People, Planet, Profits & Projects

Most of you know the city of Xi’an for the famous terracotta warriors.  In fact, this necropolis project is featured in the introductory chapter of our book, Bridging the PM Competency Gap, as a way to indicate how skills and capabilities used to be passed down from generation to generation and now we simply do not have the time for that version of apprenticeship training. 

But this post is not about the warriors.  Well, in a way it is about Xi’an warriors, but a different kind of warrior – one battling pollutants, not foreign invaders. 

As background, let’s learn a little more about Xi’an – from this article in China’s Global Times:

Northwest China's Shaanxi Province has one of the most polluted provincial capitals in the country, China's environment watchdog says, as it singled out Xi'an for "severe" air quality issues.

The sixth inspection group of the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) has sent feedback to the Shaanxi government, saying that conditions in central Shaanxi have become severe, and the ecosystem in the province's Qinling Mountains is "severely damaged," China Youth Daily reported Wednesday.

According to the inspection group, the heavy chemical industry has played a significant role in central Shaanxi for historical reasons, and in recent years the region has expanded its problem with huge amounts of highly contaminated projects.

The inspection group indicated that Xi'an has now become one of the most-polluted provincial capitals in China.

Indeed, here’s a post that compares the smog levels in Xi’an to other cities in China.

https://www.quora.com/How-bad-is-air-pollution-in-Xian-compared-to-other-Chinese-cities

So what’s a warrior to do about it?

Well, this is a project management blog – so of course, the answer is: launch a project!  Indeed the project was featured in the June edition of PM Network in an article called “Soak It In”.

One “warrior”, chemist Cao Junji, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, quoted in Nature magazine, has built a tower in Xi’an, as described in Nature magazine as referenced in the PM Network feature.

A 60-metre-high chimney stands among a sea of high-rise buildings in one of China’s most polluted cities. But instead of adding to Xian’s smog, this chimney is helping to clear the air. The outdoor air-purifying system, powered by the Sun, filters out noxious particles and billows clean air into the skies. Chinese scientists who designed the prototype say that the system could significantly cut pollution in urban areas in China and elsewhere.

The technology has excited and intrigued researchers — especially in China, where air pollution is a daily challenge. Early results, which are yet to be published, are promising, says the project's leader Cao Junji, a chemist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Key Laboratory of Aerosol Chemistry and Physics in Xian in central China.

In the PM Network article, the project parameters are impressive:

• Funding $2M
• Capacity: 353 million cubic feet of air processed each day
• Results: 15% reduction of the most harmful particles during heavy pollution days

Here's a photo of the tower:

Since this was only a proof-of-concept project, the next steps envisioned include more – and larger – towers, including one that will be 1,640 feet high.  It’s going to take more than one warrior-tower to fight this battle.

The small article in PM Network intrigued me enough to do some research.  You can, as well with this scientific review of the project – visit the article in Nature here.

Other attempts to “soak up” pollutants have been glamorous but not as successful.  Dutch artist Daan Roosegaarde build a tower with the idea of “turning China’s smog into diamonds” with mixed results.  See below for a photo of the artist and his tower.

The website of the artist claims success, but an article in The Shanghiist says,

(The tower’s planners promises that it will) suck up 75% of the dangerous particles in the nearby air, and then spit back out clean air into the surrounding space. The captured smog particles would then be turned into diamonds, which would be sold as rings, cubes or cufflinks to fund the creation of more towers.

And that all sounds really awesome! Unfortunately, it sucks. Like really sucks. But not in a good way.

…the tower does manage to filter air particles, it doesn’t do it particularly well, or for a very large area. Despite claims that it could purify 30,000 cubic meters of air an hour, the machine has failed to create a non-toxic air bubble around even itself. Experts estimated that every hour the amount of harmful particulates that the machine captures doesn’t even add up to a single spoonful of salt, and have renamed it the “Smog Warning Tower.”

So on this version of vacuuming carbon and making that into diamonds, “your mileage may vary”.

And let’s get back to our ‘stone army’ - It also turns out that these two reasons for Xi’an’s fame (pollution and the terracotta army) are related.  In this article from Smithsonian magazine, it turns out that the army is deteriorating, in part due to exposure to the polluted atmosphere.  It says,

In an analysis of air pollutants affecting the soldiers, the researchers found notable concentrations of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, nitrogen dioxide and ozone. The levels the researchers recorded exceeded those typically reported each year by the museum.

