The team managing the data flowing from instruments on NASA’s Terra satellite has posted a pair of images of the Irrawaddy River delta in Myanmar before and after Cyclone Nargis struck, showing vividly the amount of land that was submerged.
From NASA:
Flood water can be difficult to see in photo-like satellite images, particularly when the water is muddy. This pair of images from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite use a combination of visible and infrared light to make floodwaters obvious. Water is blue or nearly black, vegetation is bright green, bare ground is tan, and clouds are white or light blue.
On April 15, rivers and lakes are sharply defined against a backdrop of vegetation and fallow agricultural land…. The wetlands near the shore are a deep blue green. Cyclone Nargis came ashore across the mouths of the Irrawaddy and followed the coastline northeast. The entire coastal plain is flooded in the May 5 image. The fallow agricultural areas appear to have been especially hard hit. For example, Yangôn (population over 4 million) is almost completely surrounded by floods. Several large cities (population 100,000–500,000) are in the affected area. Muddy runoff colors the Gulf of Martaban turquoise.
The 2008 Metropolis Magazine Next Generation design competition challenged young architects and designers to create a sustainable solution to make the world better, and safer, with ideas related to the theme of ‘water.’ We are thrilled to announce that this year’s $10,000 prize was awarded to San Francisco based architect and CCA professor Eric Olsen! Olsen’s winning design is a Solar Water Disinfecting Tarpaulin, a revolutionary design that promises to provide portable and potable water anywhere that it is needed.
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The tough tarpaulin is composed of laser cut LDPE and rubberized nylon and it expands to hold up to 20 liters of water, which is rendered drinkable after five hours of exposure to the sun. This purification method is approved by the World Health Organization, and uses passive solar heat and ultraviolet radiation to kill disease causing bacteria. The tarpaulin’s beauty is in its simplicity: it’s quick, efficient, and requires no filter, chemicals, or additional energy expenditure.
Cynicism alert: Promises, eh? Wake me up when it’s out in the field.
It’s very pretty (I do like the saguaro cactus inspiration), but it sounds like it will be rather expensive to produce compared to other solar disinfection (SODIS) bags. It also looks a bit hard to carry/cumbersome. Perhaps doable if you have a donkey or other animal. It might make more sense to leave the thing at home, fill your normally used 20L container and transfer water once you get back.
On the “requires no filter”piece: all SODIS bags require some level of particle filtration. The water needs to be clear for the ultra-violet rays to work their magic and I would suspect that most water sources that people are drawing from range from slightly cloudy to turbid.
Judging from the pictures, the material also looks really thick. I’d be interested in seeing the UV penetration stats.
2008 Next Generation Design Prize Runners-Up:
Andrea Brivio, Davide Conti, and Fabio Galli (Italy): S_M_L, a housing project designed for the city of Melaka, Malaysia, that harnesses the power of the region’s daily rainfall and uses it to produce electricity and replenish gray water systems.
Yuichi Watanabe, Katz Miyahara, and Yoshi Ogawa (Seattle): Polarfloat, large floating structures in the Arctic Ocean that provide places for polar bears to land as the ice melts.
Joseph Cory, Eyal Malka, and Creative Constructions (Israel): WatAir, a simple unit with an integrated infrastructure for collecting dew and rainwater.
Paul Giacomantonio, Vera Templeman, William Sorich, and Kat Taylor (Pescadero, CA): “The Sun Curve,” a self-sustaining aquaponic food growing system, powered by solar and wind energy.
Charles Lee (San Francisco): Pacific Coast Interpretive Center for Ocean Health, living systems that recycle gray water and runoff by filtering wetlands, cooling the gray water with ocean water, and producing energy with tidal generators.
Lars Mayer (Germany): Sustainable Water, a surface water purification solution that is suited to the needs of developing countries and based on natural processes, using the seeds of the moringa tree.
Robyn Perkins (Boston): emergeMUMBAI, a method of rainwater harvesting that is used as a spatial backbone, a flood mitigation tool, and a water source for redeveloping public housing lands in Mumbai, India.
Gerald Lindner, Jeroen Tacx, Beate Lendt, Peter Heidman, and Martin Oostenrijk (Netherlands): Water Harvester, a double-tubed solar water distiller that is made of polyethylene film and uses a solar-powered water desalinator to make fresh water from polluted or salt water.
