Solutions Volume 6, Issue 6

November-December 2015, Volume 6, Issue 6

For a sustainable and desirable future

Solutions How Impact Investing is Saving Nicaragua’s Coffee Industry

by Anahi Santoyo Slow Down and Save the Whales

by L. Parrott, C. Chion, S. Turgeon, N. Ménard, G. Cantin, and R. Michaud Teens Tackling Air Pollution

by Edwin R. Stafford and Roslynn G.H. Brain Waste to Wealth: Closing the Sanitation Financing Gap

by Corinne Schuster-Wallace Reclaiming the Rift Valley

by Naomi Stewart www.thesolutionsjournal.com USD $5.99 CAD $6.99 EURO €4.99

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Fioramonti, L. (2015). Wellbeing Economy: A Paradigm for the 21st Century. Solutions 6(6): 1–3. https://thesolutionsjournal.com/2015/6/wellbeing-economy-a-paradigm-for-the-21st-century

Editorial by Lorenzo Fioramonti

Wellbeing Economy: A Paradigm for the 21st Century

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or the past century, most societies have adopted a narrow definition of economic growth as the route to development. Growth has become an end in itself, as a result of which, the true meaning of development has been lost. Rather than an end goal, development should be viewed as a process towards an improved state of existence for humanity and for ecosystems.

The concept of wellbeing, with its multidimensional character, is far better suited to describe this improved state. Good, enjoyable, and fulfilling lives cannot be achieved through material output alone. Indeed, such output can easily endanger human wellbeing, leading to the deterioration of the social relationships and environmental balance upon which wellbeing depends.

The question is: “How do we build economies designed to achieve holistic wellbeing?”

The current economy can be described as a vertical structure in which wealth created by growth at the top of the pyramid is ‘expected’ to trickle down to the lower layers.

The separation of production and consumption roles leaves ‘consumers’ on the receiving end of the growth process. The model is reinforced by the predominant economic growth measurement, which is the gross domestic product (GDP).

By contrast, an economy designed to promote wellbeing needs to be adaptable, integrative, and empowering. Adaptable, because the new economy must operate like a network, abandoning the conventional vertical structure to expand horizontally, and to build resilience against external shocks through a system of nodes; integrative, because

it locates systems of production and consumption within the broader biosphere; and empowering, because its users will take control, rather than performing the passive role of mere ‘consumers.’

Moving beyond GDP with the introduction of wellbeing indicators to steer economic policy can massively support this transition.

A wellbeing system of accounting

change at a global level. As more social actors become aware of how a move beyond GDP can assist their causes, it is to be expected that grassroots social pressure will also grow, connecting bottom-up movements for change with top-down political reform. The pace is quickening, and radical change within the next decade can be anticipated, provided pressure is maintained.

The question is: “How do we build economies designed to achieve holistic wellbeing?” would emphasize the costs associated with centralized, polluting, and wasteful production, thus eroding many corporations’ social licenses to operate. It would also highlight the contributions that GDP either downplays or ignores, from the value of natural inputs, to the unpaid activity of households and the social benefits to be derived from small distributed businesses. Civil society will also benefit: its activities will no longer be perceived as marginal (as implicit in definitions such as ‘non-profit’ and ‘third sector’), but rather, as among the key drivers of wellbeing.

The ‘beyond GDP’ debate is now high on the agenda. Many international agencies, including the United Nations (UN), the OECD, the World Bank, and the European Union are actively engaged, as are a number of national governments. Moreover, the UN 2015 Sustainable Development Goals, although at times contradictory in their objectives, provide at least an entry point for institutional

In a wellbeing economy, the money system will need to follow the same distributed model of governance as the economy itself in order to provide appropriate levels of economic stimulus and control at local, national, and international levels. Local, debt-free currencies, which are mushrooming around the world, would underpin prosperity and economic resilience at a regional level, straddling arbitrary national borders to reflect economic and social networks. A national network of currencies (similar to the Regiogeld in Germany, the largest network of alternative currencies in the world) could replace the national currency to allow communities to trade with each other. Alternatively, a national currency could continue side by side with local currencies.

At a global level, a complementary system of crypto-currencies would facilitate the worldwide interchange of ideas and knowledge (the so-called ‘light economy’).

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Editorial by Lorenzo Fioramonti

A ten minute film introducing the Sustainable Development Goals is projected onto the UN Headquarters ahead of the UN Sustainable Development Summit in September 2015. The goals can provide at least an entry point for institutional change towards a wellbeing economy at the global level.

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Editorial by Lorenzo Fioramonti

UN Photo/Cia Pak

In theory, the GDP economy can only operate within the boundaries of social needs and planetary resource capacity. As an extractive system, affording no value to unexploited resources and making no judgment as to the qualitative value of production and consumption, its growth must ultimately conflict with natural and social equilibria.

In contrast to this destructive path, the wellbeing economy model is designed specifically to strengthen social and natural capital while generating human development. A ‘virtuous circle’ is created whereby value that is measured in terms of wellbeing feeds the improvements in the human and natural capital upon which the creation of value depends.

The negative impact on the environment will be greatly reduced as the ‘circular economy’ model of resource recycling and systems for up-cycling are integrated into mainstream business models. The services that the GDP model considers to be provided free of charge by nature (so-called ‘ecosystem services’) will become fully valued components of society’s infrastructure, supported by new, horizontal structures of governance that connect people more closely to the natural ecosystems in which they live and work.

The convergence of transformative technological innovation, from 3D printing to the Internet of Things, with a systemic crisis as evidenced by global warming, mass migrations, and rising inequality demands a radical shift and creates the conditions for a profound restructuring of the economic system at the global, national, and local levels. The wellbeing economy is a vision that unites existing streams of governance innovation into a coherent narrative, placing fundamental change within our reach.

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Contents

November/December 2015

Features

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Slow Down and Save the Whales

by Lael Parrott, Clement Chion, Samuel Turgeon, Nadia Ménard, Guy Cantin, and Robert Michaud A group of multipartite stakeholders worked together to find solutions to the risks of whale-vessel collisions in the St. Lawrence River Estuary. Resulting voluntary recommendations have successfully decreased risks, proving that non-regulated solutions can be achieved through cooperative collaboration between diverse stakeholders.

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“My mom idles less than your mom!” Empowering High School Teens to Tackle Air Pollution

by Edwin R. Stafford and Roslynn G.H. Brain

High schoolers in Utah were tasked with creating clean air posters as part of a contest involving both the school and the local community. The resulting entries were creative, funny, and relevant, and made their teenage designers—and community members—think more critically about the roles that they play in air pollution.

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Waste to Wealth: Helping to Close the Sanitation Financing Gap in Rural Communities and Small Towns

by Corinne J. Schuster-Wallace

Almost 2.4 billion people in the world do not have access to proper sanitation facilities. Waste to Wealth is an integrated and holistic business approach to help close the financing gap and incentivize toilet use in order to expand sanitation services, also leading to poverty reduction, greater equality, and environmental improvements.

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On the Web

Perspectives Reclaiming the Rift Valley: Sustainably Managing Land in the Village of Suswa for Environmental and Economic Prosperity by Naomi Stewart

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Kids are Complex: Connecting Learning to Life by Caitlin S. Steele

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Generously Good Graffiti by Dawn Starin

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Missing Letters: Why the SDGs Could Use a Bit More ICT by Dana Rawls

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On the Ground www.thesolutionsjournal.org Explore the Solutions website for more content and interactivity. What are your solutions? Share your vision for a sustainable and desirable future and learn more about the Solutions community.

Envisioning

How Impact Investing is Saving Nicaragua’s Coffee Industry

by Anahi Santoyo Impact investing organizations have radically transformed livelihoods for Nicaragua’s coffee farmers. Providing access to capital, skills, and market knowledge through worker-owned cooperatives empowers both farmers and their families.

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Bounce Forward: Building Resilience for Dangerous Times by Laurie Mazur In a time

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Solutions in History

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Terraced Agriculture: A Step in the Right Direction? by Maisie Powell Terraced

of drastic change and growing vulnerability, there is much to be done to make communities stronger, fairer, and more resilient. Instead of bouncing back from disasters, communities must bounce forward into a world that is more sustainable and just.

agriculture has been used throughout history as a successful, sustainable agricultural model.

This method should now again be considered as an alternative solution to destructive industrial agriculture.

Idea Lab Noteworthy

08 Interview

Why We Need an Atmospheric Trust

Hillary Clinton, Sex, and American Foreign Policy Interview by Christina Asquith Valerie Hudson, author

and academic, discusses the so-called Hillary Doctrine, and why the subjugation of women worldwide is a threat to global security.

Climate Change to be a Top Priority in the Muslim World Local Food Distribution Going Global Hijabi Model for H&M Signals Inclusive Future for Fashion

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In Review Whither Work in the 21st Century by Arthur Pearl

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Editorial Wellbeing Economy: A Paradigm for the 21st Century

by Lorenzo Fioramonti

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Solutions

Contributors 2

Editors-in-Chief: Robert Costanza, Ida Kubiszewski Associate Editors: David Orr, Jacqueline McGlade

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Managing Editor: Colleen Maney Senior Editors: Christina Asquith, Jack Fairweather

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History Section Editor: Frank Zelko Book & Envisioning Editor: Bruce Cooperstein Editors: Naomi Stewart, Dana Rawls, Cherie Stapleton Graphic Designer: Kelley Dodd Copy Editors: Anna Sottile, Nadine L. Business Manager: Ian Chambers

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Interns: Ilina Talwar, Zafirah Zein Editorial Board: Gar Alperovitz, Vinya Ariyaratne, Robert Ayres, Peter Barnes, William Becker, Lester Brown, Alexander Chikunov, Cutler Cleveland, Raymond Cole, Rita Colwell, Robert Corell, Herman Daly, Thomas Dietz, Josh Farley, Jerry Franklin, Susan Joy Hassol, Paul Hawken, Richard Heinberg, Jeffrey Hollender, Buzz Holling, Terry Irwin, Jon Isham, Wes Jackson, Tim Kasser, Tom Kompas, Frances Moore Lappé, Rik Leemans, Wenhua Li, Thomas

1. Lael Parrot—Dr. Lael Parrott

http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/subscribe Email: solutions@thesolutionsjournal.com

(PhD, McGill University) is an Associate Professor in Sustainability and Director of the Okanagan Institute for Biodiversity, Resilience, and Ecosystem Services (BRAES) at The University of British Columbia, Canada. Prior to joining UBC, she was an Associate Professor in Environmental Geography and Director of the Complex Systems Laboratory at Université de Montréal (2001–2012).

She leads a multidisciplinary research program in modelling and characterizing contemporary regional landscapes and ecosystems as complex systems.

Sponsoring Inquiries:

2. Edwin R. Stafford—Edwin R.

Lovejoy, Hunter Lovins, Manfred Max-Neef, Peter May, Bill McKibben, William J. Mitsch, Mohan Munasinghe, Norman Myers, Kristín Vala Ragnarsdóttir, Bill Rees, Wolfgang Sachs, Peter Senge, Vandana Shiva, Anthony Simon, Gus Speth, Larry Susskind, David Suzuki, John Todd, Mary Evelyn Tucker, Alvaro Umaña, Sim van der Ryn, Peter Victor, Mathis Wackernagel, John Xia, Mike Young

Subscriptions:

http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/sponsor Email: ida.kub@thesolutionsjournal.com

On the Cover Workers harvest beans on a coffee farm in El Rodeo, Nicaragua. Photo by Ingmar Zahorsky.

Solutions is subject to the Creative Commons license except where otherwise stated.

Stafford, Ph.D., is a professor of marketing at the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business at Utah State University in Logan. His research and education outreach center on the entrepreneurship, marketing, and diffusion of clean energy, technology, and products. He co-wrote and produced two research documentaries, Wind Uprising and Scaling Wind, about the entrepreneurial struggles and policy issues facing wind energy development, and his most recent work focuses on persuasive messaging to encourage citizens to act in ways to preserve air quality.

3. Roslynn Brain—Roslynn Brain,

Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor and Sustainable Communities Extension Specialist in the Department of Environment and Society, College of Natural Resources at Utah State University. She uses conservation theory, communication techniques, and social marketing tools to foster environmental behaviors. Roslynn developed and

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launched Extension Sustainability (http://extensionsustainability.usu.edu), a set of tools and information for the general public to engage in sustainable behaviors. She also teaches an undergraduate course entitled Communicating Sustainability, coordinates a statewide program to connect farmers with restaurants called Utah Farm-Chef-Fork, facilitates and teaches permaculture workshops for adults, and designed and co-teaches sustainability camps for kids in Utah.

4. Corinne Schuster-Wallace—

Dr. Schuster-Wallace has worked at the water-health nexus for over a decade and spent the last eight years working in an international, transdisciplinary context developing the evidence for informed decision-making, creating tools to help local decision-makers collect the information required for making decisions regarding sustainable WaSH solutions in rural communities, and developing innovative self-financing frameworks for accelerating scale out of WaSH coverage. She has broad experience at the water-health nexus including environmental factors for, and environmental change impacts on, outbreaks of waterborne disease and the linkages with human health and wellbeing.

5. Lorenzo Fioramonti—Lorenzo

Fioramonti is Professor of Political Economy at the University of Pretoria, where he directs the Centre for the Study of Governance Innovation. He is also Senior Fellow at the Centre for Social Investment of the University of Heidelberg and at the Hertie School of Governance, and Associate Fellow

Contributors

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at the United Nations University. He is the author of over 50 scientific articles and eight books. His most recent books are How Numbers Rule the World: The Use and Abuse of Statistics in Global Politics and Gross Domestic Problem: The Politics Behind the World’s Most Powerful Number. Both books deal with the political interests behind economic statistics and the GDP ideology. He is the founder of the Action Research Network for a Wellbeing Economy in Africa (WE-Africa).

6. Naomi Stewart—Naomi Stewart

is currently a Project Associate at the United Nations University - Institute for Water, Environment and Health, in the Water & Ecosystems program, and previously worked in hydrometric monitoring and water chemistry research for the Government of Canada.

Naomi was also Managing Editor for the Water Quality Journal of Canada.

She is a long-time freelance editor and writer that is focused on science liaison and communications, with a research background focused primarily on water and agricultural issues and policies. Naomi holds a B.Sc. from the University of Toronto in English, Biology, and Geography, has traveled extensively to learn about global environmental practices, and strives to maintain public interest and fascination in science and nature through her blog and other ventures.

7. Christina Asquith—Christina

Asquith joined Solutions in 2009 as one of the founding editors. She has been an investigative reporter, war reporter, and narrative nonfiction author; working

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both as a staff writer and freelancer for The New York Times, The Economist, The Guardian, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Her articles have been read by millions of viewers, and she has reported from Afghanistan, Jordan, Dubai, Oman, Qatar, and South America. Christina is also author of two books, including the critically acclaimed Sisters in War, (2009 Random House).

8. Caitlin Steele—Caitlin S. Steele is

a graduate teaching fellow and doctoral candidate in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Vermont (UVM). Her research focuses on complex systems as an interdisciplinary lens in K–12 curricula. Before arriving at UVM, Caitlin taught English for twelve years. In 2009, she received a Rowland Foundation Fellowship to support her work collaborating with colleagues across disciplines to develop a sustainability-themed freshman academy. She currently serves as a Rowland Associate organizing professional collaboration among past and current fellows working in education across the state of Vermont and beyond.

9. Arthur Pearl—Art Pearl has been

working on education for sustainability, justice, and democracy for longer than he cares to remember. He is the author, among other books, of The Atrocity of Education and The Democratic Classroom.

10. Valerie M. Hudson—Valerie M.

Hudson is a professor and the George H.W. Bush Chair in the Department of International Affairs at The Bush School of Government and Public Service at

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Texas A&M University. She is the coauthor of books such as Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population, Sex and World Peace, and The Hillary Doctrine, and her research has appeared in journals such as International Security, the American Political Science Review, and the Journal of Peace Research. Valerie was named one of Foreign Policy Magazine’s Top 100 Global Thinkers in 2009, has been named Distinguished Scholar of Foreign Policy Analysis, is co-principal investigator of The WomanStats Project, and is the recipient of an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship.

11. Anahi Santoyo—Anahi

Santoyo is a Senior student at Northeastern University majoring in International Affairs and minoring in Social Entrepreneurship and Business Administration. As a native from Mexico City, she encountered various poverty issues and became interested in finding solutions for social justice. Anahi has a wide range of fieldwork experience in countries such as Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, South Africa, and Zambia.

12. Laurie Mazur—Laurie Mazur is

the editor for the Island Press Urban Resilience Project, which explores resilience in the era of climate change with a focus on equity and sustainability.

Laurie has written extensively about environment, health, and social justice issues. She is the editor of A Pivotal Moment: Population, Justice and the Environmental Challenge (Island Press, 2009) and Beyond the Numbers: A Reader on Population, Consumption and the Environment (Island Press,

1994). With Michael Jacobson, she coauthored Marketing Madness: a Survival Guide to a Consumer Society (Westview Press, 1995).

13. Maisie Powell—Maisie Powell is

a Senior finishing a B.S. in environmental studies at the University of Vermont’s Rubenstein School for the Environment and Natural Resources. She is passionate about environmental education and sustainable agriculture and hopes to link these two interests in her career in the future.

14. Dana Rawls—Dana Rawls is a

writer and editor for Solutions Journal, with almost 20 years of previous media and communications experience. She has worked in the United States, Iraq, and is now a staff member at the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University. A graduate of the University of Georgia and Georgetown University, Dana is constantly exploring ways to combine her two passions, media and international development, and is currently writing about the many ways that Information and Communication Technologies can be used to spur economic and social development on a global scale.

15. Dawn Starin—Dawn Starin

is an honorary research associate at University College London and has spent decades conducting anthropological and ecological research in Africa and Asia.

She has written both academic and nonacademic articles, appearing in publications such as The New York Times, the Ecologist, the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, and Gastronomica, among others.

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https://thesolutionsjournal.com/2015/6/noteworthy

Idea Lab Noteworthy

Takver

At the conclusion of COP21 on December 12, approximately 30,000 people participated in a march for climate action and climate justice, walking from the Arc de Triomphe to the Eiffel Tower.

Why We Need an Atmospheric Trust

by Colleen Maney Many hailed the recent UN climate change conference in Paris as a success, with a historic agreement adopted to keep global temperature rises below 2ºC. But, how do we achieve this?

Climate victories across the globe in the past year show that people grew tired of waiting on slow government action against climate change well before the meeting in Paris. In March 2015, a court in New Mexico ruled that the state has a duty to protect its natural resources and the atmosphere

on behalf of the people of New Mexico.

Shortly afterwards, in June, a Dutch court ordered the government to cut the country’s emissions by at least 25 percent in the next five years. In November, an unlikely group of teenagers took on the Washington State Department of Ecology in an effort to enact a carbon emissions rule to protect future generations. They won.

Each of these cases called upon the public trust doctrine, arguing community property rights over the atmospheric commons. According to this doctrine, all nations are co-trustees in the global atmospheric trust, making each government responsible for

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protecting the commons from damaging activities. This global atmospheric trust could then collect claims for damages to the commons directly from the parties responsible—not a difficult task, as only approximately 90 enterprises currently account for two-thirds of global carbon emissions.

In the wake of the Paris conference, campaigners for a global atmospheric trust have drafted an open letter encouraging the Vulnerable 20 countries (those facing the greatest risks from climate change) to create such a trust.

The letter is open to all, and already counts many prominent world leaders and thinkers among its signatories.

Idea Lab Noteworthy Civil society must add its weight to this movement in order to overcome corporate resistance. Read the letter at claimthesky.org, sign it, and make your voice heard in this call for action to take back our skies.

Climate Change to be Top Priority in Muslim World

by Zafirah Zein

Environment Ministers from more than 50 Muslim countries have come up with a joint declaration on environmental protection and sustainable development. At the 6th Islamic Conference in Morocco, members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) convened to discuss ways to combat climate change and deal with obstacles to sustainable development.

In the declaration, countries were urged to commit to a number of key goals. These included pursuing green economies, raising awareness about the importance of eradicating poverty, creating a new energy operating system, and adopting standards for good practices in sustainable governance.

“Climate change is a serious threat, especially to the developing world. It is only through collective action that we will overcome one of the pressing challenges of our generation,” said OIC secretary general Iyad Ameen Madani, who is the former Information Minister of Saudi Arabia.

Global warming is due to have drastic effects in the Middle East. A recently published study in the journal Natural Climate Change predicts that countries in the Arabian Gulf and parts of Iran will be uninhabitable in the future due to extreme heatwaves predicted to sweep over the region after 2070.

Oxfam International

A Bangladeshi woman stands in flood water near the camp she has been living in for five months, since her house was destroyed by climate related flooding. She holds a sign urging world leaders at the UN to fight climate poverty. Environment-linked disasters have led to widespread poverty in Bangladesh and other vulnerable OIC member states.

Professor Elfatih Eltahir of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who co-conducted the study, said, “We would hope that information like this would be helpful in making sure there

is interest [in cutting carbon emissions] for the countries in the region. They have a vital interest in supporting measures that would help reduce the concentration of CO2 in the future.”

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Idea Lab Noteworthy The OIC, founded in 1969, is the second largest inter-governmental organization in the world and includes some of the world’s least developed countries. It includes conflict-ridden Afghanistan and Iraq and huge resource-dependent states such as Indonesia and Malaysia. Developing nations are most vulnerable to global warming, and while some wealthier oil-rich Muslim countries might be able to afford protection against rising temperatures, poor countries like Yemen will suffer.

Food security also remains a critical issue in many of the OIC member states. Famines have occurred in Somalia and Mali in the last five years, and environment-linked disasters have led to widespread poverty in Bangladesh, which was ranked by the World Bank as one of the 12 countries most vulnerable to climate change.

Conserving the environment has a distinct place in Islamic thought as the religion prioritizes meeting the needs of present and future generations without destroying natural balance or excluding any segments of society.

A form of sustainable development within Islam that has gained traction in recent years is Islamic finance, in which financial institutions are governed by both Islamic law and regular banking rules.

At the Third International Conference on Financing for Development, Chief Economist of the Islamic Development Bank Savas Alpay said, “In mobilizing resources for the Sustainable Development Goals, non-traditional sources of financing need to be given due attention. In this context, Islamic finance is offering a very promising alternative.”

The Bank announced in July that it would be increasing development assistance to more than USD$150

billion to support short- and longterm environmental, social and economic projects in member states of the OIC. While the OIC declaration is not legally binding to member states, it is an important rallying call in a region that has not taken a strong lead in the climate debate.

Local Food Distribution Going Global

by Gord Stewart

From Waiheke Island, New Zealand, to the World, exporting bits, not bites: Ooooby is on a mission to make local food convenient, affordable, and fair everywhere. And, with money recently raised on the equity crowdfunding platform PledgeMe, it can now set a path to do just that.

Ooooby—which stands for “Out of our own backyards”—connects growers directly with customers, while in the process reducing transport, handling, packaging, warehousing, and merchandising costs. The result is fairly-priced, fresh food (much of it organic) for customers and the opportunity for small producers (even home gardeners) to enter the market.

