The International Cities, Town Centres & Communities Society Inc (ICTC), is an independent, not for profit association based in Queensland whose main aim is to assist cities, towns and communities to be as environmentally, socially & economically sustainable as possible.  Since incorporating in 2002, the Society has conducted annual conferences attracting 300-450 delegates in cities and towns from as far north as Yeppoon in Queensland to Fremantle in Western Australia.

The 2011 conference, “Cities with People in Mind“, is hosted by Hobart City Council and is being held in Hobart from 25-28 October and includes dedicated sessions on the following:-

• “Sustainable Cities & Towns”
• “Carbon Neutral Cities”
• “Green Building & Healthy Cities”
• “Transport & Urban Communities”
• “Housing Affordability”
• “Infrastructure Planning & Development”
• “Community Building & Consultation”
• “Managing Growth”
• “Regional Strategic Planning”
• “Place Making & Place Management”
• “Business Improvement Districts” as well as others.

25-28 October 2011

Hotel Grand Chancellor
Constitution Dock
Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

For more information visit www.ictcsociety.org

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From “Leapfrogging into a Carbon-Light Future: The End of High-Carbon Prosperity and How Low-Income Nations Are Becoming Climate Resilient” by Martin Wright:

The idea that Africa could somehow leap to a boom economy will strike some as hopelessly wishful thinking. But the seeds of this possible future already exist.  The combination of solar power, mobile phones and IT, for example, is already transforming the economic prospects for villagers across the continent. A simple piece of software enabling the transfer of small amounts of money instantly and cheaply by mobile is plugging remote rural backwaters into the global economy as never before. Millions are saving money, time and their health by switching to clean, efficient sources of energy – from solar to biogas, biomass to hydro. Agricultural innovations, too, are mushrooming, from water harvesting and hydroponics to the precise application of fertilizer and irrigation via GPS.

All such breakthroughs have one common characteristic: they are low-carbon technologies. The phrase has a rather worthy feel – especially when applied to developing countries. But it masks an intriguing possibility: that low-income nations could outflank the industrialized world, skipping the heavyweight, fossil fuel-dependent economic model and leapfrogging into a carbon-light future.

Nothing epitomizes that potential better than the mobile phone revolution. “In India in the 1990s,” observes Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah, Director of the Royal Commonwealth Society, “it took four years to get a land line. In come the private phone companies, and now the poorest Indians use mobiles to their fullest advantage – not just calls, but cash transactions and new business models. Rural India has genuinely leapfrogged the world in optimizing the benefits of this technology.”

As surprising as the extent and speed of the shift is the way it’s been delivered. Once upon a time, late last century, a massive infrastructural achievement like this could only have been conceived as a huge aid project – and one that would probably never have got off the drawing board. If the World Bank had been asked to fund a functioning telephone network for every Bangladeshi back in the 80s, its bean-counters would have thrown up their hands in horror. Instead, it’s happened virtually without any subsidy, delivered by private companies at a profit to people near the very bottom of the pyramid. It’s been repeated right across the developing world – and it’s only just beginning: as IT migrates to mobiles, expect a surge of apps specially designed for Indian farmers, say, or African school kids.

It couldn’t have happened without a parallel surge in solar. Still seen as an expensive luxury in the rich world, it has spread rapidly among off-grid communities in developing countries; sometimes subsidized, increasingly not. A typical solar home system, providing lights, mobile charging and power for TVs, radios and DVDs, costs around $500. Not cheap, but thanks to the widespread availability of micro-credit, increasingly affordable. The benefits in terms of education, health and income-generation are nothing short of revolutionary. Millions of solar installations have been sold over the last decade; the market is growing exponentially, and specialist companies like India’s SELCO, and the Indian-American D.light, are becoming serious players. [...]

The real excitement is the way technologies such as these can combine to create a new economy. Mike Harrison of the UK Department for International Development (DFID) in Kenya sees signs of this happening already: “There’s a huge number of individual initiatives, and we will continue to see lots of these being successful. Microgeneration, mobiles, IT breakthroughs, water harvesting, community jatropha plantations…could these spark some kind of momentum and change the game completely?”

