Ideas for a lower emissions future - and a question to Mexicans.

Today I was unable to secure a vehicle to collect the geographical coordinates of the new water tap stands that will change the lives of around 5,000 individuals in this southwestern location of rural Uganda. I am trying to analyze the number of households that will be positively impacted by this new water infrastructure scheme. On average households were spending between 2 and 4 hours per day collecting the precious water in 20 liter jerry-cans for cooking, drinking and cleaning purposes. Women are usually the ones that do the work, girls and boys also spend hours just fetching water. Imagine the economic/wellbeing impact of reducing this time to 20 minutes... The inauguration was so important that a large commitive including Jeffrey Sachs, the Ugandan minister of water and the Ugandan minister of health were present to do the honors. Of course the CEO of the company that donated the pipes was also there, and the press! 

The impact on the livelihoods of the people is being measured with surveys and suffer from self-reporting bias. I am trying to change this by using distance analysis with my GIS tools. 

So as I failed to advance the data collection, I read in the news about the 2011 drought in Somalia and Kenya. UNICEF is already considering that 500,000 people might die from starvation. This is a lot (Haiti and the Asian Tsunami accounted each for ~250,000 deaths and are the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history). After 1 year in Columbia University I have learned that attributing the drought to climate change is not politically correct, I know... But, if the past 9 years have been among the 10 hottest years in history, there is probably some links, don't you think? 

The World Bank published a video in you tube today, the legend reads: Almost 70 of the world's sharpest minds on climate change got together at the World Bank in Washingtonin July 2011 to find ways to best support the exploding demand from countries for a low-carbon future.

 Ideas for a lower emissions future

The sky in the center of Mexico city.
The reddish tone is due to the
pollution that floats in the city.

Ten years ago this was an impossible shot.
Popocateptl seen from the west of the city.

Iztaccihuatl and Popocateptl.
The two lovers in a beautiful sunset.
Separated by urbanization.

To my great enjoyment I found some of the thinkers that have been influential to my line of thought in the past years. Sir Nicholas Stern and his cost-benefit report suggesting that investing 1% of global GDP today is better than waiting 20 years to act and having to invest 20% of global GDP at that time (crude simplification of what he actually says but I have limited access to internet and can't give the exact numbers right now - Don't let perfection be the enemy of perfection). But to my greatest surprise among these sharpest minds are two mexicans. Mario Molina our Nobel Prize, who helped us stop the destruction of the ozone layer (He actually received the Nobel as an American citizen). Nonetheless he invested the money in the creation of a think tank based in Mexico to help solve Mexican issues. He is the main responsible for cleaning Mexico City air in the past 20 years. Also our very own Minister of the Environment Rafael Elvira Quezada giving his views on the need of policy to solve the climatic (I say environmental - Ocean Acidification, Loss of Biodiversity and Desertification are also fundamental problems of our generation) crisis. I am proud of Mexico involvement in the Climate arena, of course our vulnerability to climate change is one of the highest in the world.

So what are these ideas? Is there anything new? A brief summary of what struck me:

We desperately need to turn on the "bulb".
Ideas anyone?

1- We understand that we need a new industrial revolution that will cost a lot. 

2- The direction of this new industrial revolution is in the green technology arena and energy efficiency.

3- We need to mainstream this agenda, talking green, clean and eco only reaches the 15% of the population that are already actors of change. the 15% that will resist the change will resist it anyway (the skeptics). To achieve change we need to reach the big chunk in the middle. Engaging this chunk will be critical for green growth.

4- We need new technology but also new diplomacy, we need research and development, we need financial capital and framework policy.

5- Smart Policy is key, vehicle fuel efficiency is a good example, we have the technology, it is cost effective. But car makers will not make the change unless regulation accelerates the uptake of these new technologies.

6- Political Support at the highest level, Mexico has put Climate Change as an issue of National Security.  7- People invest in education even if it won't pay for decades, so this is a proof that there is a willingness to pay for a better future. 

8- Voluntary changes will not be enough.

9- We need to become more productive in the use of our natural resources.

10- We need leaders that look in the eyes of they grandchildren and do the right thing for them.

11- It is not cheap but it is not expensive (1.3% of global GDP)

12- We don't know everything but we know enough.

Seeds of change?

My spanish friend from SIPA always says the following after I finish my intense monologues on the problems of the world: "So, what do we do?". I am still thinking of the answer. As a computer engineer who loves making maps, growing lettuces on rooftops and thinking of the best policies to make the change needed towards the green economy, the planetary society and the paradigm of sustainable development, I am still looking for the answer. (Again sustainable development is not an empty concept: it is the process of improving the livelihoods of all humans, ensuring that everyone has the minimum necessary to live in dignity, in a way that preserves the ecosystem services for infinite future generations ). 

