Sustainable Bristol

Visions

Bristol is striving to be the UK’s green capital, a low carbon city with a high quality of life; green open and social.

Bristol sets out its Green Capital ambition

by Paul Rainger

28 July 2011

Big ambitions need a big book. Bristol, the only UK city to have been shortlisted for the European Green Capital award, has now set out part of its stall to go on and win the Green Capital crown in a beautifully produced new coffee-table book.

Bristol – Inspiring Change has been published in partnership with Sawdays and the Bristol Green Capital Partnership, which includes Forum for the Future, whose sustainable Bristol projects are extensively referenced throughout. It celebrates the remarkable journey that Bristol, already recognised as one of the UK’s greenest cities, is on as it aims to become a European Green Capital.

The book is a 192-page, lavishly illustrated celebration of the city’s green successes, including those from the public, private, voluntary and community sectors, and the visionaries that have made those successes possible. With sections on the green economy, food, transport, citizenship, leadership and governance, it presents new ways that Bristolians are living and working together to make Bristol a greener and better city.

As well as highlighting green, ethical and sustainable success stories, Bristol – Inspiring Change also offers up future visions of this great city. A city at the leading edge of environmental innovations, with a vibrant economy that reduces carbon emissions and minimises the consumption of finite resources. Bristol aims to be an ‘Ecopolis’ that takes full advantage of clean and renewable energies and energy-saving building systems. A city-region with resilient local food chains and integrated public transport and cycle infrastructures, fit for its citizens to enjoy at work and play in a high quality, equitable, low-carbon city for all.

You can buy a copy of Bristol – Inspiring Change direct from Sawdays here.

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Summer celebration: Bristol’s first Carbon Champions

by Maddie Goodey

06 July 2011

This West of England Carbon Challenge Summer Celebration Event in July, hosted by Bristol Zoo, brought together over 70 businesses in Bristol who are collectively trying to cut their carbon emissions by 10%over four years.

The event saw the first Carbon Champion Awards, for Bristol’s best carbon cutters (At-Bristol, Burges Salmon and Coda Architects), heard from Bristol Zoo and Forum for the Future’s Jonathon Porritt, as well launching the 2011 report.

Michael Bothamley, Trustee of Bristol Zoo welcomed people to the event. In his role in business he spoke of ambitions of low carbon in the city. He said that the new Local Enterprise Zone will have an ambition of being a zero carbon development. You heard it first here.

Simon Garrett, Head of Learning at Bristol Zoo introduced the work of the zoo in combining conservation, entertainment, research and learning. He also demonstrated the mutual relationships between climate change and biodiversity with case studies from Avon to Africa.

Jonathon Porritt, Founder Director of Forum for the Future, gave his insights on where we are with tackling climate change. Taking us from the lack of action on international agreements through to the difficulty of getting past the Treasury agenda in our national government. He pointed to the importance of business leadership and innovation.

Simon Billing, Forum for the Future, introduced the 2011 report of the West of England Carbon Challenge. Over 70 organisations, representing over 77,000 staff or one fifth of the workforce in the region are now committed to the Challenge. 30 organisations have reported data so far for 2010, giving a collective footprint of 450,000 tonnes. Of the 25 who reported in 2009, 20 reported in 2010, year-on-year reduction of 1.3%. The report card is satisfactory, in the right direction but below the 2.5% per year target. So it’s a C/B, good work but room for improvement. The report includes some great examples of local action and can be downloads below.

The Carbon Champion Awards were then presented by John Pontin of The Converging World. All three award winners have achieved significant reductions year on year. What do they have in common. Interestingly, they share three things. One, they have got a real handle on the numbers and used it to drive the changes. Second, they have all successfully engaged their workforce. Third, they have all taken advantage of appropriate technologies to meet the reduction. They were:

• Burges Salmon made the savings through a night time switch off of all equipment, organised through a campaign which staff called the ‘The Big Switch off’, and through the virtualisation of
  their IT servers, which meant reducing them from 130 to 35.
• Coda Architects didn’t let the fact they’re based in a sub-let office put them off. They plugged in a simple energy monitor to measure their power consumption, and experimented with measures such as reducing lighting.
• At-Bristol initiated regular monitoring of energy use and set up an energy reduction group with staff from key departments, and fine-tuned their progressive building management systems.

Download the 2011WECC report here

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Leading Bristol’s Low Carbon Economy

by Paul Rainger

27 April 2011

The four Councils that make up the West of England (the Bristol bio-region) have long been taking collective leadership to develop the area’s low carbon economy, helping make Bristol a current leader in the UK for green jobs.

