Symbiotic cities

As everybody knows, the human race is going urban. In every single country in the world, more than 50% of the population lives in cities. That is expected to increase to more than 70% in the next 30-40 years. What we do with our cities has a lot to do with climate change, both how we respond to it and how we affect it. Thinking of cities as dynamic ecosystems is not new, but it is increasingly promising, and relevant. A new Swedish national initiative, "SymbioCity: Sustainability by Sweden," was launched at the beginning of 2013. It is a collaboration between the Swedish Government, Business Sweden and the international affiliate of the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions, SKL International. The idea is to create and nurture symbiosis in the design and running of cities, all around the world. Their impressive website is a gold mine of resources, ideas, tool kits, contacts and, above all, inspiration. They are doing things. They are open, inclusive and sharing. Go there and explore the possibilities.

Brilliant waste

(All images in this blog post have been borrowed with kind permission from www.logiwaste.se and www.envacgroup.com, where you can find many more. They are brilliant, like everything else on their sites!)

Anything that can help our cities run more smoothly, use less energy, create less pollution, leave more green space and be more pleasant to live in is also good as a response to climate change. Good responses to climate change are also good contributions to sustainability. That's why I got so excited this week when I heard about the work of two Swedish companies. What I read literally made me stop reading and start thinking (not too bad in our current age of information overload). The companies are Envac and Logiwaste. They build and install central vacuum waste collection systems for entire building and housing districts, among others. Yes, you read correctly, the word was "vacuum!" The main idea is that "the garbage truck" and everything that goes with that old-fashioned, but common, way of collecting garbage is eliminated from the first stage of a community waste collection system. That means that there's no need for an access road, and none of the noise, engine exhaust, fuel, labor and cost of running a vehicle-dependent system. You have to go to their excellent websites to learn more about them, since they have too many interesting aspects to report here. It's not just science fiction, either; many systems have already been installed. Believe me, I have no economic interest in these companies (but I wish I did!), but it would be great if they became extremely well-known and successful. Bravo!

Mainstreaming is not headline news

Right in the mainstream--coping with winter, nationally and locally, Öresund

There's not much about climate change response in Sweden that's exciting and attention-grabbing these days. I've been thinking a lot about this lately, since it seems that the more headlines there are about climate change at the global level, the fewer there are in the Swedish press, about what's happening in this country. Entire weeks can go by with scarcely a mention in any of the half-dozen or so larger newspapers of any Swedish climate change-related activity. To know if there's anything going on, you've got to do a lot of sleuthing. My theory is that this is because responding to climate change is gradually becoming mainstreamed here. I'm not sure yet if this is the best way to go about it, but it does help to explain the lack of media coverage. Climate change is just part of everyday business . . . maybe.

Believe it or not, but one of the coolest places to see innovative thinking about climate change is deep inside the Swedish bureaucracy, in one of the least trendy-seeming places. It's not at the Swedish EPA (Naturvårdsverket), for instance, nor at the Swedish Met Office (SMHI), nor even at the Ministry of Environment, all of which have admirable programs underway, as you would expect. No, this nest of real solid work on societal aspects of climate change is Boverket, The Swedish National Board of Housing, Building and Planning. I'll be describing some of their activities in the coming weeks, but one of their more recent achievements has been the result of a massive exercise in producing a Vision for Sweden 2025, which the Government commissioned from them. The defining objective for the vision is a society guided by sustainable development, and based on the over hundred goals, from national to local level, that have been defined for the country's physical societal planning. The resulting Vision was released, as a "web app," with a surprising lack of media attention and undeserved modesty, on December 12, barely a week ago. The Vision poses four megatrends, of which climate change is one. Since so far the whole thing is only in Swedish, I'll be telling more about it in coming posts. Stay tuned (and Visionary!)

They're saying, "Canada is a brake shoe"

                                                                        Figure by Nimal Kumar

Whatever your view of the fact that Canada, in the company of Russia and Japan, has continued to stay out of the Kyoto Protocol and its renewal at the recently concluded Doha climate talks, Swedish opinion is surprised. Much of the reporting about the conclusion of the talks has pointedly mentioned Canada's earlier withdrawal from the Protocol. For example, one of Sweden's most prominent climate change publicists, Johan Rockström, Director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, was quoted, in the Sunday edition* of the largest Swedish newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, as saying that not only was Canada a "brake shoe" (Sw. "bromskloss") in reaching more sweeping agreements, but it was a "camouflaged brake shoe." This is real insider talk. Actually, it seems that it is Russia that is the real master at such camouflage, which means that it is pretending to be a constructive player at the same time as it moves to protect its oil and gas industries and refuses to sign. It's been difficult to see the accuracy of extending the metaphor to Canada, though, since it isn't even pretending. Shall we say that it is a "plain-as-day brake shoe"? What's out there for everybody to see in plain daylight are the tar sands of northern Alberta, and now that market prices are high enough to sustain their extraction, they're too true to be good. It's a pity that Canada, which once had a global reputation as an environmental champion, has gone the way of the camouflaged, and is now considered, in the climate change world, as one of the bad guys. Deservedly.

