Local Stakeholders Consultation public hearing

Photo Debberah ten Velthuis

Photo Niels Kuiper

For the Clean Development Mechanism project I am developing with HoA-REC on Addis Ababa’s landfill gas extraction, we organized and chaired a Local Stakeholders Consultation.  Read the full details on the HoA-REC website.  The meeting was held to the standards of UNFCCC CDM and Gold Standard, with 88 participants including the waste scavengers, local residents, local police, technical experts, NGO’s, and government officials.  The meeting was a great success, and the participants were especially thankful, as they expressed it was the first time they were ever consulted for their opinion on city management by the government.

30 days of GPS tracks in Addis

As an update to my previous post, some 30 days of running around Addis with my Garmin eTrex occasionally turned on, as visualized on Google Earth.

Average Certified Emission Reductions (CERs) issuance per CDM methodology

I created this graph from data sourced from the IGES CDM Project Database (updated to 1 Nov 2011).  I took the average all of the ACM carbon project methodologies to compare their performance of carbon reductions versus what the project expected to achieve.  The average performance is 78%; the highest performer is collection of methane from pig farms at 103%; and the lowest is landfill gas capture projects at 40%.

One theory I heard regarding the low performance of landfill gas projects was a poor methane prediction model that was used in years past, which has been replaced by a better model.  I checked this theory by graphing the date of CER issuance for landfill gas projects against the CER issuance rate:

You can see the orange regression line is so minimal as to be statistically insignificant, so it must not be an outdated landfill gas estimation formula that has been causing the miscalculations of expected methane output.  There has only been one project that has exceeded the amount of predicted emission reductions, so the optimism is systemic.

On the ground in Addis

(click image to view full resolution, light white lines are recorded tracks)

After twelve days of starting to live in Addis, my new toy, the Garmin eTrex, has been an invaluable help in getting around the city with no street names and no decent maps.  I loaded it with “OpenStreetMap world routable” data, which is available for free in extremely high detail – every little dirt lane is included.

(Screen shot of Garmin’s MapSource software loaded with OpenStreetMap data)

So far it has been useful for marking waypoints ahead of time for navigating to destinations, keeping taxi drivers honest, and recording points of interest while ambling along.  I hope to make more use of it in the process of preparing data for solid waste management.

Some off-the-cuff observations are that the coffee is delicious, and sometimes served with popcorn; the rim of a cup of espresso may have sugar on it; and it is difficult to run at 2500 meters.

Goodbye Holland, hello Ethiopia

Today I leave Rotterdam, where I have been living and working for two years, and move to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to begin with with the Horn of Africa Regional Environmental Centre, as a grantee of the U.S. State Department’s Fulbright Program.

David Maisel does it again

And now for something completely different, one of my favorite photographers, David Maisel, who combined fine art photography with urban metabolism in the amazing The Lake Project (not surprisingly as he studied at HGSD) has done it again with another series, this time x-rays from a museum archive.  Still the best!

David Maisel, The Lake Project

David Maisel, History’s Shadow

Stuck

I was cleaning my desk at the Rotterdam Collective and found this drawing I made last year when I was stuck on the Fyra train between Rotterdam and Amsterdam for an hour due to a technical malfunction.

IPCC Special Report on Renewable Energy

Published in 2011, a brief 1544 page report on renewable energy by the IPCC, the Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation (SRREN).  The above diagram neatly shows the renewable energy potential by region as a pie chart, and each region is colored by the renewable energy potential versus the existing energy demand.

These hairy graphs are bundled projections.  Left panel: Projected increase in primary energy supply. Right panel: Expected carbon intensity changes.

Global biofuel production and trade.

Long-term trend in global CO2 emissions; 2011 report

Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency with the EU Joint Research Centre have published the 2011 report on Long-term CO2 emissions.  It is a straightforward, accessible, well-presented document of only 42 pages, a rare succinctness for governmental publications.