Last year, an opportunity arose for this West of England Partnership to collaborate with Forum for the Future to reassess planned actions, and to review appropriate leadership in tackling difficult climate change issues.

The UK has of course passed the world’s first long-term, legally binding legislation to tackle climate change. The Climate Change Act 2008 sets a legally binding target of at least an 80% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, and a reduction in emissions of at least 34% by 2020 (against a 1990 baseline). It also confers specific responsibilities on our Councils to adapt for the effects of climate change.

And the West of England is already a leading environmental technology centre, with the Partnership area home to over 300 world-class companies in renewable energy, waste management, recycling, energy control, sustainable transport, environmental consultancy and specialist services.

Much of the work of course falls to the four local Councils who make up the West of England, but the overarching role of the Partnership and, going forward, the area’s new Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) will be crucial to success in the common leadership needed between all four to create prosperous communities with good transport and growing green jobs.

The transition to a low carbon and resilient future provides significant economic opportunities which have the potential to play a key role in the economic recovery, resilience, competitive advantage and marketability of the West of England economy.

Though 2010, Forum for the Future’s founder director, Jonathon Porritt, led a series of workshops on leadership in tackling climate change with the Partnership’s Boards and the Joint Transport Executive Committee. 

These workshops enabled the Partnership to develop action plans specifically geared at addressing these issues, contained in a report – Collective Leadership for a Low Carbon Economy – which received the strong support of the Partnership Board at its meeting in February 2011.

This report, a key early reference document for the new LEP, sets out existing activities and initial action plans to guide activities at the West of England level which aim to:

• Decrease the energy intensity of the domestic, transport and business sectors.

• Accelerate the development of renewable and decentralised energy infrastructure.

• Stimulate growth in the Low Carbon and Environmental Goods and Services (LCEGS) Sector.

You can download a copy of the report Collective Leadership for a Low Carbon Economy here.

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Minister tours Bristol’s Green Businesses

by Peter Madden

12 March 2011

At the end of February, Chris Huhne, the Government Minister in charge of energy and climate change came down to Bristol to see what the city is up to.

He visited the wind turbines at Avonmouth. He drove Wessex Water’s ‘Bio-Bug’ (otherwise known as the ‘poo-powered car’). And he joined a meeting  hosted by Forum for the Future’s CEO, Peter Madden, to hear from the companies and organisations at the forefront of building the low-carbon economy in Bristol.

The Minister was visibly impressed by the enthusiasm and activity here. He heard from some of Bristol’s most successful green businesses: Garrad Hassan, the world’s biggest renewables consultancy; Marine Current Turbines, the global number one in marine and tidal energy; and Triodos Bank, who lend tens of millions for sustainable projects.

There were some strong messages to the Minister. Pretty much everyone in the meeting said he should set some clear, ambitious, policy goals and stick to them, rather than chopping and changing. Business needs certainty to invest, they said, so don’t suddenly shift the ground-rules – as his department has recently done on support for large-scale solar energy projects.

Mr Huhne was reminded that David Cameron had promised, in his first major speech as Prime Minister, to make Bristol a “centre for marine energy”. This is certainly an area where we could really be a global leader. Round here, we not only have some of the world’s top companies, two great universities, and lots of people skilled in advanced engineering, but off our shores we have some of the best tidal and wave energy to found anywhere. (For example, the River Severn has the second highest tidal range in the world, of up to 50ft, and this creates a great mass of moving water which is ideal for generating power).

We also talked about how to grow and expand our green businesses more quickly. In the UK, we tend to be excellent at the research and development and coming up with the ideas. But we are much less good at commercialising these ideas. Too often it seems to be the Germans or Chinese who end up with the manufacturing jobs that stem from our innovations. We seem to lack the investment to take the kind of small entrepreneurial companies, that Bristol has so many of, to scale.

Chris Huhne promised to work with Bristol-based companies and organisations on how we can grow our environmental businesses. We’re obviously incredibly well-positioned to be at the forefront of these industries of the future and to benefit from the thousands of skilled jobs that would bring. Now we need to get stuck in and grab the opportunities before somebody else does.

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Making Bristol the UK’s Green Capital

by Paul Rainger

20 October 2010

The Bristol Evening Post featured Forum for the Future on its green page this week, with a look our 10 year Sustainable Bristol programme of projects to help make the West of England city-region the UKs’ green capital.

Working with partner organisations and local networks the Sustainable Bristol programme encompasses a variety of projects to tackle key sustainability challenges such as making homes energy efficient and helping organisations cut their carbon emissions.  The programmes’ goals also include reducing dependency on private cars; encouraging local food; and raising awareness of sustainability. 

The feature includes a nice guide to the current projects. You can read the full article below. 

