China: wheat crop failure

It is a one-size-fits-all news story, good for almost any part of the world right now: Cue the video to a farmer standing in a field of parched and stunted plants. Then cut to b-roll of cattle carcasses dotting the landscape, rivers barely trickling, reservoirs sinking fast and caked mud at the bottom of village wells. Under unrelentingly cheerful skies, tell a tale of thirst, hunger, devastation and death.

Kenya: 2 years, no rain

A drought is a stealth disaster. There are no headline-grabbing satellite images of hurricane swirls, no “iReporter” videos of towns blown apart by tornados, no families perched on roofs desperate to escape rising floodwaters, no photographs of cities buried under snow. A drought has a different, much slower rhythm. The signs — a warming ocean, a shift in the wind — are subtle. But the effects can reverberate across continents, last for years, even decades, and spare nothing in its path.

Argentina: dying cattle

Like recessions, droughts are declared official well after serious damage has already been done. It takes time for a patch of pleasant sunny weather to morph into a severe drought. And although scientists have become better at interpreting data for predictions (reading teak rings in Indonesia), options for prevention remain pretty much non-existent. Whether or not man-made climate change is at least in part responsible for the current spike in droughts — as many suspect — the odds of man changing the climate back any time soon are pretty slim.

Taking more of an address-the-symptom-never-mind-the-cause approach, the Chinese bullied a few inches of snow to fall in Beijing by assaulting the heavens with a barrage of  silver iodide-loaded cloud-seeding missiles. But beyond a brief uptick in the number of  tourists at the Great Wall and a little frosty fun in the city, not much changed.

Australia: the "big dry"

Meanwhile, the best plan to prepare for lean harvests remains the old biblical stand-by of stashing away surplus reserves from good harvests. But what do you do when global grain stores are running low and almost every “bread basket” farming region in the world is buckling under the same wilting weather report?

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• Australia: Roughly 40% of the harvest, including $13.5 in exports sold mostly to Asia and the Middle-East, comes from the drought-plagued Murray Darling basin. Irrigated crops such as rice and grapes have been particularly had hit, but even native eucalyptus trees have taken a hit, with a staggering 80% stressed or dead. Water reserves are at just 16% of capacity. To make matters worse, algae are blooming and fish are dying in the warmth of shallower waters.

• The Middle-East: Australia’s bleak harvest is especially bad news here since the region is reeling under its own extreme drought. Annual rainfall totals in Jordan are down over 70%, while Israel experiencing its hottest, driest winter in 60 years. In Iraq, the marshlands of Garden of Eden and Marsh Arab fame are drying up. Water wars are heating up in comparatively moist Lebanon, exacerbated by out-of-date irrigation systems and a growing population. Everything is that much worse in the West Bank and Gaza with the Palestine Water Authority calling the situation “dangerous.”

• California: The recent decision by the federal government to turn off the spigot, at least temporarily, to irrigate the state’s Central Valley farms may have been inevitable, but it didn’t make the damage any easier to take: $2 billion in losses, 850,000 acres out of production, as many as 80,000 jobs lost. Although recent heavy rains helped, the problem is deeper. Or higher. The snowpack that feeds the streams that feed the Colorado river that supplies irrigation water is down by 40%. Ironically, the rains could make things worse, leading a burst of plant growth that will dry out just in time for fire season. In the meantime, sky-high alfalfa prices are threatening the entire dairy industry. Farmers, faced with losing money on every cow, are now sending them to the slaughterhouse instead of the milking barn, while horses, sometimes by the herd, are simply being abandoned by their owners. Elsewhere, Texas is toast and Florida’s looking pretty crispy.

• Kenya & Somalia: According to the World Food Program, 10 million people in Kenya are in urgent need of food aid. The impact of drought has been magnified by political violence and a fractured infrastructure. People are being forced to walk further and further – at great personal risk – simply to get water. It hasn’t rained in two years, the maize harvest is a complete bust and what little ground cover has managed to grow isn’t enough to support livestock. Just over the border in Somalia, the situation is just as dire. Families by the thousands are pouring into urban areas desperate for help. Meanwhile, some aid organizations have reportedly left the area due to fighting between Islamists and pro-government forces.

• Afghanistan: Drought has added yet another layer of complication to an already volatile situation. Taliban fighters in Pakistan routinely attack the Khyber Pass, which is used by the aid workers as well as military convoys to deliver supplies.

