Partner Opinion | Connect4Climate

Using Social Psychology for Climate Change Education

Climate change can be a pretty scary and depressing topic, and that makes a lot of us just want to tune it out. Social psychologists have been studying this for a while now, and have some interesting ideas.

1) Future discounting. Humans are pretty bad at long-term planning. Economists, dieticians, and anyone who’s tried to get their dads to quit smoking can tell you that. Climate change moves slowly, and while impacts are being felt here and now, people still perceive it as distant in time and space.

2) Motivated reasoning. We’d like to think we’re rational creatures, weighing evidence and making decisions based on facts, but we’re not. Humans are highly emotional, social beings that seek out information that confirms what they already believe.

3) Emotional numbing. People have been hit over the head multiple times with images of polar bears on melting ice sheets, or the earth on fire. These scary visuals are emotionally jarring, and tend to disengage people from the issue. It’s a lot to take in. So we just tune out.

So how can we effectively engage people in the biggest challenge of our time? Well, knowing is half the battle. Climate & Urban Systems Partnership (CUSP) has been using what we have learned from social psychology to create climate change education programs that counteract some of those more negative reactions.

CUSP is a network of climate scientists, learning scientists, informal educators, and community organizations in four cities in the U.S. Northeast. CUSP develops and delivers programming both in museums and in the community that focus on local climate risks and educates about tangible solutions people can get involved in at the community level. CUSP is currently active in New York City, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C., and is led by the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.

Community programs range from short tabletop interactions at festivals, to eight-week programs at senior centers or afterschool centers, to educational workshops at community meetings. For example, in one tabletop activity, participants learn that climate change can lead to increased heavy downpours. They are then challenged to re-engineer their neighborhoods to absorb more water, using sponges to represent green infrastructure. A recent evaluation suggests that this approach not only teaches people about potential climate change impacts and responses but also leads to an increase in conversations about climate change at home. We are continuing to test the idea that engaging in a locally framed and solution-focused activity that promotes hope and empowerment will lead participants to want to learn more about the issue as a whole.

Similarly, the CUSP Map, currently active in New York City and Pittsburgh, allows visitors to make connections between their daily lives and climate impacts. The map, which is used in conjunction with other CUSP programs and products, pairs hard data with local narrative information, creating a local picture of climate impacts and solutions that values the public’s experiences and observations. For example, map users might explore a dataset about precipitation projections or floodplain changes in conjunction with a dataset that shows the location of subway lines, helping them make the connection between a projection (increased heavy downpours and flooding) and an impact (a delayed subway commute).

Our approach of keeping climate information local, relevant and solutions-focused is in line with the latest learning research and science communication research. Ultimately, we want to give hope and empower people and organizations to work beyond personal choices to make an impact on a community and city level. Collectively, we can reduce further damage to the climate and prepare for those changes that are already underway.

Are we doing what we should?

There’s one simple fact that we have to accept: Climate Change is real and it is here now.

This has been reflected in the rising of temperatures across the globe - last year was the hottest year on planet Earth since records began. Sea levels are also rising, with island nations such as Kiribati in the Pacific and even cities like Miami under threat!

It’s time to direct our energies to what we can do to get out of the situation we have got ourselves into. For centuries, humans have managed to solve many of the problems that had been tormenting them. This is reflected in The Power of Man! - a Green Hatters video that tells the compelling story of mankind and its impact on our planet.

At last, we are slowly waking up. There are lots of organizations which are focused on trying to reduce their impact on the environment. Governments, NGO’s, different industries and even oil and gas companies are acting. Efficient energy use and green focused strategies are in…LEED certification too. Electric cars are making inroads and there are more and more charging stations on the streets. Applying carbon pricing on internal projects is a good start to show we are taking social impact into consideration - even if it sometimes seems too insignificant. The truth is that it is being recognized.

But that is not enough!

It is not enough for large employers and government just to talk and act on carbon emission at the work place. They should assume they are in a pivotal position to take this beyond their work borders and follow the example of a lot of companies that are engaging employees in managing their carbon emission, by incentivizing them to make smart daily choices - reduce energy use at home, alternative commute options - sharing rides, bike, use public transportation available et.al.

Products are now out on the market that enable both companies and individuals to calculate their carbon emissions and encourage changes in behavior. It is time for the rallying call for action, as global citizens, with an individual focus.

Time to End Solution Delusion?

Circular economy is not a long difficult journey, it’s a quick easy choice between binary options.