The future of the world is urban. So the global battle for sustainability will be won or lost in our cities. We clearly have to find different ways to live, and city regions are places of opportunity to shape a sustainable future. 

You can follow Sustainable Bristol on the website – www.sustainablebristol.com- or on our Facebook and LinkedIn groups.

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Agroforestry for a Happy Future

by Paul Rainger

18 June 2010

Bristol’s leading agroforestry expert, Adrian Morley, makes the case for our city-regions to focus just as hard on managing their biospheres, as their material flows, on the journey towards zero carbon:

Is the only sustainable security we should be thinking about is our dependency on the practically unrenewable lithosphere – the Earth’s crust? Of course not, we also need to focus on using what’s growing on the Earth to provide for our needs – the biosphere.

So far we can only manage the biosphere by using lots of energy, water and chemicals, to achieve less productive and severely degraded systems than what would have naturally been there anyway. Quite simply we need to stop digging up the Earth’s crust and spewing it all over the place (including the Gulf of Mexico), and start concentrating on managing the biosphere in order to promote its health and to provide for us. If we need to tap into the Earth, let’s be very sensible and conservative in what we use it for.

What are our needs? Is economic growth a real need for our existence, or is it a result of charging interest and making commercial profit on money creation? Is food security a real need, or is it food waste in a retail infrastructure that is the issue to be addressed? Is energy security a real concern, or is addressing consumerism; do we need disposable plastic toy soldiers for our children, or DIY tools that will never do the job that they are supposed to? Do we have to shelve too much innovation because it does not achieve the target bonuses or dividends for shareholders?

Do we have as a species the capacity to raise our consciousness and actions above greed, fear and ultimately war? And why are economic and political requirements the main drivers that define net human activity?

Can we use the biosphere sustainability to produce our needs? The answer is yes, agroecology and agroforestry provide both resource and food needs very sustainability and very efficiently.

So why do we suffer technological fixes that need constant evolution and lack systemic insight, when nature has already provided us the answers? The answer probably lies in the end report that will be produced when the human race fails to survive. Jared Diamond has fortunately already written this report for us: ‘Collapse- How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive’. Deforestation is a main component of civilisation failure: it’s a bit like an Inuit knocking down his igloo in midwinter -a very stupid thing to do.

Consider the benefits of agroforestry:

• increased productivity
• less energy use
• nutrient and water hydraulic lift
• increased natural disease and pest regulation
• increased biodiversity
• restoration of ecology
• soil protection, restoration and remediation
• increased genetic pool with enhanced resilience
• flood defence, water regulation and purification
• carbon sequestration
• wind protection
• landscape enhancement
• multi-resource yields from same parcel of land

Can agroforestry be integrated into current agricultural practices with little disruption? – Yes. Silvoarable agroforestry can incorporate the use of modern machinery and practice if so desired, but also attracting the added bonuses and benefits of agroforestry. This practice has an arable crop alley sandwiched between tree lines. Silvopastoral agroforestry can quite simply be livestock in an orchard, hens in woods, an old and to recently, before EU subsidy changes, common practice. Or agroforestry can replicate a whole forest ecosystem and provide a vast array of diverse resources.

So what do our sustainable cities rely on, considering the masses from them dictate land-use? Can rural and urban integrated transition work together?

The UK’s Royal Agricultural College, Bristol City Council, the Centre for Alternative Technology and others are all collaborating together on a Zero Carbon Bristol event on 29th June. In the heart of a city, agroforestry will feature in an event designed to take zero carbon seriously and bridge the dialogue gap between urban and rural communities.

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How the Hammarby model cuts emissions

by Fran Forman

18 May 2010

Hammarby Sjostad, a district in Stockholm Sweeden set an overall environmental goal for reducing emissions to a level that was 50% lower that for newly constructed housing from the late 1990s. Hammarby is an exemplar city suburb where the existing city infrastructure was re-modelled and reconstructed around existing city architecture and housing stock as well as new builds.

Residents of Hammarby Sjostad are all part of an eco-cycle known as the ‘Hammarby model’, which handles energy, waste, sewage and water for all housing and offices. The model was developed by Fortum, Stockholm Water Company and Stockholm Waste Management Administration.

Hammarby recognises that environmental performance is not just about design, the development also needs to influence how people use places. An environmental centre has been established at the centre of Hammarby to promote understanding of how residents can help in achieving the city’s environmental aspirations.

An example of how the eco-cycle works is the way in which combustible waste from the district is incinerated to produce both electricity and heating. Additionally, waste heat from treated waste water is used to heat up water for the district’s heating system.

