Sponge Cities
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Gotcha! I bet you thought this was another in the series of posts about project management stories about colorful creatures (purple bacteria, green iguanas, blue-blooded horseshoe crabs). Indeed, that was the theme of the past few posts. If you missed them, go back - these are colorful posts. But no - this post is not about sea sponge colonies, but rather about actual cities and their ability (if designed properly) to absorb excess water. A recent article in Scientific American (December 2018) caught my eye. It starts with some drama: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sponge-cities-can-limit-urban-floods-and-droughts/ Beijing’s largest storm in more than 60 years killed 79 people, most of them drowned in their vehicles or sucked into underground drains. Damages reached nearly $2 billion. This isn’t a unique storm. As the article says, this has happened a great many times and has a large economic and social impact, and the cause is related to climate change: Sixty-two percent of its cities flooded between 2011 and 2014 alone, imposing $100 billion in economic losses, according to the Chinese Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development. The floods are partly the result of stronger storms fueled by climate change. Further drawing my attention was the fact that the word “project” occurs more than a dozen times in this short article. The story is about Sponge Cities – a philosophy and practice to switch from dams – and concrete in general – to natural methods to absorb or re-route excess water. Featured in the article is a company called Turenscape, which has a fascinating history: Turenscape was founded by Dr. Kongjian Yu in 1998 and is one of the first and largest private architecture, landscape architecture, and urbanism practices in China. Dr. Yu’s pioneering research on Ecological Security Patterns and Sponge Cities has been adopted by the Chinese government as the guiding theory for national land use planning, eco-city campaigns, and urban ecological restoration. Dr. Yu’s clear vision of bringing harmony between Earth and people has been used to transforming many heavily polluted wastelands into aesthetics of sustainability. Read more about Turenscape here and its academy here. I think it’s also very interesting to examine the cultural aspects of change as it applies to this type of project. Yu’s ideas were not accepted immediately. It was even politicized: For years while Yu was building his firm’s portfolio, many Chinese derided his farm-based ideas as backward. He says that some even called him an American spy—a nod to his doctorate from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and his opposition to those big dams. But in recent years sentiment has begun to shift. Various groups in China are building green infrastructure projects, often in partnership with Americans, Australians and Europeans. I thought it may be interesting to focus on one of the Turenscape projects, Quzhou Luming Park: Project Profile 1. Project Statement: On a site surrounded by dense new urban development, the landscape architect created a dynamic urban park by incorporating the agricultural strategy of crop rotation and a low maintenance meadow. An elevated floating network of pedestrian paths, platforms and pavilions create a visual frame for this cultivated swath and the natural features of the terrain and water. Using these strategies, a deserted mismanaged landscape was dramatically transformed into a productive and beautiful setting for urban living, while preserving the natural and cultural patterns and processes of the site. 2. Project Narratives Challenges and Objectives： The project is located on the west bank of the Shiliang River, in the West New District of Quzhou City, Zhejiang Province, with a population of 2.5 million. The city, boasting a history of over 1,800 years, is known to the world because of its strategic location on the east coast of China. During the World War II, the US Air Force used the small airport at Quzhou as a base for the Doolittle Raid (the Tokyo Raid), on 18 April, 1942.
The description of the project goes on – very well expressed. Here’s a photo of the completed project.