It’s a question explored in a major new study by Forum for the Future, funded by DFID. The future climate for development: scenarios for low-income countries in a climate-changing world sets out a range of possible scenarios for the coming decades. They are not all exactly rosy – one scenario foresees a world in which oil shortages play havoc with the global economy. But they share a common conclusion: that the days of high-carbon prosperity are over. As lead author Jemima Jewell says: “Low-income countries cannot and should not have to make a false choice between addressing climate change and development. The report clearly demonstrates how the two are fundamentally, inextricably linked, with future scenarios to provide a practical means of exploring how low-income countries can best capitalize on the synergies.”

[...]

So how might a low-carbon future for low-income countries take shape? In energy, expect networks of smart micro- and mini-grids, using everything from solar and wind to mini-hydro and biomass. These could prove a far more effective way of delivering electricity to rural and even urban areas than attempting to roll out an inefficient, centralized system which in many countries is already stretched to breaking point. It’s a possibility explored in The future climate for development, and one which is already taking shape, as governments begin to recognize the potential. Nepal is planning mini-grids for its remote mountain valleys; China is rolling them out in sparsely populated western provinces; and the Indian Government has finally unveiled its much vaunted ‘Solar Mission’, with a target of installing a hefty 20GW of solar by 2022 – and bringing its price down to a par with coal generation.

[...]

Cities which have yet to collapse in gridlock or spend billions on old-style metro schemes, says Chris West of the Shell Foundation, could leapfrog to next generation urban transport systems, like bus rapid transit (BRT) of the sort pioneered in Curitiba (see, ‘Exclusive interview with the man behind Curitiba’s master plan’). He sees a future for “small, efficient bus fleets, structured like an underground but running on the surface…Undergrounds are so expensive, no city ever recovers the cost,” he says. By contrast, land values around BRT networks go up, and so rising rents swell the city coffers. Adair Turner sounds a cautionary note: “Status fascination remains a problem… High-income people in London will use the tube. High-income people in Nairobi will not use the bus. We will not have emerging economy middle classes immediately jump to the attitudes of the green middle class in high-income countries.”

[...]

As the ‘leapfrogs’ multiply, so developing countries will start to be attractive places to do business. Some companies could relocate their HQs there, drawn by cheap, low-carbon electricity and a vibrant workforce. Western countries could find themselves scrambling to keep up, says Camilla Toulmin, Director of the International Institute for Environment and Development. Unless we meet tough carbon reduction targets, she argues, we will be increasingly left out of the new economy. She cites a cautionary tale from the last century: “The US auto industry fought tooth and nail against government regulation on emissions. The net result was a complete inability to compete with the Japanese and Europeans for the 21st century car market. It shows how it’s a real mistake for government to listen to industry lobbies too much!”

[...]

It’s easy, of course, to get carried away on a rush of optimism. Toulmin sounds a note of caution. “[The low carbon transition] is not going to happen by itself… you need a mixture of measures, some economic such as subsidies, some institutional – like establishing and safeguarding land rights. And you need a proper price for carbon.” Other experts emphasize the need for vast improvements in fiscal and regulatory control, and in governance – with trust and transparency still lacking.

But virtually all agree that a simple functioning carbon market would be the single most effective intervention. “The minute you charge a proper price for carbon,” says Alan Winters, Chief Economist at DFID, “many other sorts of decisions – on food miles, on energy sources, and so on – become perfectly obvious. So many policies would be simpler if we could have a basic global carbon tax, involving every significant player. Yes, it’s politically difficult, but [it] is also the easiest solution in the long run.”

Instead, argues Hande, the Government should think: “‘What are the best interventions we can make to meet the needs of those 100 million households?’ And once you start looking at that, everything changes. A lot of people’s basic needs – like cooking, lighting, education, ways of earning income – can best be met with a combination of low-carbon interventions – solar, biomass, biogas, micro-hydro, and so on. These are site specific, highly efficient ways of meeting those needs; they’re not dependent on help from outside. So there’s a huge potential for developing countries to grab this with both hands, rather than just complain about the rich world.”