Renata Fenton and Enrique Lomnitz (Mexico): Isla Urbana, small, modular, inexpensive and expandable rainwater harvesting systems that can be affordably purchased by the low-income households in Mexico City most affected by the rapidly increasing water shortages.
Thomas Kosbau and Tyson Gillard (New York): Vena: Water Courses from Air, a biomimetic low-cost, low-energy solution for people in climates that lack consistent rainfall or clean ground sources to harvest vast amounts of drinking water from the atmosphere.
All over India, projects to fight trash, pollution, global warming and poverty are attracting kids from the Indian diaspora who want to spend a few years, or maybe longer, pushing for social change in the mother country.
Several recent studies have highlighted the important role that cross-border ethnic networks might play in facilitating entrepreneurship in developing countries. Little is known, however, about the extent to which domestic entrepreneurs rely on the diaspora and whether this varies systematically by the characteristics of the entrepreneurs or their local business environment. The Indian diaspora is estimated at over 18 million people spanning 130 countries. Given that formal institutions in India remain weak and hence the informal barriers to trade are higher, do diaspora networks serve as substitutes to the functioning of the local business environment? Do they help entrepreneurs to circumvent the barriers to trade arising from imperfect institutions? This study examines the extent to which software entrepreneurs within India vary in their reliance on expatriate networks.
“The grain required to fill a 25-gallon SUV tank with ethanol will feed one person for a year,” [Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization author Lester] Brown says. “And what we are seeing now is the emergence of direct competition between the 860 million people in the world who own automobiles and who want to maintain their mobility while the 2 billion poorest people in the world simply want to survive.”
In a recent NYTimes Magazine piece on whether cell-phones can end poverty in developing countries, we get introduced to Jan Chipchase, Nokia’s “human-behavior researcher”. His job is to be a “design and usability ethnographer“, to find out how users in different countries actually use their cell phones and help the designers back home figure out what features they need. He moves from a Vietnamese barbershop to a Mississippi bowling alley, from a Brazilian phone booth to the Dharavi slum in Mumbai.
This sort of on-the-ground intelligence-gathering is central to what’s known as human-centered design, a business-world niche that has become especially important to ultracompetitive high-tech companies trying to figure out how to write software, design laptops or build cellphones that people find useful and unintimidating and will thus spend money on.Several companies, including Intel, Motorola and Microsoft, employ trained anthropologists to study potential customers, while Nokia’s researchers, including Chipchase, more often have degrees in design. Rather than sending someone like Chipchase to Vietnam or India as an emissary for the company — loaded with products and pitch lines, as a marketer might be — the idea is to reverse it, to have Chipchase, a patently good listener, act as an emissary for people like the barber or the shoe-shop owner’s wife, enlightening the company through written reports and PowerPoint presentations on how they live and what they’re likely to need from a cellphone, allowing that to inform its design.
The premise of the work is simple — get to know your potential customers as well as possible before you make a product for them. But when those customers live, say, in a mud hut in Zambia or in a tin-roofed hutong dwelling in China, when you are trying — as Nokia and just about every one of its competitors is — to design a cellphone that will sell to essentially the only people left on earth who don’t yet have one, which is to say people who are illiterate, making $4 per day or less and have no easy access to electricity, the challenges are considerable.
This tactic is likely part of why Nokia is doing so well in emerging markets.
[In January], Nokia announced that it had sold a record 133.5 million mobile phones during the fourth quarter of 2007. This figure was up by more than a quarter from the same period a year earlier, boosting its overall market share to 40 percent.
Meanwhile, Nokia rival Motorola reported Wednesday that shipments of its handsets had fallen 38 percent during the quarter, pushing its market share down yet again to 12 percent, the lowest level since 2001. But Motorola isn’t the only handset maker struggling; Sony Ericsson has also had trouble growing its market share. The company, which targets the high-end market in Europe, only grew its market share in 2007 by 2 points to 9 percent.
Nokia reported that it saw the strongest growth in sales in the Middle East and Africa. Shipments here were up 52.3 percent. Asia-Pacific and China also saw strong sales growth, while sales in mature markets like North America fell during the quarter.
For more of Jan’s work/though process, you can read his intriguing blog Future Perfect. A good story to start with: Recycled, Upcycled: Remade. “Is it possible to make an upcycled mobile phone entirely from recycled materials… that consumers will want to buy?”