The article is worth reading, and the effort to be more ‘flowing’ when it comes to drought and flood control, is worth doing. I’ll close with this, from the article as well:
The hubris of believing that people can control water with concrete will be increasingly exposed as more of those kinds of projects fail, unable to buffer the knock-on impacts from rapid population growth, urban sprawl and climate change. Although sponge cities will likely not protect everyone from these challenges, their advocates think their resilience can temper extremes better than the concrete alternatives. Plus the multiple benefits they bring can make the lives of humans and other species healthier and happier. |
Project Tree Chicken
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This is a story about turning a threat into an opportunity. I’m going to keep the theme this month of blog posts regarding colors and species. We’ve already talked about purple poop-eating bacteria and blue-blooded horseshoe crabs. Don’t miss those posts! Today, the subject is the blue and green iguanas of the Cayman Islands. This story is courtesy of an article in The Economist, quoted below. The Cayman Islands, a British territory, does not tax companies. So Grand Cayman, its largest part, has more companies (106,000) than people (61,000). Its population of green iguanas greatly outnumbers both. The green iguanas are an invasive species, introduced as pets and then multiplying in huge numbers, and causing big problems, not the least of which is the possible doom of the blue iguana (pictured above), a native animal which is increasingly endangered by the green iguana’s taking of its food supply. In addition, the green iguanas, which can be up to 5 feet long, poop on cars, eat crops and gardens, and consume the eggs of wild birds. As if that wasn’t enough, because they dwell in trees, they also sometimes short-circuit transformers, causing power outages. Here's a photo of these 'tree chickens':
The green iguana is equipped with a spiked tale and nasty claws, while the native blue iguanas are smaller and cannot defend themselves well against predators such as cats. At one point, in 2004, the population of blue iguanas was down to near single digits. A breeding project has brought them back up to 1,000 and many have been released to a nature preserve. However the presence of the green iguana remains a threat. So the Cayman Islands has initiated a culling project. “…the cull, when it starts, will be open to all Caymanians over the age of 18, who will be required to register and go through a basic review of the rules regarding the process. Importantly, they will also learn the difference between blue iguanas, which are a protected endangered species, and the pesky greens.” Read more about the culling project here and here. In the green iguana’s home countries (Central and South America) the animal is called a ‘tree chicken’ and the meat is enjoyed there. So the Cayman Islands may be able to turn the threat into an opportunity, exporting the iguana meat to those countries and turning unwanted tree chickens into cash. The video in this link is quite amazing. An exporter, Spinion, is talking about getting this accepted as a delicacy in the USA, and if that doesn’t work out, producing dog cookies from the green iguana meat. If you’d like to learn more about preparing green iguana meat, this piece from National Geographic (which discusses the same problem, but in Puerto Rico) could whet your appetite…
To read more about eating 'tree chickens', read this recently-published Associated Press article, Eating the Chicken of the Trees. In the case of removing these 'tree chickens', perhaps money does grow on trees!
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Bleeding Crabs, Expensive Tabs, and Project Labs
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My last post was about purple bacteria. Keeping the color-science theme, this week I’d like to discuss a liquid which is blue, important, and very, very expensive. A gallon of this liquid costs more than twice as much as Chanel No. 5 per gallon, which will cost you only $26,000. Yep. A gallon of this blue stuff will set you back $60,000 and it won’t smell nearly as nice. The liquid? Horseshoe crab blood. Ewww. What do you do with this liquid? It’s certainly not for drinking, and it is not used for watercolor painting. The recent video below from Business Insider tells the story well. If you are more interested in the science, also watch the video which follows. Business Insider video Scishow video If you saw the videos (and really, it only takes a few minutes to see them both, and this critter has been around for 450 million years - do the math!), you now know that if you have ever had any sort of injection, your life may have been saved by this liquid. You also know that the supply of horseshoe crabs is limited and is falling. It's unclear how many of the crabs survive the bleeding. This story is particularly meaningful to me as a Bay Stater who has spent many summers visiting Cape Cod and noting the decline in the number and health of horseshoe crabs quite personally. A recent story from the Audubon Society talks about a heroic effort to create a synthetic alternative. It’s a project that may improve the function of the test aided by horseshoe crab blood and help protect this ancient animal from extinction after surviving for 450 million years and all sorts of dangers (but perhaps not surviving human intervention). https://www.audubon.org/magazine/summer-2018/inside-biomedical-revolution-save-horseshoe-crabs The problem solved by the crab’s blue blood goes something like this: When gram-negative bacteria like E. coli die, they shed endotoxins, which are everywhere—in water, soil, the human intestinal tract. Danger arises when high concentrations of the potent poisons enter a person’s spinal fluid or bloodstream, potentially causing fever, respiratory distress, septic shock, organ failure, and even death. As a result, injected drugs (for people and their pets) or implanted medical devices that come into contact with blood must be tested for endotoxin. Horseshoe crab blood, exquisitely sensitive to endotoxin, clots in its presence. LAL, the assay made from horseshoe crab blood, ensures that millions of heart stents, pacemakers, joint and cataract replacements, and radioactive tracers in PET scans, along with millions of doses of flu vaccine, insulin, and intravenously delivered antibiotics and chemotherapies, are free of endotoxin. Manufacturers also must test the water and raw ingredients used in their manufacturing. To