Perhaps the most crucial shift of all, then, is not one of technology, politics or money, but of attitude. It’s early days, but from India to Africa to Latin America, there are signs of a break from the post-war consensus that development necessarily involves ‘catching up’ with the industrialized West. Catching up, that is, through a distinctly 20th century mix of fossil fuels, heavy industry, intensive chemical-fueled agriculture and mass urbanization. “We might just be looking at a ‘values leapfrog’,” says Jewell, “where because low carbon living carries so many benefits in its wake, people see it not just as a necessity, but as an aspiration.”

Such a leap could give a whole new slant on that hackneyed term, ‘development’. In years to come, perhaps, ‘developing country’ will mean just that: unfolding and evolving, rather than striving to emulate the fossilized model of the 20th century West.

Read the full article by Martin Wright on WorldChanging.

Image: 3degreesinc

San Francisco International Airport (SFO) is launching the Climate Passport program allowing travelers to offset the impact of their air travel through an airport kiosk. This will be the world’s first airport kiosk-giving people the opportunity to calculate the environmental impact of their flights and purchase carbon offsets to address that impact while at the airport.

Where does the money go? The City has conducted extensive research on each project supported by the program to ensure that all carbon offsets are sourced from a specific project that results in real, quantifiable, permanent greenhouse gas emission reductions.

The offsets for Climate Passport customers, supplied by San Francisco based carbon firm 3Degrees, are currently sourced from the Garcia River Forest, a conservation-based forest management project located in Mendocino County, California. Formerly a heavily cut forest, this project is helping bring back Redwood and Douglas fir trees to the Garcia River Forest. As a result, huge amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) are absorbed and stored, and native habitats are restored and protected. Offsets from the Garcia River Forest Project are third-party verified against the Climate Action Reserve’s rigorous, transparent and comprehensive forestry protocol.

A portion of the offset sales will also go to the San Francisco Carbon Fund, helping to develop local San Francisco carbon reduction projects. The first project supported by the fund is Dogpatch Biofuels, San Francisco’s only publicly-owned biodiesel filling station. It is estimated the Dogpatch project will reduce as much as 660,000 pounds of CO2 in its first year of operation. Offsets will also help to pay for the planting of urban trees in San Francisco.

See the full article by Gavin Newsom.

Source: World Environment News

Image: Hannam Vale

The Australian Farm Institute has launched its FarmGAS Calculator.

The Calculator is an online application which enables farmers to model both the financial and greenhouse gas outputs of farm activities and the implications of changes in enterprises. The FarmGAS Calculator is available free online for anyone to access. The FarmGAS Calculator includes individual calculators for the major livestock and cropping enterprises, and any combination of these enterprises can be added to create an individual farm business. Farmers can come back to the calculator at any time to update or change their production data, or complete the process in stages.  The Calculator applies the same methodology that is used by the Department of Climate Change in the estimation of Australia’s National Greenhouse Gas Accounts; and provides reports on the annual amount of methane and nitrous oxide emitted by each enterprise expressed as carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2-e).

Farmers enter details of their enterprises (both financial and production) to calculate enterprise gross margins. The following enterprise types can be analysed using FarmGAS: beef production (both breeding of progeny and fattening), sheep production, broadacre cropping, irrigated cropping, intensive livestock systems (beef feedlot and piggery), perennial horticulture crops and environmental tree plantings.

FarmGAS is the result of an Australian Farm Institute research project on greenhouse gas mitigation options for Australian farmers. Funding for the project was provided by the Australian Government Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry under the National Agriculture and Climate Change Action Plan: Implementation Program

Abstract: “Whole-house thinking”, Dr. David Strong, The Ecologist, 20/06/2008
“What’s the point of zero-carbon homes that aren’t fit for habitation? There is more to sustainable building than meeting Government targets, argues Dr David Strong

The UK Government has declared a laudable and ambitious plan to ensure all our new homes are zero carbon by 2016 and new non-domestic buildings zero carbon by 2019. The impact of this plan has been felt throughout the property and construction industry, and the drive towards zero-carbon has already had a powerful effect in galvanising the house-building and property development community, and in stimulating innovation. I am not sure that would have happened without such a strong legislative and policy initiative.