• Argentina: Rains have finally come to Argentina, but as in California, it may be too little, too late for many. The worst drought in a half-century has devastated this year’s corn crop, with yields down more than third from last year. An estimated 1.5 million cattle have been died. The  economic tally? Over $5 billion.

• Northern India: The state of  Uttarakhand is almost entirely dependent on rainfall and snow melt  for farming and lately there hasn’t been much. Warmer temperatures has also caused mustard, a key crop, to flower prematurely, reducing yields.

• China: A massive 240 million-acre drought, the worst in 50 years, has left an estimated 4.4 million people and 2 million livestock literally high and dry. Rainfall in some areas is less than 10% of normal totals, threatening half the wheat crop. And due to the global recession, factories in the cities have shut down, leaving an estimated 20 million migrant farm workers with nowhere else to go. Ironically, the water shortage may have been exacerbated by China’s extensive reservoir system, which has diverted water from underground aquifers and increased surface evaporation.

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TrackerNews has been full of  stories over the last few months painting the same grim picture:

• The Sea of Japan absorbs only half has much CO2 as it used to. Scientists suspect warmer water temperatures have changed the pattern of vertical currents known as “ventilation.” The water on top has essentially become saturated with CO2.  If it turns out this is happening in other oceans, the ramifications are immense. Oceans absorb about a quarter of human-generated CO2

• All this CO2 is making the oceans more acidic, which is destroying coral reefs, along with anything else unfortunate enough to rely on a calcium carbonate shell. That, in turn, is making it more difficult for stressed fisheries to recover, leading to higher food prices and hunger. The circle may be even more vicious. Researchers have just discovered that fish play a key role in marine carbon sequestration. Fish excrete vast quantities of calcium carbonate as a result of drinking seawater. Scientists speculate that climate-warmed seas would speed up fish metabolism leading to increased excretions. But fewer fish means a net decrease and less calcium carbonate in the water to neutralize acidity.

• Canadian forests are now carbon emitters. A combination of drought, logging, beetles, milder winters (warm enough to allow beetles to survive) and fire have turned 1.2 million square miles-worth of carbon sink solution into part of the problem.

Clearly, if we are going to make any headway with this disaster, we are going to have to come up with goals considerably bolder than “carbon neutral.” Optimistically, we are thisclose to an irreversible tipping point. According to yet another depressing study, global warming could trigger massive marine “dead zones” persisting for thousands of years.

BIOCHAR, a.k.a. AGRICHAR, a.k.a., TERRA PRETA:  OLD TECH TO THE RESCUE

Soil holds more carbon than the combined totals of the vegetation than grows in it and the atmosphere above it. And soil laced with biochar, a special charcoal made in a low oxygen burn, is particularly good at sequestering carbon. It also reduces nitrous oxide emissions, which is significant because molecule for molecule, nitrous oxide packs about 300 times the greenhouse gas punch as CO2.

That’s not why pre-Columbian Amazonians, who were the first to figure out how to make it, liked it. Bichar improves soil fertility. Its porous structure provides an inviting matrix for microbes and nutrients. It holds water more efficiently. Rootlets and other soil dwellers have an easier time navigating the depths.

Pockets of Terra Preta can still be found in South America – soil that is strikingly black amidst washed out, nutrient-poor rain forest dirt. Even after thousands of years, it still hold its richness and ability to sequester carbon. In short, biochar is a proven long-term option for reducing atmospheric carbon, with the added bonus of improving crop yields.

Tim Flannery (“The Weathermakers“) suspects it may be “the single most important initiative for humanity’s environmental future,” while James Lovelock (“The Revenge of Gaia“) suspects it may be our only chance:

So are we doomed?

JL: There is one way we could save ourselves and that is through the massive burial of charcoal. It would mean farmers turning all their agricultural waste – which contains carbon that the plants have spent the summer sequestering – into non-biodegradable charcoal, and burying it in the soil. Then you can start shifting really hefty quantities of carbon out of the system and pull the CO2 down quite fast.

Would it make enough of a difference?

