Tag: impact

Categories
business

Efficient hippie

Driven by a sense of purpose, Simonne Wood is chair of Sustainable Dunedin City.   Simonne has worked in fair trade, in international relations, in an ethical property company, and now Otago Polytechnic – all “organisations looking to change the world in a positive way”.

 

Samuel Mann with Simonne Wood [ 57:13 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Talking points

A sense of it being possible to change things

Sustainable language has been co-opted by the elite

Collective impact, a sense that we can all take responsibility for small things

The big challenge is how to do values at scale

You can make a difference, or at least you have a right to try

Sustainable: Trying to live a life without waste and I think waste is what really upsets me, and that’s not waste in the narrow sense of rubbish but rather about people, resources and nature just being wasted.  We’re trying to move to a sense of regeneration, interacting together. 

Superpower: I’m an efficient hippie! Being someone who has fairly non-mainstream opinions and maybe quite idolising views about creating a better world, but someone who executes change in an un-hippie like, effective and efficient way.

Activist:I’m an activist in the sense that I strongly believe in our personal responsibility to take action, for me that mostly means doing things in a non-confrontational way. I believe that most people would like to do the right thing if they knew more about it, so instead of being an angry activist I work to educate people about the issue.

Motivation: The sense of not letting things go to waste as well as knowing that there is an intrinsic value in every person and the natural world that shouldn’t be spoilt and wasted.

Challenges: I would like to get more involved in climate change, water quality and the reduction of waste in the Dunedin City area.

Advice: Sign up to the SDC (Sustainable Dunedin City) newsletter and get involved with the events within the community.

 

Categories
computing energy

Footprints of digital infrastructure

danielSchien-01

Knowing the impact can be used to start a conversation, to reflect on choices.

Samuel Mann with Daniel Schien [ 55:34 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Dr Daniel Schien is an expert on the footprint of digital infrastructure. We talk about his background – Informatics in Berlin, developing software in Australia and teaching computing in Afghanistan. His research has involved the environmental impact of the transformation of the Guardian newspaper. He also teaches teaching environmental management and is involved in Green Hackathon.

Talking points

I was always interested of questions of ethical concern

Curriculum was technical content but it was informatics so questions of ethics and intersection of computers and society, not just the numbers.

Understanding of the consequence of future business

In making a comment on the environmental impact of a service we need to be clear that we are not making a comment on its value from another perspective. …that technology might be liberating…we are not claiming that environmental sustainability is the only criteria that should be applied.

Systems methods of dealing with the complexity of so-called wicked problems.

How can you deal with this wicked problem with no single optimisation criteria

The goal is to make sure that communities who are often marginalised in decision making…when other organisations are dominating the decision making, marginalising some actors. There is a potential here to make a change for good by teaching environmental managers -giving them the tools to involve everybody who is affected.

The Green Doors was a project to see how can we use ICT to make other practices more sustainable

(Superhero) Because I’m a computer scientist I’ve got an understanding of the anatomy of digital systems, but I bring into this a passion for sustainability, and an awareness of processes in the social domain. That’s a good starting point for doing this interdisciplinary work.

(Success) Daughter.

(Activist) No, my work takes place professionally. Activist compromises professional activities.

Guardian, making a difference…environmental footprint, I hope that other organisations follow

Chance here to create more awareness for consumers about the sustainability implications of consuming these services…a decision support tool. Knowing the impact can be used to start a conversation, to reflect on choices. The goal is not to blame people, to make people feel guilty, but to create more awareness and understanding.

By exposing themselves to criticism they should be applauded while other players are shying of that risk.

(Motivation) Chance to make a difference

(Challenges) having impact from academic position

Miracle: The biggest environmental concerns I have are around transportation, domestic heating and consumption.

Advice: trying to remain cool and aware, not too frantic about trying to play academic game

Categories
law planning policy

Fragmented landscape: fragmented law

Pip Wallace

Just as we know our landscapes are fragmented, so too is our law. A double-up of our problems.

Pip Wallace [ 53:51 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Dr Pip Wallace is convenor of the environmental planning programmes at Waikato University. We ask her why she has described environmental law as a fragmented landscape.