The 8th March 2016 is an important day for everyone concerned about resource consumption and waste issues, including climate change. It’s the 50th anniversary of the solution to these problems being offered by Kenneth Boulding. Boulding’s poetic vision of a future ‘spaceman economy’ on a ‘spaceship Earth’ more than encompassed today’s vision of a ‘circular economy’. He set us the challenge that ‘man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system which is capable of continuous reproduction of material form’. The economy must ensure that resources are continually renewed, not abandoned and lost as wastes.

Given 50 years to work on this challenge, how have we done? Would Boulding be proud of our progress? The world has not been idle. A global environmental movement of millions of people has undertaken millions of initiatives every year for decades. The circular economy vision has been reinvented and relaunched with new language roughly every decade since the 1960s. There have been multitudes of conferences, hefty reports and case studies of circular resource flows. All that’s missing is any actual circular economy.

When Boulding pointed out the option of running the economy without destroying the resources it depends upon, annual global materials consumption was around 20 billion tonnes. Today we collectively get through four times more of the Earth’s resources every year, around 80Gt. As little as 6% of this is recycled into circular flows. Boulding’s warning that “the atmosphere may become man’s major problem in another generation” turned out to be well-founded. The reckless, exploitative and violent behaviours characteristic of Boulding’s ‘cowboy economy’ remain pervasive.

We shouldn’t assume we have another 50 years to make circular economy happen. So what should we assume? The easiest assumption, that our problem-solving is on the right track, offers the least incentive for new thinking. The toughest assumption, that our efforts been on the wrong track for 50 years, offers the greatest scope for disruptive thinking and new possibilities. Real solutions to looming global problems remain possible to the extent that we can look beyond conventional solutions. Ending our collective self-destruction requires first ending our collective self-delusion, which I call the solution delusion.

Tackling the solution delusion is a special category of problem, deeper and less tangible than the logistical challenge of realigning product designs and business model designs so resources flow one way rather than another. For 50 years the solution delusion has been the problem we least want to face, because it insulates us from our persistent failure with sustainability. As the tangible local and global consequences of a non-circular economy become more overwhelming, we rely even more on it to make all these problems feel less overwhelming.

Why has circular economy felt like an uphill struggle? Photo: Craig Sunter/flickr.com

Can we overcome the solution delusion and make circular economy happen for real? Certainly, if we are willing to tackle our self-delusion as well as our self-destruction. We can be aware not only of global problems and of practical solutions but also of the likelihood that some of our most common ideas on these topics may be unintentionally reinforcing the systems we seek to change – even when we talk about system change and struggle to make it happen. It may turn out that the biggest struggle with system change is not to do it, but just to see how to do it.

Our minds trick us into translating big visions such as circular economy into the smallest initiatives that we can fool ourselves into calling ‘ambitious’. Initiatives based on long-established methods, within areas of expertise where we are most familiar, are everywhere most favoured. The assumed theory of change is that gradual incremental improvements will add up over time to trigger a spontaneous shift to a new status quo, where people’s values and behaviours align with sustainability imperatives.

The alternative viewpoint is to be wary of the solution delusion. We can deliberately cultivate the non-incremental non-reductionist thinking that is trained out of us by our education, our jobs and a half-century of too-big-to-admit collective failure. From this viewpoint, circular economy is not a long difficult journey, it’s a quick easy choice between binary options. Resources become either new resources for nature or for people, or wastes in land, air or water. The materials in a shoe, a phone, a chemical or a building can become in future either new resources or wastes. The same binary choice applies to economics as a whole.

The economics can be set up to either incentivise or ignore the need to preserve current resources as future resources. Today it’s set up as linear economics, to generally ignore the systematic conversion of all kinds of resources into wastes, causing diverse problems and diverse exponential threats. This choice of economic models is not the outcome of an international committee of experts that meets every year, weighs up both options and votes to proceed with global self-destruction. It’s the default; it’s the choice we get when we don’t make a deliberate choice. It has remained the default for the past 50 years even whilst the other choice was constantly available.

Conventionally, circular economy has ended up being about design choices in the economy. It has become the logistical challenge of rearranging products and businesses so fewer resources get trashed. What has been missed is the design choices of the economy. We could, if we weighed up the options and made the decision, simply replace linear economics with circular. Ordinary market forces, of prices guiding decisions, would then take care of the logistics just as it does today when linear outcomes prevail. As a bonus, the new economics would define a new cultural reality that guides new default values and behaviours.

Photo: Jeff Golden/flickr.com

The circular economics to get circular economy is simple, though it departs radically from traditional proposals for green economies such as taxes, cap and trade, recycling fees and degrowth. To anyone pursuing incremental reductionist change, circular economics might look like theoretical nonsense. For a start there is a new term to encompass the range of possible practices in switching to circular resource patterns. Existing language could only specify individual practices such as recycling or energy efficiency or biodegradability.