But one thing I do know. It is not fair, ethically correct, recommendable or even economically efficient that tropical nations who contribute near to nothing to green house gases to pay for the excess use of energy in high and middle income countries. This is the most unfair of all negative externalities that exist today.

A urban farm in Brooklyn,
empire state in the background and that great flag!
America wake up, the world needs you!

So if a global binding agreement is not possible because of the "tour de force" between US and China is not possible, what do we do. Moving without them is like shooting ourselves in the foot (the path towards the green economy will probably slow down our economies in the short run). But not moving is like cutting both legs with a rusty machete in the long run (at least for Mexico). So if you have read this far, I would really like to hear your ideas on these matters, if you are Mexican even more (although I would certainly like to listen to other nationalities views). It is highly likely that half of our country will become a desert, we are depleting the reservoirs of fossil water that we had in the Laguna region and Sinaloa. The south will suffer from recurrent floods. It could be that we loose the southern peninsula in the long run. Hurricanes could become more frequent or more intense (and we get them from both sides).  Sounds creepy? Well add the terrible problem of violence and insecurity to the equation and you get a recipe for disaster. 

The map of the city of hope in my old apartment.

La ciudad de la esperanza by night.

We are a nation that complains, a nation of victims. But we have so much potential, we have one more chance to rise to the level of the challenge. We are still among the 15 richest economies in the world, our 2010 census show some indicators that are at the level of the developed world. We live in one of the 13 most biodiverse countries in the world. We still conserve 54% of our natural capital. We have just finished our demographic transition. We are contributing 1.5% of the global emissions (14th place). We are part of the OECD (I still don't know how we did it , but we are...). We are running out of oil. Our neighbor in the north in building a wall to keep some problems at bay. We have the most interesting election process coming in 2012. What are we going to do?

Tons que? Le entramos?

That is totally Terra Ignota... 

Que si se puede, carajo!

The missing MDG

The Millenium Development Goals are a set of objectives that the international community agreed on in the year 2000 that needed to be accomplished in the world by 2015. They relate to halving hunger, women empowerment, health, education, environmental and economical sustainability.

My first event at Columbia was about the status of the commitments in 2010. I remember one of the speakers arguments was that all the MDG's could not be fully accomplished without access to modern energy. For good health services you need refrigeration services, children cannot study only with candlelight. I remember I disagreed with his point. If the whole population uses energy in the way that developed nations do we would need three more planets.

I have been living without electricity at night for the past three weeks. Something about a strike by some of the power generating companies in Uganda. And I have come to realize that without access to cheap energy, development is truly impossible. I have changed my mind about the fact that we do need to provide energy to the world population.

Now the question is how to do it without trashing the planet. Yes, renewables and energy efficiency are part of the solution. Lowering consumption in some countries should also be an important strategy. So in the end energy is indeed the critical aspect that needs to be addressed both for development and for environmental sustainability.

My blog is suffering from this lack of energy and I am not enjoying it...

Somethings are just the same everywhere.

A very short thought, last week we were in Kampala, Uganda's capital and largest city (2 million or so). We were spending the weekend in Jinja (a sort of industrial center by the Nile riverside). We tried to make the most of our trip and had scheduled a meeting with someone in the forestry ministry. The meeting was a complete disaster: the person never showed up and his cellphone was off... No comments.

What I really want to talk about is that we had the chance to explore the Bugologi neighborhood in Kampala. Huge houses with neat gardens, reminded me of some areas of Mexico city. I guess that somethings are just the same everywhere...

Please notice the water tanks.
Different from the Rotoplas tanks in Mexico or the beautiful,
enormous Cedar water tanks of New York.
Why are there on a different structure and not on the roof?
One more question that probably has a very logical explanation.

I have absolutely no idea what is this tree doing here.
It is of course not to be found anywhere else in the city - maybe even the country (looks lebanese).
It seems some eccentric Ugandan or Expatriate decided to "be original".