There are a number of interesting figures.  In the Global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel and cement from 1990-2010, there is a significant dip in 2008 due to the recession.  The recession was good for the environment, as the slow-down entails less production and transportation, which is reflected in the data.

The report also shows that per capita emissions have decreased in EU-27 and USA from 1990 to 2010.  The net emissions of USA has increased, but not as fast as the population, whereas the net emissions of EU-27 has actually decreased since 1990!  The biggest change in the last 20 years, however, has been the meteoric rise in emissions from China.

AfricaMap

Image: AfricaMap showing a combination of population density and land use.

Harvard’s Center for Geographic Analysis’ AfricaMap is an incredible assemblage of data.  Using the WorldMap service, the user can turn on and off dozens of different layers containing rich geographic data regarding Africa.

Some of the layers are Ethno-Classifications (incl. Prevailing Type of Dwelling, Type of Slavery, Male Circumcision, Settlement Patterns), malaria distribution, historical maps, period maps back to 2760BCE, population density, language families, and old world trading routes.  Truly a deep source!

Dadaab / Ifo refugee camp extent 2007-2011

Using Google Earth’s historic imagery, I was able to map the extent of the Dadaab / Ifo refugee camp (see previous post) in Kenya.  The two images are in 2007, approximately one year after initial construction, and in July 2011, where new construction can be seen and the size of the camp has swelled.

Birth of a new city

Somali people are fleeing to the world’s largest refugee camp near Dadaab, Kenya.  By the sounds of it from this article (9 Aug 2011), the camp is their final destination, as many of them were nomads whose livelihood has been ruined by drought.  According to this article (17 Sep 2011), 1000+ arrive each day, amount to 100,000 nomads who have lost their livestock.  Aid organizations there are working to establish a permanent city for the 450,000 inhabitants, and in the process also creating Kenya’s 3rd largest city (another article indicates that the local population is 250,000, even some falsely claiming to be Somali refugees). A more permanent area was built, Ifo 2, with stone houses and vital infrastructure, though still closed in July (article) due to the Kenyan government’s fear of permanent Somali inhabitants, has been finally opened.  One of the facets of life as a refugee is loss of freedom – once they have entered, they are not allowed to leave or to work.  Other dynamics are the relationships between the refugees and the locals, and the minority of adult male refugees, who more often stay behind in Somalia.

Diagram of ZERI brewery in Namibia

Working for WUR Urban Environmental Management, this is a diagram I made of the content from:

DO Okeyo, 2000. The application of the Zero Emissions Research and Initiatives (ZERI) concept in an integrated industry-polyculture-farm system in Namibia: The case of Tunweni Sorghum Brewery. African Journal of Aquatic Science, 25: 71-75.

The academic paper showed some differences between the reality of what was achieved in the application of the concepts in Namibia versus what was published in Yes! Magazine or on the ZERI homepage, for example the earthworms were not able to live in the yeast-rich spent grain substrate.

Loss of free energy

From Exploring the history of industrial metabolism, 2002:

“Nobel Prize-winning chemist Wilhelm Ostwald argued that minimizing the loss of free energy [entropy] is the objective of every cultural development. Thus one may deduce that the more efficient the transformation from crude energy into useful energy, the greater a society’s progress (Ostwald 1909). For Ostwald the increase of energy conversion efficiency has the characteristics of a natural law affecting every living organism and every society. He stressed that each society has to be aware of the ‘energetic imperative [Energetische Imperativ]’: ‘Don’t waste energy, use it’ (Ostwald 1912, p.85). Ostwald was one of the few scientists of his time who was sensitive to the limitations of fossil resources. According to him, a durable (sustainable) economy must use solar energy exclusively.”

Urban Gateway

UN-HABITAT recently launched the Urban Gateway, “Promoting a global discussion on how to manage our towns and cities better in a rapidly urbanising World”.

As I have made myself a member, I am quite curious how it develops, and what utility it will serve.