Part of a 2004 PBS Frontline story by Shoshana Guy on the Struggle for Water in Haiti. [Full story: Flash Version | Text Version]
Water Trucks - “God Before Water”
Massive water trucks, belching black smoke and sloshing water down their sides, dominate the teeming streets of Port-au-Prince. The trucks, which can carry 3,000 gallons, are painted in bright greens, oranges and yellows with the business names displayed on the windshields in big blocky letters. Some have religious names, like Merci Jehovah and Gradier Dieu. Other truck owners like to rhyme their own name or that of a celebrity with l’eau, the French word for water: Madou Eau, Joe’s Eau and Ronaldo-Eau.
The business of trucking water began in the early 1970s. And what started as an enterprising idea involving a few trucks has turned into a huge and profitable business. The trucks have become one of the main distributors of water throughout the city. They deliver to anyone with a cistern. Private homes and institutions order trucks of water to meet their daily cooking and cleaning needs. Individuals that own cisterns in poor neighborhoods buy a truck of water, then sell it to others by the bucket. And big water companies, like Sweet Water, for example, buy the trucked water, treat it, then sell it as drinking water.
A truck of water can cost anywhere from $30 to well over $100 for the consumer, depending on where in the city you are located. Port-au-Prince rises at a steep angle from the sea; the higher up the hill you are, the more you pay for water.
I spent several days hanging around the truck filling stations, trying to get a sense of the profitability of the business and hoping a driver would take me along on a delivery.
I finally found my ride at a filling station named Penguin. After getting permission from the company officials, I walked out into the trucking yard. The sun beat down relentlessly. A small tin shack served as a restaurant. Every 15 minutes, empty trucks pulled under the four huge white pipes that gushed water pumped from a 200-foot well. While the drivers waited their turn to fill, fights broke out regularly about who was in line first.
No one seemed eager to have me along, but after about 45 minutes, the driver of Dieu de Vant Eau, which translates as “God Before Water,” agreed to take me. God Before Water is a beat-up white truck with orange and blue stripes and a huge cross on the door. I happily climbed up and squeezed in with the driver, Erik Orlis. He was a skinny man with an antelope-like face who constantly wiped his brow with a blue rag. The truck trembled and shimmied into gear, and we were off. Orlis told me that God Before Water can make between $3,000 and $4,000 a month. Orlis takes 10 percent of that, making his wage between $300 and $400 a month. In a country where the average wage is a dollar a day, this is big money.
We bumped along the road, and I envisioned an interesting ride through the city, but the fun was over before we even started. Orlis and God Before Water were only delivering to a kindergarten around the corner. I guess that’s why he agreed to take me.
Back at Penguin, chief engineer Roosevelt Poteau claimed that the water trucks were not profitable because Penguin’s overhead was too high. “The [cost of] petrol rises, and the cost of electricity is too much. We are not making a profit from the water trucks,” he informed me. But based on how much money Orlis and God Before Water seemed to be making, I was skeptical.
At Baron filling station across town, the trucks were lined up 20 deep. People gathered to bathe and collect water from the runoff under the trucks. A skinny girl in underpants stood under the stream of water leaking from the truck while a teenaged girl in a strapless bra top soaped her hair. When the full trucks moved off and the new ones pulled in, there were a few seconds of water gushing out at full power, and everyone ran to fill their buckets. “Get lost,” a trucker screamed at them. “You’ll be run over or electrocuted.” The water collectors scattered, but resumed washing and filling their buckets seconds later. “This is the closest place to get water, and it’s free,” 14-year-old Joanne Mica told me.
I walked the line of trucks to see if I could find owners and drivers who wanted to talk profit. After speaking with several recalcitrant owners, I found Lucien Pierre. Pierre is a sparkly-eyed 65-year-old who spent years in Brooklyn driving trucks and cabs. He returned to Haiti in 1980 when a friend told him of a profitable business he could get into selling water from trucks. He has expanded slowly and now owns four trucks. He told me that his drivers are making roughly the same as Orlis but that after all of Pierre’s overhead, his business is making him the equivalent of roughly $300 a day. During the rainy season, business is slow but the rest of the year makes up for it.