Seventy thousand boxes of locally produced food delivered to 5,000 households in five years is good proof that the system works. From its launch in the Auckland area, Ooooby has added other food hubs in New Zealand and has already entered the market in Sydney and in Fresno, California.

As a committed social enterprise, Ooooby aims to address genuine need, focus on value over profit, and care about stakeholders (customers, community, and the broader environment) at least as much as it does about shareholders.

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“Crowdfunding was chosen as our capital-raising method because it perfectly aligns with the philosophy of food for the people, by the people,” said Ooooby co-founder, Peter Russell.

The newly invested funds will be used to perfect, expand, and market their software and systems to allow local food hubs anywhere to launch and grow at speed without the typical trial and error misadventures. All you need are 150 households wanting local food delivered weekly to their door to make the service viable.

Ooooby charges a small fee for use of the software system and a bit more if the local organization wants some hands-on help in the early stages.

Consistent with the goal of reducing environmental impact through local food production and paying farmers a generous 50 per cent of the retail value of food sold to customers is Ooooby’s uncommon investment approach.

The founders have transferred 90 percent of their shares to the Ooooby Foundation, with any dividends earned used to support projects such as community gardens, food-growing education, and buying land for local food production. Investors will not receive cash dividends. Instead, their earnings can be converted to Ooooby store vouchers if they have a hub nearby, or contributed to local food production initiatives.

Crowdfunding and social enterprises like Ooooby are part of an unfolding story, building on the likes of triple bottom-line accounting, benefit corporations, and companies making natural capital declarations.

These are all developments that give hope for the sustainable and desirable future we so need.

Idea Lab Noteworthy

Ooooby

Locally produced food is packaged by an Ooooby worker for delivery to a customer.

Hijabi Model for H&M Signals Inclusive Future for Fashion

by Zafirah Zein Earlier this year, Samantha Elauf won a court case against upscale clothing brand Abercrombie & Fitch (A&F) after the label denied her a job seven years ago. Known for their East Coast collegiate style, the brand cited that Elauf violated its look policy by wearing the headscarf.

While A&F decided that the headscarf does not fit their allAmerican image, popular Swedish retailer H&M recently embraced the hijab with its newest Muslim model.

Twenty-three-year-old Mariah Idrissi is the first hijabi model to be hired by the world’s second largest retailer. She is featured in the label’s latest video, called “Close the Loop,” which aims to promote clothes recycling. The video’s models range in nationality, gender, and size. Not only is H&M helping to increase the positive visibility of veiled Muslim women, it is also giving them representation in an industry that has long excluded them.

Until recently, Muslim women, and especially hijab-donning women, have been absent in modern, mainstream fashion. While societies grow increasingly diverse and the fashion world seeks to become more global, the stylish Muslim woman has yet to

have much influence in the Western fashion industry. Although the biggest names in fashion have opened up to a range of unconventional and traditional styles, Muslim women are not represented in this global identity. Things are evolving, however, as successful brands commit more to diversity in order to broaden their customer demographic.

While the intersection of faith and fashion has been a contentious issue within Muslim communities, recent years have seen the rise of the fashion-savvy Muslim woman, who sports fashion’s latest trends while keeping in line with the modesty that is deeply encouraged by her faith.

She cannot be found on billboards

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Idea Lab Noteworthy

Febrianto Pudi Utama

Hijab fashion models pose in a photoshoot for a fashion boutique based in Jakarta, Indonesia.

or commercials, but her presence makes waves on various social media platforms. With thousands of girls following her style on Facebook and Instagram, she has been coined the “hijabster,” a term that fuses hijab with, essentially, being hip.

“Even though fashion with hijab has been going on for years, we’re really seeing it more with Instagram and Twitter and Facebook and everything,” said Idrissi in a video by the BBC. “Over the last few years, it’s really boomed.”

In many countries in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, hijabsters model for the trendiest local retailers, and bigger brands are cashing in by

producing clothing more catered to Muslim customers. British–Egyptian influential online personality and fashion designer Dina Torkia is often seen on Instagram dishing sartorial tips while decked out in pieces from notable labels Zara and Mango. These brands are also slowly reaching out to Muslim fashionistas by coming up with specialty collections made available during the month of Ramadan.

Another example is well-known Japanese retail company Uniqlo, which recently collaborated with Muslim fashion blogger and designer Hana Tajima on a modest clothing line. It launched two months ago in Singapore and offers pieces that

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blend comfortable fabrics with both contemporary and traditional designs. A hijab line is included in the collection.

In an op-ed for ELLE, founder of online retailer Haute Hijab, Melanie Elturk, responded to H&M’s latest hire, saying “The significance of Mariah Idrissi wearing hijab in the H&M campaign is noteworthy for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that she’s fiercely stylish in her hijab. Mariah represents the millions of hijab-wearing women who have a voice, who are pumping with intellect and enthusiasm, and who possess a very real need to find appropriate modest clothing.”

Mazur, L. (2015). Bounce Forward: Building Resilience for Dangerous Times. Solutions 6(6): 13–19. https://thesolutionsjournal.com/2015/6/bounce-forward-building-resilience-for-dangerous-times

Envisioning

Bounce Forward: Building Resilience for Dangerous Times

by Laurie Mazur

This article is part of a regular section in Solutions in which the author is challenged to envision a future society in which all the right changes have been made.

W

hen Superstorm Sandy came ashore in 2012, thousands of New Yorkers were plunged into what seemed like an earlier century.

No lights. No heat. No refrigeration.

No elevators. On the upper floors of high-rise apartment buildings, the taps went dry and toilets would not flush.

For the poorest New Yorkers, this went on for weeks. Less than a mile from the seat of global capitalism where stock traders were back at work soon after the storm, residents of public housing rifled through dumpsters full of discarded food looking for something to eat.1 Sandy was many things: a disaster that cost hundreds of lives and billions of dollars, a wake-up call on climate change, and a reminder of the fragility of the systems that hold our civilization together.

It is a reminder we would do well to heed. We live in a time of wrenching change and widening inequality; of growing vulnerability to disaster.

The good news is that there is much we can do to make our communities stronger, fairer, and more resilient.

That does not, however, mean “bouncing back” to the status quo that got us into this mess in the first place. Instead, it means bouncing forward to a world that is more sustainable and just.

The New Normal It’s safe to say that we’ve never been here before. While change is a constant in natural and social history, the pace, scale, and impact of change today is utterly without precedent.

Part of that change is environmental, reflecting our wholesale transformation of the natural world.

Over the last half century or so, human beings have altered the planet’s ecosystems more than in all of previous history combined—clearing forests, diverting rivers, replacing the riotous diversity of nature with uniform monocultures. Those changes have improved the lives of many, but they have weakened nature’s ability to protect and sustain us in the long term.2–4 Most ominously, we are changing the climate. Through industry, agriculture, and the business of daily life, humans have increased the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 40 percent above pre-Industrial Era levels, trapping heat and warming the planet.5 The impacts are increasingly visible: in monstrous storms and devastating droughts, in spiking food prices, and wrecked infrastructure.

Climate-related disasters in North America have nearly quintupled since 1980.6 On our altered planet, the past is no longer a reliable guide to the future. Temperature records are broken on a regular basis and “hundred-year storms” arrive every few years. October 2015 was the warmest in recorded history by a wide margin—a record that may be broken again by the time you read this. And 2015 is shaping up to be the warmest year ever.7

As the planet warms and climate disasters multiply, there are more people in harm’s way than ever before.

The global population has tripled in the last hundred years, with most of that growth taking place in coastal areas that are exposed to rising sea-levels.8,9 At the same time, our world is rocked by enormous technological and social changes. More than any previous generation, we are connected by dense global networks of commerce and communication. Those networks can accelerate the spread of innovation, information, and opportunity, but they can also spread disaster.

For example, the financial crisis that began in 2007 was triggered by risky mortgage lending in the United States, but in an interconnected global economy, its impacts continue to reverberate around the world. Other threats—from Ebola to terrorism—can easily hop a plane and go from local to global overnight.

The complex systems that keep our lights on and our refrigerators full would have dazzled our agrarian ancestors—but they are surprisingly vulnerable. For example, Big Food’s globe-spanning supply chains are easily disrupted and its vast monocultures susceptible to drought and disease.10 The electrical grid is ridiculously fragile. According to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, if saboteurs or disaster were to destroy just nine substations and one transformer manufacturer, “the entire United States grid would be down for at least 18 months, probably longer.”11 A massive solar storm, similar to one that occurred in 1859, could take down the grid and interfere with essential

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Envisioning

Neil Cummings

What is resilience, really? Island Press defines the concept as “the capacity of a community to anticipate, plan for, and mitigate the risks—and seize the opportunities—associated with environmental and social change.”

electronics—putting the world as we know it on indefinite hold.12 In the face of these new and sobering risks, all people are not equally vulnerable. That’s because we live in an era of stark and growing inequality.

The richest one percent of the world’s population lays claim to 46 percent of the world’s wealth; the bottom half— some 3.5 billion people—together possess less than one percent of global assets.13 Not surprisingly, the poor bear the brunt of climate and other disasters.14 In this unequal world, the affluent seize opportunities and shield themselves from harm, while the poor face greater risks with fewer resources.

These dynamics are self-reinforcing: the rich get richer while the poor fall farther behind.

Defining Resilience In these turbulent times, the concept of “resilience” has growing appeal.

Lately it’s been the subject of serious books and breezy articles, of highminded initiatives and countless conferences. After Sandy, it was triumphantly plastered on city buses, declaring storm-ravaged New Jersey “A State of Resilience.”

But what is resilience, exactly?

Recently, Island Press—a nonprofit that provides ideas and information on environmental problems and solutions—set out to answer that question. To that end, we reviewed relevant literature in the natural and social sciences and interviewed dozens of scholars, activists, and practitioners. Based on that inquiry,

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we define resilience as “the capacity of a community to anticipate, plan for, and mitigate the risks—and seize the opportunities—associated with environmental and social change.”15 Resilience is an idea with potentially transformative power.

The need to protect our communities from climate impacts and other threats asks us to rethink the systems that supply our basic needs. It asks us to live within planetary limits and to avoid further destabilizing natural systems. It asks us to eradicate the inequities that magnify vulnerability to disaster, and to distribute opportunities more fairly—so that all people have a chance to adapt and thrive in a fastchanging world.

Envisioning ASK

ANALYZE

ACT

Resilience of what?

• What do we need?

• What do we value?

Is it: • Diverse • Redundant • Modular

Persist • Protect/restore system in current form

Resilience to what?

• Hazards • Environmental/ social changes Resilience for whom?

• Who is vulnerable?

• Who decides?

But the transformative potential of resilience is far from assured. Too often, resilience is defined narrowly as a community’s capacity to “bounce back” after a disaster. For example, the self-declared “State of Resilience” rebounded after Sandy by building even bigger houses on the Jersey Shore.16,17 Bouncing back to a status quo that degrades the environment, increases greenhouse gases, and widens inequality will only make us more vulnerable in the longer term.

Here, we offer an alternative path—a framework for communities to consider as they endeavor to become more resilient to the shocks and surprises of the future. This framework is neither definitive nor universal; it is best seen as a jumpingoff point for communities to begin their own conversation.

Ask–Analyze–Act The process of building resilience is not value-neutral; decisions about what to protect and strengthen reflect deeply entrenched values and power structures. Should public funds be used to build seawalls around Wall Street or to put solar panels on a

Adapt • Modify system to increase resilience

Does it have: • Tight feedbacks Does it promote: • Social capital • Agency • Equity • Inclusiveness • Innovation

Transform • Replace with more resilient system

housing project? The first step is to ask what in the community must be strengthened, against what threats or changes, and for whose benefit.

The next step is to analyze the systems that supply a community’s needs. Resilient systems and communities have certain characteristics in common: • Diversity: A system with diverse components will have a wide range of responses to change and is therefore unlikely to fail all at once.

This is why a healthy, mixed forest is less vulnerable to fire or disease than a tree farm. Similarly, a city with a diverse economic base is less vulnerable to economic upheaval than one that relies on a single industry.

• Redundancy: A resilient system has multiple ways to perform basic functions, so that the failure of any one component does not cause the entire system to crash. For example, a multimodal transportation system that includes a variety of public transit options as well as opportunities for walking and bicycling will weather disruptions

better than a system that relies wholly on automobiles.

• Modularity: Modular systems that can be self-sufficient when disconnected from larger networks will fare better in times of change.

For example, people living in a city with a robust local food culture (nearby farms, a farmer’s market) will be less likely to go hungry if there is a disruption in national or global supply chains. Modularity allows a community or system to manage its connectivity to larger regions and the world; it is a way to guard against “contagions” from a hyper-connected, globalized economy.

• Tight feedbacks: A resilient system has tight feedbacks, allowing it to quickly detect changes in its constituent parts and respond appropriately. If a reservoir is low, for example, water conservation measures may be put in place. But in today’s globalized economy, consumers may be thousands of miles away from the source of resources on which they depend—so feedback loops go slack. Inequality also weakens

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Envisioning

Reeve Jolliffe

Manhattan’s West Village experienced a blackout in the immediate aftermath of Superstorm Sandy in 2012.

feedbacks, as affluent communities routinely outsource production and pollution to poorer ones.

• Social capital: For an individual, social capital is about relationships with family, friends, and colleagues.

In communities, social capital can be measured by levels of trust, cohesion of social networks and the quality of leadership. In a disaster, social capital can literally mean the difference between life and death.18 Resilient communities build social capital with public spaces that encourage interaction and with traditions and institutions that enable neighbors to help one another.

• Agency: Resilient people have a sense of control over their destiny; resilient cities fully engage their

citizens in decision making.

Fundamentally, agency is about power: personal and political.

Strategies to build agency include community organizing, education, public health and society initiatives, and civic engagement.

• Equity: Equity means that opportunities—and risks—are equally shared. It is a building block of social cohesion—the sense that “we’re all in it together” that enables communities to cooperate in times of disaster. And equity improves performance on a broad range of human development indicators—physical and mental health, public safety, social capital—that form the bedrock of individual and community resilience.19

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• Inclusiveness: Inclusive social institutions—economic, political, and cultural—can strengthen resilience at every level, by increasing social capital, agency, and equity.

In an inclusive society, power and opportunity are shared broadly, not concentrated in the hands of a few.

Inclusive governance has practical benefits. For example, it tightens feedback loops so that problems are more readily detected, and it expands the depth and diversity of knowledge available for problem solving.

• Innovation: A resilient system generates novel responses while learning and adapting to changing conditions. In nature, this is accomplished by evolution.

In human society, it requires innovation—the ability and

Envisioning

Dianne Cordell / US Department of Agriculture

A farmer’s market in Glen Falls, New York. A robust local food culture builds a city’s resilience in the face of potential disasters.

willingness to try new things. The capacity to innovate derives from the qualities described above. A diverse system generates more novelty than a monoculture; in social systems, innovation often comes from the margins.

An inclusive society is better able to engage the agency and creativity of all of its citizens. And tight feedbacks provide timely and accurate information about changing conditions, which is essential for appropriate innovation.

Finally, communities must act by protecting, restoring, adapting—and, if necessary, transforming—the systems on which they depend. Building resilience in complex systems may require all of the above.

Take, for example, the electrical grid, which, as noted above, is staggeringly vulnerable to disruption.

A more resilient grid requires persisting—urgent action to protect vulnerable links in the chain. It also requires adapting—measures to make the grid more redundant and

modular, as some are doing now.

For example, Co-Op City, a housing complex in the Bronx, kept their lights on during Superstorm Sandy with a microgrid that disconnected temporarily from the larger system.20 But ultimately—given the limited supply and disastrous climate effects of fossil fuels—the existing electrical grid must be transformed to one that relies instead on a diverse array of renewable power sources.

Resilience requires a holistic view: focusing myopically on the system at

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Envisioning

Pembina Institute

Humans have increased the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 40 percent above pre-Industial Era levels.

a single scale, or managing for a single outcome, is likely to yield surprises from unanticipated feedbacks. So managing resilient communities begins with an understanding of systems and their functions at many scales, from many perspectives. And, it calls for a certain amount of humility; an admission of what we cannot know.21 To avoid a narrow focus, interventions to build resilience can try to solve more than one problem. For example, energy efficiency in affordable housing can help low-income people save money on utilities. It also makes homes more habitable during power outages, so that residents can shelter in place during a disaster. And it reduces energy usage, mitigating

climate change and improving air quality and public health.

There are many other such win–win solutions. For example, the Evergreen Cooperatives of Cleveland are employee-owned, for-profit companies—laundry services, urban farms, and renewable energy—whose green jobs pay a living wage and enable workers to build equity. Because Evergreen is linked to the supply chains of the city’s anchor institutions, it helps keep financial resources in the community. Evergreen builds resilience by protecting workers from the vicissitudes of the global economy and also by protecting the ecosystems on which the city depends.22

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Bounce Forward Facing an unknowable future, we can build resilience with win–win strategies like distributed, renewable energy; local food; and greater social equity.

These strategies will help protect our communities from a broad range of disruptions, and help create a world that is more sustainable and just.

Resilience, in essence, is about strengthening our connections to the natural world and to one another.

We may live in cities, divorced from nature, but we are not exempt from nature’s laws. To survive and thrive in these disruptive times, we need to reconnect to the values that enabled our species to overcome hard times through the millennia.

Envisioning 5. IPCC, 2014. Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change. Working Group III Contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge University Press, New York, 2014).

6. Munich RE. Rise in weather risks [online] (2015) http://www.munichre.com/us/weather-resilienceand-protection/rise-weather/rise-weather-risk/ index.html.

7. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information. State of the climate: global analysis for October 2015 [online] (2015) http://www.ncdc.noaa. gov/sotc/global/201510.

8. Goudarzi, S. Flocking to the coast: world’s population migrating into danger. LiveScience [online] (July 18, 2006) http://www.livescience. com/4167-flocking-coast-world-populationmigrating-danger.html.

9. Plenert, G. et al. Supply Chain Vulnerability in Times of Disaster (Wipro Consulting Services, Bangalore, 2012).

10. Foley, J. Farming changes can limit risks of extreme drought. The New York Times (July 25, 2012).

11. Smith, R. U.S. risks national blackout from smallscale attack: federal analysis says sabotage of nine key substations is sufficient for broad outage. The Wall Street Journal (March 12, 2014).

12. Lovett, R. What if the biggest solar storm on record happened today? National Geographic News [online] (March 4, 2011) http://news.nationalgeographic. com/news/2011/03/110302-solar-flares-sun-stormsearth-danger-carrington-event-science/.

13. Shorrocks, A. and J. Davies. Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook (Credit Suisse Research Institute, Zurich, 2013).

14. Ross, T. A Disaster in the Making: Addressing the Vulnerability of Low-Income Communities to Extreme Weather (Center for American Progress, Washington DC, 2013).

15. Island Press and The Kresge Foundation. Bounce Forward: Urban Resilience in the Era of Climate Change (Island Press, Washington DC, 2015).

16. Kaysen, R. Back to the Jersey Shore. The New York Times (April 4, 2014).

Carlos Pacheco

A volunteer peels carrots for Occupy Sandy.

17. Klinenberg, E. Adaptation: how can cities be “climate-proofed”? The New Yorker (January 7, 2013).

18. Klinenberg, E. Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2002).

Those values were out in force after Superstorm Sandy, when “Occupy Sandy” mustered volunteers to provide food, clothing, transportation, generators, and other vital assistance to storm victims.

One Occupy supporter summed up the group’s philosophy: “We’re all in this together, so let’s help each other out.”19

19. Wilkinson, R.G. and K. Pickett. The Spirit Level:

References

Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better

1. Buckley, C. and M. Wilson. In New York’s public housing, fear creeps in with the dark. The New York Times (November 2, 2012).

(Bloomsbury Press, New York, 2009).

20. Gardiner, B. Bypassing the power grid. The New York Times (October 8, 2013).

2. Vitousek, P.M. et al. Human domination of the Earth’s ecosystems. Science 277 (1997).

3. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Board of Directors. Living Beyond Our Means: Natural Assets and Human Well-being (Island Press, Washington DC, 2005).

4. U.S. Global Change Research Program. 2014

21. Berkes, F. and C. Folke in Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems (eds Gunderson, LH & Holling, CS) Ch. 5 (Island Press, Washington DC, 2002).

22. Lawrence, J. and L. Moreno-Caballud,. It’s mutual aid, stupid. Huffington Post (November 18, 2012)

National Climate Assessment [online] (2014) http://

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-lawrence/

nca2014.globalchange.gov.

occupy-sandy_b_2155103.html. www.thesolutionsjournal.org | November-December 2015 | Solutions | 19

Asquith, C. (2015). Hillary Clinton, Sex, and American Foreign Policy. Solutions 6(6): 20–22. https://thesolutionsjournal.com/2015/6/hillary-clinton-sex-politics-and-american-foreign-policy

Idea Lab Interview

Hillary Clinton, Sex, and American Foreign Policy Interview by Christina Asquith

V

alerie Hudson is a Professor and the George H.W. Bush Chair in the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. She is also co-author of the recent The Hillary Doctrine: Sex in American Foreign Policy.

Your book examines then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s approach to foreign policy—the so-called Hillary Doctrine—that purports that the subjugation of women worldwide is a threat to the common security of all nations.

You ultimately support that idea. What evidence did you find in your research to back this up?

I’ve got lots of evidence, and most of the hard, academic evidence went into my first book, Sex and World Peace.

This second book was intended to be more reader friendly and included qualitative data. My co-author Patricia Leidl traveled to Afghanistan, Yemen, Mexico, and Guatemala to get a sense of how these ideas are interlinked— how women are not the canaries in the coal mine. Male–female relations are the coal mine, and poverty, ill health, violence, and dysfunctional government are the canaries that tell the tale.

There’s also empirical work using statistical testing. So for example, Professor Mary Caprioli’s work shows that states with better levels of gender equality are less likely to have interstate and intrastate conflicts or use force first, that is, be the aggressors in a conflict. My own findings show how the level of physical security of women is correlated with the overall

peacefulness of the nation and in particular its relations with its neighboring countries and its compliance with its own treaty obligations. Rose McDermott has done negotiation and war gaming simulations and has found that women are less likely to resort to force, which bolsters Caprioli’s argument. There is also a lot of psychological literature showing that boys that have been socialized in households with domestic violence are more likely to use violence to resolve interpersonal conflicts in their own lives.

Bring us up to speed on the Hillary Doctrine. Has Hillary the candidate mentioned it on her campaign?

No, she has talked in vague terms about the importance of women but I haven’t seen a foreign policy speech during the campaign seasons. Is that a strategic move on her part? Does she think talking about it won’t gain her voters? If that’s her judgment, that’s pretty sad.

How would Hillary Clinton as president be able to implement her strategy differently than when she was Secretary of State? What might we expect?

That’s a question that hung over our work because what we found was that while she took it very seriously and was willing to follow up with programming and resources, somewhere between Foggy Bottom and the Oval Office, its importance got dropped and there was not much will at the top to consider the impact of foreign policy moves on women.

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Courtesy of Valerie Hudson

Valerie Hudson recently co-authored the book, The Hillary Doctrine: Sex in American Foreign Policy.