In Hammarby there is also a pilot of an experimental on site sewage works which will employ new technologies to extract nutrients from sewage and waste water for use on farmland. Rather than overloading the sewage works, surface water is treated locally.

The planners recognised that environmental performance is not just about design but that the development also needs to influence how people use places. An environmental education centre called the Glasshaus has been established in the centre of Hammarby to promote understanding of how residents can contribute to achieving the city’s environmental aspirations.

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Taking city food to new heights

by Amy Slack

13 May 2010

Increasing awareness of ‘food miles’ and consciousness about the environmental impact of modern food systems over the last few years has rapidly propelled interest in, and demand for, local food. But what does this mean for cities?

How can more food be produced locally in increasingly urban societies where land is a scarce commodity and at a premium?

Whilst traditional forms of urban agriculture have their place; there is increasing focus on how food production can be incorporated into the cityscape using vertical surfaces.

High tech solutions like the proposed Vertically Integrated Greenhouses challenge the vision of the future of our urban environment with hydroponic food growing systems being incorporated into the new construction methods of high rise buildings.

Here, not only can fresh food be produced but the vegetation can also act as a natural heating and cooling system for the building. Whilst such ideas may seem a little ‘space age’, the technology to see them become reality already exists. The Verticrop products produced by Valcent Products Inc. already utilise hydroponic methods on a conveyor belt system that could be adapted for use in integrated building designs.

The idea of vertical farming is now influencing architectural design with proposals challenging the traditional concepts of ‘city farms’. Ideas such as those proposed by Andrew Kranis see whole buildings designated for urban food production with incorporated hi tech systems and renewable energy generation. Is this how cities will feed themselves in the years to come and is this the way we picture the farm of the future?

Whilst such ideas spark debate over animal welfare, sustainable farming methods, and logistics of building design to cater for such systems, moving food production away from current land based monoculture practices and closer to the areas of demand will arguably help reduce the environmental impact of agriculture. This image of the future may also allow land to replenish and cater for nature conservation and recreation.

There is no doubt that in order to mitigate and adapt to the challenges of climate change and peak oil, more food will have to be produced on a local scale. With ever increasing and expanding urban environments this will inevitably mean producing more food within the city.

This will challenge how we use and design our urban environments and presents real opportunities for inspirational innovation – as the saying goes – ‘the only limitation is our imagination’ – how do you imagine a city designed around food?

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Bristol Beyond Oil

by Paul Rainger

20 April 2010

Bristol has become the first UK city-region to start planning for a sustainable future, not just in terms of the new low carbon economy, but by also considering its life beyond peak oil.

Bristol’s Peak Oil study considers the implications for the city-region in the future of declining oil production. The comprehensive 108 page report spells out the potential impact of ‘peak oil’ on every aspect of Bristol life – transport, food, healthcare, public services, the economy, power and utilities.

The UK cities’ pioneering peak oil work to prepare for the future oil crunch confirms Bristol’s green capital ambitions in a region that is already one of Britain’s most energy efficient cities.

The report paints a picture of how life could be under the oil crunch, arming local planners with the information needed to begin to take major action now to ensure that the city is able to thrive in a future without oil.

Barbara Janke, leader of Bristol City Council, says,

“As part of our Green Capital programme, we are already tackling climate change issues head on by reducing our dependence on oil and ambitiously working to cut our carbon footprint by 3% every year.”

• Peak Oil report

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Learning to live in cities

by Peter Madden

17 April 2010

According to the UN, the world reached a historic tipping point in 2007: for the first time, we became a majority urban world. This trend is set to intensify. And by 2030, two thirds of our species will be city-dwellers.

The environmental implications of this are enormous, making some issues (public transport, waste minimisation and low-carbon housing) easier to deal with and others (total energy consumption, air pollution and overall quality of life) a great deal harder.

As mega-cities such as Mumbai, Sao Paulo and Shanghai grow we have no choice but to learn to live together in sustainable ways. This will mean providing a high quality of life for all urban residents. It will also mean reducing the impact that cities have on the wider world.

The impact of cities tends to extend beyond their population or geographical area, with urban areas having a disproportionate environmental impact on the rest of the world. London, for example, has an ecological footprint 293 times its geographical area (that’s a land-mass roughly twice the size of the UK!).

The world’s major cities will face a range of major challenges over the coming decades. All of our cities need secure supplies of water, energy and food to survive. Two years ago, with global agricultural shortages and commodity spikes, UK decision makers got very worried about food security. ‘MI5’, our security services, said we were potentially just ‘four meals from anarchy’. In southern Australia many areas face acute water shortages and water storage levels are on the front page of the newspaper in Melbourne every day. And whether you believe that oil will run out sooner or later, it is clear that our cities are very oil reliant, not just for transport in the cities themselves, but also for the agriculture and global supply chains on which they depend.

