With its lofty pines and vast, glassy lakes, its rare roaming wood bison and endangered whooping cranes, Fort Chipewyan seems like one of the world’s last true wildernesses. Yet even in this remote spot, with its rich natural resources, the effects of the climate crisis are an ever-more pressing daily reality.

This community of 1,000 souls, many of whom are descended from the Chipewyan, Misikew Cree and Métis First Nations tribes, have for decades had their heat and cooking power supplied by a diesel power station owned by Canadian energy group ATCO, which trucks in its heavy black liquid fuel via barge down the northern Alberta’s waterways, or via the ice roads that form across its lakes and tributaries during the freezing autumn and winter months. The trouble with this arrangement, however, was climate change. With Canada’s north warming nearly three times faster than the global average, both the river barge and ice road seasons are becoming increasingly unpredictable.

In 2018, a group of First Nations leaders in Fort Chipewyan decided that enough was enough. In a joint venture of the Mikisew Cree First Nation, Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and the Fort Chipewyan Métis Association, Three Nations Energy (3NE) they decided to bring an ambitious renewable energy project to their remote community.

“We worked together and we made it happen,” Chief Allan Adam of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation said at an event celebrating the completion of the project’s second and final phase.

Replacing 800,000 litres of diesel a year, or 2,500 tonnes of carbon emissions, the Three Nations Energy Solar farm project is Canada’s largest remote off-grid solar farm in Canada, with 5,760 solar panels supplying Fort Chipewyan with 25 percent of its energy needs (in the first phase). The solar farm’s energy will be bought under a long-purchase agreement by ATCO and supplied back to the local grid.

Blue Eyes Simpson, Vice President of the Fort Chipewyan Métis Association and one of the founding directors of First Nations Energy, has lived in Fort Chipewyan all of her life. Simpson is area manager for Parks Canada as well as an advocate for sharing the stories of First Nations elders with younger generations, in a bid to reawaken an imperative for protecting the national environment.

“Our people have a proud tradition of making our livelihood from the sustainable use of local renewable resources,”she says. “We are committed to being good stewards of the land for future generations.”

In a picture in which Canadian native ancestral lands are often denuded and polluted by oil speculation, including neighbouring Fort McKay (where emissions from a controversial oil pipeline project have poisoned plants and fish), Fort Chipewyan is a brighter picture. The Three Nations Energy Solar farm was launched November 17, 2020 with a ceremony at the solar farm in Fort Chipewyan featuring indigenous drummers and prayers as well as tearful thanks from the directors of 3NE.

The group now plans to set up hydroponics food production and support other indigenous green energy initiatives across Canada. This model of use of renewable energy goes to prove, Chief Allan Adam of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation says, what can be done if indigenous communities have a 100 percent stake in their natural resources, as well as their future.

“We work with the sun, we work with the wind, we work with mother nature and we work with the water for the children of the future to give them a better life, a cleaner life,” he adds.

Author: Sally Howard, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: 3NE

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The Covid-19 pandemic showed many global city dwellers a future in which we might all breathe more freely. Across the world, as populations were subject to stay-at-home orders and road transport activity dipped, city-dwellers enjoyed clear skies; and a respite from road traffic produced pollutants such as nitrogen dioxides, carbon monoxides and the dangerous vehicle particulates PM 2.5s: tiny specks of pollution which, once inhaled, lodge in the lungs and can cause a variety of health problems.

Those traffic-borne emissions prompted the World health Organisation, in 2019, to characterise air pollution as the number one environmental health risk globally, the cause of an estimated 7.1 million premature deaths per year.

One solution to cities’ pollution problem is air purifiers and, as populations demand clearer air yet policies to reduce car-borne pollution lag behind, air purifiers are big business. Indeed market size is expected to reach USD 22.80 billion by 2028 and is expected to expand ten percent a year from 2021 to 2028.