In fact, we have that awful quote from an unnamed Obama official in 2011 describing US efforts to advance women [in Afghanistan] a “pet rock” that was “weighing down our rucksacks.” If that’s what Hillary was dealing with with her boss, then her ability to implement effectively was likely to have been seriously restrained. In Afghanistan, it wasn’t Clinton who dropped the ball—it was Obama who dropped the ball, and US Ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker gave us a devastating interview in which he made that case in spades.

So this would be different with a Hillary administration?

Absolutely, no one in her inner circle would dare suggest gender was a “pet rock” that would be subordinated to more pressing issues. Just by the choice of staff—by the choice of cabinet heads, we would see much more than just the rhetorical tip of the

Idea Lab Interview

David Amsler

Guatemalan women walk in Comalapa. Guatemala is used as an example in support of the Hillary Doctrine, demonstrating that empowering women can prevent violent conflict.

hat. We’d see real commitment and you saw it in a more circumscribed way at State and USAID when she was Secretary of State. People paid attention. You need to do this gender stuff—people would say, “Teach me,” “Tell me what I’m looking for,” “What should I emphasize in requests for proposals?” There was an openness there that went away when she went away. Kerry mentioned women for the first few months and then really it’s become a nonissue for him. Cathy Russell, the current head of the Office of Global Women’s Issues (OGWI), doesn’t hold the same

sort of relationship with Kerry that former OGWI head Melanne Verveer did with Hillary.

If Hillary were elected, all that groundwork she laid for women— including elevating the OGWI, creating nine gender indicators in the Master Indicator List, making sure the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review was chock full of references to women, and creating the US National Action Plan—would still be there. If she came back as president, she could turn the light switch back on. And she’d be much further ahead than in 2009. She’d be so

far ahead with people already there or willing to come back. We’d see a much more effective implementation of the Hillary Doctrine.

How does the example of Guatemala in your book demonstrate that empowering women would help stave off violent conflict and authoritarianism?

Where does a culture of impunity come from—the kind you see in such a dysfunctional regime—and this template of pillaging and raping the state and its resources for its own benefit? It comes from the toleration of pillage and rape during the genocidal

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Idea Lab Interview war against the Mayan and against intellectuals. There is a devastating new report about high levels of incest in Guatemala fueling the teen pregnancy rate there. This shows what you live by in the household, where males are completely dominant; there is an expectation to use violence and to live off of the labor of their wives and female kin. When they have impunity for committing crimes like incest, this spills over into the entire culture, the political culture of a country. Especially in a country like Guatemala with a history of a genocidal conflict. The war against the Maya kickstarted a dysfunctional state in Guatemala where Mayan women were targeted for horrendous atrocities and where it was recognized that to break the Mayans, you had to destroy their women. It was useful to kill the men, but you had to destroy the women, and it was an effective way to destroy and attack that community and force many to flee across the border.

Walk us through the role USAID has had in (inadvertently) setting back women’s rights?

USAID used to be a marvelous tool to advance foreign policy interests in tandem with interests of foreign countries, and that has been degraded over time.

It once employed engineers, agricultural specialists, sanitation engineers, and experts who went into the field. But over time, personnel got slashed even as the budget increased significantly. So USAID was forced to become just a matchmaker: matching huge American contractors with programs to be implemented on the ground, and so this, plus the vigorous accounting requirements, has done a double whammy on USAID. In fact,

one of the things I discovered was that USAID doesn’t even do its own monitoring and evaluation of its own contractors—it relies on the contractors themselves to do it.

One of the reasons awards all go to these megacontractors is that the application process is absolutely arcane and complicated—you would need an immense staff to fill it out.

And USAID doesn’t want to hear you need USD$20,000 in Mali. They want companies asking for USD$20 million.

Plus everything has to be done in English. So these NGOS would just say, “We just can’t do it.” And then the folks who could make the most effective interventions would never get the money.

And these megacontractors are like a holding company and they hand off projects to subcontractors and sub-subcontractors, and finally when it gets to the Nepali or Indian worker on the ground implementing it, they couldn’t care less about things like women. Your gender-sensitive USAID program is being implemented by people who don’t care about gender, and they treat women in demeaning and humiliating ways, often using and running brothels on the side. The more we investigated the USAID angle, we were just stupefied by how this tool has been degraded to the point that it brings about the opposite of what it was intended to bring about.

Let’s envision a world in 50 years in which most of what you would like to see happen, has happened. How did we get there, and how does this world look better from today?

I’d like to see a world with lower violence against women and higher levels of gender equality. That’s vague, but the one thing I would do if

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Columbia University Press

I had a magic wand is eliminate child marriage from the face of the earth.

There is no other social practice that mires society in utter dysfunction than the marriage of girls who are 8, 9, 10, 11, up to 14. This guarantees you have poor outcomes not only for the girls but for the children and society. If that one issue was solved it would solve so much.

Other issues, on the heels of that, are polygamy, which does the same—it mires future generations in poverty, levels of physical violence against women, and property rights for women. Before I get to the wage gap or labor participation for women or women in government, I would do these basics. If we had those things, everything would change. Rwanda for example has now 60 percent women, but for the life of a rural woman in Rwanda, not a heck of a lot has changed. It’s the household dynamics that needs to change. When the house changes, then interventions from the top bear fruit.

Stewart, N. (2015). Reclaiming the Rift Valley: Sustainably Managing Land in the Village of Suswa for Environmental and Economic Prosperity. Solutions 6(6): 23–27. https://thesolutionsjournal.com/2015/6/reclaiming-the-rift-valley-sustainably-managing-land-in-the-village-of-suswa-for-environmental-and-economic-prosperity

Perspectives Reclaiming the Rift Valley: Sustainably Managing Land in the Village of Suswa for Environmental and Economic Prosperity

by Naomi Stewart

S

wift views of the Rift Valley carve a pathway through Kenya, offering dusty red and green vistas of the ancient lands of the Maasai people.

Several hours west from the cluttered noise of Nairobi is a small village called Suswa, nestled amidst the hills and valleys of Narok County.

Here, the arid land is smudged with dusty soil from volcanic ash and spotted with clusters of the musky camphor bush. However, drought and overuse of the fragile land in this small corner of the Rift Valley has led to deforestation and depletion of the vegetation cover, which served to stabilize the top layer of hard pan soil and retain the nutrients in the soft clay soils underneath.

To survive in the new conditions that land degradation brought, the Maasai in Suswa have come to rely more heavily on charcoal production for income, even though it is unsustainable and degrades the landscape further. While they may be able to feed their families for a year or two with this income, what will they do in the next five or 10 years when the soil is so poor the land will be unable to produce trees or grow grass for livestock herds to graze?

Given the arid features and on-going degradation of the fragile landscape around Suswa, these problems need to be and are being addressed now. Simple technologies to rehabilitate the landscape and return it to a level of sustainable productive capacity are being implemented with the support of local universities and global research institutes, with 250 hectares of land already reclaimed.

The successes being seen here can serve as models for other regions

experiencing decreasing livelihoods and sustenance from land degradation, not only in Kenya and East Africa but globally, too.

Traditionally, this land was communally managed with rotational livestock grazing. The red-robed Maasai roamed with their herds, allowing the lands left behind time to regenerate, preserving their productive capacity. However, the tenure regime changed over time from this communal management to private leasing, a practice mirrored in many other African countries. This created broken-up parcels of individually owned ranches, and the larger holistic management picture was lost. Many native trees were cut down to make way for intensive farming in these plots, which destabilized and reduced the productivity of the soil.

Under these circumstances, when the rain comes—which it often does with force—it barrels down these nowexposed and fragile hills, washing the precious soil away with it and creating large gullies up to 25 meters deep and 30 meters wide. This is detrimental not only to the delicate architecture of the landscape, but also in providing sustenance and livelihoods for the villagers as a result of lost biodiversity and soil productivity. The gullies also pose other dangers, such as humans and livestock falling in and injuring or killing themselves.

As the land became less productive and their livelihoods became threatened, the inhabitants of Suswa resorted to cutting down trees to convert to charcoal and sell for income (a bag of charcoal could fetch 600–700 shillings in the countryside, with much of it flowing towards the

growing nearby town of Narok and even Nairobi). The Maasai increasingly depended on charcoal for income, and sustainable practices were abandoned in order to meet their short term economic and sustenance needs.

Recently, a collaborative project was set up in the village to address this issue and develop a sustainable land management plan with funding from the United Nations Development Programme, Global Environment Facility, and the Government of Kenya.

Other collaborative institutes included the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute, University of Nairobi, Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, and the Kenya Forest Research Institute. The idea was to restore alternative livelihoods, reduce the dependence on charcoal, and increase the resilience of the community economically while the land’s productive capacity was being restored sustainably.

The Masaai have built retention and infiltration ditches dug at strategic locations along the hillside that capture water and soil and prevent it from washing away as it streams downhill during periods of rain. Many of these are not much more than long, rectangular trenches reinforced with sandbags (all impressively done with their own manual labor), but these simple techniques go a long way in preventing and reducing downhill loss of soil and nutrients. In other areas semicircular bunds, check dams, grass strips, and cut-off drains have also been constructed with the same purpose. These adaptive techniques not only provide novel sources of water replenishment but also capture the soil and prevent the precious nutrients from being lost.

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Perspectives

Naomi Stewart

The Maasai have developed long trenches to capture soil as it washes downhill as one of their sustainable land management techniques applied in Suswa.

With enough water and nutrients now available in these stores, the Maasai are starting to regenerate the landscape with native trees and grasses, provide fodder and water for livestock and vegetation, and ultimately diversify their incomes so that they are not dependent on one degrading practice that will render their land unusable in the near future. Other adaptive techniques include establishing perennial grasses, tree planting, improving soil fertility, upgrading livestock breeds, and temporary area closures. They also implemented livelihood diversification by setting up beehives with farmers already harvesting kilograms of honey.

Training and capacity building is also a key element of the project to ensure that the knowledge gained is captured and can be shared with others. Local farmers and villagers collaborated to learn about droughttolerant crops, water harvesting, postharvest loss control, and other best-practices. A demonstration site was set up in the reclaimed area, where farmers experiment with different farming techniques as well as supporting a bulking site for pasture seeds. All of these practices allow the villagers in Suswa to develop their own environmental and economic sustenance, which are key in securing their long-term health and well-being.

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As the Maasai learned, these types of sustainable land management solutions are not necessarily difficult to put into practice. It’s more a matter of being armed with the locally appropriate tools and knowledge and having access to enough capital. Sometimes, not being able to afford seedlings, gravel, or shovels can be a very real barrier to change. A key component of tackling this problem lies in understanding the short and long-term values and rewards in productive, healthy landscapes and accessing the support to transition to sustainable land management.

While there has been a lot of movement towards sustainable land

Perspectives

Clemens Olbrich

Some of the Maasai women of Suswa in the Rift Valley stand to greet their guests from the Economics of Land Degradation Initiative.

management, the issue of economic drivers, costs, and benefits was not always as clear. An initiative called TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity) saw great success in framing issues around biodiversity loss and concentration with economic understanding.

After the success of TEEB, a multinational organization called the Economics of Land Degradation (ELD) Initiative was established in 2012 to apply the same type of solutions for land. Their goal is to “transform global understanding of the economic value of productive land based on both market and nonmarket values…improve stakeholder

awareness for socio-economic arguments to improve sustainable land management, prevent the loss of natural capital, preserve ecosystem services, combat climate change, and address food, energy, and water security.” They are a global collection of researchers, practitioners, and interested stakeholders working to solve land degradation issues through economic understanding of sustainable land management.

In September 2015, the ELD Initiative released a comprehensive report called “The Value of Land” on the knowledge and research amassed in this field globally to date, inclusive of new research and

perspectives aimed at total economic valuations. This included novel estimates of the cost of land degradation, placed between USD$6.3 and 10.6 trillion annually—a staggering 10 to 17 percent of the world’s entire GDP. These estimates of financial loss show just how economically practical it is to shift from degrading practices to sustainable ones. It is hoped that uncovering and sharing these powerful economic numbers will motivate action on sustainable land management as they highlight the value of land and the potential it holds for economic and environmental empowerment. It is important to note that land degradation is a problem

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Perspectives

Naomi Stewart

Another sustainable land management technique applied by the Maasai in Suswa: a massive water reservoir reinforced with sandbags to capture the soil and water as it washes away when it rains.

at different scales—not just globally but also regionally, nationally, and locally—and thus solutions must be able to transition across scales.

At the global level, the recent enactment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the UN General Assembly in September 2015 included one for land, specifically number 15: to sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, halt and reverse land degradation, halt biodiversity loss. This type of agreement provides the impetus for worldwide efforts to protect land—for instance, motivating rewards for local users who protect land and in doing so, reduce atmospheric carbon

levels—benefits which are redistributed at the global scale. The success of setting these types of global targets was seen with the UN Millennium Development Goals which pushed progress on issues like reducing gender inequality and eradicating poverty. Though these international agreements do not necessarily chart a course, they do provide a destination.

Accomplishing SDG number 15 is a signpost and reminder that local solutions like those in western Kenya need to be seen as part of a regional and global approach.

Countries that share geographical landscapes or features that cross

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political boundaries (e.g. sub-Saharan Africa) must work together to ensure that downstream and upstream users have equitable distribution of benefits and rewards from sustainable land management. For instance, decisions taken by bordering countries like Uganda or Tanzania can have positive or negative impacts on Kenya.

Alternatively, engaging in sustainable land management in shared boundary forests improves the value of ecosystem services across the whole forest, regardless of political boundaries.

Countries need to ensure that benefits generated by one and collected by the other are justly rewarded. Economic

Perspectives

Clemens Olbrich

Project leaders explain the sustainable and management techniques used by the Maasai.

understanding of land use works in a neutral, clear language that allows nations to confer together and implement harmonized cross-border practices from an equal platform of understanding.

Understanding that livelihoods and self-sustenance depends on sustainable land use and getting the financial means to support a transition to it can completely alter a rural community’s long-term economic and

environmental well-being. Support from governments and international organizations can be very central in this change. Government support also includes ensuring equitable distribution of the benefits and rewards of sustainable land management practices across different types of land users, so that those who protect the land are justly compensated for doing so by everyone else who benefits from it. For instance, the Kenyan

government co-funding sustainable land management projects for the Maasai is a recognition of the benefits that flow back to Kenya from their sustainable land-use practices. This redistribution of benefits reduces the Maasai’s dependence on degrading practices like charcoal production and instead allows them to reap rewards from land use activities that protect the land—like eco-tourism, agropastoralism, agroforestry, etc.—but end up with benefits delivered elsewhere, even though the costs are incurred locally.

In our current society, money talks, but it often flows through our systems in many ways that aren’t ‘tracked’ by the market, especially when it comes to natural capital. So why not use that language and gain a deeper understanding of where the value is being stored and moved around to empower people, governments, and the global society while also protecting natural capital? In the case of land, understanding the many benefits it provides directly and indirectly allows land users and owners to reap the economic rewards of sustainable land management. Having global agreements like the SDGs and networked organizations like the ELD Initiative allows for a web of knowledge sharing and capacity building, which can have genuine impacts at the local scale on real people like the hard-working men and women of Suswa.

Being able to put holistic values on land ensures that at all levels and types of stakeholders can work together to protect it while also providing livelihoods, sustenance, and environmental and economic stability. In this one small corner of the Rift Valley, it is clear from obvious renewed pride of the Maasai in their restored land that these are solutions worth creating and sharing with the world.

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Steele, C.S. (2015). Kids are Complex: Connecting Learning to Life. Solutions 6(6): 28–30. https://thesolutionsjournal.com/2015/6/kids-are-complex-connecting-learning-to-life

Perspectives Kids Are Complex: Connecting Learning to Life

by Caitlin S. Steele

W

ouldn’t it be great if students arrived to class each day cheerful and eager to learn? Teachers could simply open their mouths to bestow wisdom and knowledge, and students would listen, absorb, and then dazzle everyone in earshot with their brilliance. Though teachers’ lives would be easier if the good, oldfashioned direct instruction approach worked every time, this simple model of education does not suffice for one important reason: students are not simple. Sure, they want to learn, but about the Russian Revolution?

Students can’t see how it relates to them. What about the rich ecosystem just beyond the school walls? Are there power outlets out there?

Students are hard-wired for learning, but they can fail to retain what they’ve been taught if they don’t see why it is important to them.

So, what is important? Friends, sports, music, the environment, human or animal rights. . . and sometimes they do get excited about school, too. I’ve seen many students engage actively when confronted with subjects like the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, or issues that hit close to home.

When students are fully checked in, teachers can read it all over their faces, not to mention their work. When school topics connect to their personal experiences or challenge them to grapple with questions they feel are important, they react and respond.

Still, some students evade all hooks.

Despite teachers’ best efforts, some kids will still text message on their phones when they should be listening, hide ear buds under hoods, and pass long notes that ignore every grammar lesson they’ve ever had. But, they do

care. Maybe it’s about a band they’re starting up, a new game they’re playing, or a new love. Maybe it’s a struggle they’re having with body image or a home without heat. Students are complex beings, and that complexity influences their learning.

Students’ learning is affected not only by the strengths and limitations they bring with them—as well as the strengths and limitations of their teachers—but also by the school, its community, and all of the relationships within it. In these days of mass media and information being a click away, learning is affected by an increasingly broad scope of global events and realities. Education is a complex system.

cross traditional disciplinary boundaries—problems like climate change that exist at the intersections of politics, religion, economics, and conservation.1-5 Several have argued that if we want to prepare students to thrive in a complex world, we need to teach them systems skills, which include the ability to see connections between diverse subjects and contexts, view any given situation from multiple perspectives, and recognize patterns of change over time.6-9 However, teaching about complexity is not just about preparing students for future challenges or opportunities. It is also about helping them to orient themselves in their world today.

The language of systems can illuminate direct connections between the curricular content of schools and the world that surrounds them. Meadows and Wright define a system as “a set

Teaching students the language and skills of systems offers them new ways to understand not only traditional school content, but also themselves and the complexity of the world around them.

This all seems fitting. We are, after all, educating our kids so that they may thrive in a diverse and ever more interconnected world. Teachers have heard that by the time their students graduate from college, they will be assuming jobs and careers that don’t even exist yet. They will be living in a complex world full of complex systems—biological, ecological, political, economic, and social—all nested, overlapping, and interdependent.

Many authors have made the case that systems thinking is critical for addressing modern problems that

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of things—people, cells, molecules, etc.—interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time.”10 There are simple, linear systems in which “each part works in a lockstep way with the other parts.”11 Think of the coffee pot sitting on your counter at home. Add coffee grounds and water, turn it on, and you can pretty much predict what it will do. That is one of the primary characteristics of a linear system. It is predictable, and so it is controllable.12 Teenagers, of course, aren’t linear systems. They are complex. Unlike

Perspectives

Innovation School

Students at Renaissance Charter High School for Innovation in New York City work on a group project. Today’s students are complex beings living in a complex world comprised of complex systems.

the coffee pot, students don’t behave predictably at the press of a button.

They have the capacity to learn and grow, and to respond to feedback from teachers, their peers, and the greater systems of which they are a part. The complexity of each individual’s lived experiences is an example of complex systems in action.

A complexity-oriented perspective is both an academic and intuitive way of looking at the world, a way of studying patterns of behavior and relationships over time. In research and in practice, complex systems approaches have been used to advance knowledge across a range of disciplines from computer science and engineering to archeology and public

administration.13,14 Systems concepts have surfaced in the hard sciences, social sciences, and humanities.15 They have made their way into education standards as well. The Next Generation Science Standards, developed by the National Research Council, the National Science Teachers Association, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, contain several references to systems in both their Crosscutting Concepts and Disciplinary Core Ideas.16,17 Furthermore, the Cloud Institute, which aims to inspire K–12 students “to think about the world, their relationship to it, and their ability to influence it in an entirely new way,” includes the Dynamics of Systems and

Change as one of nine core standards in its Education for Sustainability framework.18 Imagine if we integrated school subjects and taught through a complex systems lens. Shakespeare’s works could help students understand common patterns in human behavior.

What reinforcing feedback loops, “in which an action produces a result which influences more of the same action,” led to the deaths of Romeo and Juliet? What balancing feedback loops, where a current state changes to a desired state through some action, have kept Shakespeare’s writing from going out of fashion for hundreds of years?19 Teaching students the language and skills of systems offers

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Perspectives them new ways to understand not only traditional school content, but also themselves and the complexity of the world around them.

As educators struggle with how to teach students to thrive in a future we cannot imagine, teaching through the lens of complex systems offers great promise. At its core, complexity in the classroom is about illuminating common patterns in history, science, mathematics, the arts, and humanities; helping kids to see connections between them all; and showing them how to discover for themselves how one thing impacts another and how each individual might impact her or his world.

References 1. Meadows, D.H. and D. Wright. Thinking in Systems: A Primer (Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction VT, 2008).

2. Fisher, D.M. “Everybody Thinking Differently”: K–12 is a Leverage Point. System Dynamics Review, 27(4), 394–411 (2011).

3. Richmond, B. Systems Thinking: Critical Thinking Skills for the 1990s and Beyond. System Dynamics Review 9(2) 113–133 (1993).

4. Senge, P.M. Creating Schools for the Future, Not the Past for All Students. Leader to Leader, (65), 44–49 (2012).

5. Metz, S. Systems Thinking. The Science Teacher, 79(7), 6 (2012).

6. Wessels, T. The Myth of Progress: Toward a Sustainable Future (University of Vermont Press, Burlington VT, 2006).

7. Sweeney, L.B. Learning to Connect the Dots: Developing Children’s Systems Literacy. Solutions.

Vol 5, No. 3. pp. 55–62 (2012).

8. Cassell, J.A. and T. Nelson. Visions Lost and Dreams

Devon Christopher Adams

A high school student reads Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in the classroom.

Forgotten: Environmental Education, Systems Thinking, and Possible Futures in American Public Schools. Teacher Education Quarterly, 37(4), 179 (2010).

9. Dubberly, H. A Systems Literacy Manifesto. RSD3 2014 Symposium—Relating Systems Thinking and Design 3. Conference address. [online] (2014) http://www. dubberly.com/presentations/system_literacy.pdf.

10. Meadows, D.H. and D. Wright. Thinking in Systems: A Primer (Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction VT, 2008).

11. Wessels, T. The Myth of Progress: Toward a Sustainable Future (University of Vermont Press, Burlington VT, 2006).

12. Wessels, T. The Myth of Progress: Toward a Sustainable Future (University of Vermont Press, Burlington VT, 2006).

13. Michell, M. Complexity: A Guided Tour (Oxford University Press, New York NY, 2009).

14. Bar-Yam, Y. Making Things Work: Solving Complex Problems in a Complex World (NECSI Knowledge Press, Cambridge MA, 2004).

15. Byrne, D. and G. Callaghan. Complexity Theory and the Social Sciences: The State of the Art (Routledge, New York NY, 2014).

16. The Next Generation Science Standards:

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Development Overview [online] http://www. nextgenscience.org/development-overview.

17. The Next Generation Science Standards: Executive Summary [online] (NGSS Release, 2013) www.nextgenscience.org/next-generation-sciencestandards.

18. Cloud, J.P., ed. Education for Sustainability: EfS Standards and Performance Indicators. [online] (2012) http://www.cloudinstitute.org/cloud-efsstandards/.

