In the last week I attended the Kirloskar Vasundhara International Film Festival (KVIFF) organized by the Kirloskar Group. This is a week long festival held every year in the month of January in many cities of India. In Pune KVIFF was hosted from 3rd Jan to 7th Jan 2019. This festival involves film screenings and other allied activities like seminars, panel discussions, workshops on a specific environmental theme. Eco bazaar - an exhibition exclusively for ecofriendly products and innovations - is an important part of the festival. This year the theme of the festival was in line with the UN theme for World Environment Day 2018 i.e 'No to Plastic and Yes to Earth'. This is KVIFF's thirteenth year of creating an environmental protection movement that aims to enrich lives of the citizens of the city. I feel its a great platform for availing information on environmental issues through films and other allied activities.
Karan Shelar at Ecobazaar
This year at the Eco bazaar along with our products Deodorizer, Samuchit Steam cooker (upgraded model of Sarai cooker), Sampada gasifier stove, Charring kiln and Self watering pots, we introduced our family carbon footprint calculator, developed by Dr. Priyadarshini Karve and launched as a web app by Pune International Centre (PIC). We also conducted a live poll on Vision for Pune city from the visitors. While Prashant Borate, Supriya Borate and Karan Shelar were involved in presenting the Samuchit products. I was involved in interacting with the people for the carbon footprint calculation and the live poll along with Aditi and Akash from PIC who also joined us. Dr Priyadarshini Karve supported all of us!!!
Supriya Borate at Ecobazaar
Prashant Borate at Ecobazaar
Dr Karve at Ecobazaar
Calculating carbon footprint
It was good to know that a lot of people were already aware about carbon footprint and why it is important, some people were even scared to know about their footprint since they had a suspicion that it would be high! Yet many people calculated their footprint using our calculator. Unsurprisingly everyone who had an impression that their footprint is less were shocked to know that per capita footprint was either 2.7 or 3 tCO2eq. The whole idea of calculating carbon footprint of urbanities is to understand that though at the country level India's carbon footprint stands well below the norm of 2 tCO2eq. At the city level it is around 3 tCO2eq and above. Our calculator is a tool to measure how much carbon emissions we generate due to our daily activities.
Click here for calculating your carbon footprint using our calculator. Once you get your results, please write to us at pournima@samuchit.com we can guide you on how to reduce your footprint!
Our live poll activity on Vision of Pune city, will be active till this Sunday (13th Jan), you can check out the instructions below for giving your responses. You can feed in multiple responses but each response has to be ONEWORD. The word cloud posted above is the result of the responses received till date, word cloud generated through your responses will help us in policy advocacy for our city and hence your response matters a lot as a citizen!
Instructions to participate in the live poll
This was my experience at the KVIFF Ecobazaar. Were you there? Did you participate in some way or were you a spectator? kindly share your experiences as well!
Pournima Agarkar. "the power of the people is much stronger than the people in power.”Wael Ghonim
Firstly I thank all the people who made it to our event, held on the 20th December, 2018 at the Kalmadi High School, Shakuntala Jagannath Shetty Auditorium on behalf of Samuchit Enviro Tech, INECC and LAYA. We really missed the presence of Ajita Tiwari, Nafisa Goga D'Souza and Dominic D'Souza from INECC and LAYA during the event. I am sure there were many others who wanted to grace our event but couldn't make it, however for all of you I would like to narrate the event😃
Pune International Centre (PIC) with their initiative on Climate Collective Pune (CCP) were our collaborators and helped us in organizing the entire event. We are grateful to Prof. Amitav Mallik and Aditi Kale for being available to us throughout the event planning and implementation phase.
Prof. Amitav Mallik, trustee of PIC and core member of CCP opened the session. CCP is a network of experts from varied backgrounds like Urban planning, Groundwater, Renewable Energy, Green Building, Environment Education and experts working with the Area Sabhas and Mohalla committes etc. The goal of this network is to make Pune a Carbon Neutral city by 2030. It is noteworthy that this vision is very much in line with our vision of making Pune a Sustainably SMART city by 2030 and he expressed his belief in achieving the goal collectively for the common good.
Word Cloud showing citizens vision of Pune city.