For further reading:

Critical review – will it work?

https://smartairfilters.com/en/blog/xian-unveils-smog-fighting-tower-work/

Clean Air Alliance of China

http://en.cleanairchina.org/channel/type/75-364-1.html?menuId=588

Blogger’s Note: The title of the post, while catchy, is actually a bit inaccurate as the idea is to remove a multitude of pollutants, not just carbon or CO₂.  Still – I couldn’t resist.

In Part 1 of this post, we left off with this:

NARRATOR: But the models can be checked against things we know, like air temperature over the past hundred years. The models can be started in the past and run forward. The blue line shows the average of those predictions.

When compared with the actual temperature record, in red, their accuracy is revealed.

Below is a screenshot that compares the model output for temperature when run backward (blue) against the actuals (red) – you can see that the alignment is pretty good, speaking to the ability of the model to forecast.  So what happens when you let the model run forward?

As a reminder, I was discussing the Public Broadcasting System’s NOVA broadcast, “Decoding the Weather Machine”. 

The documentary covers a lot of ground, but I had focused Part 1 on the idea of modeling and the concept of a “World Breakdown System” used by scientists to slice up the globe (and atmosphere) into chunks that we can reassemble into reliable data.  If this sounds like a Work Breakdown Structure, well, that’s why this post exists – my PM antennae went up as I watched this segment.

So indeed, what does happen when this simulation model, based on a “World Breakdown Structure” is run forward?

I’d paraphrase, but it just won’t do the show justice.  Let me share what happens next:

JOHN HOLDREN: Computer models don't exist in isolation. We calibrate them against what we've observed. We test them against the history of climate change. And we now know they're pretty good.

NARRATOR: The models can be used to run a virtual experiment: if we continue emitting carbon dioxide on the path we are on, what do they say our world will look like in 2100?

This map shows how temperatures could change. The models predict the average temperature could be 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit hotter. That means in New York City, days with temperatures over 90 degrees would more than triple. And in the Arctic, which will heat up even faster, it could rise, on average, more than 15 degrees.

HEIDI CULLEN: One of the things we understand really well about our climate system is that if you crank up the average temperature of the planet, it is going to fundamentally change your weather.

JOHN HOLDREN: Their results suggest we will see more Category 4 and 5 hurricanes, and the prevalence of devastating heatwaves will be much more extreme.

NARRATOR: The models also show that by the end of the century, it is likely the ocean will rise one-and-a-half to four feet. Without major changes, this would put parts of cities like Miami under water.

And new insights are coming in all the time. The work of David Holland and other scientists suggests that if large parts of western Antarctica break off, eight feet or more of sea level rise by 2100 is not out of the question.

DAVID HOLLAND: All bets are off for Antarctica. That is a place where very large sea level rise, on the scale of 100 years, is quite possible. That doesn't mean it will happen; but it actually could physically happen.

NARRATOR: The road ahead is a world that could be increasingly hard to live in. The question now is what can we do about it to reduce the possible damage?

PAUL DOUGLAS: We're going to figure this out, because, in the end, we are not going to have a choice; we're going to have to figure this out.

NARRATOR: The path ahead comes down to three basic options (Suffer, Adapt, or Mitigate – see this post's header image). We can do nothing and suffer the consequences;…

…we can adapt as the changes unfold, or we can act now to mitigate, or limit the damage. The options are connected. The more we mitigate, the less we would need to adapt. The more we adapt and mitigate, the less we would suffer.

JOHN HOLDREN: Society has only three options; and if we want to minimize suffering, as should be our goal, we need to maximize both mitigation and adaptation.

Again, another connection to project management – this time in the area (I’m sure you sense it) of Risk Response.  “Suffer” would be Passive Acceptance in our language – do nothing, not even setting aside contingency.  Adapt, in our language, would be mitigate the impact, and what they call mitigate would be mitigating probability and impact*.  

Suffer: I won’t even go here, because that is just not an option.

Adapt: In the program, they refer to the efforts of US city Norfolk, VA and the way it is working to adapt, since it is facing impact of climate change right now – streets are already regularly flooding there.  See this recent article from the New York Times: “When Rising Seas Transform Risk Into Certainty”. If you watch the show, watch the part in which they interview Colonel Jason Kelly of the US Army Corps of Engineers.