*Kihlström, Saffan & Clas Svahn. "Nytt avtal får skarp kritik." Dagens Nyheter, Stockholm, Sunday, 9 December 2012, 10.

Mind the steps

On the charging station for electric cars, at the local Coop Forum food store, here in Lund, Sweden, the instructions for using it are helpfully printed on the cover, in the local language:

1. Unlock
2. Plug in the plug
3. Close cover
Charging starts

Green light = circuit-breaker functioning
Blinking green light = charging underway
Red light = circuit-breaker must be reset
Follow instructions inside the box

The cover of the charging station has a logo that says GAPO. I'm checking that one out. My theory is that this is the name of a Norwegian industrial door manufacturer that has diversified. I'm on the trail. The suspense must increase!

Waiting for Go, though

(Apologies to Samuel Beckett). We keep checking the parking lot at the local Coop food store to see if any electric cars show up. I'm going to go in and do a mini-interview of the manager one of these days, to see if anyone has ever used the charging stations. They have locks on them, so I guess if anyone wanted to use them, they'd have to go in and ask for the key. That's one theory.

The atmosphere was electric

I thought about buying an electric car, and had seen that the local Citroen dealer had an attractive little model on sale in its showroom. It's been there for about a year-and-a-half now. The salesman, who seemed reasonably interested in selling the car, pointed out that the (Swedish) price had been reduced by a quarter, from about 60,000 USD, equivalent, to about 45,000, including the Swedish government's special subsidy for environmentally-friendly car purchases (about 6000 USD). Still, in the time it had been in the showroom, there had been only one serious prospective buyer, who in the end just couldn't make the equation of low range (optimally, about 150 km) between charges, expense and lack of charging stations make sense. A number of people, like me, had shown some interest, but little more. I thanked him for his time and went home "to think about it." I also wrote a letter (now about three weeks ago), to the owner of my apartment building, when I realized that even if I bought an electric car, it would be impossible to charge it at home. My letter was simply to ask for information about their plans for electric car hookups. I still haven't received an answer.

Two electric car charging posts await their occasional users.

Eons ago, the world's biggest wind turbine

It's now more than twenty-five years since the biggest wind turbine in the world, at that time, was spinning in . . . can you guess where? Denmark? The USA? China? Spain? Germany?

Nope. Sweden. Outside the tiny hamlet of Maglarp, on the southern tip of this Nordic country, the WTS 3, was built by Wind Turbine Systems, which was part of the Swedish state-owned Swedyard Group of Ship Yards. It was one of a half-dozen or so research prototypes built mainly in the 1980s. It was designed to generate 3 MW of electricity, but often produced more. I remember visiting it, where it stood all by itself in the middle of a grain field, just a few kilometres from the seashore, and it was huge. I was flabbergasted that the equivalent of a Boeing 747's wingspan was sitting up there on its tower, spinning it's two enormous blades in the wind. Yes, it had only two blades, and it had a lot of problems; its designers learned a lot, but went on to other things. Along with most of the rest of its tiny family of wind turbines, it was dismantled in the mid-1990s, and wind power faded mostly away from Sweden for most of the next ten years. That was an institutionalized, state-run failure, with little support from the high-tech nuclear power industry that was flourishing in Sweden.

Anyone travelling on the other side of the strait in nearby Denmark during those years had a hard time missing the hundreds of wind power generators that were sprouting up everywhere. Most of them seemed to have the name Vestas on the sides of their nacelles. That was a grassroots private start-up, the result of dozens of small-scale ventures.

Today, Sweden's nuclear program faces an uncertain future. But you can see hundreds of wind turbines sprouting up across the countryside here, too. Most of them seem to have the name Vestas on their nacelles.

The company that built the Maglarp wonder-of-the-world has now been bought by the German company, E.ON. In the last week, E.ON announced that it was moving its northern-European headquarters for land-based wind power, to Malmö, only a short distance from Maglarp. There's a lot to do here.

Foundations for the new offshore wind farm being built by E.ON off Kårehamn, Öland, Sweden (Photo credit here)