The problem with standard electric air purifiers however is similar to air conditioners, in that they can compound the problem in themselves requiring power to run, which, in most global contexts, produces additional carbon pollution. Trees, of course, are excellent natural air purifiers but demands for land in cities make it difficult to plant the number of trees necessary to drastically improve air quality.

One answer to this problem also comes from nature, in one young German horticulturist’s design for an air filter that’s based on air-cleansing abilities of common-or-garden moss.

Green City Solutions was founded in 2014 by 29-year-old Peter Sänger, who brought together a team of experts in fields ranging from horticulture to mechanical engineering to design a novel bio-tech filter, the City Tree. “I felt the solution to air pollution can only emerge in combination with nature,” he says, of concentrating his research efforts on moss. “After all, nature has millions of years of experience in air purification.”

Moss is well adapted to the task of filtering polluted air, possessing the ability to bind fine dust and metabolise it. It can filter soot and particulates from the air breathed by 7,000 people every hour. In addition, mosses cool surrounding air by evaporating water on their leaf surface. The problem is that mosses can barely survive in cities due to their need for water and shade. So Green City Solutions solved this problem by connecting a range of species of mosses (with different filtering abilities) to low-energy water and nutrient provision based on unique Internet of Things technology, which measures the plants’ requirements and surrounding pollution levels in real time.

Independent field studies have shown that up to 82 percent of the fine dust in city air can be filtered directly by the City Trees, which the company has installed in cities across Germany, and in London and Paris. Each moss tower has the carbon dioxide absorbing capability of 275 trees.

Positioning is key; as Sänger notes: “Not all places where people live are polluted, and people aren’t everywhere there is pollution. Where the two meet, that’s where we place the trees.” Sänger would like to see his devices installed in the world’s most vehicle-polluted cities within the next decade.

The company is now developing moss-based air filters that are also suitable for consumers to use in their homes or that function – in an extra boon – as attractive greenery for vertical facades.

Author: James Gavin, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Green City Solutions; Peter Sänger and Peter Puhlmann for Green City Solutions; Nate Bell

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The future of global infrastructure is to be found on a humble stretch of motorway in the province of Zeeland, in the Netherlands. In 2010 the Dutch government donated a 400-metre strip of the A58 to Erik Schlangen and his team at the Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences at the University of Delft, to test the radical idea of creating a road surface capable of healing itself.

The porous mixture of bitumen and aggregate stones used on road surfaces across the globe is a dream to drive on, but costly to maintain. Over several years UV light exposure and tyre pressure cause the binding bitumen to shrink, loosening the aggregate and leading to everything from potholes to damaged windscreens and road accidents. Schlangen realised that by incorporating into a novel asphalt tiny fibres of the steel wool that’s commonly used to scrub domestic saucepans and applying occasional induction heat from a modified vehicle, he could initiate a form of self-repair.

“When you heat up the steel, you melt the bitumen and the bitumen will flow into these micro-cracks and the stones are again fixed to the asphalt,” said Schlangen, demonstrating his self-healing asphalt with a sledgehammer and microwave, in a TED Talk that’s been viewed over a million times.

Repairing the material world that supports our modern lives is costly, both financially and it comes to carbon emissions. In 2009, EU governments invested €4.5 billion into the development and maintenance of EU road networks and corrosion of industrial and transport infrastructure is estimated to cost the global economy US $2.5 trillion a year. The arrival of animate materials promises to radically reduce these expenses as it revolutionises the way we understand our built world.

“Animate materials are more like nature,” says Mark Miodownik, Professor of Materials and Society at University College London in the UK and author of a 2020 Royal Society report into the potential of animate materials. “Nature makes materials, but these materials look after themselves, they harvest energy from the sun and can heal themselves. That is where the materials of the future will be.”