Mitigate: Reduce the use of fossil fuels.  An example of a Whirlpool’s Findlay, Ohio.  Watch the interview with Dale Laws about how this factory has converted to renewable energy. They also take you to NREL (the National Renewable Energy Laboratory near Denver, Colorado.  They are an innovation hub for renewable energy.  They’re working on reinventing solar cells using perovskites, tame algae to create a new form of jet fuel, and improve the way wind power generates power.

The forward pass – what the simulator shows us – is not very rosy.  But it does underline the need for us to choose a combination of Adapt and Mitigate, and luckily, that means that project managers can be key contributors to reduced suffering – and that’s no BS.

**one could argue that what they discuss as “Mitigate” is actually “Avoid”, because the work here is about “changing the plan completely”.  This aspect is not worth arguing – the point is that this is all about risk response.

Screenshot from the movie "Forest Gump" via YouTube

My last post – Project Managers – We're full of BS - promised a follow up, a second part called, Backward Pass, Forward Fail, and that is still forthcoming.

However, in the meantime, and in the process of researching that post, an article in the June issue of PM Network caught my eye and deserves treatment immediately if only for its awesome title - which I have borrowed for this post.  Full credit to the article - read it here.

The story is about a very low-tech, and literally down-to-earth application of fighting climate change.  And it’s as basic and old-school as planting trees, but with a fancier, more project-management name: reforestation initiatives.  The United Kingdom launched a 500 million pound , 25-year project to plant 50 million trees in a large area of northern England.  China’s government is launching a project in 2018 to plant trees covering a an area the size of Ireland, aiming to increase forested areas in China over 5% by 2030.  And in Africa, a joint 21-nation program, seeks to cover almost 250 million acres with trees by 2030 – a $1B investment in fighting climate change with CO2-capturing trees.  That’s equivalent to the total combined area of US states Minnesota, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, and Oklahoma!

The initiatives also require public-private partnerships, like the Atlantic Forest Restoration Pact program in Brazil which will restore 2.5 million acres of tropical forest in Brazil.

What’s important to note here is that these projects – of course – reap ecological benefits.  Forests help absorb carbon dioxide, and provide wildlife habitats, but they also provide social and economic benefits.  Assembling a coalition of stakeholders is key.  In a partnership with the World Bank, for example, Conservation International worked with the Brazilian Ministry of Environment and other NGOs on a six-year project to plant 73 million trees by 2023.  In doing so, the coalition of stakeholders hired indigenous community members and farmers to execute the project, bringing in as many as 2,000 local people to aid in the reforestation of each hectare.  This generates jobs and income for the communities.  Taking stock of the long term benefits from reforestation is an important element in reaching out to the various stakeholder groups.  And yes, gaining this stakeholder engagement early on means a longer time between planning and execution - but it makes for a more sustainable sustainability project. 

It’s not all success stories, however, when it comes to planting trees.  My own hometown, Boston, as recently reported in this Boston Globe story, is lagging other cities in keeping its promises with respect to planting trees.  The photo of Boston’s iconic Citgo sign with a tree stump in the foreground, is representative of what you’ll find in the story.

Photo Credit: John Tlumacki, Boston Globe

The story begins:

A decade ago, Mayor Thomas M. Menino stood with other local officials in the Geneva Cliffs Urban Wild in Dorchester and vowed that Boston would plant 100,000 new trees by 2020, expanding the city’s tree canopy by 20 percent.

With climate change a growing concern, cities across the country made similar pledges, a simple way to soak up carbon emissions and curb energy use, among many other benefits. That same year, New York City set an even loftier goal to plant 1 million trees by 2017. New York met its goal — two years early. Boston, however, has fallen woefully short. Not only has the city abandoned its goal for this decade, but it has barely kept up with tree mortality.

The article goes on to describe some or the reasons the project has failed so far – a mixture of mismanagement, lack of focus on the project objectives, and some realized threats, such as the amount of trees that have actually had to be removed based on such things as redevelopment projects and disease.  It’s actually a good case for students of project risk management, I suggest reading it from that perspective.

But it doesn’t take away from the overall thrust of the post – the focus on reforestation projects – mainly successful ones – and the contribution they have to offer in helping to provide long-term benefits of the social, ecological, and economic variety… in other words, People, Planet, and Profits.