keep up with demand, companies that make LAL capture and release some 500,000 horseshoe crabs along the eastern seaboard of the United States every year. In Asia, most bled horseshoe crabs are ultimately killed. Enter: Jay Bolden, a tall, thin scientist who seems to disappear in his lab coat. He works in a sparkling new lab at Eli Lilly’s sprawling technology development center in Indianapolis. For the last five years, in his lab far from the sea, he’s been steadily working to develop a product that will take biomedical pressure off horseshoe crabs. Building on research carried out in Singapore, and continued in Maryland, he’s been compiling evidence that a synthetic enzyme, recombinant factor C—rFC for short—can replace horseshoe crab blood in endotoxin tests. According to his work, rFC works just as well as LAL, is more efficient and cost-effective, and doesn’t require a live animal. “It will benefit Eli Lilly,” he says. Bolden is a birder (a person who observes and photographs birds). It turns out, as is almost always the case in nature, that the horseshoe crab does not stand (or rather, crawl) alone. If it fails as a species, other species fail as well. In particular, birds such as the Red Knot rely on the eggs of the crab for sustenance in their migration pattern. This further motivated Bolden. From the article: Bolden, aware that Asian horseshoe crabs taken for biomedical use are often bled to death, became concerned about “supply problems down the road” when he learned that Eli Lilly was planning to build a second manufacturing plant in China, one that would make insulin, which requires endotoxin testing. “Here,” he recalls thinking, “I can have an impact. I can make a difference. I can be part of conservation.” His vocation and avocation came together. If Ding in Singapore had started this relay to end the practice of bleeding horseshoe crabs, and passed the baton to Lonza’s Burgenson, then Bolden was ready for his turn at the track. But this lap, like the others, would take time. He pitched an Eli Lilly vice president on using rFC, and with his support, then sought approval from two of the company’s governance committees: the specifications committee, dealing with quality control, including tests for endotoxin, sterility and pH, and the water committee. Tremendous quantities of pharmaceutical-grade water—some of Eli Lilly’s water tanks are 12 feet wide and two stories tall—are required to manufacture injectable drugs and vaccines. “When we got the green light,” he says, “we were off and running.” The Atlantic article, The Last Days of the Blue Blood Harvest tells the story of how Eli Lily became a company committed to synthesizing horseshoe crab blood. There is another way though—a way for modern medicine to make use of modern technology rather than the blood of an ancient animal. A synthetic substitute for horseshoe-crab blood has been available for 15 years. This is a story about how scientists quietly managed to outdo millions of years of evolution, and why it has taken the rest of the world so long to catch up. Click here to learn more about the project to synthesize LAL and reduce the impact on the ancient horseshoe crab (and the other species – including humans – which it supports). A very recently-published description of the synthesis is below: Recombinant Factor C (rFC) – a synthetic substitute for LAL – was developed by Dr. Ling Ding and Dr. Bow Ho of the National University of Singapore in 1997. Until recently the manufacturing and patents for rFC were licensed to Lonza – one of four LAL manufacturers in the United States and one of three rFC manufacturers in the world. With the expiration of patent protection in the U.S., there is now an economic incentive for additional suppliers to begin producing rFC. In turn, the addition of new rFC manufacturers will end an important barrier to adoption for the pharmaceutical industry, which has been hesitant to transition to the synthetic alternative without a robust number of suppliers. Lingering doubt on the efficacy of rFC has also been an important barrier to adoption of rFC. Although there is now abundant evidence that the efficacy of the synthetic alternative is equivalent to or better than LAL, adoption of new technology is difficult and change has come slow to the industry. Since the development of the rFC test, numerous studies have been conducted to evaluate its efficacy and comparability to the LAL test for a wide variety of potential applications. Revive & Restore synthesized these studies to demonstrate that all available scientific evidence suggests that commercially-available rFC tests detect endotoxins with equivalent of better efficacy than the LAL test. In fact, rFC signals fewer false positives, which can be costly when they occur in the manufacturing process. Revive & Restore’s efficacy review was published on May 10, 2018. We are optimistic that this will lead the pharmaceutical industry to live up to industry sustainability tenets and make the switch away from the unnecessary use of animals in the production of injectable medications. Source: https://reviverestore.org/horseshoe-crab/#synbio
Other references:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101004101330.htm https://www.businessinsider.com/why-horseshoe-crab-blood-expensive-2018-8 https://blog.frontiersin.org/2018/08/15/marine-science-horses https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/05/blood-in-the-water/559229/ The Atlantic article, The Last Days of the Blue Blood Harvest tells the story of how Eli Lily became a company committed to synthesizing horseshoe crab blood. https://www.audubon.org/magazine/summer-2018/inside-biomedical-revolution-save-horseshoe-crabs Video from PBS: https://youtu.be/e8KlAmtIu1E |
Purple People Poople Eaters
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Co$t of Inequality (part 2 of 2)
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In Part 1 of this post, I introduced the Kuznets Curve (see References) and the main ideas from the October 2018 article How Economic Inequality Harms the Environment. In Part 2, I’d like to provide more examples and supporting information for the concept and connect it more firmly to project management. As a reminder, the main point of the article is: When people who could benefit from using or abusing the environment are economically and politically more powerful than those who could be harmed, the imbalance facilitates environmental degradation. And the wider the inequality, the more the damage. Furthermore, those with less power end up bearing a disproportionate share of the environmental injury.
