No 187: The Crisis Response Register

Exactly one week ago there was a horrific accidental explosion in the port of Beirut. Current estimates are that more than 200 people have died, 7000 people are injured, 300,000 people have been made homeless. Up to $15bn of damage has been caused. As I watched this terrible event unfold I wondered, as I often do when these crises like this happen, what I could do to help.

There are, of course, many excellent, highly capable and well-equipped organisations and charities who are working hard to address the immediate needs. Supporting these organisations, helping them do what they do best, is a given.

However my thoughts turned to the water and sanitation challenges that this accident has created.  300,000 homeless people in a country which had, even before the accident, an unsatisfactory sanitation infrastructure. For those poor homeless Lebanese families this coming winter is going to be incredibly tough. Ensuring that there is no cholera outbreak is going to be a particular challenge.

I was sure that I was not be alone in wanting to apply my professional knowledge to help, but I didn’t know how to do it. How could I ensure that my well-meaning input would be channelled through the right organisations to ensure it complimented the ongoing relief efforts, rather than frustrated them. On a more practical level, how did I even begin? Who should I talk to? And once I had found them, how would they determine whether my skills were useful and complementary, or redundant and superfluous?

It all felt too difficult, too impenetrable. Perhaps I should do what I always do at times like this: feel a little guilty that I couldn’t do more, but tell myself that sitting back and letting others do the do the heavy lifting was actually the best result.

No damn it. No.

Over the past 72 hours I have spoken to multiple organisations and relief agencies. I had thought (hoped even!) that somewhere there would be a register of global water professionals who could be called upon at times like this and all I would need to do is add my name to that list. But time and again I was told that no such register existed. In fact, I was told, if such a thing did exist it would be hugely valuable. After the 4^th time I was told this the penny finally dropped…

With this in mind, we are launching the Crisis Response Register. It is for water professionals who feel they may have something they could contribute – be it for this Beirut disaster or any future disasters. Whether you work within a water utility directly, or are part of the supply chain (contractor, consultant, tech company) your input, and perhaps that of your organisation, could be the thing that makes a difference.

If you feel this strikes a chord then follow this link and register your details. I have no idea if you will be called upon, or if the call comes what it might entail. It will vary depending on the crisis, and the expertise you have to offer. For some it might be that you can provide professional advice from afar, for others it might require getting on a plane. The first step however is creating that register of expertise; an army of willing water-professionals who can be mobilised as and when required.

This is not to take anything away from the excellent organisations who provide support currently. Be it the Red Cross, Unicef, Oxfam, Global Crisis Response or the multitude of others. RedR for example are brilliant. They provide trained people to help during an emergency response. What we are creating here is a register of water professionals who can be called up to support these organisations.

If I discover that someone has already built this Register then brilliant, no one will be happier than I to fold our database into an existing one. But until someone tells me that it exists we are going to create our own. I ask you, I appeal to you, please join me in registering your name and listing the areas where you may be able to help. You may never be called upon. But then again, you just might. And it might be your input which makes a real difference to someone in need.

 

No 186: How the water sector can help solve Covid19 (and, in other news, I am growing a Skullet)

Surely no decade was quite a great as the 1980s. The music was better (Squeeze, Madness), films were happier (Ferris Bueller, Back to the Future) and Supermodels really were Super. Yes, I am talking about you Cindy Crawford (she follows this blog, I just know she does). We even lived through the Chernobyl crisis: I remember vividly being advised by the government that we should all stay at home for a week while the radioactive cloud blew over. A week contained in your house with only your family for company! How would we cope?!

This brings us rather neatly to the ongoing Cov19 epidemic. Hopefully dear reader you are safe, well and sane.

Seven weeks ago I, through the company I work for (Isle Ltd), launched a WhatsApp group for water utilities to share their Cov19 experiences. To be honest, I thought this group might attract a dozen or so like-minded organisations. At the time Italy was 2 weeks into their lockdown and the UK was just about to start. There was a brief window I thought where those who were already deep in the pandemic could help those who were just entering. Within 72 hours over 80 utilities had signed up (from Bogota, Colombia to Hobart, Tasmania). 3 weeks on there was just short of 300 utilities involved (we have had to create subgroups as WhatsApp only allows 256 people per chat). Nothing I have ever done previously, including writing 186 of these damned blogs, has ever caught the zeitgeist like this. It seemed cruelly ironic that this simple Whatsapp platform would be the thing that ‘goes viral’.