JL: Yes. The biosphere pumps out 550 gigatonnes of carbon yearly; we put in only 30 gigatonnes. Ninety-nine per cent of the carbon that is fixed by plants is released back into the atmosphere within a year or so by consumers like bacteria, nematodes and worms. What we can do is cheat those consumers by getting farmers to burn their crop waste at very low oxygen levels to turn it into charcoal, which the farmer then ploughs into the field. A little CO2 is released but the bulk of it gets converted to carbon. You get a few per cent of biofuel as a by-product of the combustion process, which the farmer can sell. This scheme would need no subsidy: the farmer would make a profit. This is the one thing we can do that will make a difference, but I bet they won’t do it…. (“We’re doomed, but it’s not all bad”)

NEXT STEPS

"This book, I believe, provides the basic information required to allow implementation of the single most important initiative for humanity's environmental future" Tim Flannery

Interest in biochar has increased over the last few years, though it is still mostly soil scientists talking excitedly to one another.  The International Biochar Initiative, chaired by Cornell’s Johannes Lehmann, has helped focus efforts. There are currently research projects in nine countries, several conferences on the calendar and a new book due out in March.

Yet the big dollars for underground carbon sequestration about going into drilling projects. The U.S. Department of Energy has spent nearly a half billion dollars trying to figure out how to inject CO2 from coal plant smokestacks into rock deep beneath the surface — with precious little to show for it so far.

Imagine if that money had been invested into wind, solar, geothermal, smart grids and biochar. Reduced emissions. Increased carbon sequestration. Let’s aim for carbon negative! Given the alternative, it certainly seems worth a try.

So tell your friends. Tell everybody. Biochar: better climate through charcoal.

* related post: Matchmaking: On Soil, Lost Ideas, Terra Preta, Carbon Sequestration and Amy B. Smith

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Reported Incidents of Somali Pirate Attacks and Hijackings in the Gulf of Aden - UNOSAT

When the Great Somali Pirate story broke into the headlines last week, the media’s first reaction was to make a joke of it. Pirates are Jack Sparrow, popcorn, a night on the couch for a cable-movie marathon and one of the best film scores ever. Piracy is a fake Fendi. Yes, buckles are swashed (if not copied), alcoholism is a job requirement, and mythic monsters are part of the scenery. But pirates are heroes. The villains are the bloodless bureaucrats driven only by corporate greed. Ask any little kid: Who wants to be the tea-sipping dressed-for-success executive from the East India Company for Halloween? Who wants to swill a bit o’ rum and sing about rotten eggs as Captain Jack?

While the pirates of Disneyland swaggered around an imaginary 17th century Caribbean, the 21st century pirates of Somalia, a rag-tag bunch of 1,500 men with nothing to lose and millions of dollars to gain, patrol the Gulf of Aden, holding the world hostage. Still, it is difficult, at least for me, not to take a moment to savor the image of a supertanker stowing $100 million worth of a climate-threatening fossil fuel literally stuck in the water – a perversely green turn of events.

"The Fragility of Domestic Energy," by Amory and L. Hunter Lovins, The Atlantic, November, 1983

News of a robust modern pirate trade took many by surprise, though not the folks at UNOSAT, who have been diligently charting and mapping attacks for some time. Nor was it a surprise to relief workers, who started using escort vessels courtesy of NATO and the Netherlands in 2007 to protect shipments of vital food aid for 2 million people.

Nor was it news to Amory and L. Hunter Lovins who, 25 years ago this month, penned a long article for The Atlantic magazine spelling out in great detail the dangers of sprawling energy delivery networks:

On shipping: (emphasis added)

…The lumbering supertankers that bring Middle Eastern
oil halfway around the world to Western ports are also
insecure. Naval planners shudder at the tankers’ vulnerability
to submarines, but even pirates in small boats manage
regularly to board and rob tankers off the coasts of
Singapore and Nigeria. Moreover, it is not at all unusual.

Somalia may have been left off the list, but the point is made. As for Nigeria, protesters / militants seem to prefer pipeline sabotage.

(Also see the Bowoto vs. Chevron case currently working its way through U.S. Courts. At issue: Whether the oil giant, enlisting the Nigerian military, used lethal force against unarmed peaceful protesters who occupied an oil platform.)

On drilling for oil off the coast of the U.S.:

Offshore oil is favored by the secretary of the interior,
James Watt, as a secure substitute for Persian Gulf oil. The
Coast Guard says that in good weather it could put a vessel
alongside a threatened platform in the main Gulf of Mexico
fields in eight hours. Only an incompetent saboteur could
fail to destroy the platform in eight minutes.

On the Trans-Alaska Pipeline:

Our research revealed a comprehensive denial of reality:
policy-makers tend to be so preoccupied with Persian Gulf
oil that they fail to consider the frailty of their favorite
alternatives. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline, for example, carries
a seventh of all the crude oil fed to American refineries.
Its failure would cost more than $700 per second*, and
in three winter weeks could turn the line into “the world’s
biggest Chapstick,” as 9 million barrels of hot oil congealed
inside. (The pipeline’s proprietors believe that the
pumps are powerful enough to get the oil moving again,
but no one knows for sure.)