19. Bellinger, G. TheWay of Systems [online] (2004) http:// www.systems-thinking.org/theWay/sba/ba.htm.

Starin, D. (2015). Generously Good Graffiti. Solutions 6(6): 31–35. https://thesolutionsjournal.com/2015/6/generously-good-graffiti

Perspectives Generously Good Graffiti

by Dawn Starin

O

ur urge to create graffiti has probably been around since the beginning of humankind. Certainly in Portugal, it has been around for tens of thousands of years. At the Prehistoric Rock Art Sites in the Côa Valley on the banks of a tributary of the river Douro, hundreds of panels of graffiti depicting thousands of animal figures were carved over several millennia.

Designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1998, this site represents “the most remarkable open-air ensemble of Palaeolithic art on the Iberian Peninsula.”1 And now a modern take on this millennia-old art form thrives in another UNESCO designated, Portuguese world heritage site—the fascinating riverside, seaside city of Porto. Here, on the banks of the Douro River, architectural gems rest side by side with bold contemporary graffiti to create a marvelous mélange of creativity.

Porto, Portugal’s second largest city, is a patchwork quilt of lofty bell towers, Romanesque, gothic, rococo, and baroque churches, and elegant art nouveau facades and interiors. The city also contains a number of derelict and deserted historical buildings.

Now, a group of young and enthusiastic graffiti artists have added their creative threads to this quilt. A graffiti renaissance is filling the streets with vitality, merriment and exuberance, and adding bold, colorful designs to the facades of many of the deserted buildings.

While graffiti often conjures up images of vandalism and/or the mindless destruction of property, this is not the case in Porto. Here, graffiti has enhanced the landscape and instilled

Dawn Starin

wonder and awe in those lucky enough to see it. What was once, and often still is, seen as an eyesore in many countries and cultures now lures visitors in and offers a positive future for Porto as a youthful, and vibrant cultural hub. Today its inhabitants, known as tripeiros—tripe eaters—appreciate and even celebrate good graffiti.

One of the most gifted graffiti artists is 34-year-old Hazul Luzah (both a pseudonym and a palindrome).

For almost two decades, Hazul, with his sweeping sense of humor and design, has spray painted hundreds of pieces of graffiti around Porto. At the moment, about 80 of his designs survive.

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Perspectives

Dawn Starin

A handwritten message on the wall to the left of Hazul’s artwork demonstrates local support for his work.

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Perspectives On the streets, Hazul paints only on abandoned buildings or on walls legally set aside for graffiti. With his kaleidoscope of color and wit, blockedup concrete facades and metal gratings develop a life of their own. Crumbling, deserted buildings come alive. Dull, grimy surfaces blossom.

Hazul, however, has not limited his work to the streets. When FAP Wines launched their Giroflé Espumante Bruto, they hired Hazul to design their label, and Yours Guesthouse commissioned a painting for the front entryway in their UNESCO World Heritage building. And while Hazul describes himself as “100% Porto,” Porto is not the only city displaying his art. His work can be found at Le Mur, the birthplace of the street art movement in Paris, in Wittenberg in Germany, and in Logrono and Barcelona in Spain.

Like the ancient graffiti artists who worked at the Prehistoric Rock Art Sites in the Côa Valley and will always remain nameless, the modern day graffiti artists also have hidden identities as they create sparkling, fun, colorful works of art along the narrow cobblestone streets. Hazul says a pseudonym is “an advantage.” He feels it allows him personal security and complete creative freedom, and while he normally paints alone, he does not consider it a lonely calling since he “is open to all the world’s influences.” He also feels that people should “appreciate my work as it is and not because of who I am and what my personal life might be. It is not important or necessary to know who I am.”

While being labeled a UNESCO World Heritage site brings tourism that boosts the local economy in Porto, it also places expensive restrictions on property owners to maintain historical buildings according to UNESCO rules. These restrictions create a large number of abandoned buildings that

Dawn Starin

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Perspectives could possibly be used to house the homeless and the needy. In order to prevent squatters entering the premises, the city blocks the entrances to these buildings with concrete. In order to bring attention to this issue, Hazul spray paints his artwork over the concrete-barred doorways.

Since part of the process of rehabilitating an abandoned building is erasing the graffiti, I wondered whether Hazul ever felt sad when a piece of his creativity disappeared.

According to Hazul, “I never feel sad.

I’m used to my paintings being erased sooner or later. It is normal that the city changes, so nothing is forever.

The ideal situation is that the piece is destroyed once the building is

renovated. Of course, I would prefer to have more public walls legally available for all artwork—be it historical, graffiti lettering or street art—where it stays for a long period of time and gets seen by many people. All kinds of works and all expression should be public, and they should exist in the open, side by side for all to see and appreciate. But, to keep a building unoccupied simply for the sake of a painting is ridiculous.”

Hazul feels his artwork comes from his search “for a sense of harmony, both artistically and socially.” He also feels that while his art might brighten up parts of Porto by adding “novelty and surprise,” it is not a solution to the housing problem.

For Hazul, repairing old and damaged buildings is the only way to address the issue. “It is necessary to repair the deserted houses so that people have places to live,” he says.

“That is what is important. If my art makes people smile, if it makes them think, if it makes them appreciate graffiti, that makes me happy. If the buildings I have spray-canned, however, are rehabilitated for the homeless, that would make me even happier.”

More of Hazul’s work may be found at http://www.hazul.pt.

References 1. Prehistoric Rock Art Sites in the Côa Valley and Siega Verde. UNESCO [online] (2015) http://whc. unesco.org/en/list/866.

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Perspectives

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Rawls, D. (2015). Missing Letters: Why the SDGs Could Use a Bit More ICT. Solutions 6(6): 36–39. https://thesolutionsjournal.com/2015/6/why-the-sdgs-could-use-a-bit-more-ict

Perspectives Missing Letters: Why the SDGs Could Use a Bit More ICT

by Dana Rawls

T

he newly minted UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were released with much fanfare at the United Nations at the end of September. Among its many aims, the 17 goals seek to improve the quality of global education, reduce inequality, and take action on climate change with a seemingly endless arsenal of weapons: from public awareness campaigns; national, regional, and international policy briefings; social media blitzes; and celebrity endorsements.

But many feel that one incredibly important and useful weapon isn’t being utilized to its full extent.

Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D) practitioners have expressed concern that ICTs are not specifically mentioned in any of the SDGs and are found in only four of the 169 targets, such as Target 5.6b, to “enhance the use of enabling technology, in particular information and communications technology, to promote the empowerment of women,” and Target 9.5c to “significantly increase access to information and communications technology and strive to provide universal and affordable access to the Internet in least developed countries by 2020.”1 Tim Unwin, the UNESCO Chair in ICT4D and the Director of the ICT4D Collective, noted in a recent blog post that, “there is widespread agreement that ICTs have been one of the major factors that have transformed the world over the 15 years of the MDGs (Millennium Development Goals)…

They have driven extraordinary economic growth, opened up entirely new ways of delivering education, health, and rural development,

transformed the relationships between governments and citizens, and created an interconnected world of communication and knowledge sharing. It is not an exaggeration to say that they have been one of the most significant changes to humanity over the last 20 years.”2 “Yet, those determining the SDG agenda for the next 15 years barely give them any recognition at all. This would not be so worrying if ICTs had not also created some of the greatest inequalities that the world has ever seen; the differences in life experience between someone connected through mobile broadband to a 4G network and someone with only 2G connectivity, let alone without a smartphone or equivalent digital device, is extraordinary.”

an April blog post that ICTs have the potential to integrate and accelerate all three pillars of sustainable development—economic growth, social inclusion, and environmental sustainability.4 “ICTs have an intrinsic value for long-term sustainable development beyond the four targets in the proposed post-2015 development framework,” wrote Fowlie. “The development of ICT infrastructures… creates an enabling environment required to implement the new sustainable development agenda. Making ICT universally available can deliver important cross-cutting synergies across different sectors.”

The use of ICTs in development initiatives is limited only by the imagination of development practitioners.

“There is widespread agreement that ICTs have been one of the major factors that have transformed the world over the 15 years of the MDGs.”

—Tim Unwin, UNESCO Chair in ICT4D “Hence, those involved in crafting the SDGs should have paid very much greater attention to the transformative role of ICTs.” In a world where more people have access to mobile phones than indoor plumbing,3 many in the ICT4D field see ICTs as critically important enablers of global economic, health, and social development. Gary Fowlie, Head of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) Liaison Office in New York, noted in

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In Sri Lanka, SOS Children’s Villages —a children’s charity operating in over 125 countries—has created a mobile technology program to provide women with parenting tips, guidance on effective family communications, and even financial advice in order to help encourage safe and nurturing environments for children in the region. The program, called Mobile for Development, was started in November 2013 and uses mobile phone technology.5

Perspectives The Urban Poor Consortium in Indonesia has established three radio stations to broadcast information on health, politics, and education to vulnerable members of the community.6 And the development of e-Choupal in India has allowed farmers there to check future and local prices around the world before going to market, increasing their ability to align their farm’s output to market demand while decreasing transaction costs to sell their goods.7 These cases provide examples of how ICTs are regarded by many as an important tool to leverage the SDGs and improve the effectiveness and reach of development projects overall.

But implementing ICT4D projects are not without their challenges or limitations.

The lack of established collaboration between development and ICT professionals has led to ICT4D being inadequately utilized in large-scale development projects. Often, ICT4D practitioners are brought into development initiatives too late in the project implementation stage, causing their impact and capabilities to be significantly lessened. Effective and successful use of ICT can only be implemented if these technologies are part of every step of international development initiatives.

Other challenges to ICT4D implementation may be inadequate technical infrastructure within the country or region receiving the development assistance, a lack of literacy within the designated populations to receive aid, and basic access to ICT itself. Additionally, many organizations do not have the internal or structural knowledge of ICT and its myriad uses to be able to apply them usefully within the international development context.8 The ever changing and advancing nature of ICTs can also be an intimidating (and potentially costly) factor to development practitioners.

Sriganesh Lokanathan/ LIRNEasia

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Perspectives

Beyond Access

A Beyond Access project in the Philippines created a model for libraries—hubs for economic opportunity and information access—to provide ICT training to local communities.

But technology professionals are looking at ways to address many of these challenges. In a recent report, the Earth Institute at Columbia University, in collaboration with the Ericsson telecommunications company, offered several ways that the use of ICTs can significantly increase the speed at which the SDGs and other development initiatives are implemented, including the following:9

• ICTs can dramatically speed up public awareness of new SDGrelated services and technologies, thereby increasing their demand and readiness; and • ICTs can significantly improve the speed in which SDG-related technologies are understood and implemented as well as provide low-cost online platforms for training workers in these new technologies

• ICTs can markedly reduce the cost of deploying new SDG-related services, for example in healthcare and education;

Even UN agencies are spreading the word. As part of a growing campaign to re-evaluate the role of ICTs in the SDGs, the International Telecommunications

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Union (ITU) has spearheaded a “Call to Action” urging development stakeholders to “acknowledge the important contribution which broadband and ICT can make to delivering on the aspirational, transformational and universal targets of the post-2015 framework.”10 And at the 2015 World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) attended by the ITU, the UN Development Programme (UNDP), and the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) called for increased ICT integration for development activities relevant to the SDGs.11

Perspectives

Erik Hersman

A local man in Nairobi, Kenya, demonstrates a LiveQuotes mobile phone application that allows him to monitor the Nairobi Stock Exchange.

The SDGs have faced a symphony of criticism and praise alike with many suggesting that the goals are too vague, too unmeasurable, or too many. Others have worried that traditional means of international development may move too slowly to achieve the SDGs by the target date of 2030.

Many in the ICT4D field believe that comprehensive development strategies that fully incorporate ICT tools could significantly increase the chances of achieving the SDGs by their 2030 target date, providing profound impact on the world’s most vulnerable people as well as raising the profile of this relatively new and increasingly important development area.

References 1. United Nations Sustainable Development Knowledge Platform [online] (2015) https:// sustainabledevelopment.un.org/?menu=1300.

2. Unwin, T. ICTs and the failure of the Sustainable

7. e-Choupal. ITC Portal [online] (2015) http://www. itcportal.com/businesses/agri-business/e-choupal.aspx.

8. Devex Impact Editor. The five key challenges in implementing ICT for development. Devex

Development Goals [online] (2015) http://www.

[online] (2013) https://www.devex.com/news/

ict4dc.org/blog/tim-unwin/icts-and-failure-

the-five-key-challenges-in-implementing-ict-for-

sustainable-development-goals.

development-82499.

3. Worstall, T. More people have mobile phones than

9. The Earth Institute Columbia University. ICT &

toilets. Forbes [online] (March 23, 2013) http://www.

SDGs: how information and communications

forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/03/23/more-

technology can achieve the Sustainable

people-have-mobile-phones-than-toilets/.

Development Goals [online] (2015) http://www.

4. Fowlie, G. The catalytic role of ICTs in the #Post2015 Sustainable Development agenda. Itublog [online] (April 17, 2015) https://itu4u.wordpress.

ericsson.com/res/docs/2015/ict-and-sdg-interimreport.pdf.

10. International Telecommunications Union. ITU and

com/2015/04/17/the-catalytic-role-of-icts-in-the-

GeSI call to action: ICTs as a means of implementation

post-2015-sustainable-development-agenda/.

for the post-2015 Sustainable Development agenda

5. SOS Children’s Villages. SOS Sri Lanka uses ICT4D and mobile phones to strengthen parenting skills [online] (2014) http://www.sos-childrensvillages. org/publications/news/sos-sri-lanka-ict4d-mobile.

6. Urban Poor Consortium [online] http://www. urbanpoor.or.id/.

[online] (2015) http://www.itu.int/en/Documents/ITUandGESI-CalltoAction-post2015.pdf.

11. WSIS Forum highlights ICTs for implementing, monitoring SDGs. IISD Reporting Services [online] (2015) http://sd.iisd.org/news/wsis-forum-highlightsicts-for-implementing-monitoring-sdgs/.

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Parrot, L et al. (2015). Slow Down and Save the Whales. Solutions 6(6): 40–47. https://thesolutionsjournal.com/2015/6/slow-down-and-save-the-whales

Feature

Slow Down and

Save the Whales

by Lael Parrott, Clement Chion, Samuel Turgeon, Nadia Ménard, Guy Cantin, and Robert Michaud Jean-Louis Provencher / Parks Canada

The St. Lawrence River Estuary is both a home for endangered whale populations and a busy maritime route.

In Brief The St. Lawrence River Estuary is a busy maritime route through which ships transit to reach Canadian and American ports located along the river and in the Great Lakes of North America. It is also home to an endangered population of beluga whales and is used as a summer foraging ground by minke, blue, humpback, and fin whales. The high number of whale–vessel co-occurrences cause potential disturbance to the whales and also pose a risk of collisions. We describe how a multipartite group of stakeholders worked together to find a consensus solution to manage this risk. The process involved extensive analysis of data describing ship and whale movements in the region, leading to proposals for mitigation scenarios. An agent-based model of ships and whales in the estuary was used to simulate and test the scenarios to evaluate their effectiveness in meeting multiple objectives. In 2013, the group recommended voluntary measures for speed reduction and area avoidance to reduce whale exposure to vessels and decrease the risk of whale–vessel collisions. The measures are communicated to mariners each year by the Canadian Coast Guard and have received high compliance. This is a successful example of how nonregulated solutions can be achieved through collaboration and cooperation between diverse stakeholders.

40 | Solutions | November-December 2015 | www.thesolutionsjournal.org

M

any natural resource management and biodiversity conservation problems are so-called wicked problems.1 Such problems involve multiple stakeholders with differing objectives and for whom the chosen solution will have a significant impact. There is no single solution for a wicked problem and no simple solution. Reducing the impact of commercial shipping on marine mammals in the St. Lawrence River Estuary, Quebec, Canada, is an example of one such wicked problem. The estuary and associated Gulf of St. Lawrence is an area of exceptional oceanographic and biological diversity and is frequented by large whales that use the area as a summer feeding ground. Part of the estuary has been designated as one of Canada’s first marine protected areas: the Saguenay–St. Lawrence Marine Park.2 Established in 1998, the Marine Park is co-managed by Parks Canada and Parks Quebec. In addition, the waters surrounding the Marine Park have been selected as an Area of Interest (AOI) for potential designation as a Marine Protected Area (MPA) under the Oceans Act.3 However, long before this marine park designation, the estuary was an important shipping route. The whale’s main feeding ground is routinely transited by commercial shipping traffic heading to and from the Atlantic Ocean to the major ports along North America’s Great Lakes (Figure 1). In addition, seasonal whale-watching boats supporting a vibrant tourism industry in coastal communities as well as other types of vessels such as ferries and pleasure craft, navigate the marine park waters on a daily basis in the summer season (Figure 1).4 This heavy traffic poses numerous potential threats to marine biodiversity, including the possibility of ship strikes on whales.5–7 Ceasing or reducing shipping activities along the St. Lawrence River, however, would have billions

of dollars of economic impact and is not a realistic option for biological conservation. Marine transportation is also one of the most sustainable forms of transport due to its relatively low carbon emissions per ton of commercial goods moved. Marine shipping should therefore be favored over other types of transport on the basis of carbon footprint per ton-kilometer,

Key Concepts • In the St. Lawrence Estuary, almost 8,000 commercial ship transits per year cross through the critical habitat and foraging grounds of several species of large whales, leading to concerns about the potential impact of traffic on the whales.

• A multipartite working group used a participatory, agent-based modeling approach combined with spatial analyses and scientific expertise to assess scenarios to reduce whale exposure to vessels and manage the risk of collisions.

• The group’s work has led to recommendations for voluntary speed reduction and area avoidance in the Estuary since 2013.

• Including all stakeholders in the solution building process has led to high compliance and a greatly reduced risk of lethal collision between boats and whales.

• Such nonregulatory solutions, achieved through stakeholder collaboration and cooperation, can lead to positive and sustainable outcomes.

and an increase in marine traffic on the St. Lawrence River is anticipated in the future. Reducing the exposure of whales to marine traffic and decreasing the risk of whale–vessel collisions while still maintaining essential marine transport activities is thus a wicked problem: any proposed solutions need to reconcile ecological and socio-economic objectives in a way that is acceptable to all stakeholders.

Here, we describe how a multipartite group of key stakeholders from industry, government, and not-for-profit research and academic organizations came together to seek solutions to reduce the impact of marine transportation on marine mammals in the St. Lawrence River Estuary. The group has formed a sustained partnership, the Working Group for Maritime Transportation and Marine Mammal Protection (referred to as simply the Working Group hereafter), and has adopted the mandate to identify options to reduce the risks posed by commercial shipping to marine mammals in the St. Lawrence Estuary, accounting for ship operation constraints, and without compromising safety at sea.

Context Almost 8,000 merchant and cruise ship transits occur through the St. Lawrence Estuary each year. About 4,000 of these take place from May to October, the season when migratory whales are present.4,5 In 2012, prior to the implementation of the mitigation measures developed by the Working Group, these ships moved at average speeds of around 14 knots, with 17 percent of them exceeding 16 knots on average (Figure 2). Data show that collisions between vessels and whales at speeds of 14 knots have a greater than 60 percent probability of being lethal, with this probability increasing to 90 percent at speeds of 16 knots.8 The ships are traversing the main foraging grounds of baleen whales as well as beluga whales’ critical habitat (listed as endangered by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada). While the number of reported whale–vessel collisions in the Estuary over the past decade is low, any collision is one too many.

For many endangered species, such as the blue whale or the beluga, the loss of a single individual due to a collision may have detrimental effects on population recovery. The

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Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans has assessed collisions to be a medium-high threat to the recovery of the Northwest Atlantic Blue Whale population and a medium threat to the Fin Whale Atlantic population.6 In addition to collision risk, marine traffic noise and congestion are known to disturb and possibly stress, marine mammals, with potential cascading effects on their feeding success or reproductive activities.9 For these reasons, biologists and wildlife conservation managers working in the estuary have been seeking solutions to reduce the impact of all categories of navigation activities on marine mammals in the estuary.

In 2011, a multipartite working group was established to assess possible mitigation measures that could reduce the impact of maritime transportation on marine mammals in the estuary, with an initial emphasis on reducing the probability of fatal whale–ship collisions. The working group is co-chaired by representatives from the Federal organizations, Parks Canada, and Fisheries and Oceans Canada, and includes participants from a range of sectors, including industry, government, academic, and not-for-profit research organizations.

Initial meetings of the Working Group were focused on establishing a shared understanding of the economic and operational constraints of the maritime transport industry and of the ecological conditions of the estuary, including the seasonal patterns of movement and use of the study area by marine mammals. Group members shared relevant data, information, and knowledge from their respective realms and explained their organization’s use of the estuary or their role in managing human activities. For many organizations, this was the first time that they’d had the opportunity to interact closely with organizations from different sectors. The group therefore focused many of its initial meetings on relationship building.

Samuel Turgeon

Figure 1. This map shows areas of high concentration of whale populations and marine traffic density along a stretch of the St. Lawrence Estuary.

This sharing of perspectives contributed to a better understanding of each organization’s mandate and operating constraints. It also helped establish a sound collaboration based on trust and understanding between the different group members.

The group acknowledged the heavy overlap between whales and marine traffic in the study area that may lead to numerous impacts on whales, including risks of collision.

Managing the risk of collision and reducing overall exposure of whales to ships was the initial objective of the group. The group identified a series of possible traffic management scenarios

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(e.g. speed limits, off-limit areas, and traffic deviation schemes) that might reduce the risk of ship strikes on whales and which were perceived as feasible within known ship operation constraints. These traffic management scenarios were developed using a combination of expert knowledge, long-term monitoring data, and geographic information for the region.

Over a period of two years, the group analyzed the acceptability of the different scenarios, weighing the trade-offs between economic costs and conservation gains and revising scenarios as necessary to accommodate new information and results of the

100

Speed through the water (knots)

60

51 43

40

42

26

20

Percentage of transit (%)

80

_ 10 < _ 11.8 > 10 - < _ 13 > 11.8 - < _ 16 > 13 - < > 16

23 17

17 13

12

0

21

18

9 4

1

2012

1

2013

2014

Years

Samuel Turgeon

Figure 2. Average speed of ships both before and after the implementation of the Working Group recommendations.

analysis. Also, traffic safety was always a background consideration, and St. Lawrence ship pilots were involved in every step of the process to ensure that proposed scenarios did not pose navigational risks. Evaluation of the scenarios was done with the aid of an agent-based model called 3MTSim.11 3MTSim simulates the movement of boats and whales in the estuary based on known movement patterns for the whales and ship captain decision-making while navigating (Figure 3). 3MTSim was developed as a collaborative project between a team of university researchers and biologists and managers at Parks Canada, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, and the not-for-profit Group for Research and Education on Marine Mammals (GREMM). The model has been extensively calibrated and validated by field data collected as part of various monitoring campaigns carried out in the estuary since the mid-1990s. In addition, the model was developed in an iterative fashion with regular communication between model

builders and end users to ensure that the model met management needs and that the rules and assumptions were clearly understood by end users. The active involvement of the St. Lawrence pilots also contributed to calibration of 3MTSim’s ship movement module using realistic decision rules.11–15 The working group used 3MTSim to simulate the outcomes of 10 different traffic management scenarios on three key indicator variables.

