My ticket was booked yesterday for going to Rio+20 and the office has a registration for the Major Groups. I am extremely excited for my first trip to Brasil and for the chance to participate in such a significant sustainable development platform.
So far I have looked at a number of interested side-events, of which there are over 500, and at opportunities to engage in sustainable development workshops and dialogues.
I took this shot of a vacuum truck emptying its contents into the fecal sludge drying bed at Addis Ababa’s Kaliti wastewater treatment plant. A number of containers are lined up on the rim of the sludge drying bed to serve as “urinals” for the trucks to empty themselves into the bed.
After signing with the Addis Ababa City Administration for releasing the funds for the implementation of infrastructure for the extraction of landfill gas, the work on Repi Landfill has begun in earnest. I am keeping track of all of the important dates in this multi-year project as they happen here. In the past weeks, we at HoA-REC have been overseeing the contractors on the site to ensure that the wells are installed to specifications.
Shown above is Well #03, ten meters deep in the middle of the first working area. The biggest concern at the moment is finishing the entire project before the rainy season begins at the end of May.
The “periodic-table” nature of the Ge’ez script fidel used in Amharic appeals to my rational side. There are a number of mostly-standard transformations to each base syllable symbol, with irregulars of course. For example, the “u” vowel on the end of a symbol is mostly denoted by a wing emerging from the middle-right, while an “e” is denoted by a loop on the bottom right.
Ouroboroughs is a new word I formed from Ouroboros, the ancient symbol of a snake eating its tail thus symbolizing a feedback process stretching towards infinity, with borough, as in the 5 boroughs. Taken together, Ouroboroughs is defined as a settlement in autarky (self-reliance), thus describing a sustainable city.
In the spirit of the Afsluitdijk, the Palms, and other large-scale artificial geo-formation works, I created the concept of a shipping harbor within Ethiopia (a landlocked country) by flooding the Danakil Depression, a geologic dip of over 100 meters deep, by digging a 32 km canal from the Depression to the Red Sea. Of course, the concept insensitively ignores that there are lingering tensions (to say the least) between Eritrea and Ethiopia after the war, and that the Afar nomads partly live in the Depression. Nevertheless, here is the concept:
Ethio-Eritrean Danakil Canal
Aim: To increase bilateral economic development of Eritrea and Ethiopia by creation of a new deep-water port within Ethiopia by digging a canal between the Danakil Depression and the Red Sea within Eritrea. Flooding the Danakil Depression, over 100 meters below sea level, would open Ethiopia to international shipping trade, to which it has no current access. Eritrea stands to profit in the arrangement by taxing transport through its borders. A new settlement, Danakil Port, would be planned to be an important urban center for the country, and could increase agricultural security and re-greening by means of solar desalination.
Topographic image from ASTER GDEM. Canal elevation profile from Google Earth.
Municipal sewage sludge drying beds in Dire Dawa, Ethiopia, January 2012.
New sanitary landfill in Dire Dawa, Ethiopia, January 2012.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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