* 1982 dollars

Just last week, a recently-retired EPA investigator blew the whistle on what looks like sweetheart deal between BP and the U.S. Department of Justice over a fine levied against just such a “Chapstick” spill in 2006. According to the investigator, BP had a full year’s warning that corrosion in a section of pipeline could lead to a catastrophic failure at any time. BP was charged with a misdemeanor and fined $20 million, but since oil prices spiked at news of the pipeline shutdown, it is hard to know how much the company’s profits suffered, if at all.

Beyond Alaska, a simple Google search yields a gusher of problem pipeline stories. Indeed, one website – “Iraq Pipeline Watch“  lists 469 incidents just in that one country going back to 2003 (as of March 2008, only sporadic updates).

On alternatives:

According to a study released by the Solar Energy
Research Institute in 1981, the U.S. could double its energy
efficiency and convert at least a third of its energy supply
to renewable sources within the next two decades. The
institute’s data suggest that such a shift could save several
trillion dollars, make the energy sector deflationary, and
provide as many as a million jobs.

Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? Imagine what the world would have been like in 2001 – two decades later – had this path been followed.

When the Lovins’ wrote their article, foreign oil imports accounted for about 10% of the total energy supply in the U.S., and it was a buyer’s market. Today, the U.S. imports 60% of its oil, 16% of its natural gas, faces stiff competition for resources – primarily from China and India – and a much more volatile and vulnerable world.

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Watching the Congressional hearings this week, where executives from the Big Three Detroit automakers begged for a multi-billion dollar bailout because “1 out of 10 American jobs depended on it,”* I kept thinking what an absurdly dumb position to find ourselves in: Why can’t factory workers be employed to build something else, something better?

After decades of lemonade-out-of-lemons “teachable moments,” haven’t we learned anything? Maybe. The new Obama administration has made jump-starting a “green economy” a top priority. It’s a win-win-win for jobs, energy independence and climate change.

What if pirates boarded an oil supertanker and no one minded? In fact, for “sequestering carbon,” they’d be paid, no extortion required. That’s the kind of easy booty that would bring a rum-soaked grin to Captain Jack’s face. Aye, matey. Yo ho to that.

* The “1 in 10″ figure is a bit misleading, as the New York Times’ Catherine Rampell explains.

It has been a real learning curve over the last few weeks figuring out the natural rhythms of TrackerNews: How often should the story list update? Is there enough balance in the mix of health, humanitarian and tech? What adds meaning and real value to a grouping of stories?

The idea for TrackerNews grew out of series of conversations bemoaning the “silos of expertise” that make it difficult to see the bigger picture, identify opportunities or develop collaborative relationships across disciplines. The hope is that a sparky enough story mix will eventually begin to draw an equally sparky mix of readers.

I am often asked about metrics. Good question. In the coming months we will no doubt be obsessing over clicks and click-through’s, but to me the most important metrics are intangible. Did someone see a story or a grouping on stories on TrackerNews that started a conversation, sparked a new line of thought or perhaps even began a chain of events leading to a collaboration? (extra credit for something cross-disciplinary…)

A part of me wonders whether people are secretly so comfortable in their oft-decried silos, they will find TrackerNews’ format more overwhelming than enlightening. We purposely decided not to segregate stories by subject, or create a typical news site with a standard navigational structure. TrackerNews is as broad as you can imagine and one page deep. Stories, or groups of stories, cycle through the columns, just as one moment follows another. The only hard-wired hierarchy is the green bar banner where one suite of stories gets special focus for a limited time.

The Haiku Challenge

In these first few “learning to walk” weeks, one of the biggest issues has been figuring out how to cover breaking news, such as hurricanes or the rumblings of war. It makes no sense to duplicate what other, much larger news organizations are doing. If the weather is going kerflooey, tune into Weather Channel, or check the wires, fergoshsakes. Rather, I have tried combining links to those larger news services, with links that provide background (research and/or older news stories) or tools (e.g., streaming audio from Congo’s only national radio station, Radio Okapi). If another website does a better job aggregating information, TrackerNews links to them (hats off to Andy Carvin’s work at the Hurricane Information Center and Hurricanwiki.org for coverage of Gustav and Ike).

