The World Futures Forum is holding its 3rd seminar inviting speakers from UN Millennium Project and Eco-city Builders.
Three speakers are going to give speech on how to strengthen the strategy for green industry as future engine for growth, including Jerome Glenn, Executive Director of Millennium Project, Richard Register, President of Eco-city Builders, and Frank Catanzaro, Chairman of Cyber Node.
They highlighted that green growth is the key to the question of whether we co-exist by the help of eco-friendly growth or we end up destroying ourselves by remaining current growth plan without taking consideration into the future. The following is the abstract from their speech.
1. Why Green Growth? Business opportunities and Global Cooperation
By Jerome C. Glenn, Executive Director
The Millennium Project
Why Green Growth?
We face many environmental problems that will get much worse with the growth of another 2.5 billion people by the year 2050, UNLESS we develop Green Growth. It is not a question of growth or no growth – since without growth billions of people will be condemned to poverty – it a question of environmentally disastrous growth or Green Growth.
The amount of ice flowing out of Greenland during the summer of 2008 was nearly three times more than that lost during the previous year. Arctic summer ice could be gone by 2030, as could many of the major Himalayan, European, and Andean glaciers change water availably around the world. Human consumption is 30% larger than nature’s capacity to regenerate, and demand on the planet has more than doubled over the past 45 years. Clearly this cannot continue indefinitely. This does not mean the world is going up in flames, it just means that we have to focus on what is important to continue the evolution of civilization – and Green Growth is key to our future success.
Global Cooperation
Global collaboration for Korean initiative of Green Growth will be increased by a US-China 10-year climate change goal and global R&D program. This is currently being negated by leaders in America and China. This is not only important for the environment; it is also a strategy to increase the likelihood of international peace. Without some G-2 agreement, it will be difficult to get the kind of global cooperation necessary to address climate change seriously.
To better coordinate such international cooperation could be improved by collective intelligence. Collective intelligence is “an emergent property from synergies among data-information-intelligence, software-hardware, and experts, that continually learns from feedback to produce ‘just-in-time-knowledge’ for better decisions than these elements acting alone.” Imagine establishing a collective intelligence for Green Growth. Then imagine it with easy access for individuals, corporations, universities, governments and non-governmental organizations, and UN agencies to improve the world’s ability to act more intelligently. For more ideas see the executive summary of the 2009 State of the Future at: http://www.millennium-project.org/millennium/sof2009.html
2. Ecocities – Smart Growth Meets Green Growth
By Richard Register
President of Ecocity Builders
In the United States these days, “smart growth” means generally higher density development that works with public transportation and otherwise amounts to more sustainable development in cities: energy conserving, supporting maximum recycling and restoring natural and agricultural environments.
“Green growth” is more often thought of as growth in the sustainable technologies such as wind and solar, pollution abatement equipment, electronic communications that replace commuting and excess travel and so on.
Ecocity theory unites the two – built environment and manufactured technologies – and in addition proposes some basic principles that go farther than either of these two approaches progress, either separately or together. It’s the idea of the city, town and village like a living organism, and like any higher living organism – like us! – the ecological city, or ecocity, is compact and three-dimensional, not flat and spread out like a sheet of paper and dependent on automobiles, all laid out in two dimensions on the surface of the Earth.
Korean cities and towns are much more compact than most in the world today and far more so than American, Canadian and Australian cities. Largely, insofar as a city is built for people instead of designed on the measure of the automobile and cheap energy it is an ecologically healthy city, or an ecocity. This presentation looks into those principles, present historic trends, some of the technologies that connect and many details of architecture, transportation, energy systems and so on within.
Solar electric energy, along with wind, is among the best energy sources for ecocities. One version of concentrating solar energy, shown here, is by heating a fluid to be transported to a steam generator that turns an electricity generator. The test facility for Bright source in Israel’s Negev Desert. The “receiver” absorbs the energy from 1,600 large mirrors and turns water into very high pressure steam at about 200 degrees F to drive turbines and generators to put electricity onto the power grid.
The ecocity itself will be characterized by numerous rooftop gardens of various types.
Ecocities can be linked efficiently in moderate to high density areas with streetcars and rails. The historic streetcars of San Francisco are particularly well loved and successful.
How about eco-houses with lots of features, like green roofs, cistern for collecting rainwater, permeable paving, good recycling and the like?
Now, if we create then use the map to transform a city in the manner Ecocity Builders is promoting we might come up with changes like the following. Here is Denver, Colorado on a snowy day seen from the air. The center of the city is in the upper left and barely visible despite the buildings being 20 and 30 stories tall. The enormous two-dimensional expanse of the city is typical in the United States and uses far more material and energy than more compact cities.
We’ve covered some ecocity subjects - now let’s look at visualizing city transformations and systematizing their transformation, starting with the “ecocity map.” The first step in ecocity mapping is understanding the environment before people took over.
My proposed small towns for situation on the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) when peace breaks out between North and South Korea. Any of the rare places on Earth where people do not go, such as the DMZ which is extremely in terms of biodiversity of natural species, should not be built upon unless three or four times more open space is created exclusively for native species. Note also the three keyhole plazas in this plan. Whole cities can be designed for pedestrians around keyhole plazas. Trees and grass or gardens on Keyhole Plaza City.
If we see “green jobs” as those that build the right kinds of buildings in the right place, such as new housing in areas with jobs and good transit connections, then vastly more jobs get defined as “green.”
www.ecocitybuilders.org
3. Global Cooperation for Green Management
By Frank Catanzaro
Chairman of Cyber Node, Millennium Project
Part of the problem resulting in Global Climate change has been the lack of true global collaboration and understanding on this issue. Global collaboration to manage the climate crisis requires not only new thinking but new modes of working together across the globe and its nations and their various government, corporate and agency silos. The Millennium Project has proposed to the UN and others, a climate change situation room which will allow the universal flow of information regarding the environment to the places it will do the most good. It is called GENIS the Global Energy Network and Information System.
Standing in the way of fundamental change is the inertia of existing systems, mindsets and world views. This has less to do with available technologies and more to do with the will and imagination to see new methods of application and systems of accounting to reframe the problems and issues of global climate change into solvable, manageable projects. This requires a level of adaptation, evolution and change on the part of institutions organizations and governments that is without precedent.
The good news is that the technologies to support this type of collaboration not only exist but seem to be developing in advance of our need for them. This presentation will discuss several including, virtual worlds, augmented reality, and virtual cognitive assistants. The rate of change we face, the rate of adaptation which is required to meet the challenges of climate change may very well be causing a new digital divide, between those who can adapt rapidly to the new tools and those that cannot.
The need is greater than ever for a coordinating and communicating function so as to avoid duplication of effort and to ensure timeliness of distribution of results to chose that need the information. The collective intelligence function of the Millennium Project's GENIS program is one approach which should be tried, there are other nascent efforts to create such clearinghouses, open source repositories and databases of research which as쳌쳌쳌쳌