Talking points

Often there is not careful recognition of the environment’s rights.

A lot of the work I’ve done recently looks at how the law works to distribute harm and benefit to non-human aspects of the environment.

The law is focussed on the regulation of people and their actions in relation to how we use and allocate environmental resources

The definition of the environment at law is huge – it involves people and communities as well.

There are core frameworks, some of which have core principles – resource use and how far you can go, but in my mind they are a bit weak in terms of protecting the environment.

(How does law cope with the complexity of the environment?) Recent work that I’ve been doing suggests we’re not dealing with it very well in a range of areas. I’ve come to the conclusion that we have problems with the level of standard that we apply in terms of protecting the environment, we have real problems with being consistent across environments and across species. We also have considerable difficulty in implementing what we say we intend to do.

Just as we know our landscapes are fragmented, so too is our law. A double-up of our problems.

This is especially problematic for fauna moving across a fragmented landscape.

Law relies on scientific definitions, but has great difficulty with topics such as resilience that have a clear scientific definition but has been transposed into socio-cultural areas as well, the word becomes used in different ways. Same for ecological integrity…sustainable management.

Wildlife Protection Act, absolute protection from direct harm…but premise diluted by how the law is constructed and applied.

There’s a very muddy area related to incidental take – a poor intersection between the Resource Management Act and the premise of absolute protection in the Wildlife Act. The law suggests they should be protected, but the implementation is not good in New Zealand.

The Resource Management Act…sets out a framework in relation to all resources.

The Resource Management Act was ground breaking…it followed a philosophy of integration. Prior to that a lot of our law was in pieces. It came into being along with the understanding about the interconnection of our resources, and that you can’t direct deal with these things in isolation. The law was designed to reflect the interconnection of resources and nature – dealing with all aspects at once, together. This was clever – a good thing to do.

It was also governed by the purpose of sustainable management – which introduced the idea of environmental limits. Again, very progressive and good.

There are attempts to weaken the Act now, I find that frankly hard to understand. Why you would ever need to weaken the environmental protection provided by the RMA when in my view it is insufficient.

Around 5% of resource consents are notified, below 1% are declined.

Instead what we are seeing is intensifying and increasing loss of biodiversity, increasing numbers of threatened species and an increasingly degraded environment.

To strengthen the RMA, we should be more robust about enabling coexistence.

How we deal with avoidance of effects is not very brave.

Spatial effects such as corridors are not well managed by law.

Wildlife property of the crown, it is seriously struggling to manage its property.

Mobility in the past was a survival strategy has become a liability in the anthropocene. (Kakapo versus petrel).

Changes can be made.

Life can be hard – we should always try.

We are not applying precautionary principles with sufficient active intent.

I believe that if we plan and conserve the environment then we’ll have a better chance than we do currently.

I think it is the belief that we can have access to everything that is driving the problem. We need to look at our patterns of consumption and the way we use resources and consider what it is we wish to leave for our future generations. I’m sure we will be viewed as a very profligate generation, I’m sure that people will look back and heap shame upon us for our inability to control our consumptive choices. We are all responsible for that. We shouldn’t say “it’s a wicked problem, there’s nothing we can do about it”, I think we need to affect change sooner and be more thoughtful about the choices we do leave our children and grandchildren.

We are driving production because we are buying it.

Should future generations have access to pristine resources?

People who are environmental planning…genuinely interested and engaged in a sustainable ethic and wanting to make a difference. But room for a range of perspectives.

Planning an uncertainty and scientific uncertainty is one of the greatest challenges of any planning or policy

(Activist?) No.

(Motivation?) Deep love for this country and kids

(Challenges?) Persevere with improving systems to work better to do what they are supposed to do.

(Miracle?) Enough food and clean water for every creature. But if I could have one more miracle, on a more local scale, it would see taiko the black petrel, back breeding successfully on mainland New Zealand sites

(Advice?) It is incumbent upon us to be positive about our world.

Categories
geography

Professor with impact

Richard Morgan

There will be conflict, so we need people to recognise those different values.