The revolution has already arrived in the lab, where design breakthroughs in recent years include a a coating for concrete that contains microcapsules that seal cracks when activated by sunlight, developed by researchers in South Korea; ‘living bricks’, made by mixing gelatin, calcite and sand with Synechococcus bacteria, which regenerate in response to temperature and humidity changes, from a team at the University of Boulder in Colorado; and a self-healing coating that can patch up imperfections on metal in matter of seconds from Northwestern University, an advance on the ‘self-healing’ polymers that are already used by Nissan to heal scratches on car bodywork.

One downside to the coming revolution in living materials, Miodownik points out, is that it disrupts established economies of ‘build and repair’. “Potholes drive economic growth,” Miodownik explains, “as companies have contracts to build roads and also repair the potholes in these roads.” The revolution, he adds, will require radical new business models.

Ten years on, studies on the samples from the A58 suggest that the life asphalt road can be doubled to 15 years if induction heat is applied every four years. Erik Schlangen’s road, he is happy to report, remains pothole-free. “Imagine buildings, roads, bridges, walls and perhaps entire cities that have qualities like these, composed of building blocks that can mimic some of the characteristics of cells and that operate autonomously together to promote growth, adaptation and healing,” the Royal Society Report concludes; daring us to dream.

Author: The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Marc Oliver Jodoin, Ian Taylor, Andy Kuo (Unsplash)

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Imagine being inside a house, a smoky hearth at its centre around which the family huddles for warmth with snow falling in flurries outside. This is how people in Lahaul and Spiti, the remote, high altitude region in Himachal Pradesh, India, spend over seven months of their lives every year. Their need for fuelwood, a scarce but highly polluting resource, is undeniable, given that minimum temperatures in winters dip to minus 30 degrees centigrade. Which is what makes the inexpensive renewable energy innovations developed and implemented here by Ecosphere Spiti, a social enterprise with a passion for eco conservation, responsible mountain travel and adventure, so important.

Ecosphere Spiti uses principles of solar passive architecture: south-facing, direct solar gain windows and insulated floors and walls, to trap the sun’s heat in Spitian homes. Over the years, people here have noted that these tweaks ensure that even when it is minus 30 degrees outside, the inside temperature remains around ten degrees without artificial heating. On average, passive solar rooms reduce a household’s fuel wood consumption to half, leading to savings of USD $130-260, depending on family size. They have also developed solar greenhouses — polythene-covered structures on wooden frames with a ventilator and door, in which villagers can grow food even when it is snowing outside. These ensure that villagers have a supply of spinach, coriander, onions and garlic – not just to consume, but also to sell.

Both these solar technologies make a perceptible improvement in the local quality of life, and cost relatively little to implement. Solar passive houses cost about USD $700 to construct, while a greenhouse can be made for about USD $400.

“While Spiti urgently needs better infrastructure, we have also seen how its vulnerable ecology is being adversely affected by its very creation,” Ishita Khanna, co-founder of Ecosphere Spiti, explains. Ecosphere Spiti uses tourism as a funding mechanism: operating local tours, a café, B&B and a successful volunteer tourism programme to subsidize its development programmes. “Some time ago, volunteers helped build an artificial glacier in the village Demul to recharge the groundwater,” says Khanna. “In fact, they’ve built most of our greenhouses as well!”

Now Ecosphere is studying the potential of cost-effective solar water-pumping technologies to aid people in mountain-top villages, who have to walk long distances downhill to collect even drinking water.

While the need for plentiful direct sunlight limits the replicability of Ecosphere Spiti’s innovative solar technologies, they serve as a model for sustainable development projects in ecologically fragile regions. As importantly the project shows that development goals need not be in conflict with the urgent task of protecting the natural environment.

Author: Geetanjali Krishna, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Spiti valley banner image: Carlos Adampol Galindo/ Wikimedia Commons, 1. Geetanjali Krishna, 2. 3. 4. Ecosphere
(Wikimedia License – https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode)

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“It was an insect apocalypse,” James Mawle says of the moment, last Spring, when he realised that two decades of conservation work on his North Yorkshire sheep, hay and grouse farm had paid off. “The mayfly had hatched and the air was so thick with insect life you barely see. It was like a moment from a David Attenborough documentary.”