All our events are people oriented, hence engaging people has always been our main activity. Myron Mendes our communications expert helped us involve our audience in the event through an activity. We used mentimeter, an online interactive software that helps to execute live opinion polls. Through this app, we asked people to type a word describing their vision for Pune city. The audience had to open the menti.com website on their smartphones, and enter the code flashing on the screen to allow them to participate in the poll. We gave the audience a time of 5 minutes to enter as many responses as they could, and while people were voting, a word cloud based on their responses was being generated on the screen. In just five minutes we could receive more than 500 responses, and the word cloud clearly reflected the vision of Pune by the Puneites. Word cloud is an interesting form of graphic, the more people enter a word, it gets bigger. Our word cloud reflected that we as Puneites want our city to be Sustainable, Clean and Green!
On the Dais from left to right Dr Priyadarshini K, Myron M, Gurudas N, Amitav M and Pournima A
After this activity, we released our report on Sustainably SMART Pune 2030 by the hands of Dr Gurudas Nulkar our guest speaker and others on the dias.
Radar chart showing current status & our vision for 2030
Dr Priyadarshini Karve, the Project incharge of this study and a straightforward speaker presented summary of the report. She explained how the 3 year study kickstarted when she saw problems with the SMART city mission (SCM). SCM has a flawed financial and management structure with technology as its end goal. Its design makes it incompetent to meet the Global goals i.e. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) esp. SDG 11 which deals with making cities and communities sustainable. Through the SMART city mission, the city is being reshaped for the future without taking into consideration the basic issues that we are facing locally and globally. Hence the study proposes an approach that is Sustainably SMART where minimizing the socio-economic inequity, local environmental impacts and climate change impacts. These three boundaries encompass problems faced by urban spaces locally and globally. Here, technology does play a role but only as a tool. Our approach is very well in line with the Global goals as well esp. SDG 11. The role of citizens is crucial in making a city Sustainably SMART and is thus the objective of the study as well.
Chart from Dr Gurudas presentation
Dr Gurudas Nulkar an expert in Environmental Sustainability and a great speaker, then addressed the audience as to why and how can citizens act in order to make the city sustainable. He gave a brief background on ecological footprintand an approach for making cities livable. The most interesting part of his talk was about the transition from awareness to behavioral change. This transition is very crucial but often very difficult to attain. There are many barriers that are stronger than the benefits. Each one of us is enough aware of the problems, however in order to defeat them firstly, we need to identify these barriers, we should then talk about them, discuss them and find solutions to reduce the barriers in the path of behavioural change and increase or create barriers in the path of 'business as usual'. This two pronged strategy will help make that behavioural shift decisively, and we can create a sustainable society.
Taking note of this speech, Myron Mendes had another activity for our audience, where they had to give individual pledges on what they will do to make Pune sustainably SMART on 'handprints' - hand shaped papers - and take a selfie at our selfie corner. He concluded the event by a vote of thanks to all.
Collage of selfies at the event
Selfie collage by the Green Soldiers-a waste management group
We are going to organize another event for citizens' involvement in sustainably SMART Pune 2030 around the end of January 2019. Stay tuned if you want to be part of it!
Note: Our report is accessible to all, email me at pournima@samuchit.com for the softcopy of the report. The report is available in English as well as Marathi!
United Nation's Framework Convention on Climate Change's (UNFCCC) annual Conference of Parties (COP) is happening in Katowice, Poland this year. I am part of the Indian Network on Ethics and Climate Change (INECC) team attending the COP24 on behalf of two UNFCCC observer organisations - Laya and SCINDIeA, that are members of INECC.
5 December 2018
With our side event out of the way, we have now relaxed a bit and are focussing on managing the exhibition stall and attending side events and other activities of our individual interests.
Yesterday and today I attended two interesting side events. One was on Climate Responsive Agriculture, and the other was on Decarbonising Cities and Communities. Both these topics are very much related to projects and activities that I am currently involved in, and I learned some new insights from both the side events.
The focus of the agriculture event was on trying to understand how to bridge the gap between agricultural policy and the scientific assessments of how climate change is likely to impact food productivity in the short and long term as well as scientific solutions to risk proof the farming sector. One of the challenges that emerged from the discussions was that the outcomes of the scientific analyses were not definitive enough for policy makers to confidently plan interventions in agricultural sector on the basis of outcomes of scientific research. It was also heartening to see that the Nationally Determined Contributions of some countries are focusing on reducing the carbon emissions from agriculture and at the same time building climate resilience in the farming systems.