The variables predicted by 3MTSim were the following: the relative risk of collision between transiting vessels and each species of whale; total exposure of whales to ships (measured as the length of time that whales are in the presence of a ship within 1,000 meters); and ship transit time through the study area (an important variable linked to industry economic constraints and pilot operating constraints). The results of the simulations illustrated the complex trade-offs between conservation objectives and economics, since scenarios that reduced collision risk by slowing

ship speed also resulted in economic costs due to increased transit times, and increased transit times increased overall whale exposure to ships (although reduced the risk of collisions). Additionally, solutions that sought to reroute ships away from the large whale’s main feeding ground in the marine park by taking a more southern route raised concerns as to the impacts of increased exposure to beluga whale calving grounds. In the end, the results of the simulations contributed to illustrating which measures had the greatest gains for marine conservation, with negligible or acceptable impacts on maritime shipping.

The Working Group used the results of these simulations, as well as extensive analysis and cartography of existing spatial and spatiotemporal data collected for the estuary, to arrive at a recommendation for voluntary mitigation measures based on expert opinion and science (Figure 4). These mitigation measures were published by the Canadian Coast Guard in the

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Clement Chion

Figure 3. An image generated by 3MTSim, an agent-based simulation model developed by the research group.

“Notice to Mariners” in the spring of 2013 and have been published every year since.16–18 (The “Notices to Mariners” are official Canadian Coast Guard publications that must be read by vessel navigation officers.)

In 2014, results of a scientific advisory report on the potential impacts of increasing shipping in areas highly used by female and beluga calves was incorporated into the recommendation. The mitigation measures are to be taken by merchant vessels and cruise ships only when navigational safety is not jeopardized. The measures dictate that the entire estuary be considered an area of caution where ship captains and pilots should be on alert for whales and includes an area to be avoided (due to use by blue whales) as well as slow down area to reduce the chances of whale–vessel collisions and especially the probability of lethal collisions. The measure also contains a recommendation to navigate in the Laurentian Channel

north of Île Rouge to avoid the beluga calving grounds.

Based on a consensus, the Working Group proposed voluntary, rather than regulatory, measures. In addition to avoiding a lengthy process that would require any such regulation being passed through the Canadian legal process, voluntary measures provide a degree of flexibility that does not exist within regulation. Most importantly, they allow for rapid re-adjustment and adaptation in response to new information (a key tenet of adaptive management). The approach also provides industry partners with an opportunity to demonstrate their voluntary willingness to make an effort for biological conservation, providing them with a positive environmental image. Lastly, voluntary measures provide the opportunity for compliance through cooperation and understanding, rather than enforced compliance through a coercive system.

Such compliance is arguably more

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sustainable over the long term than a system based on penalizing offenders.

However, to be effective, voluntary measures must be accompanied by an effective monitoring system to measure how well they are respected in order to confirm that this is the right approach to follow. In the Marine Park and surrounding waters, continual monitoring of ship transits is carried out using the Automatic Identification System (AIS). Data is compiled and analyzed by Parks Canada to assess compliance in midseason as well as at the end of the season. Results are communicated to the Working Group so any adaptive corrective measures can be taken if necessary.

Successful Results Compliance to the voluntary measures has been very high, with a rapid adoption of the Working Group recommendations starting in their first year of publication (Figure 2). The result is an estimated reduction in the

risk of fatal collisions between vessels and whales of 35–40 percent in the marine park.14 Ship pilots significantly reduced their speed across the area, with 72 percent of the transits in 2014 occurring at speeds less than 11.8 knots compared to only 13 percent in 2012 prior to the implementation of the voluntary measures (Figure 2). Data also show that extreme high speeds have gradually decreased since 2012, greatly reducing the risk of fatal collisions. Since implementation of the measures, there have been no reported ship strikes on whales in the estuary. Lastly, ships have respected the recommendations by maintaining their traditional routes yet at slower speeds, rather than selecting the alternate southern route which passes through the beluga calving grounds.

This success has been made possible thanks to the shipping industry’s and St. Lawrence pilot’s active commitment throughout the process to find a feasible way to protect whales. The willingness to ground the Working Group’s recommendations on sound science certainly helped to achieve consensus by relying on facts rather than perceptions. It should also be noted that a key element of success has been the fact that a large part of the area covered by the voluntary protection measures are mandatory piloted waters, which reduces the heterogeneity of stakeholders. The participation of the piloting association in the deliberative process was fundamental to ensuring that the proposed navigational measures were feasible and acceptable to the stakeholder group ultimately responsible for implementation. Pilots were extensively consulted for feedback throughout the process, and after each year of implementation, to ensure the applicability and safety, particularly of the voluntary speed reduction. Follow-up consultations with noncompliant vessels have also been done to learn about circumstances leading to noncompliance. By understanding why these

companies did not adopt the voluntary measures, the Working Group will be able to adjust its approach (e.g. communication, education) and enhance whale conservation. This ability to easily communicate with pilots and having their professional organization within the Working Group, has greatly contributed to the success of the group’s efforts.

While these results are encouraging, there remains room for improvement for the benefit of whale conservation. The initial work of the group has focused on managing the risk of whale–vessel collisions and reducing the exposure of whales, particularly the blue whale, to marine traffic. Other risks still exist, such as those related to noise propagation in the water, availability of sufficient prey for whales, and the potential of hazardous spills that may be addressed in the future. By understanding why these companies did not adopt the voluntary measures, the Working Group will be able to adjust its approach (e.g. communication, education) and enhance whale conservation.

science. Support of the recommendations by all parties has led to positive communication of the voluntary measures to ship captains and other affected stakeholders, which has most likely contributed to the high degree of compliance.

This work is one of several examples worldwide of how consensus decision making and sound science can be used to reduce the impact of marine shipping on whales.

Similar successful outcomes have recently been achieved in the Bay of Fundy, Canada and in the Hauraki Gulf, New Zealand.20,21 Similar to the St. Lawrence Estuary, both of these examples involved extensive stakeholder involvement and collaboration between diverse groups to achieve a sustainable solution.

As for these other examples, the process carried out in the St. Lawrence Estuary provides a concrete demonstration of marine integrated management that does not merely consult industry players on solutions to problems identified by the government but that involves those actors

Voluntary measures provide a degree of flexibility that does not exist within regulation.

Learning Outcomes We describe how a negotiated solution was found to manage the risk of whale–vessel collisions and to reduce exposure of whales to ships in the St. Lawrence Estuary. The use of modeling and GIS tools provided significant advantages to the decision-making process by providing quantitative support in the form of maps and simulation outputs. The approach facilitated open discussion and information sharing, leading to trust building amongst participants and an agreed-upon solution supported by

from the onset. Through teamwork, problems are dealt with and solutions are found. All the expertise and points of view combined, from marine transportation, marine environment conservation, and scientific research helped to develop effective and agreedupon measures to manage collision risk and reduce whale exposure to vessels while taking into account the constraints of safety and economics.

Such a consensus-based approach based on voluntary rather than regulatory measures arguably leads to more sustainable solutions over the long

www.thesolutionsjournal.org | November-December 2015 | Solutions | 45

Samuel Turgeon / Parks Canada

A whale crests near a ship in the St. Lawrence River.

term, since it is grounded in cooperation and trust built between the affected parties. The group continues to meet and work together to monitor the effectiveness of the measures and to seek additional opportunities to reduce the impact of maritime transportation in the estuary on its rich marine environment.

Acknowledgements We acknowledge the dedication and commitment of Jean Desaulniers (Parks Canada), who has co-chaired the Working Group with Guy Cantin (Fisheries and Oceans Canada). In addition to the authors, the following people contributed to building the 3MTSim model and to data analysis that supported model development:

Philippe Lamontagne, Cristiane Martins, and Jacques-André Landry.

Additional collaborators and contributors to the 3MTSim project are acknowledged on the project website at http://complexity.ok.ubc.ca/ projects/3mtsim/.

activités sans prélèvement de ressources entre le 1er mai et le 31 octobre 2007. 86 pages (2009).

5. Ménard, N., R. Michaud, C. Chion, and S. Turgeon.

Documentation of maritime traffic and navigational interactions with St. Lawrence Estuary beluga (Delphinaterus leucas) in calving areas between 2003 and 2012. Fisheries and Oceans Canada [online] (2014) http://ponttadoussac.ca/wp-content/ uploads/2015/03/belugastudy.pdf.

6. Beauchamp, J., H. Bouchard, P. de Margerie, N.

References 1. Rittel, H.W.J. and M.M. Webber. Dilemmas in a

Otis, and J.Y. Savaria. Recovery strategy for the blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus), Northwest Atlantic population. Species at Risk Act Recovery Strategy

general theory of planning. Policy Science 4, 155–169

Series, Fisheries and Oceans Canada [online] (2009)

(1973).

http://www.registrelep-sararegistry.gc.ca/document/

2. Parks Canada & Parcs Quebec. The Saguenay–St. Lawrence Marine Park [online] http://parcmarin. qc.ca/home.html.

3. DFO. Marine Protected Areas [online] http://www.

doc1773f/ind_e.cfm.

7. DFO. Recovery strategy for the beluga (Delphinapterus leucas), St. Lawrence Estuary population. Species at Risk Act Recovery Strategy

dfo-mpo.gc.ca/oceans/marineareas-zonesmarines/

Series, Fisheries and Oceans Canada [online] (2012)

mpa-zpm/index-eng.htm.

http://www.sararegistry.gc.ca/document/doc2309f/

4. Chion, C., S. Turgeon, R. Michaud, J.A. Landry, and L. Parrott. Portrait de la navigation dans le parc marin du Saguenay–Saint-Laurent: caractérisation des

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ind_e.cfm.

8. Vanderlaan, A. and C. Taggart. Vessel collisions with whales: the probability of lethal injury based on

Saint Lawrence Working Group on Marine Transport and Marine Mammal Protection

Figure 4. This map shows areas for recommended voluntary protection measures for 2015.

vessel speed. Marine Mammal Science 23, 144–156 (2007).

9. Bejder, L. et al. Decline in relative abundance of bottlenose dolphins exposed to long-term disturbance. Conservation Biology 20, 1791–8 (2006).

10. Lefebvre, S.L., R. Michaud, V. Lesage, and D.

13. Chion, C. et al. Spatio-temporal modelling for policy analysis: application to sustainable management of whale-watching activities. Marine Policy 38, 151–162 (2013).

(April 25, 2014) https://www.notmar.gc.ca/ go.php?doc=eng/services/notmar/eastern-xhtml/ eas04e14.

18. Canadian Coast Guard. Notices to Mariners

14. Chion, C. Réduction des risques de collisions

publication, Eastern edition, Vol. 37, No. 5

mortelles de grands rorquals avec des navires

[online] (May 31, 2013) https://www.notmar.gc.ca/

Berteaux. Identifying high residency areas of the

marchands dans l’estuaire du Saint-Laurent en 2013.

go.php?doc=eng/services/notmar/eastern-xhtml/

threatened St. Lawrence beluga whale from fine-

(2014).

scale movements of individuals and coarse-scale

eas05e13.

15. Okanagen Institute for Biodiversity, Resilience, and

19. Vanderlaan, A.S.M. and C.T. Taggart. Vessel

movements of herds. Marine Ecology Progress Series

Ecosystem Services, University of British Columbia.

collisions with whales: the probability of lethal

450, 243–257 (2012).

3MTSIM: Marine Mammal and Maritime Traffic

injury based on vessel speed. Marine Mammal Science

11. Parrott, L. et al. A decision support system to assist the sustainable management of navigation activities in the St. Lawrence River Estuary, Canada.

Simulator [online] (2015) http://complexity.ok.ubc. ca/projects/3mtsim.

16. Canadian Coast Guard. Notices to Mariners

Environmental Modelling & Software 26, 1403–1418

publication, Eastern edition, Vol. 40, No. 5

(2011).

[online] (May 29, 2015) https://www.notmar.gc.ca/

12. Chion, C. et al. Eliciting cognitive processes underlying patterns of human–wildlife interactions for agent-based modelling. Ecological Modelling 222, 2213–2226 (2011).

23, 144–156 (2007).

20. The Marine GIS Group at the New England

go.php?doc=eng/services/notmar/eastern-xhtml/ eas05e15.

Aquarium. Right Whales and Shipping Lanes [online] (2012) http://www.marinegis.org/ shippingLanes.html.

21. Constantine, R. et al. Mitigation of vessel-strike mortality of endangered Bryde’s whales in the

17. Canadian Coast Guard. Notices to Mariners publication, Eastern edition, Vol. 39, No. 4, [online]

Hauraki Gulf, New Zealand. Biological Conservation 186, 149–157 (2015).

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Stafforf, E.R. and R.G.H. Brain. (2015). “My mom idles less than your mom!” Empowering High School Teens to Tackle Air Pollution. Solutions 6(6): 48–59. https://thesolutionsjournal.com/2015/6/my-mom-idles-less-than-your-mom-empowering-high-school-teens-to-tackle-air-pollution

Feature

“My mom idles less than your mom!” Empowering High School Teens to Tackle Air Pollution

by Edwin R. Stafford and Roslynn G.H. Brain In Brief

Betty W. Stafford

An air freshener based upon Hailey Dennis’ poster design.

48 | Solutions | November-December 2015 | www.thesolutionsjournal.org

As part of a broader Universitycommunity engagement initiative addressing sustainability issues, professors at Utah State University joined forces with Logan City to help improve air quality via a high school clean air poster contest.

Contest goals were to: 1) inform students about local air quality problems and driving behaviors that can lessen their personal impact (e.g., carpooling, refraining from idling, taking the bus); and 2) create educational outreach materials for their peers and broader community. Over 100 high school students were mentored in green messaging and graphic design by University students and faculty, resulting in over 75 poster entries.

Many posters were creative, funny, and edgy, and tapped into teen pop culture, entertainment, and values. Finally, 14 winning posters were selected for community outreach, each receiving a prize from a local business, with the best overall poster receiving a grand prize from Logan City.

Self-reported measures indicated that the contest increased student awareness about local air pollution, as well as increasing their willingness to change their behavior to protect air quality.

C

ache Valley has an air pollution problem. Nestled in the northern- most extension of the Wasatch Mountain range, the beautiful 50-mile agricultural valley of approximately 125,000 residents straddles the Utah-Idaho border, and is home to Utah State University (USU) in Logan. Flanked by the Bear River Mountains to the east and the majestic Wellsville and Bannock Mountains to the west, the valley’s bowl-like topography is prone to winter inversions.

A lack of wind and an upper layer of warm air traps cold air and pollutants from motor vehicles, buildings, agriculture, and factories onto the valley floor. For several weeks during winter, news headlines often proclaim Cache Valley (as well as communities in Salt Lake and Utah counties) as having some of the worst air pollution in the nation.1 “As locals often say of pollutants during these inversion periods, “we swim in our own soup.” Some even call the valley “little Beijing.”2 For many residents, the murky haze is viewed, with chagrin, as being beyond their control.3 People need to drive and heat their homes (primarily through natural gas, propane, and wood-burning stoves), and local dairy and farming operations have existed since the 1850s, when the Mormon pioneers settled the valley.

Nevertheless, federal and state officials, as well as local health, business, and community leaders, are increasingly alarmed about the pollution’s impact on quality of life. Of particular concern are PM2.5 emissions—fineparticulate matter of 2.5 microns or less—that penetrate deeply into human lungs and may cross into the bloodstream.4 Exposure to PM2.5 has been linked to a variety of cardiovascular and respiratory ailments, cancer, low-birth weight, autism, pre-mature death, depression, and even suicide.5 The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has designated Cache County, as well as other counties along the Wasatch Front, as nonattainment

areas for the PM2.5 National Ambient Air Quality Standards, mandating that the state develop plans to reduce pollution concentrations to safe levels.6 While vehicle emissions have the greatest impact on local air quality, given the many other complex and potentially less-manageable sources of pollution (e.g., pollutants wafting in from outside the valley), there are no ‘silver bullets’ to solve the valley’s air problems. Consequently, specific

Key Concepts • Air pollution is not typically a top-of-mind issue for high school students. However, as they join the legion of drivers in pollution-prone communities every year, educating these students in protecting air quality through driving behavior may help them learn lifelong skills, reducing their long-term, personal impact.

• Utah State University and the City of Logan, Utah, partnered to launch a high profile, clean air poster contest to engage over 100 Logan High School teens about ways to improve air quality. Self-reported measures indicated that the contest increased student awareness about local air pollution and their willingness to engage in driving behavior to preserve air quality.

• Motivating high school students requires patience and ongoing mentoring, developing plans to overcome students’ time and resource constraints, and seizing opportunities for students to be celebrated among their friends and peers.

local and state clean air proposals have met resistance among Utah’s mostly politically-conservative population, many of whom are skeptical of the severity of pollution health risks and view the U.S. EPA’s concern as federal overreach. For example, in 2013 a narrowly-passed vehicle emissions testing ordinance for Cache County met strong opposition because of its perceived cost and inconvenience. “I have a real beef with the EPA stepping

in and strong-arming us,” noted one irritated county council member, who viewed the ordinance as unlikely to significantly improve air quality.7 In 2015, a winter wood-burning ban proposed by Utah Governor Gary Herbert in areas affected by winter inversions was also met with overwhelming citizen outcry because of its perceived infringement on liberty.8 Utah’s business community, however, is increasingly concerned, as air pollution appears to be stifling the state’s ability to attract new companies, jobs, quality employees, and their families.9 For example, in 2012, a state economic development officer testified before a Utah legislative task force regarding representatives from a foreign company who cut short a Utah site visit upon experiencing a ‘red air alert’ pollution day. “These folks were shocked, literally shocked,” he explained, “they basically said ‘we’re going to conclude our visit early because we’re just not interested in being in a place that has this kind of issue.’”10 Within this context, our pilot high school student poster contest emerged as a way to engage teens on air quality. In October 2014, approximately 100 concerned valley residents, business owners, local and state policymakers, university faculty, and students met at the inaugural Cache Clean Air Consortium (CCAC) summit held at USU. They discussed the status of science, policy, and outreach efforts concerning Cache Valley air and determined collaborative paths forward. One of the summit’s conclusions was that too many segments of the local population remained unaware or unconcerned about local air, and engagement of local businesses, schools, and other stakeholder groups was insufficient.

For example, while some elementary schools had programs to encourage children to influence their parents in refraining from idling cars, there were no programs targeting high school

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Yulissa Chavez, Melissa Zarate, Gabriel Molina

teens learning to drive, and who were then abandoning the bus to drive to school. We wanted to consider ways to educate them on the implications of their new driving privilege on air quality. The question was how to make clean air relevant for high school students and empower them to engage in appropriate driving behavior.

High School Poster Contest Our vision was ambitious: launch an exciting, high-profile clean air poster contest at the local high school where students could not only learn about air pollution, but also gain savvy marketing know-how to create compelling poster messages, win sensational prizes, and have their winning posters celebrated and displayed throughout

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the community. The objective was to educate the teens by having them develop persuasive materials for others (this educational strategy is based on the “protégé effect”—the idea that children often learn better when they teach others).11 USU was encouraging faculty to partner with local government and community groups to address local sustainability issues through a new Community Bridge seed grant initiative. We seized that grant opportunity to partner with Logan City’s environmental coordinator and launch the pilot poster contest at Logan High School for the spring 2015 semester.

About 15 USU students with marketing, sustainable communications, and art skills were recruited to help mentor the high-schoolers and administer the contest (for their involvement, most of the USU students received credit for a class or internship).

Though the contest was open to all Logan High students, given that the posters would integrate clean air, marketing, and the visual arts, we invited faculty advisors of the environmental science classes, art and photography clubs, marketing club, and the Governor’s Youth Council (a service club that had advocated student carpooling the previous semester) to be involved directly with the contest.

Acceptance of our invitation required that the high school advisors would allow USU faculty and students to take several hours of class/club meeting time to launch the contest and engage in periodic coaching sessions with their students. Assistance from experts kept the students engaged with the contest and helped them develop provocative posters.

The advisors for the environmental science classes and the Governor’s Youth Council accepted their invitations, allowing direct access to approximately 100 students, of which most were freshmen and sophomores.

For environmental science classes, the poster contest was a required assignment, and the teacher included

an in-depth study unit for students on local air issues to parallel the contest.

For the Governor’s Youth Council, however, participation was voluntary, and the contest was just one of several club activities scheduled for the semester. Regrettably, because of other commitments, the art and photography and marketing clubs were unable to participate, eliminating students with potentially valuable skills for developing compelling posters. Thus, more time was dedicated to mentoring the environmental science and Governor’s Youth Council students on marketing and design.

The contest rules were simple.

Posters needed to promote the value of clean air and ways to preserve it.

Students could work individually or in teams of up to three, and all artwork and photography had to be original—no copyrighted photos or images from the Internet. Students had two months to prepare their poster entries, and they could turn in as many poster entries as their creativity allowed.

“The Fault in our Cars:” Framing Clean Air Messages Instructing students on effective poster messaging and design was a critical objective of our initiative.

Students were introduced to the contest through a presentation that captured local air pollution issues, actions to preserve air quality (e.g., refrain from idling, carpooling, taking the bus, walking, etc.), and a two-step message framing technique for creating provocative air quality messages, drawing on green marketing research and best practices.12 Specifically, we urged students to avoid the typically-fatiguing ‘doom and gloom’ or ‘preachy’ messages commonly associated with environmentalism.

Instead, we encouraged them to have fun thinking about actions to keep air clean that aligned with positive, personally-relevant values and benefits that could sway their peers and other Cache Valley residents.

NauVoo Arrendondo

More formally, students were instructed to develop messages that would appeal to their audiences’ mental ‘frames;’ that is, cognitive structures that people use to understand and interpret reality, such as their values, beliefs, lifestyles, and aspirations.13 Communicating issues aligned with audiences’ sensibilities and desires can encourage people to

act on their deepest heartfelt ideals and assumptions by appealing to emotions rather than just logic. For example, Nike’s famous Just do it! campaign dares aspiring athletes to pursue their passions without excuse, while wearing Nike gear, of course.

We introduced students to the famous 1985 Don’t mess with Texas anti-littering campaign as a successful

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illustration of environmental message framing that they could mimic in their own creative clean air posters. The slogan, Don’t mess with Texas, began as part of the Texas State Department of Highways and Public Transportation to persuade macho Texan males to stop littering Texas roadways.14 Initially, young guys did not really care about tossing trash out of their pickup truck windows. However, with the endorsement of celebrity spokespersons, sports, humor and music, the campaign told a compelling story that trashing Texas was simply unbecoming of ‘real’ Texans. The piercing slogan united a green behavior—anti-littering—with what was near and dear to the hearts of young macho Texans: Texas pride. Littering was framed as an insult to Texas. Don’t mess with Texas commanded young men to protect their beloved state’s honor. In its first year, Texas highway trash decreased by 29 percent. Five years later, litter was reduced by more than 72 percent!15 High school students were encouraged to consider the persuasive lessons of the Don’t mess with Texas campaign as they developed their own posters.

In a two-step creative process, they needed to: 1. Identify the values, concerns, and things that mattered most to them (e.g., school and grades, friends, and social media, their favorite music, sports, and video games, their smart phones, etc.), and to valley residents (their religious faith, children and families, making ends meet, etc.)