Project Managers are really full of BS.  By that, of course, I mean Breakdown Structures.  Work Breakdown Structures.  Risk Breakdown Structures, Organizational Breakdown Structures, Resource Breakdown Structures. 

That last one – Resource Breakdown Structure – and a recent episode of the excellent US Public Broadcasting Service (PBS – yet another BS, but not a Breakdown Structure) show, called Nova – got me thinking.  Isn’t the Earth a resource?  Is there such a thing as a World Breakdown Structure?

The episode of Nova was called “Decoding the Weather Machine”.  It’s a fascinating show in and of itself, but made even more fascinating in that it states in plain terms that climate change is real, it’s caused by humans, and it has significant consequences to us NOW and certainly to our children and grandchildren.  “We're poking at the climate system with a long, sharp, carbon-tipped spear”, says Paul Douglas, a meteorologist and former climate change denier, “and we’re not entirely clear of the consequences”, adds Harvard scientist John Holdren.  And here's what may be the most amazing and somewhat heartwarming thing: the show is funded by the David H. Koch fund for Science.  Yep.  THAT David Koch, of the Koch brothers.

This is a 2-hour show and it’s incredibly well-produced – and in a way, entertaining (in a worrisome sort of way).  But let’s circle back to our affinity for BS.  Breakdown Structures.  Remember – they’re all about decomposing something too big to get our minds around into smaller chunks? 

Well, have a look at this transcript from a segment of Decoding the Weather Machine:

NARRATOR: To do something about our climate future, we need to know what lies ahead.

KATHARINE HAYHOE: It's kind of as if you are driving down one of our dead straight roads, here in Texas. You can be driving down the road, even staying in your own lane, if you are driving along looking in the rearview mirror, because the road is completely straight, so where you were in the past is a perfect prediction of where you are going to be in the future. But what if you are driving down this road, looking in your rearview mirror and a giant curve comes up? You're going to run off the road, because the past is not a perfect predictor of the future if the road is changing.

NARRATOR: To see the road ahead, scientists at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, in Princeton, New Jersey, are working to turn our understanding of how the land, sea, ice and air interact into a powerful simulation called a "climate model."

KATHARINE HAYHOE: Using nothing but basic physics, we can actually produce, in our computers, a virtual Earth.

NARRATOR: With this virtual Earth, scientists like Kirsten Findell work to predict where our climate is going, before it's too late to change course.

The first step is breaking the climate machine into its core components.

KIRSTEN FINDELL (Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory): Every climate model has four major physical components represented. We represent the ocean, we represent the land, the sea ice and the atmosphere all around the earth. Within those four components, we also then break up the earth into little grid boxes. And then we can slice up the atmosphere into thin layers and slice down into the ocean and down into the soil.

NARRATOR: Once they have divided the system into manageable parts, they use well-established mathematical equations, grid box by grid box, to run the model forward in time.

KATHARINE HAYHOE: These models are amazing. They can produce weather systems, even hurricanes; they can produce droughts and floods.

NARRATOR: Worldwide, there are dozens of models. They predict how each part of the climate machine will change, like sea surface temperature, storm intensity or the extent of the ice caps. Every detail is included. But the path to perfect models is still a work in progress, because Earth's climate machine is such a complicated one.

The role that clouds play, for instance, is important, but poorly understood. And the speed at which ice sheets will break apart is another big unknown.

STEPHEN PACALA: We're definitely making progress on making better predictions, but there is still an enormous amount about the climate system that we don't fully understand.

NARRATOR: But the models can be checked against things we know, like air temperature over the past hundred years. The models can be started in the past and run forward. The blue line shows the average of those predictions.

When compared with the actual temperature record, in red, their accuracy is revealed.

Below is a screenshot that compares the model output for temperature when run backward (blue) against the actuals (red) – you can see that the alignment is pretty good, speaking to the ability of the model to forecast.  So what happens when you let the model run forward?

You’ll just have to wait until the next blog post: Backward Pass, Forward Fail.

If you can’t wait, view the show here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/decoding-weather-machine.html

In Part 1 of this blog post I said that I would give examples of BIO projects.  Instead, since they are all really good examples of how a project can clearly state its charter, I present you with a more in-depth view of one, rather than a collection of loose descriptions of many.

