When in 1997, Dutch filmmaker Josepha Wessels arrived in Shallalah Saghirah, a small village on the fringe of the Syrian steppe southeast of Aleppo, it was like stepping back hundreds of  years. “There were all of these wonderful little, white-painted beehive houses,” she says. “It was very rustic and had no electricity supply.” The most remarkable historical artefact, however, was beneath Wessels’ feet. The village’s water arrived via a series of tunnels that were constructed not hundreds but 1,600 years ago. “To some people it sounds dull but the qanats really excited me,” Wessels says.

Qanats were first laid down during the Byzantine-Roman era (395 to 1453CE). They consist of a series of porous subterranean wells connected by gently sloping tunnels that use the force of gravity to transport water to the earth’s surface. They were traditionally used to provide a reliable supply of water to human settlements and to irrigate fields in hot, arid and semi-arid environments.

“In Greek and Roman times the qanats played a key role in the development of empires and thriving cities such as Palmyra,” Wessels, who went on to author a PhD on the topic, explains. Spreading with the Persian empire from south to Egypt and and as far east as India, qanats – also known as kariz – fell out of use from the 1960s on with the advent of diesel-driven pumps and private wells. 

But could they be the answer to the Middle East’s water woes? Today a combination of that 20th century over extraction and climate change has led to a crisis for water tables in the already drought-prone region. Although Wessels warns against a facile link between drought and political instability, a 2020 report by the University of California argues that a severe drought, worsened by a warming climate, drove Syrian farmers to abandon their crops and flock to cities, helping to trigger today’s brutal civil war. 

In troubled Syria and in Iran, Jordan and Oman, water shortages are an increasing threat to both livelihoods and liveability.

Wessels’ chance trip led, in the summer of 2000, to a participatory project in which a small group of Shallalah Saghirah villagers cleaned and renovated their village qanat. Wessels, with colleagues including her hydrologist husband Robertus Hoogeveen, went on to lead similar community-led renovations of qanats in towns including in Al Dumayr, a city located 45 kilometers north-east of Damascus, and Qara near to the border with Lebanon with funds from, amongst others, the Netherlands Government. Wesssels soon found that although over pumping by mechanical means was a feature of qanats falling out of use, often they had simply become blocked with calcareous deposits or debris as communities lost to knowledge, or will to maintain them.

“Qanats are simple technology, but every ten years or so they need to be cleaned out, relined so they don’t collapse and desilted,” Wessels says. “Importantly, you cannot do this without the community working together.” Wessels adds that whilst Iran still boasts individuals capable of building qanats – known as muqannis, and often trained by their fathers – Syria now lacks these traditional skills, and thus relies on ancient qanats laid down hundreds, or in some cases thousands, of years ago.

There are obvious attractions in reverting to this ancient water extraction system in our turbulent, heating times. Qanats have the advantage of being resistant to natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods, and to deliberate destruction in war. Furthermore, they are almost insensitive to levels of precipitation, delivering a flow with only gradual variations from wet to dry years. The abandonment of qanats is a warning sign that groundwater in a region is being overexploited, says Majid Labbaf, who has worked on the reconstruction of qanats in Iran, Iraq and Azerbaijan. “The drying up of the qanats is an indication of a disconnection between humans and their natural environment,” he says.

Sadly, the city where Wessels original renovation took place is today abandoned due to Syria’s long civil war, although qanats in Al Dumayr and at Qara are still in operation. Wessels hopes that should inhabitants return to Shallalah Saghirah, they’ll find its ancient qanats will still be able to provide sufficient water for community life. Wessels also welcomes bids to recognise qanats as prime examples of Islamic heritage for example in the case of the UNESCO world heritage listing of Persian qanats in Iran. For successful restoration, state actors also need to be involved, she says, as qanats have to work in tandem with modern piped water systems. This, she adds, is not just a case of returning to the ‘old ways’.

“By rehabilitating the qanat system in combination with efficient groundwater management measures water resources, in Syria and elsewhere, can be saved for future generations,” she said. “But for that you need political will, and you need peace.”

Author: Sally Howard, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Robertus Hoogeveen and Lund University

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Think of the Cotswolds countryside and what springs to mind? Green, sheep-dotted fields? Honey-stone cottages? Neatly tended gardens with flower beds in full summer bloom? What about lawns and verges that sprawl unmown as they sprout daisies, clover and that most reviled of gardeners’ weeds, the shock-haired common dandelion?