The minimalist nature of TrackerNews’ links makes the selection of those links that much more critical. Much like syllables in a haiku, the limitations become a strength and a challenge. And, as I am fast learning, there is an art to it, too…

One Pill Fits All

The current quartet of “Green Bar” stories about statins is a case in point:

The video link is breaking news about a new study showing statins can prevent heart attacks in people with low cholesterol. Many expect millions more people will be put on long-term statin use as a result.

The next link is a story in the India Times about a big multinational study testing out a “polypill,” an inexpensive combo drug with aspirin, a statin and a couple of blood pressure medicines. It is designed to cheaply treat people with heart disease both in the West and in the developing world. According to the article, “17 million people die of heart disease and strokes every year and 80% of these deaths are in developing countries.”

The next link is BusinessWeek cover story from last January about “numbers needed to treat” (NNT) data for statins. Here’s the nut:

The second crucial point is hiding in plain sight in Pfizer’s own Lipitor newspaper ad. The dramatic 36% figure has an asterisk. Read the smaller type. It says: “That means in a large clinical study, 3% of patients taking a sugar pill or placebo had a heart attack compared to 2% of patients taking Lipitor.”

Now do some simple math. The numbers in that sentence mean that for every 100 people in the trial, which lasted 3 1/3 years, three people on placebos and two people on Lipitor had heart attacks. The difference credited to the drug? One fewer heart attack per 100 people. So to spare one person a heart attack, 100 people had to take Lipitor for more than three years. The other 99 got no measurable benefit. Or to put it in terms of a little-known but useful statistic, the number needed to treat (or NNT) for one person to benefit is 100.

Compare that with, say, today’s standard antibiotic therapy to eradicate ulcer-causing H. pylori stomach bacteria. The NNT is 1.1. Give the drugs to 11 people, and 10 will be cured.

Finally, I linked to a post on “germtales,” a blog I started a few years ago and for which I still write occasionally. I have a deep interest in animal health and had written about statins used as a contraceptive for wildlife. It makes sense: Eggs have cholesterol for reason. Remove it and you don’t have a viable eggs. Weirdly, statins work as a contraceptive for both boys and girls. While animals were given higher doses, they were also given fewer doses. Nobody knows what long-term low-dose use might do. Of course, humans taking statins are mostly past child-bearing age, but this is a real flag about the global effects of drugs. Even aspirin acts as both a pain reliever and a blood thinner. Before we start putting statins in the water, like fluoride, as some have suggested, it is important to consider it from all angles.

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And now I’ve done it again — written a ghastly long post. I promise in the future to work on my “pithy”. If TrackerNews can do headlines as haikus, surely I can whittle down words, too.

HeroRAT

I knew I’d seen that face before. Those cheeks. Those whiskers. That long, long tail. The giant African pouched rat – a.k.a., the giant Gambian pouched rat (Cricetomys gambianus) – was all over the headlines five years ago, fingered as the likely culprit in a first-ever outbreak in the U.S. of monkeypox (a smallpox relative).

Shift continents and the villain becomes a hero. In fact, a “HeroRAT,” with a genius for sniffing out landmines and diagnosing TB.

Bart Weetjens, an engineer with Apopo, a Belgian organization focused on “vapour detection technology,” with a emphasis on land mines and disease detection, hit upon the idea of using pouched rats about 10 years ago. The rats are smart, thrive on repetitive tasks, have a top-notch sense of smell, are cheaper to train than dogs ($3,000 to $5,000 vs. $40,000+) and literally work for peanuts. Despite its giant-by-rat-standards size (a pouched rat can weigh as much as 9 lbs), it’s too light to trip off a mine. In any case, as one journalist noted, “(t)he bonds between rats and humans are looser.”

Maybe. But on the HeroRAT website, you can read all about Allan, Chosen One, Kim and Ziko, and even Adopt-a-Rat. In their own little pouchy way, they’ve got Ratatouille charisma. Jane Goodall’s a big fan.

They’re pretty efficient, too. In 30 minutes, a rat can sniff out an area that otherwise would take a couple of days to clear. And they’re just as good at detecting plastic mines as metal ones.

There are an estimated 100 million landmines in over 90 countries, so the scale of the problem is beyond daunting. Using existing technology, it would take centuries to remove all the mines. In the meantime, dozens of people are maimed and killed each day, while social fabric fractures when people are kept from their homes and farmland is kept out of production.