I really do invite you to look at all of them here:

https://www.kew.org/science/projects/kew-colombia-bio-programme

What I really like about the way in which the single selected project is described – and this would be true whether it is a ‘sustainability-oriented’ project or not – is that it links the rationale of the project back to the main portfolio and mission of the parent organization.

Here is the background of the ‘charter’ of this project (Boyacá’s Useful Plants):

Colombia is known to be one of the most biodiverse countries in the world. Nevertheless, the current knowledge on inventory and monitoring of biodiversity and ecosystems does not fully reflect this richness, being incomplete in certain regions. Counteracting this situation, the nation-wide ‘Colombia Bio’ programme has recently been established by the Colombian government with the main aim of making sustainable economic use of Colombia’s biodiversity resources. This programme offers a unique opportunity for Kew and partner organisations in Colombia to undertake primary research on biodiversity and ecosystem services in parts of the country as yet completely unexplored. The ambition of this exploratory research is to enable long-term plans for the conservation and sustainable use of Colombia’s natural capital to be established.

This particular project is focused on the Boyaca region of Colombia and by Spring 2018 will deliver a catalogue and prioritisation of the huge number of useful plant species of Boyacá, to boost the economy of the region whilst supporting livelihoods, food security and health.

It then goes on to specify objectives and outcomes:

• Data compilation and databasing: Collect, classify, digitise and organise information on the useful plants of Boyacá, to develop a robust and comprehensive database with structured high-quality curated botanical information on useful plants of Boyacá. 
• Online platform: Build an open-access online dynamic platform that can retrieve species information in real time from our databases, displaying it in a user-friendly environment in Spanish and English, to provide authoritative, expert-driven, up-to-date information on uses and characteristics of these plants.
• Prioritisation of useful species: Prioritise useful species, testing various algorithms and methods, taking into account conservation status, endemism, rarity, number of references in literature, category of use, ecological importance, information on seed germination/propagation and bio-prospecting potential.

Outputs

• Catálogo de Plantas Útiles de Boyacá (PUB): The information on Boyacá’s useful plants will be available online through the PUB catalogue, integrated with Kew’s Plants of the World Online Portal (POWO). The PUB will be the go-to source of information for all the useful plants of the department, organised and reliable information based on the highest taxonomic resolution, and maintained and updated over time as part of the POWO.
• Prioritised species profiles (generated from the database): These will be published in a book edited by Kew/IAVH in English/Spanish for local users, along with key priorities for management, research and engagement, integrated into national/regional/local decision-making,
• The final algorithm for species prioritisation: This will be published in a high-impact publication.

In Part 1 of this post I also mentioned that, in Part 2, I’d cover the relationship of this program to the upcoming election in Colombia. The success of the BIO program is not immune to politics.   The presidential election in Colombia, one almost concurrent with this blog post - may determine its future.  This extract from the article which inspired this two-part post:

Whether the president’s aspirations are shared by other national politicians will soon become clear. On May 27th, Mr Santos having served as president for the maximum period permitted by law, Colombians go to the polls to elect a replacement. After a possible second round in June, the winner will take office in August.

One candidate, Iván Duque, talks of an “orange economy” of knowledge-based production, which might bode well for aspiring biotechnologists. A second, Gustavo Petro, is a former guerrilla who says he is keen on renewable ways of creating wealth. And a third, Sergio Fajardo, a maths professor who was once mayor of Medellín, also seems interested.

…BIO offers an opportunity to clarify which parts of the country’s wild areas most deserve protection at a moment when the offer of protection is still meaningful. And, since no one actually knows how the biotechnological future will turn out, just possibly the surveys it is sponsoring will reveal riches that make the gold rushes of the 19th century look like chump change.

The election results are in, and, it turns out, are not conclusive.  This story just in from The Guardian:

 Colombians have failed to elect a president outright, setting the stage for a bitter runoff between two frontrunners from opposite ends of the political spectrum, while a peace process with leftist rebels hangs in the balance.

Iván Duque, a hardline conservative who viscerally opposes the peace accord, took the largest share of the vote on Sunday with 39%, though fell short of the 50% required to win at the first round. Instead, he will face Gustavo Petro – a leftwinger and former mayor of Bogotá, who came second with 25% – in the second round on 17 June.

So, there is not quite a resolution there, but I do hope you have noted the important connection between screaming monkeys and project management!