One Cotswolds village has challenged British gardeners to cast aside their famous prediction for neatly trimmed lawns and rigorous weeding of unwanted plants. Tysoe’s journey began in spring 2019, when a handful of its residents refrained from mowing their lawns during May, the month when emerging bumblebees and hoverflies are feeding on the rich nectar of wild plant species such as dandelion, bluebells and cowslips. The campaign, dubbed #NoMowMay, was first proposed by British wild plant conservation charity Plantlife in 2019, as a way to protect endangered species as well as the fast-disappearing natives that feed on wildflower nectar and whose populations are threatened by factors including global warming.

In Tysoe, locals took to it with gusto: sowing wild flower seeds, refraining from mowing and installing Brian May, a scarecrow who inadvertently resembled the legendary guitarist with British rock group Queen, to deter birds from pecking at wildflower seeds and shoots.

“The effort has been growing every year since,” Rosemary Collier, one of the project’s local coordinators and an entomologist at Warwick University. “The idea to make space for nature came from members of the church and we first rewilded parts of the churchyard. Then the parish council came on board and we re-wilded some of the parish’s verges. We also harvested seeds from local native wildflowers and sowed these alongside yellow rattle, which is semi-parasitic and suppresses grass, allowing other wildflowers to grow.”

Tysoe villagers are part of a broader citizen-led British green volunteering trend that’s been dubbed ‘ungardening’, which urges Britons to let 30 percent of their gardens and public spaces grow wild for the benefit of native wildlife. The trend can present a challenge to British tastes, admits Shirley Cherry, who coordinates a conservation campaign to turn Tysoe into a year-round wildlife-friendly village that’s sprung from the village’s rewilding efforts, Tysoe Wildlife.

“You won’t win everybody over because some people like primness in their gardens,” Cherry says. “Nature likes things messier: curving lines rather than straight lines, plants left to grow.”

On a mild day this May, Tysoe’s verges bloom with daisies, buttercups and wild violets as bees fly in busy arabesques and passersby quizzically stop to read the signs erected to explain the thinking behind the villages’ unkempt verges. Collier, who studies insect counts in her work at Warwick University, says that quantitative analysis of the impact on Tysoe’s insect life is tricky but that she had noticed more bees in the village this year, as well as a greater range of insect species.

Any good news is much needed. A 2019 study found that a third of British wild bees and their pollinating relatives, the hoverflies, are in decline, with habitat loss and climate change thought to be the principal causes of the insects’ demise.

Collier has enjoyed the flowers that have sprung up on her village’s unmown verges, including nectar-rich wildflowers such as oxeye daisy, field scabious and knapweed. She’s also pleased that dandelions, unsung kings of the pollinating world, are being rehabilitated, in Tysoe and beyond.

“People get annoyed with dandelions because they’re so good at dispersing their seeds but they’re amazing pollinators because they’re composite flowers with lots of little flowers in their head,” she says. Collier hopes such efforts will lead to a renewed appreciation of the environmental benefits of wildflower such as dandelions and nettles and the important role they play in supporting insects and animals higher up the food chain.

Author: Sally Howard, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Unsplash, Rosemary Collier and Sylvia Davies

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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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At almost 4,000 meters above sea level, the high-altitude grasslands of Peru, known locally as punas, are a complex and increasingly fragile ecosystem. Climate change, the melting of glaciers and unpredictable rain patterns have shrunken the wetlands, with alarming consequences for some of the country’s most vulnerable communities, who depend on them to graze their sheep, alpacas and llamas. Though Peru is home to 70 percent of the world’s tropical glaciers, their size has diminished by 40 percent in the past four decades. As glaciers recede, the drying grasslands force herders to concentrate in smaller areas, leading to intensive grazing practices, which further degrade the puna.

In search of a solution, the residents of Miraflores and Chanchayllo, two small Andean villages in the Nor Yauyos reserve, decided to look back into the past; a bet that has yielded extraordinary results. With the help of the U.S. non-profit The Mountain Institute (TMI) and enlisting Colombian archeologist Alex Herrera, local authorities were able to bring back to life a 1200-year old ancestral hydraulic system. The complex network of waterways had been used for centuries, but it was abandoned in the 17th century when Spanish colonizers forced indigenous populations to relocate.

The silt dams, reservoirs and canals were used by ancient communities to slow the movement of water through the soil and grasses. The slower pace of water they produced mitigated the impact of both floods and droughts, created nutrient-rich soil and expanded the wetlands, allowing for rotational grazing. While livestock and crop productivity have indeed increased since the system was revived, Herrera explains that the success of the project should not be measured in terms of output, but of sustainability. “Andean knowledge is not about maximizing production, but minimizing risks,” he tells us, “and that can be antithetical to the current growth paradigm.