The Pox

"Easy to raise and breed"

Still, as I read about interest in using HeroRats beyond their native Africa, my thoughts went back to 2003 and a sick little girl in Wisconsin who sparked a bioterror scare.

Giant Gambian pouched rats had become popular pets, a development that would, no doubt, have amazed and amused Africans who generally see them as pests, or possibly dinner.

The disease chain was convoluted, but for those tracking zoonotic diseases (illnesses that affect humans and other animals) and concerned about the largely unregulated “exotic” pet trade, it was all too predictable.

It started when a shipment from Ghana of 800 animals (9 species), including some clinically-healthy but infected pouched rats, was delivered to an outfit in Texas. The rats were then sold to a vendor in Iowa, who sold them to a dealer in Illinois, who also stocked prairie dogs. The rats infected the prairie dogs, which were then shipped to at least a dozen other states. The prairie dogs began falling ill (a rodent replay of what happened to American Indians after exposure to the smallpox virus carried by Europeans). At least one sick “doggie” ended up at a swap meet in Wisconsin, where a little girl bought it, was promptly scratched and became ill. The specter of monkeypox made the West Nile virus outbreak look like child’s play. Fear drove speculation: Was it bioterrorism? Would the virus infect wildlife and become endemic? What about person-to-person spread? Were sick patients a risk to doctors and nurses?

Thanks to some phenomenal epidemiological legwork and some lucky breaks (no person-to-person transmission), the outbreak was contained and panic faded. Monkeypox devolved into a harmless punchline on late night talk shows.

Imports of giant African pouched rats were, of course, quickly banned, but hundreds, if not thousands, were already here. Escaped rats had begun to roam wild and multiply all over Grassy Key, Florida – Jimmy Buffet territory. Last year, the Florida Depart of Natural Resources mounted what was supposed to be a final campaign to eradicate them. It didn’t work. A native Grassy Keysian I spoke with today reported seeing a rat on her driveway recently that was so big, she thought it was a cat at first. They are so big, actual cats won’t take them on.

Naturalists worry the rats will eventually find their way into the Everglades, with devastating implications. Whether as a carrier of an invasive disease, or as an invasive species infecting an ecosystem, giant African pouched rats pose a significant biothreat. That’s an important consideration for HeroRATS deployed outside of Africa.

Lab Rats: “That’s ‘Dr. Rat’ to You”

Still, as long as they’re here, perhaps we should put them to work. HeroRATS are also being trained at the Apopo lab in Tanzania to sniff for the tell-tale scent of tuberculosis in human sputum.

HeroRAT Sniffing for TB

The standard microscope test is both time-consuming and pricey. A rat can zip through 40 samples in 10 minutes with an 85+% accuracy rate, according to early tests. It would take a lab tech at least a day to do the same. Rats have even correctly diagnosed samples missed by microscopy. Considering that nearly 30% of all new TB cases are in Africa, a local, scalable solution for cheap rapid diagnostics is clear winner.

The Skoll Foundation thinks so, too, and gave Apopo a $1 million grant for social entrepreneurship last August. With funding now secure, hordes of HeroRATS will be trained to sniff for all sorts of trouble. Imagine that: Saved by rats.

Even those of us best described as “mechanically-challenged” can grasp how these inventions work — which is a big part of the point. In fact, it is #4 on Smith’s list of “Seven Rules for Low-Tech Engineering”:

Create “transparent” technologies, ones that are easily understood by the users, and promote local innovation.

Personally, I have given up hope of ever understanding all the nifty features on my too-smart-for-its-own-good cell phone. But I know I could master that corn-shucker (the “Design on $2 a Day” video includes a segment on it — note to MIT: video embed codes please…)

Rule #7 also focuses on the critical user-interface issue, but with a emphasis on design as an iterative, rather than a static, process:

Provide skills, not just finished technologies. The current revolution in design for developing countries is the notion of co-creation, of teaching the skills necessary to create the solution, rather than simply providing the solution. By involving the community throughout the design process, you can help equip people to innovate and contribute to the evolution of the product. Furthermore, they acquire the skills needed to create solutions to a much wider variety of problems. They are empowered.

My friend Ed Jezierski at InSTEDD is attempting to apply this low-tech philosophy to high-tech, setting up an “innovation lab” in Cambodia (full disclosure: TrackerNews is also a project of InSTEDD). To jump start the effort, he helped put together a one-day tech event in September – Bar Camp Phnom Penh — for which 200 people registered and 300 showed up. Clearly, Ed’s tapped into something big. Now the challenge is to make the dream real by putting together a lab where local talent develops software solutions for local and regional needs (in this case, with a focus on health systems). “All technologies go obsolete — so for true sustainability you need to assemble a team of people that will invent the ‘next thing’ — and give it the skills, capital and opportunities to do so,” he explains.