I have been blown away by the openness with which utilities have shared. Through the telling of honest stories other organisations have undoubtedly avoided repeating mistakes. Lives will inevitably have been saved. At a time when the world feels quite gloomy this is truly worth celebrating.

Some things have been quite simply fascinating: for example, the morning peak in water demand has shifted from 7 – 8am to 10 – 11am. Clearly when isolated at home people – irrespective of culture colour or creed - like to sleep in (although the Germans are, characteristically, a little more precise; their peak is now at 940am). Furthermore, the domestic water demand has increased by about 20%, whereas industrial usage has dropped by up to 50%. The impact varies for each water utility depending on their customer mix, however those utilities with limited domestic water meters find themselves in the extremely uncomfortable position of providing more water for less income.

My favourite fact however is that at 8pm each Thursday in parts of  Spain there is a 10% reduction in water usage due to people going onto the streets to clap, sing and cheer their thanks for local health workers. Now that is something worth smiling about.

Unfortunately however it is becoming increasingly clear that Cov19 is likely to be with us for many years, at least until we have a vaccine AND >3bn+ people have been inoculated. The initial hopes of herd immunity and seasonality appear to have fallen through, unsupported by the empiric evidence. Bearing this in mind, it is increasingly likely countries will be forced to adopt repetitive cycles of lockdown, responding as the virus takes hold, dies down and then resurges again (just as we are seeing right now in Singapore). If this is the New Normal, what can the water sector do to help?

Well, one very exciting area of research has opened up. Over the last few weeks it has been confirmed that the inactive (ie non contagious) part of the Cov19 virus can be detected in wastewater. This potentially offers the possibility of an early warning system for identifying when the virus is present in a local community. The dream is that samples from the sewer network could provide governments with the ability to deliver a precise, local programme of lockdowns, rather than the current approach of a blunt ‘whole nation/state’ lockdown.

Lots of clever people are working hard to make this dream a reality. If you want to know more then you are welcome to join my weekly webinar (I attempt to summarise in 15 minutes the previous weeks WhatsApp discussion). It is held on Thursdays at 730am British Summer Time and repeated at 430pm. Email Charlotte.dewitte@Isleutilities.com if you want to join. As an added benefit you will get to see me in my 3-months-since-a-haircut state. I am sure we all have our own little hair-dilemmas, however take pity on me. The few hairs I have left on the top of my head stopped growing many years ago, yet the ones at the side and back seem to have the growth virility of a teenager.

Yes, I am growing that quintessential 1980s hair style: a Mullet.

Or if you are bald, a Skullet.

No 185: #TenTimes

The average carbon footprint for a resident of the UK is between 6 – 10 tonnes/year. For my 2020 New Years Resolution I decided to (a) measure my carbon footprint on a daily basis and (b) try and achieve a level of just 3 tonnes/year. I researched various websites, blogs and carbon-measuring sources and decided to focus my monitoring on 4 aspects: energy usage, travel, diet and plastic waste.

Much to my family’s amusement I have covered our fridge with an array of charts and tables over which I gently obsess. They are less amused by how my ‘dad-habit’ of turning off every unused electrical item has reached a particular crescendo. Or how quickly I will share my pre-prepared monologue on the carbon footprint variance between pouring milk (vegetarian, but with milk from a local cow) vs orange juice (vegan, but with juice from halfway across the planet) over my morning muesli. Where I really seem to have pushed the boundaries of acceptable family behaviour is in my obsession (and it IS an obsession) with segregating all plastic from our household rubbish. To be fair, doing the separating is the easy bit. It is the task of weighing, recording and then disposing of it all which is where familial patience runs thinnest. Maybe if I didn’t do it on the kitchen counter I might not upset quite as many people (but where is the fun in wearing a hair shirt if nobody else gets to experience it?). 

We are now at the end of January and the results from Month 1 are fascinating. For example, despite living in a house where gas is only used for heating (we have an electric cooker) the CO2 footprint from my gas usage is 5 times that of my electricity footprint (ie 6kgCO2/day vs 1.2kgCO2/day). Furthermore, turning down the heating and reducing the time that the boiler runs has a negligible impact. It is possible that our 15 year old boiler is inefficient and needs changing. It is equally possible that our neighbours have tapped into our gas line.