Of course the huge surge in interest in sustainable building is good news. After 35 years working in the industry, it is highly gratifying to see sustainability finally reaching the top of the political, planning and construction agenda. The emphasis being put by the Government on more energy-efficient buildings, and greener communities generally, is a truly welcome and encouraging sign.

However, those of us who are passionate about delivering a genuinely sustainable built environment currently face a real dilemma.

Here’s our problem: there is so much more to delivering exemplary built environments than zero carbon. In fact, there is even a danger that a fixation on zero carbon may result in highly perverse outcomes and deliver seriously damaging and unintended consequences in terms of sustainability – with the pursuit of the ‘best’ becoming the enemy of the good.”

The full article can be viewed at http://www.theecologist.org/pages/archive_detail.asp?content_id=1879.

If you are interested in joining the network free of charge, please visit the “Documents” section of www.cities-for-mobility.net (“membership forms”) or write to cfm@stuttgart.de.

You are kindly invited to join existing project initiatives and to bring in new ones.

Currently the network members put special emphasis on the crucial issue of rising energy prices in the ending oil age. How will local authorities be able/enabled to guarantee in the future sufficient mobility services to their citizens at affordable prices? The rational use of energy, energy-efficient vehicles as e.g. bicycles or electric mobility (above all Light Electric Vehicles – LEV; http://www.pedelec.com/main.php?language=en) and the use of renewable energy sources in transport are among the most urgently needed and most promising solutions that are already available at present.

C4M members are invited to gather in Stuttgart at the yearly World Congress at the beginning of June (next event: 15-16 June 2009) or at Regional Congresses in other parts of the world.

Carpooling, Carsharing and Walking School Buses
Transportation is a major focus for planners in cities and municipalities, and while increasing gas prices are being felt across the board, they are much more evident at the pump. Nationwide spending on gas in the US has increased by 26% to 5.2% on average overall. How can one curb spending on gas and all the related costs of car ownership while still getting around? Shelby Tay offers some examples of community activities that can help us make the transition away from our gas guzzling ways. Read more here.

Online Resources
This time of year also brings the start of awareness campaigns around the world, including Bike-to-Work week and car-free festivals that encourage us to be smarter with our travel. May is national bike month across the United States. Check out 50 ways (large PDF) to celebrate Bike Month and browse bike advocacy groups by state to find one near you, courtesy of the League of American Cyclists.

Here are some more resources to give you some ideas:

• Interested in seeing what it takes to organize a carfree day in your neighbourhood?

  Download Sierra Club of Canada: How to Stage a Carfree Day in Your Community.
• Need some graphics to spice up your latest poster or news release?

  Browse the World Carefree Network: Carbusters Graphics Book.
• Want to show a friend a video illustrating how carsharing works?

  Take a peak at the World Carshare Video Library.
• Unsure whether you’re ready to take to the streets on your bike or want to find ways of making streets more bike friendly?

  Read through Better Environmentally Sound Transportation (BEST)’s Guides: Safe Cycling Tips, Street Reclaiming Guide
• Are you an employer and want to encourage your employees to bike to work?

  Consult the London Cycling Campaign: Guide for Employers

To read more about The Relocalisation Networks’ work visit http://www.relocalize.net.

“Four- and five-year-olds living along the city’s greenest streets were less likely to have asthma than young children living in sparsely planted neighborhoods, Dr. Gina S. Lovasi and colleagues from Columbia University found.

“We think that trees might have a beneficial effect on air quality — affecting air quality right at the street level,” Lovasi told Reuters Health. While the effects were independent of poverty and pollution, the researcher added, its possible street trees may simply be a stand-in for a healthful environment. “We’re not confident that it’s the trees themselves that are what’s driving this.”

Asthma rates have risen sharply in the US since 1980, and inner cities have been hit particularly hard, Lovasi and her colleagues note in their report. Trees could cut asthma risk by cleaning the air and encouraging kids to play outdoors, they add; but the pollen they release could also contribute to asthma attacks. To investigate, the researchers compared a census of New York City’s half-million street trees from 1995 to statistics on asthma prevalence and hospitalisation rates for 1999.””

To read the full article visit http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/48292/story.htm.