On sunday, we were desperate to go back to Mbarara, we had absolutely no clue how to get back to the bus station that brought us here. The Boda-Boda (particularly dangerous motorcycles that originally transported you through East African Borders --- Border-Border ---> Boda Boda!) guys we took obviously took us to the wrong terminal, then a guy told us to get into the wrong bus for which we payed the wrong price. Typical scam, I felt like a stupid amateur. The longest ride to Kampala of my life, we stopped in every single Trading Center (what in Mexico we call rancherias or Hoyo del Puc). Of course we got early to Kampala to do the traveling by day, got to the bus station at 2 PM, the bus left at 6 PM, no reimbursements of course once we learned he was not leaving right away. Stupid Muzungu, having travelled to 27 countries in three continents, lived in three of the largest Megalopolis in the world (NYC, Paris and of course, the "City of Hope" or "el Defecado", Mexico city) and still got scammed like a peasant seeing the big city for the first time.  We got the see the old taxi park, an area where all public transportation gathers and start all the routes inside and even outside the city. It is definetely not the nicest spot in Kampala, reminds me of Mexico City "paraderos" of  "microbuses". A sort of orderly chaos that you can only find in the developing world. Masses of people, cars, bicycles, walking, shoping, honking... And you wonder how can this disaster work? And yet it does. In in it's own, very particular way but it works. El "Realismo Magico" of Latin-america can be found in Africa also, here it has a different name and feeling that a Muzungu would take years to fully understand. I guess that somethings are just the same everywhere...

The streets are not paved though!
During the more than 3 hours wait for the bus to finally leave,
I just stood in that spot and started taking pictures undercover.
People don't like Muzungus taking pictures of them - I completely understand.

The noise and movement of people, motorcycles, minivans, bicycles.
The market, the sound coming from the mosque,
the songs in the background from a place that was having a Sunday party.
Images say more than 1,000 words
but they can't completely transmit what this moment was truly like.
You are missing the sounds, the smells
and the feeling of frustration I had at the time.
In 20 years I will also have forgotten the full scene.

The secret to success: Teamwork.

I must say that during most of my years in school I strongly relied on my capacity to excel in exams by exploiting the good memory I used to have. I would always wait until the last minute and cram all the information in my head right before the exam. It was not until my College days that I started to realize that no man is an island. Indeed, heroes, stars and leaders require from others to rise up. A leader without followers is usually just a schizophrenic with dreams of "grandeur". Although we stress that  outperforming in today's society requires us to be competitive and gifted with the individual skill of entrepreneurship, humanity managed to survive in a highly hostile environment by forming groups and societies. 

The outcome of poor team coordination,
natures extremes + human vulnerability = Disaster!
We swallowed tons of Nile water.

My father has always been a strong advocate of high performance team work. He would repeatedly mention to his selfish son that no one needs little stars or geniuses. That the secret to success lies in being able to form balanced teams of people with complementary skills and characters. I learned the hard way in the world of consulting that doing the best analytics was not enough if your client did not understand what you talk about and that if you were not capable of forging a good relationship with them your highly developed quantitative senses were not very useful in the real world. At the same time, people in the office, your coworkers, your boss, your subordinates will never support you if you work on your own even if it means money for everyone. During my years as a consultant I had some great successes but I have to say that I also had enormous failures. I succeeded because of my abilities as a consultant, computer engineer, extroverted personality and negotiation techniques, my failures were often related to social factors. I would convince myself that it was the clients fault, the providers faults, the taxi driver fault, my coworker fault. I got to the point of some quite unprofessional attitudes that made me loose one of my first subordinates in the company. It took quite some time, one amazing girlfriend and stepping away for a couple of months from my consultant career to realize everything I was doing wrong. It reduced to one single thing, I was not good at team working. 

I remember in 2009, in the midst of the "great recession", I started loosing some major contracts, everyone was at the time. I was so frustrated by the situation, one day I asked my father: "What can you do in such a situation". He said: "High performance team working". 

Even if you manage to stay in the boat,
loosing one of your teammates to the white waters
 usually means failure.
You loose paddling power, stability and moral.
All for one and one for all.

That year the company I used to work for managed to transmit the feeling of urgency to the whole office. I still do not know how we managed to ride the storm out. A combination of need for information from our clients as the car market was free falling, our fear to get fired, our desire to prove that crisis can mean opportunity and especially a motivated group of young professionals with diverse skills and backgrounds and thirst for running the extra mile managed to do the impossible and we, not only maintained revenue and reduced costs, managed to grow. When I finally left Urban Science to shift into the world of sustainable development I had finally learned to appreciate what a fine-tuned group of people can do when paddling together in the same direction. Team Work is the secret to great achievements. 

Joining the ranks of Ivy League graduate students, inserted me back in a world of individualism. In the country were individual freedom is praised as the most important value, in the city where there is no free lunch, in a university were each one is reaching for one's dream, teamwork is not so highly regarded. Envy, competition and ambition are common in Columbia. It is of course only half truth because I have also made some amazing friends and colleagues and teamwork also exists but success in academia depends on being the best. I have met some amazing people in Columbia, but I have to say that PHD's and Master Students tend to work on their own, some people even decide to not work in groups for working on homework. 

As you start improving interpersonal skills you
avert total failure but half a failure is still a failure.
Plus you have to rescue the team one by one.

