countries.

The process continues to be improved. Here is a step-by-step DIY field demo by Smith:

SHIT HAPPENS – THAT’S GOOD NEWS

SOIL, a small American non-profit operating in Haiti, has a plan for turning one of the country’s foulest, most intractable public health issues into a plus: transforming smelly poop into fragrant fertile compost. “Instead of potting soil, potty soil.”

Composting toilets themselves are nothing new, but developing a sustainable community-supported model for their use is – and  key to the group’s over-arching mission to reduce poverty via “liberation ecology.” With the likes of Partners in Health co-founder Paul Farmer and The Land Institute’s Wes Jackson on their all-star advisory board, they have a better shot than most at getting the plan to work.

In March, 2009, the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof took a tour with SOIL staffers Sasha Kramer and Sarah Brownell:

SOIL’s approach parallels MacArthur genius Will Allen‘s vermiculture-based urban farms. The flagship 3-acre Growing Power farm, located just a few blocks from Milwaukee’s largest public housing project, is a stunning example of ecosystem-thinking applied to intensive agriculture. And it all begins with worms chowing down on municipal waste, turning garbage into fertile black gold. Allen also weaves in aquaponics – a freshwater closed loop fish-operation (perch, tilapia). Plants are nourished by fish-poo water, which filters down back to the fish. Could such a system work in Haiti? It certainly seems worth investigating.

HIGH TECH HELP

Tree-planting, briquettes, compost toilets and urban farming don’t require a lot of complicated moving parts or all that much money. Their simplicity is an essential part of why they might make a real difference. But high tech tools can help make these good ideas even more effective.

• Mapping: Tools to track and predict deforestation, including illegal logging, and to help identify good sites for reforestation projects.

• Communications: Connecting charcoal briquette producers with ag waste sources and with customers; Web-based how-to guides on how to make charcoal briquettes, tree-care tips, etc.

• Fundraising: M-giving and other philanthropy tools, e.g., develop a game where players grow a cyber-forest – download proceeds to support a real forest.

RELATED READING / VIEWING:

“After the earthquake: Haiti’s deforestation needs attention” by Moises Velasquez-Manoff (Christian Science Monitor)

“Agroforestry and sustainable resource conservation in Haiti: A Case Study” by Nathan McClintock

U.S. Senate Bill 1183: Haiti Reforestation Act of 2009 introduced by Senator Dick Durbin

“Haiti and the Dominican Republic: One Island, Two Worlds” by Jared Diamond (excerpt from “Collapse”)

“Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” by Jared Diamond (book)

“Jared Diamond on why societies collapse” (TED talk – video)

The Charcoal Project (website)

Growing Power (website)

“The Farm Next Door: Urban Agriculture, Biomimicry, Aquaponics, Why Worms are Priceless & How Will Allen Aims to Fix the World” by J.A. Ginsburg (Trackerblog)

“Google Earth boosts deforestation monitoring capabilities” by Rhett A. Butler (Mongabay.com)

A special TrackerNews page with news, info and resources relevant to Haitian relief and reconstruction; A prototype “sketch” for a personal aggregation tool; Hi-tech meets What-tech?; Haiti’s legacy

At TrackerNews, we tell stories by collecting and connecting links. Unlike most aggregators  that are driven by by dateline or popularity, we are interested in context, mixing news stories and research papers, conference videos and book sites, archived articles and blog posts from the field. Typically, between 4 and 6 story groups about health (human / animal / eco), humanitarian work and technology are on the site at any given time, setting the stage for the alchemy of cross-disciplinary insight. Eventually, everything ends up in a searchable database. Day by day, link by link, a broadly defined beat becomes a richer archive, a deeper resource.

Very occasionally, major breaking news stories  – a hurricane, disease outbreak, political unrest, climate conference – have taken over the entire site. But the Haitian earthquake stands apart with its mix of staggering devastation, technological hope, massive global response, cascading threats (disease, looting, hurricanes), ecological horror (the fertile skin of  the land has literally been stripped bare from deforestation) and the glimmering potential to right more than three centuries of unspeakable wrongs rooted in the slave trade.

For two weeks, dozens upon dozens of Haiti-related links have coursed through the TrackerNews columns. More have been tweeted via @TrackerNews. Now we have created a special permanent TrackerNews: Haiti resources page.