If it works, the Cambodian lab would also serve as a prototype for labs in other developing countries. Given the infrastructure hurdles (electricity, connectivity, etc.) if the concept can make it in here — to paraphrase Frank Sinatra — it can make it anywhere.

As perfectly seasonal as it all seems, 10,000 years ago – a blink in geologic time – my neck of woods was under a mile of ice. No leaves, or birds, and certainly no earthworms. The “seasons” were cold and colder. It took a warming world to melt the ice, which left behind the puddles of the Great Lakes and land that is still springing back from a glacial grip so many millennia later.

These sorts of changes are supposed to take thousands, or at least hundreds, of years. But according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) latest Arctic Report Card, they’re happening in Greenland at a breathtaking pace right now. In 2007, Greenland’s ice sheet “lost at least 100 cubic km (24 cubic miles) of ice, making it one of the largest single contributors to global sea level rise.” Autumn temperatures are up about 5 degrees Celsius (~9 degrees Fahrenheit). Greenland is turning…green.

“Sea Ice 2008,” NASA

Half of the six categories NOAA tracks – “Greenland,” “Sea Ice” and “Atmosphere” – are rated code red, indicating climate change plays the dominant role. The other three categories – “Biology,” “Ocean” and “Land” – are code yellow, meaning other factors, including natural seasonal variations, are also at work.

********

Climate change has quickly emerged as a major them on TrackerNews, with several recent links to research on climate as a driver of hurricanes, wildfires and disease spread. Bottom line: Brace for more and worse of all the above.

Now, ironically, frozen global credit markets may thwart efforts to cool the planet down.

The global downturn could scupper plans for a landmark “son of Kyoto” deal to combat climate change, green campaigners have warned.

The warning came after the European Union’s ambitious plans to combat climate change were left in disarray at the close of its summit in Brussels yesterday. Some member states are calling for the programme to be watered down on the grounds that it cannot be afforded in a downturn.

Sharp divisions over whether or not the EU’s flagship goal to cut carbon emissions by 20 per cent by 2020 can be afforded in a downturn forced the Brussels summit to put off a decision on a route map for achieving it.

(read full article from the London Independent)

But cutting carbon emissions isn’t a luxury. Not doing anything comes at a price, too. Insurance giant Munich Re’s cost estimate for natural disasters during first half of 2008 was US$50 billion. That included the tally for the earthquake in China – a climate-neutral catastrophe – but missed the hurricane season. Fully 75% of the 400 disasters analyzed through June were weather-related.

Figuring a cost of US$100 billion per year (a conservative estimate), inaction is the equivalent of a Congressional Bail-out Bill every seven years. (For more on costs, see “Humanitarian Implications of Climate Change: Mapping emerging trends and risk hotspots,” a report released last August by CARE International, UNOCHA and Maplecroft)

*******

The news from NOAA isn’t completely bleak…if you happen to be a goose. Expanding habitat, along with fewer hunters and wild predators, has helped the global goose population nearly double to just over 21 million over the last ten years. Even here, though, news is mixed. About a third of Arctic goose populations are actually in decline.

But the flocks in Chicago certainly look happy enough. They honk and streak across brilliant fall skies in V formations, like Nature’s own computer cursors pointing south. If only the rest of us could adapt as easily.

Like TrackerNews.net itself, the Editor’s blog focuses on health (human, animal, plant, and environmental), humanitarian work, and the technologies that support both. The website features links to news, research and resources, while the blog provides a little more depth and context.

Every humanitarian crisis has a health component. Every serious outbreak of disease has a humanitarian dimension. This now plays out against a backdrop of climate change. Altered weather patterns trigger floods and droughts that can affect food supplies, drive regional conflicts and expand the range of vector-borne diseases. In an ever-flattening world, regional disasters can quickly go global, while global events can have devastating local consequences. It is all of a piece.

Connecting the Dots…

Tracker is an aggregator with a few twists. Links are not limited to breaking news, but include research papers, in-depth analyses, blog and vlog posts, podcasts, videos, websites and even book reviews. A story on a major earthquake might be grouped with an older but still relevant research paper on predicting aftershocks and fresh-from-the-field blog post about a new software application for mapping damage using a cell phone.