My Master in Development Practice classmates and I are dispersed all over the least-developed work, trying to contribute to organizations that focus on alleviating poverty in these development-forgotten areas of the world. We are all discovering that we have to rely on others to do our work. Whether fetching a project car to go to a meeting, obtaining data from the local team, organizing a meeting with the coffee farmers, preparing the logistics for a sanitation training or receiving support from New York, we are back in a situation where you have to rely on others to achieve your goals. An let me tell you, grad students at this level don't like to rely on others, we are little stars that want to shine on their own. And of course it doesn't work...

We had a fantastic trip to raft on the Nile this past week end. We discussed about the possibilities of contracting schistosomiasis from the still waters of this tropical river. We took the risks of braking a bone in the level 5 rapids. But most importantly we risked ourselves to get on the same boat with six other individuals with different physical capacities and experience. Rafting is all about synchronizing efforts and following instructions. Forward, back, left forward, right back. Simple instructions, but once you are paddling to avoid turning flipping you discover that you are actually with a bunch of lazy paddlers that have absolutely no coordination capacities... right? Wrong, again it is all about trust and team work, you need two good leaders that coordinate their paddling, with strength, not rushing like a madmen with rapid strokes but with deep strong paddling. Oh Hisse! Oh Hisse! The rest must follow this rythm, have bad leaders and you will fail to navigate the rapids. If you fail to balance the strengths between sides you will be turning instead of going forward. If your people get scared in the middle of the rapid and hide inside the boat you will fail. 

You need the brain, the heart and the guts to succeed. 

Perfect coordination!

We tipped twice in the first two rapids, swallowed tons of water, probably got the nasty worm and irritated our guide and ourselves. We tried several combinations of leadership, we tried to stay on the boat, rescued our team members when they fell to the water. And slowly, we started to understand that the secret to stay dry was to follow a good set of leaders, work hard, talk to each other and be ready to help one another. When we finally reached the final rapid we were one of the only teams to survive a triple rapid of whirlpools and enormous rocks. By the end of the day we were completely exhausted, in pretty bad shape and feeling a little bit defeated by the river. Once in the lodge we watched the video of our exploits that day. We saw our first failures, everyone paddling without any coordination, yelling at each other, hiding in the boat. As the video continued and we realized that we were one of the only teams to perform that bad I felt the need to write this post, we were terrible team workers. One japanese, three colombians, one nicaraguan, one american and myself, the mexican were completely incapable of agreeing on anything. It took some hours of hard comments, some trial and error with the leaders, a couple of people loosing their temper to start scoring some points. By the end we were (almost) like an perfectly oiled machine whose paddles moved in perfect harmony (exageration) and with individuals that were risking a little more than they would normally to put their paddle one or two extra times into the water. The video was amazing, we all grabbed one another and just yelled like cavewomen (because using men would be sexist!) while drinking our beers. We had bonded! 

The brains, the heart and the guts!

Yesterday I was talking to a Ugandan Colleague over some Waragi (the local drink) and Rolex (the local fast food) about the difference between Latin american poverty and development and the one of subsaharan Africa. It certainly seems like Latin america has managed to move forward while Africa has had some limited success. He told me that the problem in Uganda is that you belong to your tribe and then to your region and then to your country only because you were forced to. Governments benefit their clans and put obstacles on the rest. How can you move forward in this situation. Then aid comes and creates a situation of dependency that limits entrepreneurship even more. Corruption and disbelief in the future are the result, people stop believing in the common good and they decide to work by themselves for themselves (or not work at all, I must also say). 

Work together and you might face challenges
you thought impossible to overcome.

The world today looks a lot like this actually. We are aware that our current development paradigm is a failure (there is still even some groups of blind people that are unable to put things in perspective and acknowledge that the era of cheap development is over). Sustainable Development is no longer a matter of ethics or of just being nice. It has become a necessity. We are all in the same raft, we cannot keep making holes to the raft to fulfill our needs, we all need to paddle and we all have to move forward and we need to thing of those who will use the raft after us. I have discussed in previous posts the needs to shift our linear production/consumption system to a cyclical one, we need to decouple growth from fossil fuels and environmental degradation, we need to ensure a better distribution of wealth and we need to stop believing in the impossible idea of infinite economic growth (per capita) in a planet with limited resources. But we also need to work as a team, we need to become planetary citizens, we need to govern ourselves at the planetary level. We have to work together as a planetary society. Governments, corporations, entrepreneurs, organizations and institutions and especially the civil society urgently will have to learn how to manage common goods and avoid the scaling up of the outcomes in Easter Island. Humanity will have to overcome the terrible situation of the prisoner dilemma and game theory and start with real global cooperation. Maybe it is impossible, in which case we are probably going to tip the raft. Let's hope we don't swallow too much water...