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Road to Copenhagen
| Date: |
22 November 2009 07:00 |
| Producer: |
Bernadette Cook
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| Presenter: |
Annika Larsen
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| Researcher: |
Susan Comrie
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| Show: | Carte Blanche |
Here in the arid desert on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, a revolution in renewable energy is taking place. Masdar City, the world's first zero waste carbon neutral city will rely entirely on solar and other renewable energy sources. This clean tech 6-million square metre desert utopia may look like a science fiction vision, but it's fast becoming a reality as construction gets underway. Sustainability expert and the man who greened the White House under the Clinton administration - John Picard - believes cities like Masdar are the future.
John Picard (Sustainability expert): 'Completely solar powered, completely digital. There'll be bodies of water and green. I don't think you'll see it [yet], but if the rooftops don't have solar on it, it's going to be growing food.'
Masdar city will be entirely car free with residents using pods and solar powered people movers. John believes that we need these unique solutions for future transportation.
John: 'Jumping on airplanes is going to be a tough one until we come up with soy-based oxygenated fuels that we can fly airplanes around with no footprint. You won't need a car - you're going to get off the airplane and you're going to touch a button and say, 'I need to be here.' All these opportunities about how to get there are going to pop up on your screen. So it's about being mobilised. It's not about owning a car - it's just about being able to get somewhere.'
While transport may be difficult to solve, the biggest contributors to global warming remain our cities. They occupy three percent of the world's land mass yet contribute more than two-thirds of global greenhouse gas emissions.
John: 'All those buildings out there, they switch on every day, they switch off... well some of them switch off, most of them stay on. And that stranded investment out there - the whole business platform - is not nearly as environmental as it should be. And so this immediate future of green, we have to make that our new economy. We have to mine all the energy and efficiency in the buildings that we've built.'
One man who understands the need for greener buildings better than most is South African born architect Shaun Killa. He pioneered green commercial buildings in the Middle East with his award winning designs - including the iconic World Trade Centre in Bahrain.
Shaun Killa (Architect): 'It was an enormous challenge to do something that nobody had ever done in the world before, because there was no precedent, there was nobody to call, there was no help and a lot of people thought that I was even taking some big risks putting three 30m wind turbines between two buildings in a windy environment, because they move at quite a speed.'
But Shaun says it was a risk worth taking.
Shaun: 'They switched on the turbines for the very first time and we were standing on the bridge. And they started them up and I just stood there and it was unbelievable. I mean, the wind was blowing and they just started accelerating and it was an amazing feeling.'
Estimates suggest that the turbines generate about 40% of the energy needed of these huge commercial towers. It's seen as a catalyst to the green movement in the Middle East with multinationals queuing up to rent office space and be associated with the building.
Shaun: 'The Bahrain World Trade Centre has absolutely transformed the way people consider Bahrain, because it's pushing it right into the future and people are considering that this is a country, or this is a society, which is highly sophisticated, who are conscious about their environment. And probably a message around the world where people are starting to look at integrating large-scale renewables into buildings - not only in the urban space, but within master plans and taking it a lot more seriously.'
Here in South Africa the current spike in energy costs has given the green building movement a major boost says Green Building Council of South Africa CEO, Nicola Douglas.
Nicola Douglas (CEO: Green Building Council of SA): 'The property industry is sitting up and realising that with about 40% of worldwide energy being consumed in buildings - both in their construction and in their ongoing operation - we can have a major impact on this issue.'
The property industry is the sector which can make the biggest difference in the shortest time at the least cost.
Nicola: 'People have accepted that this is inevitable. This is something that's going to happen for so many different reasons and the shift is happening from that perhaps slightly grudging acceptance to a real excitement of doing things differently.'
To incentivise the change The Green Building Council has created a green star rating system for buildings.
Nicola: 'We've brought in our green star South Africa rating system, and this really takes this slightly vague concept of green building, 'Is it only about energy efficiency or is it about many other things?' and it defines it into eight different categories. So it's energy efficiency, water efficiency, it's your impact on transport, and how people arrive and leave from a site, it's your indoor environment quality, and your air quality... those types of things ... emissions off a site.'