‘Precycling’ is action taken now to ensure that something does not later become waste in any ecosystem. This pre-waste focus corrects the systemic error of trying to manage waste when it’s too late, at the point when all that people can think about is how to get rid of it. For example preparing for recycling, by a new product design or setting up boxes for different materials, is precycling. Waste management is the subsequent collection and recycling of the discarded materials. In one way or another every product can be precycled, so none need become wastes. Every household, business and community can prevent future waste by precycling.

Today there is no effective incentive to get everyone precycling. Every item that ends up dumped in landfills, burnt in an incinerator or discarded in oceans is a glaring clue about missing or misguided incentives. If not ignored, these clues tell us that the conventional ragged patchwork of incentives, targets and regulations, to encourage for example more recycling or less landfilling, is futile against the scale and urgency of the challenge. Circular economics can create a circular future for products of all kinds by quickly installing an effective incentive at the necessary scale, throughout the whole economy.

Circular economics can be based on financial responsibility for the circularity of market decisions rather than intervention in those decisions. This responsibility can be fairly shared among all market participants via prices but first it needs to be allocated somewhere. Producers are given this responsibility since their decisions have the biggest influence over the circularity of their products. They should be responsible for the quantifiable likelihood of their product ending up as waste in land, air or water ecosystems, which I call ‘waste-risk’.

No existing economic tool is adequate for circular economics. My proposed new tool extends existing producer responsibility and recycling insurance from just recycling particular product types to all the ways of preventing all products from becoming wastes. Producers pay a ‘precycling premium’ to insurers according to their product’s waste-risk. Premiums go into an independent ‘circular fund’ which receives crowdsourced proposals for activities that contribute to cutting waste-risk throughout society. The circular economics would then pay to build the circular society.

What will this mean in practice? For example, fossil fuels, nuclear fuels, biofuels and all the equipment to make and use them are products. Even solar panels are products. Each of these has a waste-risk that can be used to calculate a premium to account for their compatibility with a circular future. Materials with high waste impacts, such as greenhouse gases and radioactive wastes, would pay higher premiums which would be reflected in energy prices. These prices will carry a strong message for shoppers and investors, whether or not they care about climate or circular economy or sustainability.

After a 50 year delay, we can now start the race to circular economy for real. Photo: commons.wikimedia.org

Precycling premiums also carry a strong message when they are spent; ‘we’re serious about making a circular society and here’s the money to make it happen’. For example, premiums from high waste-risk fuels are not just an effective way to price carbon. The premiums are spent throughout society to phase out our waste-dumping habits, including our dependence on burning fossil fuels. Premiums would support work to boost energy efficiency and substitute fossil infrastructure with renewables. Funds would be available for expansion of ecosystems, which regenerate dispersed wastes into new resources for nature and people.

What would everyone do in a future of circular economics? Firstly, those who have been saying they want circular economy would ask governments to institute circular economics. Governments would legislate, potentially across regions such as the European Union. In order for precycling premiums to be accountable, governments would regulate to ensure transparency, fairness and effectiveness but they would not handle the funds. Scientists would provide a template for producers to calculate their waste-risks. Insurers would collect premiums from producers, which would then be spent cutting waste-risk everywhere. The public would provide crowdsourced oversight.

What would happen to conventional regulatory options such as targets, taxes, bans, product design rules and public procurement criteria? With circular economics in place, these would be little needed, just as today’s linear economy is able to generate massive waste without explicit targets and rules to encourage waste. However conventional regulation can still express a nation’s particular concerns. For example, tougher targets for cutting emissions can inform higher premiums for products with high risks of becoming emissions. Green public procurement or subsidies can support favoured solutions.

The precycling approach to circular economy is a fresh response to Kenneth Boulding’s 50 year old challenge. This is the moment in history when we will continue with the default solution delusion – or choose to meet this challenge. We will continue to explore how much circularity is possible within the default linear economics – or how fast circular economy is possible within new circular economics. We will continue to struggle with the default of accelerating unsustainability – or we will learn to correct the systems that keep causing it. I hope you will join me to help make this choice!

The article was originally published here. Banner photo: Carsten Tolkmit/flickr.com

KARAMEA: Is this the end of the road?

It is only a 3 to 4 hour drive from the nearest point of civilisation as we know it; yet it could be another world. It is the town of Karamea, at the top of the West coast of New Zealand’s southern island. And it’s a place where you can touch what could be the future for the rest of us.