When Mawle’s father bought Coverhead in the 1980s, the river from which the farm derived its name had been reduced to a dribble, insect life was largely absent and the land was prone to regular flash floods, or ‘spates’, which washed away smaller river rocks and turned larger rocks, as Mawle evocatively puts it, into ‘grinders for aquatic life’. Mawle was amazed to hear that someone had once offered to buy the farm’s salmon-fishing rights. “What salmon?,” Mawle says, wide-eyed. “How could our poor parched river support salmon?”

The chief culprit was ‘gripping’, the 20th century practice of digging moorland drains to speed up runoff and dry out the ground. Britain’s 1946 Hill Farming Act encouraged it, offering farmers up to 80 percent of the cost of digging the 18-inch deep, foot-wide ditches it was believed would increase agricultural yields (a subsidy that continued into the 1980s). Coverhead’s legacy was a five-mile chain of grips, which had drained the top-level peat and routinely led to juvenile animals such as lambs and grouse chicks getting trapped in its depressions. The flash floods caused by the grips also increased the risk, in an era of unpredictable rainfall, of flooding of communities down-river.

The clincher for Mawle, however, was the discovery that moister peat is carbon-storing peat. “Blocking the grips became the obvious thing to do,” he says.

Mawle took over the farm in the early 2000s and began blocking the grips by forming small peat dams downhill of the drains. He completed plugging Coverhead’s hundreds of grips in 2009,and his farm was thriving.

“Where formerly the [river] Cover was a raging brown torrent or a dry boulder field it was not slower flowing and clear,” Mawle says, “vegetation had returned to the edges and smaller stones were settling in the riverbed; peat was blooming on the moors. Trout and insect life had returned too!”

Rewetting, however, can be a fine balance, with the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust warning that greenhouse gases can temporarily increase from bog habitat as soils rewet.

Buoyed by his rewilding successes, Mawle, with the Yorkshire Dales River Trust, has begun work on his next project: restoring the river Cover’s meander. The Cover, as many rivers, was historically straightened to expose fertile farmland and divert flow to watermills. A healthy river, however, traces a curving route across the landscape, slowing its flow and allowing flora and fauna to bloom. The new project has help from some four-legged friends.

“We’re weaving willow around posts sunk into the riverbed to create something like beaver dams in the hope that beavers will come and finish the job for us,” Mawle says, adding that the new snaking route might entice back Cover’s long-lost wild salmon, “wouldn’t that be nice?”

Author: Sally Howard, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: The Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust

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It is estimated that 20 billion shoes are produced every year. Of these, about 350 million are thrown away every year in the US alone. And they are non-biodegradable. In 2014, athletes Shriyans Bhandari and Ramesh Dhami considered the several pairs of expensive sports shoes they had to discard every year and came up with an idea. Why not recycle the soles of their discarded sports shoes into new shoes? While they were no longer optimum for running, they would do nicely under a pair of slippers… Without any background or experience in shoe manufacturing, the duo probably didn’t even realise that their idea was novel and audacious. Soon, they were able to patent two of their industrial designs and roll out their first line of recycled shoes in 2015. This is how Greensole, a social startup that not only recycles old shoes into new footwear but also distributes them to the barefoot in 13 Indian states, was born.

“Going barefoot exposes people to injuries, parasitic infections and worse. Yet, while food, drinking water and shelter are considered basic to their well-being, wearing shoes is often overlooked,” says Bhandari. “Our retail business and corporate funding ensures that we are able to put shoes on the feet of countless people in the country.”