The session on decarbonising cities talked about a direction of urban development that I have been advocating for a long time - rather than striving for village electrification through renewables, it is the cities that need to go 100% renewable and local for meeting their electricity needs. It was good to hear that technologies are now available and various countries are creating policies favourable for combining energy efficiency and distributed renewable-based local energy generation for various types of urban buildings. As a result, cities are pledging and planning to go 100% distributed renewables or 100% carbon neutral by 2050. This very much resonates with the efforts of Climate Collective Pune of which Samuchit Enviro Tech is a member. This forum initiated by Pune International Centre (PIC) and Centre for Environment Education (CEE) is aimed at making Pune Carbon Neutral by 2030.
India has some unique challenges on both these fronts. While world population will stabilise to about 9-10 billion individuals by the middle of the century, India's population will continue to rise till the end of the century. During this period, it is expected that the agricultural yields across Asia will drop by 10% or more. Feeding an increasing population in a climate changing world is going to be a major challenge for us. At the same time, India is rapidly urbanising, and new urban infrastructure is coming up at a tremendous pace. A number of future megacities will be in India. Fulfilling the ever increasing urban electricity demand is going to be another huge challenge. But I don't see much long term thinking around climate change vulnerability reflected in agricultural or urbanisation policies in India. The two side events, one by Cornell University and the other by Delta Electronics Foundation and Renewable Energy Institute, provided a number of examples of how governments and organisations are addressing the issues in different parts of the world. It is only a global platform like this that provides opportunities to get such information from across the world.
Anyway, at the end of the previous blog, I had said that I would write about the India Pavilion. The exhibition area and the side events area are at two ends of the conference venue. In the ten odd minutes trek from one to the other takes me past the India pavilion at least twice daily. We also happened to be there when we were just wandering around the venue on Sunday when people were still putting things together.
The boundary wall of the India Pavilion is a actually a wall of fast spinning fans that are generating holographic images. Unfortunately, as there is a risk of people getting cut by the fans, they had to also erect a protective barrier outside it. If the barrier had been plain and transparent, it would have been a fantastic effect, but for some unknown reasons the barrier has been created in the form of a cage with Indian design motifs.
Inside the pavilion there are tables with touch screens which give information and statistics on various environmental and developmental schemes currently operational. On one side there is a virtual reality corner, where you can ride a bicycle and the images on the screen make you feel as if you are riding through roads of New Delhi. As you ride through the streets of New Delhi, you also get flashes of information on various schemes of the present government. The screen also shows how much electricity would be generated by the cyclist if the cycle was connected to a dynamo. No actual electricity is being generated as the technician told my friend Myron on Sunday after he had cycled for a few minutes and rejoiced at the number appearing on the screen!
The centrepiece of the pavilion is an arrangement of two robotic arms and a video screen, all controlled by a touch pad by the viewer. The panel allows you to check out India's achievements in four sectors -renewable energy, the lighting success story, forestation and transport.
These are represented by tableaus on four surfaces of two discs, each operated by robotic arm. So when you press a button on the touch screen, the corresponding robotic arm moves and rotates to show you the corresponding tableau, and on the screen behind a film shows you present and future achievement in that sector - for example, how the LEDs have transformed the lighting sector and how the bullet train and electric vehicles will transform the transport sector, etc.
All in all, it is a rather high tech pavilion and people are getting quite impressed by it from the feedback that we are getting from visitors to our booth. However, judging from the technicians that were tinkering around things when we first visited on Sunday, none of the high tech set ups used for the pavilion seem to be 'made in India'! That to me was a bit disappointing.
Inside the pavilion there is a small meeting room, where some governmental and India-specific side events happen on a daily basis. I am not prioritising these because I can know about what is happening in India any time! This is an opportunity to see first hand what is happening in the rest of the world, and therefore I am more focused on the international side events and other activities.
There are some more interesting side events coming up in the next few days, and I also still have to go around the exhibition area and see what other organisations from different parts of the world are showcasing. So stay tuned!
Credits: The hashtag COP24 photo is by Myron Mendis of Laya, other photos and videos are by me.