On the electrical usage front we are undoubtedly doing better. That said, try as we might, we cannot get the 24/7 smart meter (positioned strategically in the middle of the house so no one can possibly miss its gleaming readings) to go below 200W. Seriously. We have gone around the house turning off every single electrical item, but the reading never goes below 200W. Either the smart meter itself is drawing 200W (unlikely), or, once again, the finger of suspicion points to our neighbours tapping into our electrical circuit. (And to think they seemed such nice people when we moved in.)

Our energy usage is offset by the 7 small rooftop solar panels. Over January the output from these has doubled as the sunlight hours have increased. During the first week of January we ‘recovered’ 0.25kgCO2/day from the photovoltaics, rising to 0.5kgCO2/day in the last week. My hope is that by Spring our PV generation will exceed our domestic electrical usage. Interestingly our neighbours also have pv panels. I am thinking of building a big extension just to overshadow them.

You might expect travel to be the biggest contributor to my carbon footprint but not so. My 2008 Prius generates 200g of carbon per mile, but outside of work I drive less than 10 miles a day (ie 2kg/day). If I started running to the gym it might even be less (and I might be thinner…but then surely I wouldn’t need to go to the gym?). I am not including work-related travel in my calculations. This is because it is dealt with by the company, Isle. At Isle we offset 10 times our carbon footprint. Last year, 10 months into the year, we calculated that our corporate carbon footprint from flights alone was 70 tonnes. We rounded this up to 100 tonnes for the full year and then off-set ten times this amount via the brilliant UN-Carbon Offset Programme (- https://offset.climateneutralnow.org/howtooffset). It is a wonderful website. You simply select your project(s), each of which has a clearly stated £/kg, and then go to the checkout. It’s like shopping on Amazon, but without the guilt. Offsetting a thousand tonnes of carbon took less than 5 minutes and cost less than £3.5k.

My diet is the source of my biggest carbon impact. I decided it would break my marriage to try to calculate the specific carbon input for each ingredient so instead I am standing on the shoulders of giants (Scarborough et al, 2014) and using their carefully researched figures for different meal types. They produced a table for different meals, with a ‘Heavy Meat’ at 7.2kg/carbon, and Vegan at 2.9kg, for example. My average so far is 4.34kg/meal. This puts me just between a Low Meat Eater and a Pescatarian. Or to put it into common language, I am mostly a Vegetarian, but every now and then I like a big roast or a bacon sandwich (Readers of my previous blog will no doubt conclude that this is typical of a middle-class Liberal. I am at least true to type).

The biggest surprise from my little experiment however is plastic. 6kg of carbon is produced for each 1kg of plastic we throw away. When I look at the rubbish we throw away in our house (as oppose to recycle) it is mostly plastic, hence I decided I should include plastic in my carbon metrics. However after a month of diligently separating, measuring and recording it has become clear that while the volume of plastic waste is depressingly large (see photo) its weight is actually very low, typically less than 10g/head/day. It accounts for less than 2% of my typical daily carbon footprint. With this in mind, going forward I am removing the plastic metric from my calculations. Since I weigh the plastic using the kitchen scales this single act may both save my family from the ravages of food poisoning, and may remove the kitchen-ban that I know my wife is contemplating placing on me.

To help incentivise me to keep my carbon levels low I have committed to off-set 10 times my carbon footprint at the end of the year. Why 10 times? Well, the number 10 is particularly special for me this year. Very little happened of note on January 29^th 2010 (in fact, I have searched numerous websites and found it to be a uniquely uneventful date) but, for me at least, it will always be noteworthy. January 29^th 2010 was the official birthday of Isle. It was the day Isle was incorporated. This week therefore marks our 10^th birthday! Over the past decade Isle has steadily grown to become a team of 90 people working across 12 countries for over 300 utility clients.  

As noted above, my dream target is keep my carbon contribution below 3 tonne/year during 2020. If anyone wants to join me in this challenge I would be delighted to share my spreadsheet (it comes with all the usual caveats and denials). Based on my performance during the first week of January I was heading for over 6 tonnes/year,  but the average for the last week has been just over 4 tonnes. Squeezing out that extra tonne is going to be tough. I think I need to go and speak to my neighbours…