Between 10 and 15 new links covering the range of the health-humanitarian-tech beat are added each day. Stories are not segregated by subject. Rather, the hope is that the mix will a provide a broader perspective (if only at the “peripheral vision” level) and make it easier to see connections and, perhaps, opportunities.

Finally, headline stories are not ranked by popularity — a self-reinforcing skew — but are chosen for intrinsic newsworthiness and how they add to the mix.

In contrast, resources are are organized by subject. This section includes links to organizations, professional journals, news sources and blogs, along with links to other aggregators with more depth on specific topics.

TrackerNews is the first of four planned strands that will also include Trackers on Conferences, Funding & Projects and Gear.

A Brief History

The idea for Tracker grew out of my experience as part of a large civilian / military disaster preparedness exercise called “Strong Angel III (SA3”) two years ago. For the better part of a week, hundreds of Silicon Valley’s finest gathered in a couple of crumbling buildings next to an airport runway in San Diego, intent on innovating their way to better, safer world. According to the dire scenario cooked up by SA3’s planners, terrorists had taken advantage of a global pandemic to launch a series of infrastructure-shredding cyber attacks. It was geeks to the rescue!

My job was to observe, interview and try to make sense of what was going on, writing daily summaries for a handful of SA3 organizers. No question, I had the best view in the house.

In astonishingly short order, arch competitors became supportive, enthusiastic, almost giddy collaborators. Programmers from a half dozen GIS companies worked with the team from Google Earth to figure out how to layer real-time disease surveillance and emergency data onto interactive maps. A year later, the telltale fingerprints of SA3 could be seen on news maps charting the progress of wildfires in southern California. Today, layered mapping is like email, a no-longer-miraculous part of daily digital life.

The techs faced a panel of judges much tougher than venture capitalists: a group of aid workers, veterans of floods, fires, earthquakes, war zones and refugee camps who had literally seen it all. No matter how elegant a concept, if it wasn’t practical in the field, it didn’t make the cut.

Winners and losers quickly sorted themselves out.

* Sahana’s disaster management system, developed in response to the Indonesian tsunami, was lauded for its egalitarian open-source roots, while Microsoft was rapped on the knuckles for software that barely worked with Linux and was oblivious to Apple.

* A computer and server-filled minivan with a small satellite dish strapped to its roof drove literal rings around a gas guzzling two-gallons-per-mile RV decked out with tons of medical gear.

* A lightweight satellite dish set inside a 8’ cloth globe (the “beach ball”) beat out a parking lot full of massive satellite trucks. Cheaper, requiring about 1/3 the power, it could be packed up into a couple of boxes, shippable anywhere overnight by FedEx.

My particular interest is in biology and disease surveillance, so I began imagining all sorts of mash-ups:

a cheap portable satellite dish
+ a solar refrigerator
+ rapid diagnostic tests
+ cell phones and computers (powered by micro fuel cells – let’s dream big)
+ a cell phone digital camera
+ transportation (motorized or hooved)
= one superior field lab

Researchers could collect and store samples, do on-the-spot tests, gather information, distribute vaccines, take photographs and send data back to a central lab. Wow.

Predictably, if unfortunately, the intense esprit de corps of SA3 proved impossible to sustain once everyone returned to their cubicles and daily deadlines.

I had seen this sort of thing happen before, as had Eric Rasmussen, the chief architect of Strong Angels I, II & III and now the CEO of InSTEDD. We began what became a two-year discussion on how to address the need to for better communication between people working in the health, humanitarian and tech fields.

The Tracker concept emerged as a promising approach: a lean operation with a broad reach – a tool to encourage and facilitate the exchange of news, research and ideas.

This is a beginning, a “v.1.” I am looking forward to hearing your feedbacks and ideas over the next few months. It is both a daunting and very exciting challenge.

Let’s get Tracking!

But first…

I would like to thank my colleagues at InSTEDD – Eric, Judith Kleinberg, Ed Jezierski, Robert Kirkpatrick, Mary Jane Marcus, Dennis Israelski, Taha Kass-Hout, Wendy Schultz, Susanne Jul, Luke Beckman, along with Sandro Franchi and Daniel Cazzulino – for their thoughts and leads for Tracker over the last several months. More, more, more!

Tracker was designed by DesignScout (Scout Ambrosy and Jeremy Pettis with project manager Amelia Jee), with site development and programming by Byte Studios (Michael Diedrick and Joel Glovacki).