There aren’t a lot of reasons to go there: either you are a travel-blog nerd and you stumbled upon one of the few posts about it, or you’re a serious adventure walker with the will to walk the “Heaphy track”, a gorgeous scenic 4-day hiking trail with no shelter that ends up (or starts) in Karamea.

Karamea pops up, literally, “at the end of the road”. It’s precisely 100 kilometres from the nearest town, but is an island of community surrounded by a beautiful, green and lush national park.

So, do people really live here? Absolutely. And this is exactly where things get interesting. As the documentary trailer for Karamea says, “Answers sometimes may be found where least expected”.

The Karamea documentary movie follows the inspiring journey of a bunch of modernhippies that have made this community their home, attempting to “change the world” from one of the most remote places on earth. They might be far away from mainstream civilisation, but this community is tightly knit and passionate about living the way they choose to.

As we meet Karamea’s people, we realise that they’ve managed to live… a little bit differently from the way most of us do.

Instead of just talking about problems, how the world is drifting away or the social theories and ecological systems to save it, they are putting in practice an actual process toward sustainability where everybody takes their part in this “there is another way to live” project.

This is not a community of old-fashioned hippies, and there are no communal rules that impose how to live and behave with others. Instead, there is private property, and a economic system based on exchange or barter (either it’s food or work) to cover the majority of people’s needs. With fewer places to use it, money is spent wisely and less frequently, leaving no room for conspicuous consumerism.

The pillars of the Karamea lifestyle are also renewable energies, organic agriculture and permaculture design; but it isn’t just about solar power, water supply tanks or “growing your own tomatoes”.

It is simply a philosophy of “quality over quantity” that the people of Karamea practice in every aspect, following the sustainable living playbook their own way. And the results are staggering: prosperity, community, success, and that elusive goal of people in the modern world, happiness.

Karamea becomes a sort of social, economic and ecological experiment where people can touch what really means to live sustainably. It is such a compelling place that travellers who plan to pass through for a night end up staying for months or years, getting involved in the unpredictable vitality of the town.

This other way to live comes to life through the stories of those that created and are living this dream in Karamea: Is this the end of the road? In 2014, Marco Gianstefani and his crew shot the first part of the documentary, collecting content for a first trailer release and a future crowdfunding campaign that will be launched in early 2016.

[video:https://vimeo.com/125299567]

To share this story with the world, the team is fundraising to complete the shooting and post-production process, and to create the original score so that Karamea can be presented in major international documentary festivals. By telling this fascinating story, we hope to show that the real sustainable living of Karamea is far from the end of the road; it is just the beginning of it.

Change Pallets for Climate Benefit

Background

Imagine that the average U.S. dishwasher is only 65% full when run, but you had the power to ensure that all dishwasher loads were filled to capacity. Massive water savings and reduced energy consumption come to mind, but what about less detergent use, and scaling back on the substantial resources needed to produce and transport detergent?

By replacing wood and plastic pallets with lightweight corrugated cardboard pallets, we can ensure that U.S. truck shipments are much closer to 100% than currently is the case. And yet we don’t.

Let’s change that, starting with some directional numbers:

• Wood pallets weighing approximately 50 pounds each are loaded with product and shipped on semi-trailer trucks (“semi’s”)
• An estimated 5 billion such loaded wood pallets are shipped in the U.S. each year (based on 2 billion pallets in circulation, used 5 times or less)
• Assuming an average of 20 pallets per truck equates to 250 million truck shipments
• Applying the conservative assumption of only 400 miles per trip takes us to 100 billion truck miles per year

How much is 100 billion truck miles? The equivalent of driving to Mars and back...more than seventy (70) times.

These 250 million trucks, each traveling 400 miles -- and hypothetically weighing 65,000 per truck -- will use over 1.66 billion gallons of diesel and emit nearly 170 million metric tons of CO2e(carbon dioxide equivalent) annually.

Lightweight corrugated cardboard pallets are as effective as other pallets. Photo Credit: Change the Pallet

Corrugated pallets weigh only ~10 pounds, so “changing the pallet” would lower the amount of pallet weight alone shipped each year in the U.S. by ~200 billion pounds. Doing so would theoretically save 205 million gallons of diesel and emit some 21 million fewer metric tons of CO2e annually (based on a 10% drop in fuel consumption).

While intuitive, this model does not hold in the real world, where vast CO2e reductions are driven by filling space, not reducing weight.