2. Associate those values, concerns, and things, in creative and persuasive ways, to clean air actions16 To initiate creative thinking, we asked the students to consider a typical, deeply valued teen lifestyle activity—texting—and how that could be connected with supporting clean air. Teens know they are not supposed to text while driving, and

Carmen Guadarrama

are confronted with “PLEASE DON’T TEXT AND DRIVE” signs on roadways.

After some discussion, the students were then shown the image of a school bus with the familiar street sign, but re-worded with a twist: “PLEASE DO TEXT AND RIDE.” The illustration sparked laughter. The example showed the students how to frame a clean air activity—riding the bus to school—as an opportunity to do an activity they valued—texting!

In another example, we discussed how most Utahns detest cigarette smoking, which is against Mormon beliefs. Though considered a controversial analogy among some clean air experts, the group Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment has described the risks of breathing Utah’s air pollution as comparable to involuntary cigarette smoking.17 Again, students were asked to think about how anti-smoking values could be connected to improving air quality. After some conversation, students were shown a striking image of an idling car’s tailpipe depicted as a smoldering cigarette with the adage, “Thank you for not smoking.” Through these and other humorous and provocative examples, the students were challenged to come

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up with their own framed messages, coupled with pictures snapped on their cell phones, to align clean air actions with the values of their peers and Cache Valley residents.

Over the two-month poster development phase, USU faculty and students used the two-step messaging framework to coach high school teens during class or club time (approximately one hour every two weeks).

They would chart relevant values of teens and local residents and brainstorm ways to connect them to clean air awareness and action. Favorite movies and entertainment emerged as a popular focus of these coaching sessions, and two movie tie-in poster examples where circulated among the students for them to follow. One poster on display at the local movie theater, sponsored by the Utah Department of Transportation read, “Never fly Solo.

Always carpool when you go to the movies,” with an image of Star Wars’ Han Solo and his companions flying aboard the Millennium Falcon space ship. A high school student assisting with the contest also created another illustration, entitled, “The Fault in our Cars.” This was a movie poster parody of the popular young adult film, The Fault in our Stars, incorporating

Betty W. Stafford

A bumper sticker based on a student poster design.

take-offs on memorable film quotes, including “The fault, dear friends, is not in our cars, but in our idling.”

Many students liked the creative opportunities posed by satirizing their favorite movies and entertainment.

Once the contest was underway, we procured 14 local businesses popular with teens to donate prizes (mostly gift cards and merchandise valued around USD$50 to $70 each), including restaurants, retail stores, and a rockclimbing gym. We offered many prizes so students would recognize that they had a good chance of winning. For the donations, local businesses that were not engaged with clean air issues were purposefully targeted. This was so that the owners and employees would become more aware of air issues, and their contributions were publicized.18 The awards were named after the business donors (e.g., Al’s Sporting Goods Prize) to further promote the businesses’ support for the students and for clean air. The City of Logan’s mayor also contributed a USD$100 cash grand prize for the best overall poster.

During mentoring sessions, students were reminded of the numerous prizes for the winning posters to keep their interest and motivation peaked.

“May the Air Be Ever in Your Favor:” Poster Entries and Winners Over 75 posters were entered, many of which were creative, funny, and edgy, relating to teen pop culture, entertainment narratives, and community values. Predictably, some entries were disqualified, as they did not adhere to the guidelines by using original artwork, despite the reiteration of contest rules. Two judges recruited from the community selected the best 14 entries based on the likely appeal of the poster to other high school students and to the broader community.

As expected, many winning entries spoofed popular teen entertainment and media narratives. One clever takeoff on the Hunger Games read, “May the Air be Ever in Your Favor,” with an image of a hand pulling a slip of paper from a glass bowl that read,

“Carpool.” This corresponds to the memorable quote and scene from the film. Another poster featured a male student striking a menacing Arnold Schwarzenegger-like pose from The Terminator, captioned, “Stop Idling or … Idle Be Back For You!” written across his black sunglasses. A whimsical lampoon of the salacious Fifty Shades of Grey movie read, “Zero Shades of Grey Air. Zero Idling.” For the grand prize winning poster, a student painted two minion characters from the popular Despicable Me animated movie with the words, “Clean air is deliverable.

Dirty air is despicable. Walk to school or carpool.” Other teen media parodies among the winning posters included American Idol, Brave, Eggo Waffles commercials (“Leggo that bad air”), and York Peppermint Patty ads (“York your air. Get the Sensation of Fresh Air!”).

Aside from movies and entertainment, some winning posters tapped into values and matters important to youth and the broader community, including catchphrases, children, the Mormon faith, saving money, and love of the outdoors. One showed a mischievous young boy with his arms on his hips badgering the reader with, “My mom idles less than your mom!”

Another edgy poster depicted three black stick figures in a black car with “Don’t be lonely. Drive with a homie,” to encourage carpooling. One poster, promoting the fact that Cache Valley residents can ride the bus at no charge, had the slogan, “Why spend on gas?

When you have a free pass!” Another designed to appeal to the local Mormon culture showed two young girls wearing general conference name tags jumping in the air at the iconic Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints Conference Center in Salt Lake City with the headline, “Jump to Cleaner Air.” Finally, two winning posters used straightforward appeals.

One showed a majestic photo of Cache Valley on a non-polluted day with the simple headline, “Protect Cache Valley Air Quality.” The other showed

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the tail pipe of a car with the simple rhyme, “Stop the pollution…you’re the solution.”

A few entries not selected are worth mentioning as they did attempt to employ the two-step creative framework taught to the students. One potentially promising entry read “Stop the idling. Young lungs at work,” with the depiction of children in an elementary school yard. Though the message tied well into Utahns’ high regard for children, the poster was illustrated with clipart from the Internet, not original artwork. Another poster satirizing Nike’s slogan, “Just Don’t Do It. Be idle free,” included actual Nike ads and pictures from the Internet. One concept declared, “Eat more steaks,” which was supposed to be a sharp jab at reducing the valley’s methane emissions by ‘consuming’ local flatulent cows. The poster deviated from the contest’s focus on driving behaviors, and ultimately, was deemed to be too offensive for those local residents affiliated with agriculture. Another, “Don’t idle. It is in the Bible,” drew attention to the “idle hands are the devil’s workshop” religious reference. Finally, many posters attempted to tie idling and air pollution with death (e.g., “Don’t idle.

It’s suicidal!”), including one entry with an image of the grim reaper beckoning a young girl over a polluted valley.

Ultimately, the judges perceived that the gallows humor death messages would be a turnoff to skeptical valley residents and did not follow the spirit of positive messaging.

A formal awards night at Logan High School’s auditorium celebrated the posters, and winning students were presented with award certificates and prizes. The grand prize winner also received a commemorative jumbo check from Logan City’s mayor, and her picture was featured in the local newspaper along with her winning poster.19 The event also featured two short guest speeches from Logan City’s environmental coordinator and the local state representative from the

Utah Legislature, who congratulated the winners and outlined emerging local and state air initiatives.

Approximately 50 people attended the awards night (fewer than hoped), most of whom were parents. A few weeks later, Logan City’s mayor and the council members also officially recognized the winning students at a municipal council meeting.

In preparing the winning posters for public display, the advocacy group Sustainable America, based in Stamford, Connecticut, generously allowed free use of its “It’s Your Turn. Turn it Off.” anti-idling logo to be incorporated into some of the winning anti-idling posters. We liked Sustainable America’s slogan because “It’s Your Turn” conveyed a clever double-meaning, inviting drivers to turn their keys and take personal responsibility to act. We believed the slogan would resonate with teens and the local community.

Dozens of reprints of the winning posters were displayed in the city and county buildings, businesses, libraries, schools, places of worship, and other public venues across the valley (and in the Salt Lake Valley as well). Poster images were also used in social media and displayed on websites of other Utah-based clean air/environmental advocacy groups. For example, the Northern Utah Clear the Air Facebook page featured a “Mother’s Day Wish” social media campaign featuring the “My mom idles less than your mom!” poster, which generated over 1,400 hits, likes, and shares over the 2015 Mother’s Day weekend. Some of the anti-idling poster images were used to create car air fresheners and bumper stickers for distribution among students taking drivers’ education courses at Logan High and at local elementary schools in order to encourage parents not to idle when they drop off or wait for their children at the curbside. In short, the high school students’ winning posters and images were used widely in local advocacy.

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Impact on Student Participants To evaluate the impact of the poster contest on participants, a survey was administered prior to the announcement of the winners. The survey asked students to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ to “Did this contest positively impact you?”

It also asked, “Please rate your level of confidence before and, as a result of, this poster contest” on 12 specific skills related to the objectives of: 1. gaining awareness about local air pollution (e.g., “Explaining Cache Valley’s air pollution to others”); 2. gaining a sense of empowerment for working to make a difference on air quality (e.g., “Designing effective messages to encourage behavior change”); and 3. willingness to take action to protect air quality (e.g., “Engaging in behaviors that you promote in your poster to reduce air pollution”).

Each skill was evaluated on a fivepoint scale (1 = Not at all confident, 5 = Completely confident). In an open-ended question, students were asked to explain how their personal behavior may have changed as a result of the contest, along with any additional feedback. Forty-five students completed the evaluation, of which 26 (about 58 percent) affirmed that the contest did indeed impact them positively. The pre- and post-contest mean scores and empirical analysis of the 12 skills are summarized in Table 1.

Paired t-tests revealed that the mean scores of students’ perceived confidence on each of the 12 skills were significantly higher after their participation in the contest. This suggests that the contest raised students’ self-reported awareness about local air quality, perceived abilities to make a difference, and willingness to protect air quality.

Twenty-two students (slightly less than half) also wrote comments for the openended question about how the contest may have changed their behavior.

Mean Pre

Mean Post

t (correlation)

P-value (α = .05)

Explaining Cache Valley’s Air pollution to others

2.62

3.89

8.239

0.000

Knowing the specific actions that can reduce air pollution

2.82

3.89

7.09

0.000

Describing the causes of Cache Valley’s air pollution

2.58

3.73

8.35

0.000

Detailing ways that driving behavior can impact air quality

2.78

3.78

7.87

0.000

Designing effective messages to encourage behavior change

2.82

3.76

7.48

0.000

Working with university students and professors to enact change in the community

2.51

3.53

7.92

0.000

Creative thinking

3.24

4.24

6.56

0.000

Working with others as a member of a team

3.13

3.93

5.69

0.000

Your ability to make a difference in your community

2.98

3.71

5.24

0.000

Working on similar projects that make a difference in the future

2.71

3.67

6.14

0.000

Engaging in activities to reduce air pollution

2.71

3.80

6.88

0.000

Engaging in behaviors that you promote in your poster to reduce air pollution

2.82

3.80

6.64

0.000

Skill Awareness

Empowerment

Action

Table 1. Students’ perceived confidence level of skills before and, as a result of, the poster contest. Note: Students answered on a 5-point Likert-type scale (1 = Not at all confident, 5 = Completely confident) www.thesolutionsjournal.org | November-December 2015 | Solutions | 55

Virtually all of the written comments indicated that post-contest, student participants were: 1. more aware about air quality (e.g., “I didn’t really know anything at all before. But, now I understand how it works more”); 2. more willing to engage in driving behaviors that protected the air (e.g., “I try to drive less so that I know I am not polluting as much,” “I try to carpool more often now”); and 3. more willing to educate others (e.g., “I tell my parents not to idle, and they haven’t as much”).

In summing up the contest experience, one student wrote, “It was interesting!” while another said, “It [was] life changing.”

Lessons Learned Analysis of the self-reported survey measures and comments suggests that the poster contest did have a positive impact on students’ understanding and willingness to act on preserving air quality. We believe that the ongoing coaching and recruitment of specific classes/groups of students to participate directly in the contest, with their faculty advisors acting as on-campus “champions,” were instrumental in the overall success of the initiative. Nonetheless, interactions with high school students did uncover some important lessons about working with them more effectively, as outlined below.

Carmen Guadarrama

Plan to overcome student constraints.

In one mentoring session, students talked about a popular song by the pop group One Direction, “What Makes You Beautiful.” With the guidance of a USU faculty mentor, students identified several clean air actions (e.g., students biking, taking the bus, carpooling) that could be depicted in a poster and captioned with the popular song’s title to suggest that each action

can be ‘what makes you beautiful.’

The students left the brainstorming session seeming excited and enthused.

Frustratingly, these, and many other potentially creative ideas from mentoring sessions, never materialized into poster entries. We learned that several constraints hindered some students.

Early on, we learned that the students are busy! They face myriad

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demands on their time ranging from Advance Placement classes, homework, and exams, to extracurricular and after-school commitments, including athletics, clubs, and part-time jobs.

Our clean air contest was simply one more activity competing for their attention. If it was not a required assignment, the poster contest became a lower priority.

we learned that the high school’s computer equipment and software were woefully outdated and difficult to use.

Many less-privileged students who didn’t have smart phones, cameras, or home computers, and who had to rely on the high school’s inadequate equipment to create their posters were clearly at a disadvantage. This may account for many students’ use of images from the Internet rather than original art work as stipulated in the contest rules.

The lesson here is that recognition of high school students’ structural constraints is critical. In this case, more time could have been invested in photography and art (rather than just clever messaging), better access to graphic art software could have been provided, and we could have been more proactive in identifying high school students within our pool who possessed art, photography, and computer skills, matching them with others to develop posters in teams.

Have patience. Given the time and

NauVoo Arrendondo

The inability to get art and photography club students directly involved in the contest due to previous commitments proved to be a more significant hurdle than anticipated. While many of today’s teens are savvy with taking photos on their cell phones for social media, this proficiency did not necessarily empower them to develop images for educational posters.

Feedback from university student mentors indicated that, while environmental science students had good poster ideas, they lacked the artistic skills and assurance to make them feasible. One of the university art student mentors held a special meeting with students in Logan High’s computer lab to help them with their posters’ graphic designs. It was here, however,

demands on high school teens, we found that ongoing mentoring was critical for reinforcing their understanding and application of the two-step message-framing tool. Additionally, having faculty advisors for the environmental science and Governor’s Youth Council serve as ongoing ‘champions’ of the contest kept students on task.

Our faculty advisors warned us that it was not uncommon for high school students to procrastinate. Accordingly, it is advisable to set deadlines throughout the two-month development phase of the contest, requiring students to produce rough drafts and receive some small rewards for completing specific tasks with informal feedback. Two of the winning posters—“Idle be back” and “My mom idles less than your mom!”— materialized in mentoring meetings within the final days of the contest.

Our experience suggests that creativity among high school teens takes time, reminders, and ongoing support.

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Recognize students among their peers.

One disappointment was that a rather small audience attended the awards night. To ensure that at least the winners and their families attended, we had to inform them ahead of time of their prizes, which diminished the element of surprise. One veteran Logan High teacher noted that students are motivated by recognition from their friends and peers, rather than just their parents. Thus, a better venue for the awards could have been an assembly during school hours. This may have attracted hundreds of students, increasing the visibility of our winners, their posters, and guest speakers.

Another educator recommended that we could have taken advantage of teens’ preoccupation with social media and hosted an online ‘Students’ Choice’ vote on Logan High’s Facebook page, further showcasing air pollution issues, the contest’s participants, and their posters. In summary, we learned to seek ways to let students shine before their peers and use existing school infrastructure, such as school assemblies and social media, to raise the visibility of students and their achievements.

Final Thoughts Air pollution is not typically a topof-mind issue for teens. However, given the persistence of air pollution problems in Utah (and elsewhere), educating teens on ways to improve it as they join the legion of drivers may help them learn lifelong skills to reduce their long-term personal impact. We made air pollution relevant to high school students by coupling it with a high-profile clean air poster contest. This involved students learning about effective green message framing and receiving ongoing mentoring from USU students and faculty. Results demonstrated that the contest led to better understanding about air quality and willingness to engage in driving behaviors to protect it.

Erika Guadarrama

In October 2015, students at Logan High School announced that they were launching a second Clean Air Poster Contest for 2016. The contest would be administered by students in the newly-formed Logan Environmental Action Force (LEAF) Club, which was being advised by the environmental science teacher who helped champion the initial contest.

The club will distribute car decals and air fresheners designed from the winning posters to the drivers’ education classes at Logan High. As a

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result, the messages will go directly to the primary target audience we were hoping to reach. We are excited that students will continue this pilot initiative into subsequent years, building on the momentum of the pilot initiative. Our pilot poster contest and outcomes hopefully will help other educators and advocates seek ways to instill the value of social and environmental issues among young people, who as they mature, may help steer society onto a healthier, more sustainable path.

Carmen Guadarrama

Acknowledgments The authors thank Cathy Hartman, Alexi Lamm, Jacqueline Lowry, and Paige Gardner Young for their comments and suggestions.

References 1. Wells, D. Salt Lake, Logan to have the worst air

http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/politics/57322168-90/ hawthorne-health-http-lake.html.csp.

6. Utah Department of Environmental Quality,

Avoiding Green Marketing Myopia. Environment

April 28, 2015 http://www.airquality.utah.gov/

[online] (June 2006) http://www.greenmarketing.

Pollutants/ParticulateMatter/PM25/CacheValley/ 7. Christensen, J. On narrow vote, Cache approves emission testing. Cache Valley Daily [online]

January 21, 2014 http://fox13now.com/2014/01/21/

news/local/article_d54ee540-8bf0-11e2-ab5b-

salt-lake-logan-to-have-worst-air-in-the-nation-

0019bb30f31a.html. meeting. Salt Lake Tribune [online] January 15, 2015 http://www.sltrib.com/news/2058290-155/deq-

March 13, 2013 http://www.cachevalleydaily.com/

meeting-on-burn-ban-sparks.

0019bb30f31a.html.

3. Stafford, ER. We need Utahns’ hearts, not just

American Values and Vision (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York, 2006).

14. Stafford, E.R. and C.L. Hartman. Making Green More Macho. Solutions Journal [online] (July 2012) http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/node/1128.

8. Maffly, B. Wood-burning ban gets blasted at DEQ

emission testing. Cache Valley Daily [online] news/local/article_d54ee540-8bf0-11e2-ab5b-

com/files/Stafford-MyopiaJune06.pdf.

13. Lakoff, F. Thinking Point: Communicating Our

CacheValleyHealthStandard.html.

March 13, 2013 http://www.cachevalleydaily.com/

2. Christensen, J. On narrow vote, Cache approves

4 (August 2009).

12. Ottman, J.A., E.R. Stafford, and C.L. Hartman.

Cache Valley PM2.5: Health standard [online]

in the nation Wednesday. FOX13 News [online]

wednesday/.

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15. McClure, T. and R. Spence. Don’t Mess with Texas: The Story behind the Legend 71 (Idea City Press, Austin, TX 2006).

16. Stafford, E.R. and C.L. Hartman. Making Green More

9. O’Donoghue, AJ. Groups chase air pollution to keep businesses, people on Wasatch Front. Deseret News [online] May 20, 2015. http://www.deseretnews.

Macho. Solutions Journal [online] (July 2012) http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/node/1128.

17. Bauman, J. Is Air Pollution as Harmful as Smoking?

minds, to improve the air. Salt Lake Tribune

com/article/865629118/Groups-chase-air-pollution-

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to-keep-businesses-people-on-Wasatch-Front.

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10. Fays, J. Link between clean air and healthy Utah business environment explored. Salt Lake Tribune

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11. Chase, C.C. et al. Teachable Agents and the Protégé Effect: Increasing the Effort towards Learning.

18. Cannon, K. Promoting Healthy, Clean Air: Logan High Students Design Educational Poster for Contest. Logan Herald Journal, March 15, 2015.

19. Mortensen, M. Promoting Clean Air: Logan High School Hosts Awards Ceremony for Poster Contest Winners. Logan Herald Journal. April 12, 2015.

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Schuster-Wallace, C.J. (2015). Waste to Wealth: Helping to Close the Sanitation Financing Gap in Rural Communities and Small Towns. Solutions 6(6): 60–69. https://thesolutionsjournal.com/2015/6/waste-to-wealth-helping-to-close-the-sanitation-financing-gap-in-rural-communities-and-small-towns

Feature

Waste to Wealth: Helping to Close the Sanitation Financing Gap in Rural Communities and Small Towns

by Corinne J. Schuster-Wallace

A

ccess to sanitation has proved to be one of the toughest nuts to crack in international development, as evidenced by the fact that the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target for sanitation, to reduce the number of people in low and middle-income countries without access to adequate sanitation by 50 percent, was the furthest off track of any MDG at the end of 2015. Slightly less than one billion people around the world practice open defecation—that is, they do not use any toilet facilities—and 2.4 billion do not have access to improved sanitation facilities.1 This has environmental, social, and economic implications.

Environmental implications are a result of pathogens and nutrients in feces, which are aesthetically unpleasant and contaminate water sources.

In large water bodies, these nutrients cause eutrophication, an overgrowth of algae that eventually deoxygenates the water, leaving it as a dead zone for fish and other aquatic animals.

This ‘dead zone’ is referred to as hypoxia, which is increasing in lakes and oceans are increasing because of sewage contamination, in addition to agricultural runoff and water temperature changes linked to climate change.2 Social impacts include lack of dignity, respect, and safety, particularly

for women and girls. The lack of toilets appropriate for menstrual hygiene in schools means that post-pubescent girls and female teachers can be absent up to one week every month, affecting their educational achievement. For 650 million people around the world without access to improved drinking water sources, or the almost two billion without access to potable water,1,3 pathogens in water cause significant burdens of diarrheal and nematode diseases that affect cognitive and physical development in young children, affecting school attendance, individual productivity (whether at school or work), and creating a preventable burden on the healthcare system. As a result, economic costs have been estimated at USD$260 billion annually (1.5 percent of global GDP) in the countries that are most significantly affected by lack of sanitation.4 There are three main reasons for lagging progress towards the 2015 MDG sanitation target: 1) sanitation and managing bodily wastes is not appealing to some donors who would prefer to invest in “sexier” development infrastructure;5 2) many national governments cannot afford to invest in scaling up sanitation at the level required to meet this target; and 3) sanitation is not simply an infrastructure issue but also a behavior

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In Brief The newly agreed upon global Sustainable Development Goals (Agenda 2030) call for poverty reduction, equity, and sustainable development. Lack of sanitation undermines these through preventable illness that takes people out of schools and the workplace and uses up ill-affordable household income on medications; through inequitable access for the poorest countries and poorest people of the world and inequitable burdens on women, the elderly, and those with physical infirmities; and pollutes the environment with germ-ridden fecal waste. Almost 2.4 billion people in the world today do not have access to proper sanitation facilities, mainly because of the cost of providing infrastructure and the education required to change behaviors. Waste to Wealth is an integrated and holistic business approach to help close the financing gap and incentivize toilet use in order to aid in expansion of sanitation services, poverty reduction, elimination of inequities, and environmental improvements.

change issue; and 4) large gaps exist between data on access to and use of toilet facilities. A final challenge in providing sanitation facilities is what to do with the end product—human waste, consisting of urine and fecal sludge. Urine contains large amounts of nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium. When diluted, it makes an excellent fertilizer and is ready to use fairly quickly, as it contains few, if any, pathogens. The problem here lies in separating urine from the fecal sludge, and one solution is to separate the two at the source. EcoSan (ecological sanitation) toilets use this principle of urine diversion to maximize the use of both urine and fecal sludge. Fecal sludge is also high in nutrients, but most pathogens in human waste are shed through it, making it extremely dangerous to human health when first excreted. In EcoSan solutions, this solid waste is captured and stored for several months, with a significant period of this time spent out in the sun in order to kill off pathogens through heat and solar processes. After this process is complete, the waste product is used as fertilizer. To reduce health concerns, the World Health Organization (WHO), as well as many countries have guidelines and laws on pathogen levels for human-waste fertilizer and the types of crops that can be grown with it. While pathogens can be removed, heavy metals and chemical contaminants, which can be mixed with human waste in some wastewater effluents, are more difficult to remove, and become an additional threat to human health.