Ancestral technologies look to increment production to provide food for everyone over time, not to increase revenue.”

For the team behind the revival of the waterways, its success lies in its bottom-up participation and collaboration. The initiative was decided upon in community assemblies and relied heavily on local knowledge. The project is not an off-the-peg solution: combining, as it does, complex forms of social organization and an understanding of the ecosystem built over centuries and passed orally across generations.

Though the TMI believes the success of the project raises hopes for highland communities everywhere, Herrera is quick to point out that adapting it to different contexts might prove to be a complex endeavor. “Andean technology is not just material; it is also the capacity to organize work over time and space. This type of solution requires local knowledge and, more importantly, a local commitment to sustain it over time. And this can only come from the communities themselves, not from external actors,” he explains. Listening to indigenous populations, he adds, is a good place to start.

Author: Jimena Ledgard, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Grassland banner image and 1. Alexander Herrera Wassilowski, 2. The Mountain Institute

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For fish, rivers are high-speed traffic lanes in the same way that motorways are for humans. The Ruhr in west Germany, for example, is such a highway, leading fish to spawning and feeding grounds as well as summer or winter resting places in small lakes and tributaries. On those motorways, however, fish, just like humans, also have to deal with narrow lanes, road works or complete closures. And any such obstacle can have serious consequences for species diversity.

“Fish need unobstructed water ways as they depend on different conditions in different life stages,” says Svenja Storm, a fishing biologist at the regional fishing association of Westphalia/Lippe. “Where an adult fish finds the optimal food for itself, there does not have to be a suitable place for the positioning of spawn or the growth of the young fish. In fact, all fish species migrate in the course of their life in order to optimize their food intake, to avoid unfavourable conditions such as water bodies falling dry to increase the reproductive success.”

One man currently trying to solve this problem is Markus Kühlmann. The 53-year-old engineer has spent the last nine years transforming the 219-kilometre-long Ruhr into the aquatic superhighway it once was. At Baldeney weir near Essen, Kühlmann, together with a team of engineers, biologists, ecologists and hydraulic engineers, developed a system that is unique to the world: a continuously running elevator which transports the fish to the top of the weir.

Part of the impetus for the project, which cost a cool US $8 million, were regulations published by the European Union and the German Environment Agency which require all water bodies in Germany to be in “good condition” again by 2027. Within this regulation was the provision for every German river to be passable for fish.

There being the political will to get Kühlmann’s project off the ground, there was an immediate problem. This location in the Ruhr was not spacious enough for a traditional fish ladder (a series of pools where one is a little higher than the next to allow fish to climb the distance step by step).

Looking for an alternative, Kühlmann found novel fish elevator designs in France, Australia and the United States: “But they did not cover enough height or were created only for certain species,” he says. “We had to come up with something completely new.” He teamed up with engineers from southern Germany as well the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology to first develop a computer simulation.

The way the eventual elevator design works is simple: there’s a tube with a flexible chamber; when the chamber is at the bottom, the fish enter, get transported nine meters upwards and exit the chamber again to continue their journey. To prevent fish from queuing in front of a closed door at the bottom while the lift is at the top, the system consists of two tubes with alternating elevators. Kühlmann and his team developed specific algorithms and underwater sonars to detect when the chamber is full or if a particularly large fish – possibly a predator – is waiting in the elevator and preventing other fish from entering. (The large fish is then transported separately.) “A second software is fed with environmental data that influence the migration activity of the animals, such as season, water temperature or moon phase. That way, the operating intervals of the elevator automatically adjust,” Kühlmann explains.

After years of development, the fish elevator started operating in August 2020 and has been running round the clock since then.

Officials from other cities such as Augsburg are looking to adopt the high-tech elevator model, although Kühlmann admits the price tag of what’s currently a bespoke build will inhibit roll-out of replicas of the Baldeney fish ladder across the globe. That said, Kühlmann hopes his insights will help other regions to think more radically about how they can help migratory fish get from A to B.

Author: Florian Sturm, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Florian Sturm

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The scars of the ice age may be carved into Cumbria’s sweeping valleys and fells, but that’s not all that remains of the era.

Ennerdale Water, a glacial lake in the western Lake District, is home to England’s last migratory population of Arctic charr. Landlocked here since the ice retreated, now the fish emerge under cover of darkness each November to spawn in the adjoining river instead.