Nedbank's new head office in Sandton was the first commercial building to receive a 4 star rating, reducing energy consumption by 30% says project manager Kenn Reynolds.
Kenn Reynolds (Project Manager): 'I think any corporate with a corporate social responsibility outlook on the market place needs to go green. It doesn't only show that there is corporate social responsibility to do it, but there is also a financial incentive to do it. Most green buildings have a payback period of about three and five years. But at the rate that water and energy is increasing in price, those payback periods are going to improve.'
Research shows that these greener buildings not only save money, but they have other paybacks too.
Kenn: 'Working in a green building definitely will help the staff morale and absenteeism and those type of things.'
Nicola: 'Hospital stays in green hospitals are shorter than in other hospitals, children are having better attention rates and learning is shown to be better in green schools and it's very strong in green office environments. And it makes intuitive sense, you know, if you have more natural lighting, more fresh air flow, less sick building syndrome - all of these things contribute to better productivity.'
Annika Larsen (Carte Blanche presenter): 'Climate change imperatives are going to define the way we build the cities of the future and architects are increasingly having to incorporate sustainable, green thinking into their designs.'
As part of the Clinton climate change initiative the R5-billion Zonki'Zizwe development is the first green African city. Built on 200 hectares adjacent to the Midrand Gautrain station it promises to be a vibrant self-contained city.
Nicola: 'You're never going to have a green built environment if the urban planning structure is not addressed in a greener way. So green on a precinct level is going to become very important. And not having people living so far from where they work and where their children go to school, and where they shop. So these mixed-use kind of communities which are starting to come in now, are going to be a vital element of the green cities of the future.'
Melrose Arch in northern Johannesburg is an example of a mixed use development of the future. It offers a stylish integrated work, live, play and shop environment, which aims to create closer knit communities and encourages a pedestrian lifestyle.
John: 'The buildings are going to look amazing because architects are going to start engineering to capture the sun, and use the air to do ten things more than it does today. When you start to harness natural systems, it's just an endless environment of opportunities.'
Menlyn Maine in Pretoria will soon also offer a greener lifestyle for executives in an energy efficient precinct.
Annika: 'If you were given carte blanche, and an endless budget, what building would you like to design?'
Shaun: 'I think I would probably want to design a new city, like a satellite city to whether it's Cape Town or Johannesburg. I'm not talking a megacity, I'm talking 50 000 to 100 000 people, which becomes the benchmark of how to move forward with all the elements of sustainability. People work, play and live in an environment which is almost without cars. And then linking it up to good public transport and having fantastic places to be around. And it becomes sort of a benchmark - a world benchmark.'
John hopes that when world leaders meet in Copenhagen on the 7th of December - they consider these possibilities.
John: 'The mass of the people there will know that we can fix it - at Kyoto they didn't know that. There was a simple organising principle then that we had to do something, and the organising principles around Copenhagen now are, 'How do we work together to fiercely share our engineering and our solutions?''
And the engineers of this carbon mitigation drive won't be the green campaigners - it will be the manufacturing giants.
John: 'If we went over to China today, you are going to see China spending more money than the other 50 major countries in the world are on their environmental programme. And they so get it - they're going to build our electric cars, they'll be the volume and they'll be the one to crack the code on costs. They'll be the first ones to develop wind and solar that's less than what we pay at the grid - they're the real competitors for the utilities.'
It's good news for consumers - they'll be paying less for power and a green economy could offset the recession.
John: 'The green economy will prove out to be black. It will prove out to be a huge money maker. The human factor of green is it's going to be a whole new corridor of employment.'
There's no doubt transforming our cities into efficient clean tech hubs will be history bending and it's happening with or without a binding treaty in Copenhagen.
John: 'I think it's going to prove to be one of the biggest ideas that we've ever come across in humanity... let's hope so right? Nature is not a bad boss either. We should be running to work for her as if our life depended on it, because it does.'
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:While every attempt has been made to ensure this transcript or summary is accurate, Carte Blanche or its agents cannot be held liable for any claims arising out of inaccuracies caused by human error or electronic fault. This transcript was typed from a transcription recording unit and not from an original script, so due to the possibility of mishearing and the difficulty, in some cases, of identifying individual speakers, errors cannot be ruled out.
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