A Proven Solution Anaerobic digestion (AD) is a technology that has been commercialized for decades. Many large urban centers in Europe and North America use AD in municipal wastewater treatment plants. The process of AD is relatively straightforward: waste is captured in a sealed container that prevents any oxygen from entering, thus creating

anaerobic conditions. The waste is then broken down (digested) by bacteria that flourish in these oxygen-free environments. The by-products of this process are a gas that is approximately 60 to 70 percent methane (biogas) and a liquid slurry that is high in nutrients and low in pathogens. In large municipal treatment plants, the gas is used to generate electricity in order to offset the energy costs associated with treatment. More and more, this type of technology is being developed for household use, particularly in small rural communities where families raise cows and grow crops. In this context, animal manure is utilized

Key Concepts • Human waste contains significant amounts of organic material that can be digested by specific bacteria in oxygen-free environments.

• The byproducts from this digestion process can be used as energy for cooking, lighting, and generating electricity.

• Revenue or savings from the sale or use of these products provides financing to pay back up-front capital costs.

as the primary feedstock for AD, and the gas produced is used directly for cooking and lighting, replacing woodbased fuels, while the slurry is used to fertilize crops.

Several countries in Asia have embarked on large-scale programs for biogas production, including China, India, and Nepal.5 These systems vary in size from small household AD units to large-scale units that use a variety of feedstocks as a source of biomass.

The development of the biogas sector in Nepal is particularly instructive.5 With financial support from the Netherlands Directorate-General for International Cooperation, a Biogas Support Program was started

in Nepal in 1992. In the beginning, there was only one, state-owned company producing biogas and only one state-owned financial institution providing loans to biogas entrepreneurs. However, by the end of 2007, over 180,000 units had been installed in Nepal, attributable to the following developments: • Establishment of the Nepal Biogas Promotion Association in 1994 to promote commercial interests • Establishment of an apex body under the Ministry of Science and Technology in 1996 to support biogas and other alternative energy applications in Nepal at a policy level • More than 60 qualified private biogas installation companies operating by the end of 2007.

• 15 qualified biogas appliances manufacturers • 120 financial institutions (in addition to the state-owned bank) deliver loans to biogas entrepreneurs • 30 local and international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) promoting biogas technologies in Nepal In India, biogas plants are set up at the domestic (family) level, community level, and in large industrial facilities. Feedstocks vary from animal manure and food waste (used primarily in family units), to agriculture and forestry waste, food processing waste, and municipal wastewater.

By 2010, 4.3 million small domestic biogas plants (1–10 m3) had been set up in India under the National Biogas Manure Management Program.7 Also by 2010, there were 14 large biogas fertilizer plants operating in India, collectively producing more than 23,000 m3 of biogas per day.6 This represents an energy equivalent of 138,000 kWh per day. A portion of this energy is lost when converted to electricity, but according to the World Energy

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SuSanA Secretariat

Moses Wakala opened an EcoSan shop in Bungoma, Kenya, where he provides sanitary ware and technical expertise in the construction of EcoSan sanitation facilities.

Council, global average annual household consumption is just over 3,000 kWh. Even if two-thirds of energy is lost in converting to electricity, the daily capacity will satisfy annual demand for 30 average households.

In countries with the lowest annual energy demand, such as Nepal, it would satisfy annual demand for more than 300 households. Biogas generation in India is augmented by over 200 community-based public toilet biogas plants of intermediate size that are currently operating in India that were commissioned by Sulabh International.5 The “Sulabh Model” is an intermediate capacity biogas plant (35–60 m3) that uses human fecal material as the primary feedstock.

While AD has proven successful in Asia, the story is different in Africa. A review of biogas generation facilities in Africa indicates that while there are small-scale biogas systems in many African countries, a relatively small proportion of these are operational.8 There are large-scale biogas generation facilities (i.e. >100 m3) with a high level of technology development in a small number of sub-Saharan African countries, including Burundi, Kenya, Mali, Rwanda, Tanzania, and South Africa.

These AD systems utilize a variety of feedstocks, including slaughterhouse waste, waste from sugar factories, water hyacinths, animal dung, and human fecal waste. Medium-scale

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biodigestors have been installed in chicken and dairy farms in Burundi, a public latrine block in Kibera, Kenya, prisons in Rwanda, and health clinics and hospitals in Tanzania.

Some of the challenges to biogas commercialization in Africa include the following:7 • Lack of experienced contractors and consultants for construction, operation, maintenance, and repair • Lack of reliable information to reduce investment risks for financial institutions • Absence of resources and supporting infrastructure (academic, bureaucratic, legislative, and commercial)

The Uganda Context

SuSanA Secretariat

An EcoSan toilet in West Hanahai, Botswana provides privacy.

• Lack of community acceptance and responsible ownership • Lack of appropriate government energy policies to support the sector • Lack of pilot, demonstration, and full-scale systems Thus, notwithstanding technical capacity, it appears that the keys to success in the biogas sector are not based on technology alone,

but are dependent on having the right organizational, financial, and governance structures in place to support the development of the sector. Affordability was a key barrier addressed in India through multiple options to secure loans, which has not been replicated in Africa. Both financial and technical capacities require government interventions that do not appear to have been as concerted in Africa to date.

In Uganda, about 80 percent of the population lives in rural areas, and more than 70 percent of the national disease burden results from diseases linked to poor sanitation and hygiene.8 This is tied to the fact that 70 percent of Ugandans do not have access to proper toilet facilities. Diarrhea associated with this lack of sanitation kills approximately 23,000 Ugandans every year, with 85 percent being children under five years of age.1 In addition, more than 90 percent of the citizens of Uganda use wood, charcoal, or animal dung for cooking and heating, which contributes to high rates of pneumonia and acute respiratory infections—additional child killers.9 The annual social and health care costs associated with poor sanitation in Uganda are estimated to be 389 billion Ugandan shillings or USD$177 million.10 A lack of toilets and wastewater treatment also results in poor water quality in lakes and rivers. This threatens improvements in drinking water access, especially for Ugandans who depend on untreated sources for domestic needs. Meanwhile, tree cover reduction to create firewood and charcoal and increased land area under agricultural cultivation continues in Uganda at unsustainable rates, further affecting water quality as well as degrading soils. In a country where more than three quarters of the population depend on agriculture for their main source of livelihood,11 this threatens health and financial wellbeing as well as the environment.

A critical barrier to progress is the insufficient funding currently available to achieve both the MDG targets (and therefore universal access to drinking water and sanitation as called for under the proposed Sustainable Development Goals) and National Development Plan objectives, especially given rapid population growth.10 In order to increase access to drinking water and sanitation facilities, the

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SuSanA Secretariat

Instructions demonstrate how to use an EcoSan toilet, as displayed in a classroom in Kenya.

Ministry of Water and Environment in Uganda is encouraging the implementation of community self-supply models, wherein management of the water and/or sanitation facilities is borne by the community. However, even when management is devolved to the community, finding sufficient funds for upfront capital costs can be prohibitive to national governments and rural communities alike.

Waste to Wealth To address these issues, Waste to Wealth is a Ugandan initiative created in partnership with the Ministry of Water and Environment, its water and wastewater utility (the National Water and Sewerage Corporation), and other government, NGO, and academic partners. The concept is simple—to use modern bioenergy technologies

to convert human and other organic wastes into resources that will provide economic benefits and improved environment and human health. The biogas and slurry left from energy conversion will be used as a resource with economic value to provide a return on the investment in AD technology. The concept is an innovative and transformative technology-based approach to managing human wastes and providing sanitation services in low income countries. The approach is innovative because it harnesses the revenue from waste by-products to finance the operation, maintenance, and expansion of sanitation services.

Further, it is transformative because it involves the creation of a new national economic sector through multistakeholder collaboration using technologies that have been tested and

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proven in other developing countries.

A recent application to assess the global value in waste calculated that the energy from the annual waste of those practicing open defecation alone (2.4 billion people) would be sufficient to power 10 million homes for a year, and is valued at more than USD$200 million (natural gas equivalent on the global market).12 One potential barrier to uptake of AD byproduct use, particularly when the feedstock is human waste, is the associated “yuck” factor, a fear of food contamination, and cultural taboos. In a limited survey conducted

by UNU–INWEH within a crosssection of the public in the Lyantonde District of Uganda, about 40 percent of respondents did not own their own sanitation or toilet facilities. Among the respondents, there was interest

for sanitation. Ultimately, it is anticipated that the initiative will progress to the development of a decentralized system for wastewater management and sanitation in Uganda that will require little direct government investment.

A Business Opportunity

SuSanA Secretariat

Workers construct a biogas digester at a school in Kampala, Uganda.

in using a community-based sanitation facility, especially if access was provided for free, and even more so if the users received residue byproducts (e.g. briquettes and fertilizer/compost) as a benefit of using the facility.

The respondents also expressed a strong interest in producing the byproducts as a source of employment. It is not clear whether there would be widespread acceptance by the public for the use of the dried slurry as a solid fuel. There was initial skepticism among respondents about the use of the solid byproducts from

AD, but acceptance improved once safety issues were directly addressed by the interviewer. Any marketing strategy for the residual byproducts of biogas production would thus have to include a public education component to ensure acceptance of the products.

Currently, the partners are working to catalyze the development of the Ugandan water and sanitation subsector implementation of the national decentralized (on site) fecal waste management framework in order to contribute to bridging the finance gap

The business opportunities for the bioenergy sector are varied, depending upon the feedstocks that are available for use in bioenergy conversion, the size of the AD facilities, the level of investment in infrastructure, and access to markets.

For instance, entrepreneurs could use relatively small AD systems to produce biogas from human waste that generates electricity for charging cell phones or car batteries on a local fee-for-service basis. Entrepreneurs or community cooperatives that have access to investment capital could develop larger AD systems that use human waste, food waste, industrial waste (e.g. brewery or dairy waste), and animal waste to generate sufficient amounts of biogas to purify, compress, and bottle for distribution to markets far from the site of generation. The economic benefits of AD systems at large institutions would mainly be from offsets against the costs of fuel and electricity within the facilities.

The business case for marketing of the residual slurry also varies, depending upon the AD generation scenario. The simplest business opportunity is to sell residual material for use as fertilizer on agricultural land, but this market generates little revenue and there are cultural barriers to the use of this resource. With an additional investment in infrastructure, the residue can be dried and pressed into solid fuel briquettes that could then be used for industrial purposes (e.g. brick making) or as an alternative to charcoal or wood for domestic cooking and heating.

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Currently, based on established business models (Table 1), there is ongoing pre-development for pilotscale facilities at three locations in Uganda, which will demonstrate the range of business opportunities that can be exploited as well as the economic feasibility of these strategies. However, the scope of business opportunities within the sector will ultimately be driven by the creativity, drive, and business acumen of the entrepreneurial sector within Uganda.

Benefits When human waste is broken down through the anaerobic digestion process, the resulting energy and fertilizer products possess more than simply financial value. While the financial value drives the innovation-in-sanitation business models, it is the accrual of additional environmental, health, and economic benefits (Figure 1) that makes this a truly sustainable development solution.

Benefits include the following: • Green energy, reduced greenhouse gas emissions, and a reduced dependency on wood fuels • Improved soil quality and crop productivity through use of the slurry as fertilizer • A cleaner environment and healthier people through proper disposal of human waste The resulting revenue and health benefits increase economic productivity and also relieve burdens currently placed on women, including vulnerabilities associated with finding a safe and dignified location to relieve themselves. The bottom line is that, through Waste to Wealth, we can catalyze and finance social development and economic growth through implementation of AD as a sector response to current challenges facing Uganda and other countries (Figure 1).

Anaerobic digestion, as a source of renewable energy and fertilizer products, is seen to be part of the solution

25% Volatile Solids (VS)

40% VSb

$ 327,290.00

$ 327,290.00

-$ 36,010.67

-$ 36,010.67

Ice maker savings

-$ 217,753.52

-$ 217,753.52

Biogas revenue

$ 221,654.39

$ 264,566.31

$ 63,713.23

$ 63,713.23

$ 31,603.43

$ 74,515.36

10.36

4.39

Capex Total Capital Cost ($) OPEX Yearly operating expense Savings and Revenues

Briquette revenue Fertilizer revenue NET OPEX

Payback (Years)

Table 1. Business case for a fishing village in Uganda.a a Human waste, fish waste, and water hyacinth are used as feedstock for the digester. Human waste is collected from a stand of 50 public toilets near the fish-landing site. Biogas is used to manufacture ice for fish transportation in boats and vehicles, saving the local beach management unit from purchasing ice in urban centers located several hours away. The slurry is dried and converted to fuel briquettes for local sale. Partial profits will be used to reinvest in community water and sanitation improvements and expansion. b Pilot tests in Uganda suggest VS values of 30–40%.

to the linked problems associated with sanitation, energy, and agriculture. In this manner, we see AD as a solution for rural growth areas and small towns—a modular, decentralized approach to providing sanitation facilities, incentivizing the use and maintenance of those facilities, and providing livelihood opportunities in these settings. More importantly, Waste to Wealth is a business case demonstration of integrated sustainable development implementation under Agenda 2030, balancing and benefitting the three P’s of a green economy—people, profit (economy), and planet (environment). It is a strategy to improve energy security

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and waste management while reducing environmental degradation. The benefits to Uganda include improved community health, environment, and economy, and income-generating opportunities.

Acknowledgements This paper would not have been possible without financial support from a Government of Canada-funded Grand Challenges Canada Rising Stars in Global Health award. The authors thank Chris Wild for his help in business plan development and Sena Amewu and others for their reviews of the original manuscript.

SuSanA Secretariat

The results of using EcoSan fertilizer on maize in South Nyanza, Kenya. No fertilizer was used on the left, while fertilizer from EcoSan toilet systems was used on the right. Both sections of maize were planted at the same time.

References 1. UNICEF and WHO. Progress on sanitation and

5. Harvey, F. Donor aversion to ‘unsexy’ water projects

a review of progress. Renewable and Sustainable

drinking water: 2015 update and MDG Assessment

threatens development goal. The Guardian [online]

[online] (2015) http://www.wssinfo.org/fileadmin/

(2011) http://www.theguardian.com/global-

user_upload/resources/JMP-Update-report-2015_

development/poverty-matters/2011/jun/27/donor-

of poor sanitation in Africa: Uganda [online] (2012)

English.pdf.

aversion-water-projects.

http://water.worldbank.org/sites/water.worldbank.

2. Scientific and Technical Advisory Panel. Hypoxia

6. Sharma, S. and A. Sanghal. Rapid market

and nutrient reduction in the coastal zone: advice

assessment: waste-derived energy products.

for prevention, remediation and research [online]

Emergent Ventures (2013) (doi: 10.13140/

(2011) https://www.thegef.org/gef/sites/thegef.org/

RG.2.1.1335.3129).

files/publication/STAP_Hypoxia_low.pdf.

3. Onda, K., J. LoBuglio and J. Bartram. Global access to safe water: accounting for water quality and the resulting impact on MDG progress. World Health

Energy Reviews 18, 55–63 (2013).

10. Water and Sanitation Program. Economic impacts

org/files/publication/WSP-ESI-Uganda.pdf.

11. FAO. Uganda and FAO: building resilience and food and nutrition security [online] (2015) http://www. fao.org/3/a-au755e.pdf.

7. Amigun, B., W. Parawira, J.K. Musango, A.O.

12. Schuster-Wallace, C.J., C. Wild and C. Metcalfe.

Aboyade and A.S. Badmos, in Biogas (ed. Kumar, S.)

Valuing human waste as an energy resource: a

Ch. 2 (InTech, Croatia, 2012).

research brief assessing the global wealth in waste.

8. Government of the Republic of Uganda. Uganda

UNU-INWEH [online] (2015) http://inweh.unu.edu.

& Population 14(3), 32–44 (2013) (doi:10.12927/

Vision 2040 [online] (2014) http://npa.ug/wp-

whp.2013.23437).

content/themes/npatheme/documents/vision2040.

Theodoulou and V. Yargeau. From waste to wealth:

pdf.

sustainable wastewater management framework.

4. Water and Sanitation Program. Economics of Sanitation Initiative [online] (2012) http://www.wsp. org/content/economic-impacts-sanitation#top.

9. Okello, C., S. Pindozzi, S. Faugno and L. Boccia.

Development of bioenergy technologies in Uganda:

13. Schuster-Wallace, C.J., K. Cave, C. Metcalfe, M.

UNU-INWEH [online] (2014) http://inweh.unu.edu/ waste-to-wealth/.

www.thesolutionsjournal.org | November-December 2015 | Solutions | 67

AD Technology Benefits Flow Chart Process Underpinned by a National Supporting Framework (NSF)

NSF

Stimulus Funding

Slurry Organic Matter Collection

increased jobs

Anaerobic Digestion

Organic Excreta Collection

private sector growth

reduced water pollution

reduced organic pollution

reduced water related illness

reduced drinking water treatment costs

profit

research sector growth

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decreased air pollution (smell)

reduced diseases

Gas

reduced wood use

skilled labour jobs

forest conservation

reduced drinking water treatment costs

Figure 1. Summary of benefits associated with Waste to Wealth.13

reduced pathogens

R&D

improve sanitation skilled labour jobs

reduced smell = less flies

improved water quality & quantity

decreased land degradation

Improved COMMUNITY HEALTH

Improved ENVIRONMENT

Improved ECONOMY

Improved INCOME/PROFIT

Solid Fuel

reduced wood use

income from fuel

reduced drinking water treatment costs

Gas for Goods Production forest conservation

improved water quality & quantity

time for economic labour

saved income

improved wellbeing

Fertilizer Sales

Consumer

income from fertilizer

increased soil quality

income from crops

Cash Crops

Consumer

Gas Sales

Domestic Use

income from sold gas improved water quality & quantity

Gas for Goods Production

income from sold goods

skilled labour jobs

decreased land degradation

increased crop production

Manufacturing (non Ag)

Domestic Use

Fertilizer

reduced chemical pollution

Consumer

Solid Fuel Sales

decreased land degradation

reduced physical burden

Surplus Crop Sales

increased nutrition

income from crops

Domestic Use (cooking, lighting) increased soil quality reduced food water and respiratory diseases; improved safety

women: time for economic labour

increased human productivity

reduced physical burden

saved income

reduced diseases and improved community health

Manufacturing (non Ag)

skilled labour jobs

income from sold goods

increased human productivity

Authors

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Pearl, A. (2015). Whither Work for the 21st Century. Solutions 6(6): 70–73. https://thesolutionsjournal.com/2015/6/whither-work-for-the-21st-century

Reviews Book Review

Whither Work in the 21st Century

by Arthur Pearl REVIEWING Why We Work

by Barry Schwartz

B

arry Schwartz, a professor of psychology who has taught at Swarthmore College for nearly 45 years, is the author of numerous books synthesizing research in the social sciences, including psychology, sociology, and economics to challenge prevailing paradigms about markets, freedom, and choice. Among these are The Battle for Human Nature: Science, Morality and Modern Life, The Costs of Living: How Market Freedom Erodes the Best Things in Life, and The Paradox of Choice.

Schwartz’s most recent book, Why We Work (based on a TED talk), is about the meanings we attach to work and how the value of work to individuals has been undermined by particular assumptions about human nature.

Examining the value of work comes at a particularly propitious time as there is much apprehension about the lack of general availability of work in the near future, a concern spurred on by accelerating advances in artificial intelligence made possible, in part, by continuing increases in computer speed and power. Authors from economist Tyler Cowen, business professors Andrew McAfree and Erik Brynjolfsson, and technologist Martin Ford envision a work world where computers take over not only routine labor but also complex tasks such as reading medical images, making diagnoses, and designing products, to mention just a few activities once thought impervious to automation.

This is not the first time that such

fears have been raised: in the 1960s, thirty-plus thinkers and activists, including Todd Gitlin, Tom Hayden, Michael Harrington, Norman Thomas, Gunnar Mydal, Robert Heilbroner, Linus Pauling, and futurist Robert Theobald, formed the Committee on the Triple Revolution and released a “manifesto,” which among other things claimed that “a new era of production has begun…Cybernation is already reorganizing to meet its own needs…As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources, while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures— unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments.”

Of course, those dire predictions did not (entirely) come true for a variety of reasons, including the dramatic increase in service employment, education and health, the integration of large numbers of women into the labor force that maintained family incomes and effective demand in the economy, and the development of whole new industries. On the other hand, this time may be different, requiring a radical rethinking about how work is shared and who will benefit from dramatic increases in productivity.

There are some important insights in the book, in particular, that structuring institutions to be consistent with ideology (here defined as belief

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Simon & Schuster/ TED (2015)

and advocacy of falsehoods) can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Thus, if we believe the only reason people work is for pay, and the workplace must be structured on the assumption that without coercion workers will slack off and produce inferior products, then that is the result we will get. Schwartz supports this with several examples, one drawn from labor history and the exclusion of blacks from unions because of their willingness to accept lower wages, and then the union’s assumptions were “confirmed” when they crossed the picket lines of the unions that excluded them.

A second insight is that intrinsic motivations can be “squeezed out” by extrinsic motivations, that is, people may choose to do something because it is the right or moral thing to do; however, when monetary incentives are introduced, the result is a reduction, not an increase, in willingness to undertake the action.

Here Schwartz cites a well-known case of this phenomenon, that of a Swiss town whose citizens were

Reviews Book Review

UFCW International Union

Walmart employees and supporters rally outside of a Walmart store in California in 2012, demanding fair treatment and improved workplace conditions.

surveyed to determine their willingness to locate a nuclear waste site nearby. Initially this was supported by a small majority. A second survey asked the same question but added the incentive of a significant stipend and support plummeted.

However, while understanding how assumptions about human nature frame our expectations about work and the possibilities for creating more desirable employment systems are important and definitely where we must start, it is not nearly enough.

Thus, if the purpose of this book is to make the case that we can transform work from the unpleasant drudgery that it is now for most people and make it personally rewarding and even socially beneficial, then it falls short.

One glaring omission is that there is no discussion of what elements define good work, which leaves us without any metrics for determining when one workplace delivers and another does not. Of course, traditional economic analysis would insist that it is defined by individual preferences and what is good work for one person is drudgery for another. This reviewer disagrees. Good work provides security (financial, emotional, and physical), absence of unnecessary pain, a sense of competence, mastery, meaning, hope, excitement, and creativity.