Yet that instinct has proven problematic, exposing this threatened aquatic species to water pollution in an environment where the gravel the fish use as their spawning nests was in short supply. Gareth Browning of Forestry England explains that the Ennerdale population had plummeted to around 20 spawning charr by the end of the 1990s. Having outlasted the glaciers, the charr was about to disappear from the lake forever.

At that point, local landowners stepped in to form the Ennerdale Arctic Charr Restoration project. It remains a collaboration between the Environment Agency, Forestry England and other Wild Ennerdale partners.

Unfortunately, they didn’t know much about the fish at first. “It was very much initially a discovery project,” Browning says – and this was its own challenge and led to a process of trial and error.

The team’s first intervention was to replace a crude pipe bridge on the River Liza, which was blocking water flow, hoping this would once again allow the charr to swim upriver to spawn; disappointingly, however, the population didn’t respond. It took a broader survey to discover a second bridge at Woundell Beck was blocking the flow of gravel for charr nests.

The improved river flow also helped another issue that was threatening the fish: riverine needle litter from the conifers planted beside the water courses after the Second World War. “Conifers are very good at stripping pollution out of the atmosphere,” Browning explains, “but that pollution’s quite acidic.” Allowing the Liza to flow freely reduced these harmful pH spikes as did replacing conifers in the surrounding area with native broadleaves, juniper and heathland. At the same time, the Environment Agency undertook an off-site breeding programme to boost fish stock, taking eggs from local fish, and returning the hatched fry to the River Liza.

In 2020 over 700 charr spawned in the River Liza and other once-threatened species are unexpectedly blooming too, such as the formerly extinct Marsh Fritillary butterfly.

Dr Ian Winfield has studied the link between climate change and the cold-water charr, he believes that tracking the population health of species such as the charr is key to understanding the impacts of climate change. Milder winters, he says, pose a risk to the incubating eggs of a species at the southernmost limit of their natural territory.: “They really need water temperatures similar to those of a domestic fridge in order to survive well,” Winfeld says.

The humble Arctic charr’s fate is also a barometer for the health of the Lake District, a much-prized natural environment that sees 15 million visitors each year. “If the population is doing well then the lake is doing well,” Winfield adds.

Author: Ruth Bushi, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Ennerdale banner image: Kreuzschnabel/ Wikimedia Commons, 1. Gareth Browning, 2. Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, 3. Dr Ian J. Winfield
(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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Combating climate change is the biggest challenge of our times. Three years ago, Bhutan became the world’s first carbon-neutral country, meaning its carbon dioxide emissions are balanced with what is absorbed by its forests. However, this doesn’t make the small Himalayan country immune to the effects of global warming and sadly it is witnessing erratic weather patterns, fast-receding glaciers and glacial lakes outburst floods (GLOFs).

But how do you make the risks of climate change relatable to the average person when the data is dry or comprised of confusingly complex computer simulations? The country that pioneered the ground-breaking concept of prioritising Gross National Happiness above GDP is trialling a potential solution.

In 2014, the Ugyen Wangchuck Institute of Conservation and Environment (UWICE) launched – with funding from the Karuna Foundation and Bhutan Foundation – the Himalayan Environmental Rhythms Observation and Evaluation System, or HEROES, project in partnership with 21 schools located at varying elevations and ecological zones across Bhutan.

To date, it has trained 34 teachers and more than one thousand students in weather-station management, data collection and plant phenology. Working with 23 weather stations (20 in schools and three in remote mountain locations) they record changes in temperature, snowfall and rainfall, as well as monitoring how key plants and animals are responding to changing climatic patterns within the vicinity of their school’s campus and then feed the data back to UWICE. Recently, a school used the data alongside centuries-old chronicles from Kyoto, Japan to predict the changing fruiting pattern of peach trees, which are now flowering multiple times a year.

By harnessing the power of ‘citizen science’ and incorporating it into the high-school curriculum, the project is building a countrywide network of data-collection sites at very little cost, while simultaneously giving the students agency in the climate, and nation, they will inherit. The hope that this will lead to targeted interventions to help ailing ecosystems as it highlights the issue of climate change amongst the general public, including the students’ parents.

The intention is to foster a Bhutanese generation raised on the importance of environmental conservation, says Dr. Chenga Tshering, Deputy Chief Forest Officer with the Ugyen Wangchuck Institute.

“Educating youth on climate change and its impact is one of the greatest benefits of this initiative, “ he says. “We hope our climate-literate youths will become influential climate change activists on the world stage.”

Author: Emma Thomson, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Bhutan banner image – Harisai Abhi/ Wikimedia Commons
(Wikimedia License – https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode)

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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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