“What if CAMEP [Centrale Autonome Metropolitaine d’Eau Potable, government water service] gets organized and starts getting water to the people?” I asked, referring to the government-owned water service.
“We’ll make trouble for them,” he laughed. I told him that Penguin filling station said they weren’t making money. “They’re lying,” he responded simply.
At the three filling stations I visited, all the managers said they were filling 50 to 60 trucks a day at around $3 a truck. That calculates to gross earnings of roughly $900 to $1,000 a week. And since there is no water ministry to regulate the trucking business, they pay no taxes on the water.
“I will say that it is a free business for them to have water from the ground,” said the general secretary of CAMEP, Benoit Frantz. CAMEP wants to install meters but since they are also a commercial enterprise and not a water ministry, some do not feel that they have the authority to regulate the water truck business. “Here we have an organization that is taking water and selling water, and this would be disloyal competition to ask these purveyors of water to pay a tax,” argued economist Gerald Jean-Baptiste.
In all fairness to Poteau, Penguin’s chief engineer who said the water trucks are not profitable, Jean-Baptiste did say that there are so many trucks in the business now, many are complaining that their profits are diminishing.
“But it’s a good business?” I asked Pierre.
“If I leave New York to come and get it, sure it’s good,” Pierre responded, smiling.
Why is serious investment in bottom- of-the-pyramid (BOP) markets the exception rather than the rule? What keeps companies from building lines of business by meeting the needs of the poor in developing markets?
Their answers:
Business as usual does not apply. “First, and perhaps most fundamentally, these new markets look awfully different from the standardized markets of the West.” For example: “Weak infrastructure creates challenges to product distribution that range from uncertain to insurmountable.”
“Most companies don’t know how to package products for poor people, and they don’t know what products and services the poor prefer.” Some companies such as Unilever have been very successful in marketing consumer goods. “But consumer goods are, in many cases, peripheral to a more substantial opportunity with a wider potential customer base in developing markets – namely, meeting the basic demand for housing, clean water, medical insurance, and legal and financial services that fit local needs, customs, and income.”
“[B]usiness investments in social and infrastructure needs often face the highest regulatory hurdles.”
Their proferred solution: Don’t recreate, innovate via grassroots design
[T]here is another way to look at developing markets. Rather than starting with the status quo in rich countries and measuring business opportunities in poor ones by gauging what it would take to recreate that environment, businesses can take a step back and do what entrepreneurs have always done: ask questions like “What do people need?” “Why don’t they have it?” and “How do they get it?”
That approach is the essence of grassroots design. Though it requires more initial thought and creativity, it makes things far simpler in the long run. Businesses that start with a grassroots design process end up with products and services that meet real, as opposed to perceived, needs; integrate local materials and processes; and reflect the culture and aesthetic of their customers. Of course, a company that embraces grassroots design does not gain the benefits of simply importing its existing business model and product line. But mass markets are fragmenting everywhere, and firms that learn to design up from local circumstances will compete better wherever they operate.
When it rains in Tijuana, it pours in San Diego. Runoff crosses the international border in gushes of floodwater, clogging everything in its path with dirt and debris.
A river, a wildlife-filled estuary, and the sea [plus nearby beaches] are all victims of this rainy-season menace, the product of a sprawling Mexican city where the poor often live without paved streets, running water, or sanitation.
Now, a cross-border team hopes to stem the tide of US-Mexican tensions and turn a Tijuana slum into an example of environmental activism. Their goal: Convince the community to devote its own time and effort to pave the roads in San Bernardo, a bustling neighborhood that becomes a bleak, muddy lake during heavy rains.
The story also includes a nice short audio segment.
The U.S. electrical grid is one of the most regulated and least sophisticated networks out there. Of course buying power off of the grid is easy enough, but what if you want to try to sell electricity back to the grid? It might not be too easy to simply sell your excess juice from your solar panels, depending on where you live. Here’s a primer on the issue of “net metering” and how it will allow individuals to power the grid.
Vampire Energy: I’m in your house, stealing your vatts [View larger image]
Even when household appliances are turned off, most are still using some electricity. Appliances are either in passive standby mode (the clock on the microwave is still ticking) or active standby mode (the VCR is off, but programmed to record something).
Hmm, plasma TVs are shocking energy hogs. Yet another reason they’re losing out to LCDs.
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