Here’s what happens to old shoes, once they reach Greensole’s manufacturing unit in Navi Mumbai. After a thorough wash, their uppers and lowers are separated. The lowers are resized; uppers cut for use as straps and laces used in shoe packaging. Even the shoe recycling has a low carbon footprint as it is manually done. The shoes, sold online with minimal advertising, have developed a cult following in India. They’ve featured twice in the India Fashion Week – last in 2019 in collaboration with noted fashion designers Abraham and Thakore.

Partnering with heavyweight corporates such as the Tata Group, Rolls Royce, international shoe brands like Adidas, Crocs and Skechers and over 60 others, Greensole organises old shoe collection and new shoe distribution drives across the country.

“In 2020, we distributed 400,000 shoes to those in need, including returning migrants at Mumbai’s railway stations,” says Bhandari. Corporates front the approximate US$2.7 needed to recycle a single pair of shoes, to be distributed in communities of their choice. Many of them have also organised shoe collection drives with their employees. Meanwhile, Greensole’s retail sales also contribute to their charity work, with a percentage from every shoe sold going into their charity arm. In 2018, Bhandari and co-founder Ramesh Dhami were listed in Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list of Asian social entrepreneurs. The same year, they inaugurated their first skilling in Jharkhand, to train women to recycle shoes.

The Greensole model is replicable in countries where low cost manual labour is easily available. Most of all, it is timely. Not only does it reduce the load on the planet’s overflowing landfills, it makes for the barefoot and fashionistas alike, shoes that truly have a soul!

Author: Geetanjali Krishna, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images credit: Greensole

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In Uganda’s Bidi Bidi, the second largest refugee settlement in the world and home to about a quarter of a million people, cutting trees for brick-making and firewood has resulted in one of the world’s highest deforestation rates. As the country loses 2.6 percent of its forest cover every year, the search for sustainable solutions is urgent. Enter Interlocking Sustainable Soil Bricks (ISSB) technology, a cost-effective, environmentally sustainable alternative to burnt bricks. Made and installed on-site, these make construction cost-effective, efficient and environmentally friendly, believe engineers from international humanitarian charity Mercy Corps.

Cut to 2019, when Mercy Corps’ BRIDGE program funded by the UK’s Department for International Development engaged Haileybury Youth Trust (HYT) to employ ISSB technology to construct two innovation centres in Bidi Bidi. They trained ten women and 16 men in all aspects of construction from foundations to roofing, with a special focus on this new technology. This training has boosted the income and confidence of trainees and ensured they spread the technology further. Florence, a refugee and HYT trainee says, “I’m now able to buy clothes for the children and change the diet at home and hope to regain something of what we lost in South Sudan.”

Initially, many doubted the strength of these bricks; testing has proven them durable and sustainable. Today, the Mercy Corps projects using the ISSB technology have saved 45 tons of firewood, the equivalent to 72 tons of CO2 emissions, and HYT-funded water tanks using the same technology have saved 9.4 tons of firewood, the equivalent to 16.8 tons of CO₂ emissions. In 2017 HYT won an Ashden Award, an honour given to leading green energy solutions, for its vital role in using innovative solutions to climate change, poverty alleviation, and community resilience. HTY has gone on to work with and complete ISSB construction and training projects for partners such as Enabel, Mercy Corps, Children on The Edge, Build Africa, Street Child Uganda, African Revival and Catholic Relief Services.

HYT officials say they will soon have an expert team of refugee and Ugandan graduates in Bidi Bidi that are capable of building using ISSB with minimal HYT involvement and replicating the ISSB technology in other settlements. Already, seven Mercy Corps trained graduates have returned to South Sudan to implement ISSB technology and further train others to use it. Others have gone on to use ISSB technology in housing for their families, hairdressing kiosks and poultry houses. 

“We are confident ISSB will become mainstream in the coming years when it is coupled with an environmental construction policy and spear-headed by more professionals, including architects, engineers, environmentalists, and other stakeholders,” says Edmund Brett of HYT Uganda.

Author: Esther Nakkazi, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves

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