As is the TrackerNews style, it includes a mix of links to news stories, organization websites, web tools, wiki’s, apps, books, reports, magazines and blogs. It is a work in progress and covers the following categories (to start -more can be added as needed):

• Aid/Funding
• Disaster Tech / Mapping / Mobile
• Earthquakes
• Food & Agriculture
• General News (MSM)
• Haiti
• Heath: Human / Animal
• Human Rights
• Humanitarian Design
• Light / Power
• Money / Microfinance
• Reforestation / Charcoal
• Shelter / Infrastructure
• United Nations
• Water / Sanitation

The drop down box beneath the “red bar” is the easiest way to navigate around the page.

As encompassing as the approach may be, this is not intended as a be-all, end-all list. Wherever possible, we link to sources that have more detailing listings on a particular subject (e.g., Charity Navigator, UNHCR’s List of NGO partners, the ICT4Peace list of mapping sites, etc.).

On the other hand, there are links you likely won’t find elsewhere, or find easily. For example, last March, the Canadian Foundation for the Americas published a special all Haiti edition of its magazine, Focal Point, which included link to economist Paul Collier’s report to the U.N. on Haiti’s development prospects (see “Rebuilding” subcategory under “Haiti”).

There is also a link to another report detailing lessons learned from three decades of humanitarian response to earthquake disasters. (This one was gleaned from a tweet by TED conference director Chris Anderson – sources are everywhere!)

There are several links about urban agriculture – a perennial TrackerNews favorite – including a couple of stories on nearby Cuba’s success (see “Urban Agriculture” subcategory under “Food / Ag”)

From solar cell phones to microwind technology, from crisis-mapping to eco-toilets, TrackerNews: Haiti covers the gamut. You may not find exactly what you are looking for, but chances are good there will be a link to another site that will get you closer.

Frankly, however, the site isn’t nearly good enough. It is limited by inevitable editor bias and filter and by language. That’s why we are working to develop a tool that would allow anyone to curate, aggregate and share groups of links set within a graphically intuitively and flexible template. Imagine creating as many categories and sub-categories as needed, and arranging them however made the most sense to you.

Or imagine if categories prepared in advance of a disaster by experts in various areas of humanitarian response. A special TrackerNews page could be put together within a matter of hours, crowdsourced and customized – which is just a taste of what we hope to be able to provide in the future.

In the meantime, we hope you find the Haiti page useful, and that in some small way it helps Haiti.

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HI-TECH MEETS WHAT-TECH?

Within hours on the 7.0 earthquake on January 12, space satellite cameras began snapping the ultimate in aerial views, while videos of the enormous dust cloud floating above a crumbled Port-au-Prince began posting to YouTube and CNN’s Anderson Cooper dashed off to the airport.

Within days, text message philanthropy had bloomed into a national obsession and an Israeli team managed set up a best-in-class field hospital, complete with electronic medical records, telemedicine hook-ups and a neonatal unit, while everyone else sat waiting for supplies. Google set up a “Person Finder” service in English, Kreyol, French and Spanish.

Within a week, Ushahidi, a “crisis mapping” website born of a corrupt Kenyan election, and Reuters’ newly-minted Emergency Information Service  (EIS) had launched a sort of “911″ text service for Haitians to type for help by cell phone (#4636). “Crisis Camps” began sprouting up all over the country, attracting candy-fueled, sleep-starved coding crusaders by the hundreds.

Translations into Haitian Kreyol? Crowdsource! Injured, trapped and waiting for rescue? There’s an app for that! A global fund-raiser? Call George Clooney and MTV, write a song and sell albums (lots of them) via the iTunes store!

And yet, for all the bountiful, brilliant and sometimes bizarre can-do technical triumphs, the grim reality of Haiti’s disastrous condition before this latest catastrophe means there will be no quick fixes.

Case in point: food delivery. The never-was-very-good infrastructure of Port-au-Prince is so shredded, the World Food Program had to nix air food drops in the city for fear that wind generated by helicopters would further weaken quake-cracked buildings. Roads are wrecked and hundreds of thousands of people are on the move. What do you do?

Or consider shelter. While aftershocks continue to jangle masonry and nerves, an estimated one million newly homeless sleep outdoors beneath makeshift tents. Aid groups say tens of thousands of real tents are needed. But with hurricane season only a few months away, tents are a short-term solution at best.

The reconstruction effort is expected to cost billions of dollars and take at least 10 years – but that’s only if there are no more major earthquakes or killer storms. Even if Haiti is spared, there will be other disasters elsewhere that will demand the world’s attention.

Perhaps the legacy of the Haitian tragedy will be that the world didn’t leave it stranded, that life for Haiti’s people actually improved and that some of the tech developed and lessons learned from this nightmare were able to help others in the future.

In the meantime, here is a list compiled by the Foundation Center’s blog, Philantopic, of who’s doing what where. They could all use some support.