One would get the impression from some of Schwartz’s examples—a custodian at a hospital, a hair stylist, a carpet maker—that it is possible for individuals to make their otherwise

uninspiring and often deadly boring work into something that was meaningful, personally fulfilling, and even made life better for others, going so far as to heal the damaged environment.

The problem is that since the advent of the industrial revolution, individuals have not designed their own workplaces. At one time it was General Electric, General Motors, and General Mills. Now it’s Walmart, Amazon, and Apple. More people work for Walmart than for any other private employer in the United States, and none of Schwartz’s numerous referenced studies portrayed a Walmart employee as one able to transform work into something gratifying, important to others, or otherwise made the world a better place.

www.thesolutionsjournal.org | November-December 2015 | Solutions | 71

Reviews Book Review Particularly disappointing is the book’s treatment of unions, or rather nontreatment. Unions are mentioned twice: once for their racism, a characteristic of the premerger AFL but not of the CIO in its heyday, and the other to show how workers normally produce more than they are paid to do, because during a contract dispute they reduce productivity by “working to contract.”

However, it was unions that made life better for workers and improved wages, hours, and conditions, and it has been the destruction of unions that has made work less rewarding, both in wages and personal gratification. However, in as much as we are able to make the case that it is possible to create gratifying workplaces with no sacrifice of productivity, the transformation will not occur without the reinvigoration of unions.

By far the biggest problem today is what is happening to work. In the existing economic system, the need for necessary and environmentally wholesome work is disappearing.

Technology is in the process of eliminating such work. The work that is being created in this long and inadequate recovery from recession has largely been poverty jobs, and the wealth generated by them goes to the upper 20 percent of the society. It is a workplace designed by and for the corporate elite. There is little regard for the worker, the environment, nor for the betterment of society. The workforce is part of an economy that is not sustainable economically or environmentally. Its logical consequences are poverty, war, despotism, and environmental collapse.

The alternative requires the emergence of a political movement.

Schwartz does not mention politics.

He does refer to politicians. Once.

He refers to a politician as one who “believes self interest motivates all

Michael Fleshman

May Day in New York City, 2013. A coalition of immigrants groups, unions, and Occupy Wall Street members took to the streets to demand reforms for American workers.

behavior, that people are entitled to keep the spoils of their labors, and that they deserve what they get and get what they deserve. Said politician helps enact policies that erode or destroy this social safety net (p. 79–80).” There are, of course, such politicians, and they are very powerful at the moment and do the bidding of those who designed most of our current workplaces. But there was a time when politicians designed those safety nets, and therein is Schwartz’s dilemma. He has unwittingly described a political problem without providing a political solution, but to be fair, that was not his purpose in writing this book.

The political solution begins with vision. What kind of world do we want to live in? Once a vision is well

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established, what kind of work does that vision require? What steps are necessary for us to go from where we are to where we want to go? It won’t happen overnight, but there are reasons to be optimistic. The unexpected and largely positive response to Bernie Sanders’ campaign is one indication.

The critical component will be education, but not necessarily in schools.

Schools must be part of this transformation; however, it is critical that each of us take the responsibility to initiate discussions and engage as many others as possible in a project that moves a small piece of the world in the direction of the vision. As projects grow, so too is created the work of the future. If the world is to be saved it will be when all, or at the very least the vast majority, becomes politically engaged.

Reviews Media Reviews Women in the Dome

by Zafirah Zein In 1992, United States politics was abuzz with the energy of four newly elected women in the wake of of a sexism-related controversy. The year prior, Clarence Thomas was sworn in as the 106th Supreme Court Justice despite sexual allegations against him made by Anita Hill. The outcome of the hearings prompted the running and election of Patty Murray, Carol Moseley Braun, Dianne Feinstein, and Barbara Boxer into the U.S. Senate.

Observers heralded the period as the Year of the Woman.

Today, women make up 20 percent of the Senate. They hold 104 seats out of 535 in Congress, and fill almost 25 percent of positions in state legislatures. While significant progress has been made in women’s inclusion in politics and the influence of many female leaders, women continue to be underrepresented in the political arena.

Larissa Faulkner, director of the Tahoe Center for Professional Development, started the website In the Dome with the aim of creating a standard for the work of women in government. Without directly addressing the gender gap that exists in American politics, the website acts as an online collection of news and commentary covering the contributions of women in the country’s highest positions of leadership. The online space features articles on women holding and running for political office at national, state, and local levels.

A post from fall 2015 on In the Dome included an article on then presidential candidate Carly Fiorina’s speech at the Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce conference hosted by the Koch Brothers. At the event, the

audience responded well to Fiorina, and she garnered applause for her criticism on media’s biased attention on political funding for conservatives.

She also took a stab at fellow candidate Hillary Clinton by joking about the controversy that surrounded Clinton’s use of her personal email account for business purposes during her time as Secretary of State.

While the relatively new In the Dome still lacks engaging content, its goal is clear: shed light on the nation’s female change-makers and normalize their presence in the political sphere. The site also provides a list of resources that add to this aim, such as a link to The American Association

of University Women’s Elect Her program. The program is the country’s sole initiative advancing women’s presence in politics, and does this by training women in college to run for student government, and political offices in the future.

Twenty-three years after the Year of the Woman, the U.S. is once again animated by predictions that 2016 might witness the nation’s first female president. Women’s voices are now being heard across states and in the topmost levels of power. In the Dome is a careful collation of those voices, serving as an inspirational archive of the everyday work accomplished by women leaders.

WisPolitics.com

Hillary Clinton speaks at a rally in Milwaukee in September 2015 while campaigning for her 2016 Presidential bid. www.thesolutionsjournal.org | November-December 2015 | Solutions | 73

Powell, M. (2015). Terraced Agriculture: A Step in the Right Direction? Solutions 6(6): 74–77. https://thesolutionsjournal.com/2015/6/terraced-agriculture-a-step-in-the-right-direction

Solutions in History

Terraced Agriculture: A Step in the Right Direction?

by Maisie Powell

Shawn Harquail

Remnants of the Moray Agricultural Terraces, designed by the Inca beside Machu Picchu. The site descends to a depth of approximately 150 meters, with a highly effective drainage system at the bottom.

O

ur current system of industrial agriculture is destructive and has a variety of negative impacts on both the environment and human health.

Conventional, large-scale monocropping relies heavily on inputs from cheap labor and fossil fuels in the form of food transportation, cultivation, and fertilization. It produces outputs such as pollution, massive amounts of waste, land degradation, and little in the way of healthy, diversified crops.

The problems of this system have become common knowledge to most and plenty of scientific assessments

have contributed to our society’s knowledge of the impacts of our dominant agriculture system, including its large ecological footprint and its ecological degradation and overexploitation of renewable and nonrenewable resources.1 Unsurprisingly, people are today looking to new ways of producing food for our growing population while keeping our natural environment healthy. In many instances, older, traditional models can provide guidance and insight. In the U.S., there has been a grassroots, bottom–up push

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to establish food systems that are an integral part of our landscapes and ecosystems. Our current system often faces trade-offs between agricultural production and biodiversity and other ecosystem services. The challenge lies in increasing provisioning services, such as food production, by 70 percent for 2050 according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) for a rapidly increasing population while simultaneously conserving or enhancing biodiversity and the other types of ecosystem services within agricultural systems.2 By

Solutions in History looking to examples of food systems throughout history and all around the globe, we can develop agricultural strategies that can conserve biological integrity while providing for human needs.

One tried-and-true method of lowimpact food production is terraced agriculture. This has taken many forms over the course of agriculture’s long history and continues to be a prominent method for food cultivation. Some of the better-known forms of terraced agriculture come from South America, where people such as the Inca successfully developed and practiced it for centuries. In fact, despite the lack of human upkeep for almost 500 years, the evidence of precolonial Incan terraced agriculture can still be seen today throughout Peru.3 Built on contour, these terraces were constructed with a top layer of nutrient rich soil over denser clay soils for water retention, all on top of piles of stones to ultimately provide drainage. This method enabled the Inca to expand cultivatable land in Peru’s extremely mountainous terrain.3 Raised terraces were used in the Mayan civilization, too, particularly in riverine environments, the lowlands, and other areas susceptible to seasonal flooding. Like their Incan neighbors, Mayan land alteration also stemmed from the need to alter the hydrological cycle in order to increase production.4 Many farmers in Central America still look to these simple yet sophisticated methods of land alteration in their food production systems. Such methods can greatly increase soil nutrients and moisture levels and are designed to improve biological, climatic, or edaphic conditions for crop plants.5 Certainly, there are potential problems with planting on slopes, including sheet wash and erosion caused by rainfall and gravity.

However, placing terraced mounds on contour alleviates this problem by diverting water and slowing runoff.

These mounds are then planted with a variety of crops, as well as small shrubs and fruit trees for stabilization. Farmers in this region have also found that keeping the forest intact helps mitigate erosion,5 an idea that works in tandem with increasingly important and influential moves toward producing food in ways that facilitate ecological health and integrity in countries that have for too long relied on high-input industrial agriculture.

Similar to Central and South America, many of the mountainous regions of Asia also have an extensive history of terraced agricultural systems. The Hani of Yunnan Province in Southern China, for example, have for centuries incorporated terraced food production within the forested ecosystem of the Ailao Mountains.

They practiced a form of agriculture that relied on working symbiotically within the forest ecology, reflecting the importance of forests as a provider of environmental services.

This system where forest and farm are directly related and transformed by each other stems from their local, indigenous knowledge of the forest.6 The Hani understand the importance of keeping the forest intact to allow for the ecosystem to continue to provide a water source. Forests have the ability to collect and purify water, and without leaving enough vegetation intact in agriculture systems, biologically rich soil will run off into streams and rivers through erosion.

The Hani process of cultivation combines both artificial and natural nutrient accumulation and cycling.

By leaving forest processes intact, decaying plant and animal materials help enrich the soil. Such hydrological alterations ensure that nutrients

are captured within the terraces rather than running off into rivers and lakes.6 Other farms in this region have also recently adopted an integrated farming approach. One such example is in Java, Indonesia, where upland areas play an important role in the conservation of water resources and the maintenance of a stable ecosystem.7 Animal husbandry and vegetable growing are integrated in a steep, artificially terraced environment where gravity, gradient, and water flow help disperse nutrients throughout the food system.

Over the past few decades, a small but increasingly influential group of farmers and scientists in North America and Western Europe have advocated a form of agriculture called permaculture. Bill Mollison, thought to be the father of perma­ culture, coined this term in the 1970s and defined the movement as the conscious design and maintenance of cultivated ecosystems that have harmonious integration of landscape and people. Permaculture is a philosophy and an approach to land use which works with natural rhythms and patterns specific to place, weaving together elements of microclimate, annual and perennial plants, animals, water and soil management, and human needs into intricately connected and productive communities.8 Although this form of ecological agriculture is far from new—as the Hani example demonstrates—it is new and different compared to the environmentally degrading conventional model that dominates agriculture in much of the world.

A key element of permaculture is the construction of earthworks.

Earthen mounds, known as berms or Hugel mounds, help create microclimates and stimulate plant growth. Ben Falk, a renowned permaculture farmer from Vermont, has documented

www.thesolutionsjournal.org | November-December 2015 | Solutions | 75

Solutions in History

Bethan Phillips

Terraced rice fields in Yuanyang, in the Yunnan Province of Southern China. The Hani have used this method of agriculture for centuries in this region.

the success of his plants through the creation of these mounds. “We have noticed that all plants respond positively to being on a mound,” Falk notes, “and the increase in growth and health seems to vary from moderate to extreme. Often, we’ve seen plants respond with twice the growth rate.”9 Falk also discusses the added benefits of working on contour and building mounds. Not only does this increase available acreage by adding surface area, but biological activity and soil health are most heavily concentrated in the upper layers of the soil.

Mounding, therefore, also increases the availability of productive, healthy soils.9 Methods such as terracing and permaculture, in both their traditional and modern forms, can benefit

humans without having devastating effects on the environment. Such models seem particularly promising in places like New England, where large-scale industrial agriculture is largely absent and progressive attitudes toward land use are strong. Jon Turner has been using permaculture earthworks, terraced on contour within a forested ecosystem, on his farm in Bristol, Vermont. Located in the foothills of the Green Mountains, Turner’s Wild Roots Farm is adapted to the steep terrain and operates as a productive farm benefiting the local community and environment.

Turner understands the importance of maintaining a healthy ecosystem and enhancing opportunities for biodiversity while also providing for his community in Bristol. He firmly

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believes that terraced forest farming should become more widespread throughout New England’s hilly landscapes. He also stresses the added benefit of starting in fresh soil that is free of pesticides and other harmful chemicals, a strategy that has the added benefit of allowing lowland soils to regenerate.10 Another added benefit of implementing this method of agriculture in areas such as New England is that it promotes adaptation and resilience to climate change. Since a great deal of farmland is located in floodplains along rivers in mountain valleys, the probability of climate changeintensified storms causing flooding and inundated fields, as seen with Hurricane Irene in 2011, is increasing.

Moving agriculture out of floodplains

Solutions in History

Rachel M. Fry

Participants construct a berm in a permaculture design class.

would make for a more resilient food system in the face of climate change, thereby safeguarding farms from extreme floods.

Despite the benefits of ecologically designed terraced agriculture for the future of the New England food system, there are some inherent problems with this model, and it is not a fix-all solution. It probably only makes sense on a fairly small scale, as it is unlikely that New Englanders will want to convert too much of their forest into terraced agricultural land. It would therefore be best suited to communities within already developed areas. Another problem could be convincing farmers wedded to industrial agriculture to alter their current methods. However, by looking to examples of successes

throughout history, as well as current models like Wild Roots, it is likely that an increasing number of farmers will see the ecological advantages and economic benefits of added surface area and reduced inputs like fertilizers and fuels. Although it cannot be the sole solution to our current agricultural system, terracedforest farming utilizing ecological design could begin to improve our food system, facilitating at least one step in the right direction towards a method of food production that will enhance the lives of humans and the environment.

biodiversity and ecosystem services on agricultural land. Ecosystems 15, 883–899 (2012).

3. Miller, S.W. An Environmental History of Latin America (Cambridge University Press, New York, 2007).

4. Tuner, B.L. and P.D. Harrison. Prehistoric raisedfield agriculture in the Maya lowlands. Science 213, 399–405 (1981).

5. Wilken, G.C. Good Farmers: Traditional Agricultural Resource Management in Mexico and Central America (University of California Press, California, 1987).

6. Qinghua, W. Forest management and terraced agriculture: case study of Hani of Ailao Mountains, Yunnan. Economic and Political Weekly 36, 2846–50 (2001).

7. Adiningsih, J.R. and A.A. Karama. A sustainable upland farming system for Indonesia [online] (2013) http://www.fao.org/prods/gap/database/gap/ files/1264_INDONESIA_UPLAND_FARMING.PDF. 8. Wasser, K. About permaculture [online] (2015). www.permaculture.net.

9. Falk, B. The Resilient Farm and Homestead: An

References

Integrative Permaculture and Whole Systems Design

1. Kiers, E.T. et al. Agriculture at a crossroads. Science 32, 320–321 (2008).

Approach (Chelsea Green Publishing, Vermont, 2013).

2. Rey Benayas, J.M. and J.M. Bullock. Restoration of

10. Turner, J. Personal communication (2015).

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Santoyo, A. (2015). How Impact Investing is Saving Nicaragua’s Coffee Industry. Solutions 6(6): 78–80. https://thesolutionsjournal.com/2015/6/how-impact-investing-is-saving-nicaraguas-coffee-industry

On The Ground

How Impact Investing is Saving Nicaragua’s Coffee Industry

by Anahi Santoyo

Ingmar Zahorsky

Coffee pickers harvest beans on a farm in Nicaragua. Coffee production is integral to the Nicaraguan economy, but about half of the country’s coffee farmers live below the poverty line.

T

hree years ago I was studying the fair trade movement in northern Nicaragua and the impact it was having on small-scale coffee farmers.

Contrary to what most consumers think, fair trade doesn’t necessarily improve coffee farmers’ livelihoods.

Despite the increased income they received, I was shocked by their continuing lack of opportunity and support. Most of them lived in remote rural areas, relied on rain-fed agriculture, and worked brutally long hours trying to support their families.

I realized that for a fairer system in the coffee industry, it is not enough to make a living; it is also important to improve living conditions and to provide the farmers with the tools to exit the poverty cycle.

Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, Nicaragua has been

economically dependent on coffee production. Nicaragua is one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere.1 Most importantly, coffee accounts for 13 percent of total exports, with a value of USD$381 million.2 Considering that 43 percent of Nicaragua’s gross domestic product (GDP) comes from exports,3 coffee is integral to the economy. International demand for coffee has led to the country’s elite expropriating most of the suitable land from the indigenous population, and then forcing them to work in the coffee industry. The rest operate small holdings in remote areas.

About half of coffee producers— mostly family farmers—live below the poverty line.4 There are several reasons for this. Coffee only provides income during the three harvest

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months of the year. At the same time, most coffee producers aren’t doing the selling themselves but rely instead on middlemen, who glean profits at their expense. It is also difficult for coffee producers to get access to capital and credit. As a consequence, producers will not have money to buy the necessary inputs for the next harvest, reducing their ability to scale up and improve their harvests and resulting in negative effects such as exposure to crop diseases and a lack of quality control. Coffee plants take between three to four years of growing before they are ready to be harvested, meaning that it is labor intensive and requires many agricultural inputs without providing an immediate yield.

To try and overcome the main challenges of the coffee industry, farmers in Nicaragua have traditionally organized themselves into cooperatives to push for fairer prices. According to Crecencio Espinoza, president of the Augusto Cesar Sandino Cooperative, a member of CECOCAFEN, “if we weren’t organized in a cooperative we would be the poorest country in the world, because we wouldn’t have any source of support.”5 Cooperatives are a support system for small coffee farmers that help them negotiate better wages. For example, PRODECOOP, one of the largest coffee cooperatives in Nicaragua with 22 years of experience, generally pays members 20 to 30 percent above the national average.6 In Nicaragua, the cooperative system has an interesting connection to the past. The idea of cooperatives came from Augusto César Sandino, a guerilla leader that fought against the United States during the second occupation of Nicaragua. He became a national hero and his name was given to the revolutionary group that led the country for almost eleven years.

Two of his main ideals were forming a popular party and organizing land

On The Ground

Dennis Tang

A plot of young coffee plants in Finca Limoncillo, Nicaragua.

into cooperatives led by the farmers.

The motto of the Sandinista economic policy, “just, free and fraternal human life in our fatherland,” can still be seen in the walls of many coffee cooperatives in the country.7 Although cooperatives do their best to provide a better livelihood to members, they still face challenges that are hard to overcome by themselves, and most importantly, without access to financial services. In most cases, it is very difficult for cooperatives to pay the coffee producer upon delivery, when the farmer needs the money most. Historically, coffee cooperatives have had trouble accessing credit because they require loans that are too big for microfinance, but too small and risky for commercial banks,

irrespective of whether their goods are sold as fair trade or not.

This group is often referred to in the development community as “the missing middle.” The good news is that impact investors such as Root Capital, Oikocredit, and Alterfn have started to fill in the gap and have recognized that it is not just money that these farmers lack, but the skills to use capital wisely. Education levels among farmers are low. To ensure that loans are successfully repaid, these organizations provide workshops on basic finance, organizational management, sustainable practices, and even literacy programs.

Another key innovation provided by impact-investing services is to cut out the middleman by linking

cooperatives directly with international buyers. With direct access to the market, these organizations minimize the risk of underselling by providing farmers with accurate information on current prices and create a more sustainable selling environment for both producers and purchasers.

For example, Equal Exchange, a worker-owned cooperative that sells organic and fair-trade products, has established a long-lasting partnership with PRODECOOP in Nicaragua, with Oikocredit International and Root Capital providing access to capital.

One of the knock-on effects of this has been an improvement in the farmers’ markers for quality of life, such as gender equality. Dania Alexa Marín Colindres, gender coordinator

www.thesolutionsjournal.org | November-December 2015 | Solutions | 79

On The Ground of PRODECOOP, explains why they are focusing on gender issues: “When we first started the cooperative, it was comprised of both men and women, but decisions were always in the hands of the men. We aren’t pitting men against women, but we are fighting an entrenched culture of male domination, especially in more isolated communities.”8 Impact investors often push to give women in coffee cooperatives access to credit and education.

Nevertheless, impact investing is not without criticism. One of the main arguments is that this industry is very young, and it has yet to prove its real impact. According to a current landscape assessment, more in-depth case studies on impact metrics are needed in order to improve this tool and to understand what its impact really means.9 Another criticism is that the markets where impact investing is being used are too risky due to security or corruption issues, and might lead to services being withdrawn. It’s worth bearing in mind, however, that “there’s 10 times the risk profile of a standard US venture deal without the same potential upside.”10 There are deeper issues, too, about how far impact investing can take a country suffering from poor governance. But while impact investing isn’t a panacea, it can be a crucial first step to helping coffee farmers.

Counter Culture Coffee

A wet processing structure for coffee beans used by one family in a greater coffee cooperative in Cinco de Junio, Nicaragua.

References 1. Nicaragua profile overview. BBC News [online] (May

5. Root Capital. CECOCAFEN [online] (2015) http://

27, 2015) http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-

www.rootcapital.org/portfolio/multimedia/

america-19735631.

cecocafen.

2. The Observatory of Economic Complexity.

6. Bacon, C.M. Contested agrifood governance:

8. Root Capital. Promoting gender equality in Nicaragua [online] (2015) http://www.rootcapital.org/portfolio/ stories/promoting-gender-equality-nicaragua.

9. Asset Management Partners and Natural Capital

Nicaragua [online] (2013) https://atlas.media.mit.

Nicaraguan smallholder cooperatives navigate

Investment Solutions. Investing in conservation:

edu/en/profile/country/nic/.

the split in fair trade and the struggle for food

a landscape assessment of an emerging market

sovereignty in Food Sovereignty: A Critical

[online] (2014) http://www.naturevesttnc.org/pdf/

3. The World Bank. Exports of goods and services (% of GDP) 2010–2014 [online] (2015) http://data.

Dialogue International Conference (Yale University,

worldbank.org/indicator/NE.EXP.GNFS.ZS.

New Haven CT, 2013).

4. Technoserve. Impact + stories: brewing good

7. Wade, C.J. and T.W. Walker. Nicaragua: Living in

InvestingInConservation_Report.pdf.

10. Hattendorf, L. The trouble of impact investing: part 2. Stanford Social Innovation Review [online] (April

[online] (2014) http://www.technoserve.org/our-

the Shadow of the Eagle (Westview Press, Colorado,

18, 2012) http://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_trouble_

work/sector/coffee.

2003).

with_impact_investing_part_2.

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EARTHACTION

Gund Institute

for Ecological

Economics

University of Vermont

The Alliance for Appalachia

National Council for Science and the Environment Improving the scientific basis for environmental decisionmaking

Associated Socie<es International Society for Ecological Economics

Lyla Paakkanen / 1200 Posters / Creative Action Network

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Community Gardens.â&#x20AC;? Community gardens have many benefits, both in the social and environmental fabrics of local neighborhoods. Not only does a community garden build green space, but producing food locally builds resiliency within communities.