Richard Morgan [ 53:17 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Prof Richard Morgan teaches and researches environmental management and impact assessment in University of Otago’s Geography Department. A biogeographer who initially worked on the New Forest, his interests broadened to include the investigation of the impacts human activities on soil systems, and from there to the total environment, including humans. He now applies impact assessment to a diverse range of areas such as Health Impact Assessment.

Talking points

(Water is a resource management problem) – we have to measure what is available, how do we understand the demand for that, how we understand what are the competing demands and how they affect each other, what sort of decision making process is appropriate? Do we simply put a price on water and let people with money buy as much as they need? or do we have some sort of collaborative allocation process?

Water is one of the most contentious issues globally – between communities, between nations. Building dams and denying flows across boundaries, who has access to drinking water and who doesn’t. So understanding how much there is, understanding the seasonal cycles, the natural disruptions to supply, how many droughts we’re going to get in the next 50 years, this is all about having a good understanding that we can then feed into decisions about allocation and sensible usage.

Environmental management is coming in from a different perspective compared to management of an organisation, but we’re still trying to instill professional thinking about how we deal with that.

(Management doesn’t tend work at very long time scales, or to work in areas of finite resources or irreversible decisions) No, and they do have a habit of imposing a discount on their cost/benefit analysis that is ludicrous if you try and do that in natural resources – it just doesn’t work, but that’s not insurmountable.

Different time scales, different spatial scales, being aware of that, and recognising the issues that can arise in those different temporal, spatial scales is important.

The big switch in the last 10-20 years has been recognising values – not just monetary value or narrow utilitarian values – it’s cultural, it’s spiritual, it’s ecological, it’s social – how we take that into account is quite an important area of discussion.

Decision makers are now much more aware that they can’t just take a number, and say “we’ll go with the number and not these expressions of opinion”, now they might be more swayed by good, well founded passionate opinion from a local community than an accountant saying “this is worth so many dollars”.

(Book reference: Stone – do trees have standing? )
How do we play that in our value systems? Deep ecologist: of course. Utilitarian ecologist: well a healthy ecosystem needs those species, we can’t do without them, if we take them out the system is degraded… so it depends on how people what to consider it on a personal philosophical level – then my job as an academic is to point people to those values and say “so what do you think?”.

There will be conflict, so we need people to recognise those different values.

It’s values, every time.

That expression of value is becoming much more important…with increasing recognition of Maori values sets over water, for example, there has had to be a recognition of a holistic sometimes spiritual and ecological and utilitarian set of values.

Sustainability is a moral stance

The sustainability word is problematic because it does take on different meanings for different people, and it doesn’t matter how many academic publications there are saying there are these 5-10 different types of sustainability, that term is owned by the wider population and they will use it as they see fit.

I think what is more important is the ethos, the basic ethos that we need to think carefully about how we live, and how that affects the environment that includes people.

We are making choices every day in what we do, and we need to be thinking about how some of those choices might be having rather unfortunate effects, especially in the longer term.

Fashions change in terms of issues, but the basic ethos that has emerged is human as a species need to think very carefully about how we live, how we use resources – we’ve got to be much more efficient about how we reuse, we’ve got to be much more careful with things that can’t be be reused, choose resources that are not going to pollute to the same extent – I think that message is widely understood. Sustainability is a label that sort of goes over that but perhaps is a bit fuzzy. Maybe we should just talk about the ethos and not worry about the label.

(Motivation?) I’m still keen on being a university academic, every year there’s new minds coming in, new challenging questions, it makes us stop, rethink, perhaps change positions. It’s energising and rejuvinating every year, constantly being challenged.

(Are the new minds changing?) they do want jobs, but still they question and challenge.

(Activist?) No, prodder, questioner. I tend to be in the background. I want to stimulate people’s thinking. I think we have to be quite careful about that – we can’t stand up and say “I’m a professor of geography and therefore my value set should influence you”. But I can stand up and say “me personally, I think this, what do you guys think?”.

(Challenges?) Hand over area of work in impact assessment nationally and internationally – but not fade away too much.

(Miracle?) Solution to sequestering carbon

We shouldn’t be relying on a technical fix, but we should be trying our hardest to cover our options.

(Advice?) Get a good night sleep.