And as an example of how this manifests itself in real projects, here’s one from The Guardian: To take just one topical example, particulate air pollution is higher in the poorest 20% of neighbourhoods in the UK. But it’s a common theme. Ask yourself how often a new incinerator (project) is proposed for the middle of a millionaire’s row. People that are better off are simply more able to speak up – or perhaps more accurately, be heard – on things that affect them.
I promised that in this Part 2, I would go into more detail about how inequality is bad for business. Let me provide you this extract from The Borgen Project (Mission: The Borgen Project believes that leaders of the most powerful nation on earth should be doing more to address global poverty. We’re the innovative, national campaign that is working to make poverty a focus of U.S. foreign policy) which should help explain this:
Plainly put, extreme income inequality, such as the kind found in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, cause economic inefficiency. The relatively wealthy tend to save a much higher proportion of their income than the poor. In order to grow economically, a society must have robust rates of consumption. However, if most of the wealth of a country is owned by a very small percentage of its population, that wealth is saved, not spent. These savings are then invested by individuals and financial institutions. In recent history, excess savings have fueled speculative investments, exacerbating asset price collapses like real estate bubbles, such as the ones that occurred in Spain, Ireland and the U.S. during the 2008 economic crisis. Furthermore, if consumption rates are low due to excess savings, the central bank of a country may lower interest rates to increase the availability of credit, which can further fuel speculative investment. Inequality peaked just prior to the Great Depression of the 1930s and the 2008 financial crisis, contributing to the underlying economic instability which caused those events. Instead, if the wealth is more evenly distributed among the lower income earners of a society, who spend much more of their income, consumption goes way up. Thus, the poorest individuals, if they are empowered through greater income equality, may drive consumption, opening up new markets and creating increased economic growth. An article recently published in the Washington Post says, Inequality hurts economic growth, especially high inequality (like the US) in rich nations (like the US). In 2014 the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a collective of the world's 35 wealthiest countries including the United States, found that rising inequality in the United States from 1990 to 2010 knocked about five percentage points off cumulative GDP per capita over that period. Similar effects were seen in other rich countries. “The main mechanism through which inequality affects growth is by undermining education opportunities for children from poor socio-economic backgrounds, lowering social mobility and hampering skills development,” the OECD found. Children from the bottom 40 percent of households (a huge chunk of the population) are missing out on pricey educational opportunities. That makes them less productive employees, which means lower wages, which means lower overall participation in the economy. While that's obviously bad news for poor families, it also hurts those at the top. If you're a billionaire owner of a retail or manufacturing company, you want people to be able to afford the stuff you're selling. Henry Ford offered his workers high wages not out of any altruistic impulse but because he wanted them to buy his cars. This also could affect the ability to produce the numbers of project managers needed for the future. Now, let’s return to the environmental effects of inequality. Below you see a graphic from the inspirational article that triggered this two-part blog post. In the first chart, you see the relationship between the degree of inequality (called the Gini coefficient) and the number of threatened species. The correlation line is definitely southwest to northeast, meaning that as inequality grows, the effect is a greater threat to species. That may not mean immediate loss – I mean, who needs the triple-banded yellow salamander, right? But in the long-run, as Philip Crosby pointed out with Cost of Quality, this could spell the end of a major crop or the availability of an essential natural resource – one needed to sustain an important business. In the second chart, you see which factors have the greatest impact on species loss – and there it is again – income inequality is “Pareto’ed” out as one of the top factors.
Source: Scientific American, October 2018 What can project managers do? Seek out meaningful projects. Encourage your companies to look at their own “About Us” pages and find – in their mission, vision, value statements, links to ‘making the world a better place’. I’m sure you will find such in your own organization’s messaging. Hold them accountable and keep them true to their own words. Point out the longer-term benefits of projects that have this aim. On your own, direct your project team to the ‘benefits realization’, post-project continuum that takes place after handover. Does your project provide sustainable economic benefit? Does it consider social and ecological aspects in the longer term? Simply considering that longer term, in and of itself, is a step forward. All things being equal, inequality is a biggie!
References: Article from The Guardian Graphics relating GINI and Environmental effects https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921344909002419 More on the Kuznets Curve https://www.intelligenteconomist.com/environmental-kuznets-curve/ |