And overlaying – and intensifying – all of these pressures is climate change. Cities will have to deal with not only with the policy responses such as more expensive carbon, but also the physical impacts. Throughout human history we have we built our major settlements on rivers, estuaries and coasts. Sea level rise, storms and floods are just some of the impacts they will have to contend with. For cities like Sydney, one of the major impacts might be flood water backing up through the drainage system.

It is clear that the world has to learn to live together in cities in ways that work for people and the environment. We won’t survive without new thinking and more creative approaches. We will need completely new ways to live, work, produce and consume. That gives us, perhaps more than anything else, a challenge to innovate.
Forum for the Future has been working on innovation and sustainable cities for a number of years, helping city authorities, for example, innovate new low carbon services for their citizens.

We have found that there are particular issues when you are designing for cities. It is relatively easy to build new developments more sustainably, starting with a blank sheet of paper. Places such as Masdar – a new ‘sustainable city’ being constructed in desert outside Abu Dhabi in the desert– is being built from scratch using the newest technologies.

We will, of course, learn important lessons from such development. But a huge amount of what we have to do – particularly in the developed world – is to retrofit existing cities. We need to re-engineer cities that have been built up over hundreds of years. Often this will be through overlaying layers of digital information on the physical infrastructure to help a city function more efficiently.

Rather than designing individual products or services, for urban areas we need to design whole systems and rethink the infrastructure in fundamental ways. This goes beyond the technological innovations – such as electric cars or hydrogen buses – to social and institutional innovation – such as local food schemes or congestion charging.

And leadership is vital. Institutional politics often seem to get in the way in cities, partly because the governance structures often do not map well to the actual issues a city faces. It is, of course, preferable to have leadership and vision from the top but sometimes it can come from businesses or community groups, who help to develop a shared vision and a collective sense of where the city needs to go.

In many places, the city government itself is taking the lead. Stockholm, which was designated Europe’s first ‘Green Capital’ last year, is a great example of this. The City of Stockholm has a holistic vision, combining growth with sustainable development for the benefit of its 800,000 citizens. Some 95 % of the population live less than 300 metres from green areas. All trains and inner city buses run on renewable fuels. Green house gas emissions have been reduced by 25 % since 1990, and the city council has the ambitious target of becoming wholly independent of fossil fuels by 2050.

In Melbourne, I saw a smart, but simple, innovation by the City Council. On the wide streets, they’ve moved the row of parked cars out a few feet into the road. This creates a gap between the cars and the pavement. So, instead of cyclists being up against the traffic, they have their own safe space. This doesn’t require extra space, but makes cleverer use of the existing road.

In other cities, the innovation is more bottom up. The Transition Towns movement – which began in the UK, and now has some 275 communities, including in Australia – aims to raise awareness of sustainable living and build local resilience. Communities are encouraged to seek out methods for reducing energy usage as well as increasing their own self reliance. Another grassroots initiative is prolific sprouting of urban agriculture schemes in developed world cities. In Melbourne the city farm, which was previously a rubbish tip, is just minutes from the CBD in Brunswick, and people can learn how to grow vegetables. While ‘Cultivating Community’ is responsible for the management of 20 community gardens on public housing estates across the Victorian capital.

Elsewhere, it is businesses that are driving the innovation. IBM, for example, has launched its ‘Smarter Planet’ initiative, aimed at using information technology and outsourcing to solve the major problems facing cities, at the same time as driving new business for the company. Other major companies – such as Arup, Cisco, GE and Siemens, are also see huge potential win-wins through helping to make cities more sustainable.

In the UK, Forum For The Future has launched an ambitious 10-year programme to help make Bristol the most sustainable city-region in the UK, through tackling key sustainability challenges such as making our housing more energy efficient; helping organisations cut their carbon emissions; reducing dependency on private cars; encouraging local food; and raising awareness of sustainability.

We want to create a common understanding of what it means to be a sustainable city, deliver world-class projects in key areas, and share our experience. In Australia, the Victorian Eco Innovation Lab is taking a very similar ‘catalytic’ approach.

The future of the world is urban. Because of the rapid modernisation of countries such as China and India, we are seeing the largest rural-urban migration in history. How that urban development happens will lock-in behaviours for decades. We clearly have to find different ways to live. Cities are in many ways places of opportunity – hot-houses for economic, social and cultural innovation – so they are likely to be the places where we find these solutions. It is no exaggeration to say that the global battle for sustainability will be won or lost in our cities.

sources:
Masdar image: Fast Company.com

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