As an architecture student at The Bartlett, UCL, I realised that coffee was being wasted everywhere. Coffee pours out of major urban centres: coffee shops, cafes, office blocks, museums, factories, airports. Anywhere people pass through, huge volumes of coffee grounds were being thrown away into landfill at an enormous economic and environmental cost. In fact, over 500,000 tonnes of waste coffee grounds are produced each year in the UK alone, with 200,000 tonnes from London.

Approaching the problem of coffee waste from an outside perspective, and using sustainability as the driving force behind my ideas, I set out to re-imagine this life cycle. The conceptual leap here was to simply turn this problem on its head. I started with the simple premise that there is no such thing as waste, simply resources in the wrong place.

Coffee waste is transformed into useful energy by bio-bean. Photo credit: bio-bean

In two years, bio-bean has become the first company in the world to industrialise turning waste coffee grounds into advanced biofuels. We have raised several million in finance, built the world’s first waste coffee recycling factory and a team of over twenty people.

[video:https://vimeo.com/151779498]

bio-bean produces biomass pellets, used for heating buildings and in the near future coffee oil that can be refined into biodiesel, used in transport systems. bio-bean’s factory, the first in the world to recycle waste coffee grounds into advanced biofuels at an industrial scale, has the capacity to process 50,000 tonnes of waste coffee grounds each year. That’s one in ten cups of coffee drunk in the UK every year!

bio-bean is a small company interfacing with large corporations that dominate existing systems (such as the waste management industry and coffee supply chain). As the first company in the world to industrialise the process of recycling waste coffee grounds, the policy infrastructure also doesn’t exist to support bio-bean yet. By demonstrating the commercial and environmental advantages of our process has allowed bio-bean to successfully interface with partners at every scale. Most importantly, we have created a fantastic team of people, united under the vision of closing the loop on coffee waste.

The bio-bean process, find out more at bio-bean.com. Credit: bio-bean

bio-bean was set up in response to the challenges of the near future - pollution, transport, housing, food, water, energy, waste, overpopulation, physical and mental well-being equality and climate change - these are not global problems but uniquely urban ones. And if they are caused by cities it will fall to cities to solve them.

The shape of our future and that of our planet depends entirely on how we organise and evolve urban systems. Approaching tomorrow with a spirit of creativity, applying sustainable solutions to create opportunities - this will play a crucial role in all of our futures.

bio-bean is the first company to industrialise the process of recycling waste coffee grounds. Photo credit: bio-bean

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bio-bean is an award-winning clean technology company that recycles waste coffee grounds into advanced biofuels. To find out more visit: bio-bean.com

Communication and Culture for Sustainability and Climate Change

Connect4Climate participated in the international conference on Communication/Culture and The Sustainable Development Goals (CCSDG): Challenges for a New Generation held in Chiang Mai, Thailand, from 17 to 21 December 2015.

The themes of the Sustainable Development Goals and Climate Change is very timely, so soon after the COP 21 in Paris. But, as Prof. Rome Chiranukrom, the Vice President for International Relations and Alumni Affairs at Chiang Mai University, reminded us, the focus on the role and place of communication and culture has added additional value to these themes, which are normally monopolized by economics, engineers and politicians. Prof. Rome warned that “the future of our planet and the peaceful and harmonious survival of us as a human race” are at stake! More than a choice on the basis of technology assessments, economic or political models, this challenge appeals on our moral and ethical values as people.

The “new” problems we face may take years, and in the case of climate change, several generations of the world community to resolve. How do we build consensus and muster the altruistic intent of the present generation to consume less, de-escalate conflict, and subject ourselves to medical research so that future generations who will exist long after we are gone may inherit a habitable planet?

The tried and tested methods of agriculture extension, social mobilization, community participation, and multi-lateral negotiation are unlikely to succeed on their own as these systemic problems grow in their severity and people submit to innate human instincts for self-preservation and compete even more keenly for rapidly dwindling natural resources, ratchet-up violence, resist Hippocratic principles to share limited supplies of vaccines and medicines, hoard energy and water, and close markets to international commerce. We do not have appropriate strategies to begin addressing these “new” and highly complex challenges. That’s the challenge the conference participants were challenged to come to grips with in order to formulate realistic and sustainable solutions for future generations.

About 150 people had initially expressed an interest in this conference. After the first selection 70 abstracts were invited to be submitted as full papers. Of these 70, 51 were accepted forpresentation during the conference. Covering a wide range of topics, the presentations were organized in three plenary sessions – “Sustainability Redefined,” “Strategies for Commons Transition and Sustainable Development” and “Learning the Practice of Rural Development Professionalism: Challenging the Professional 2.0,” – and 15 panel sessions ranging from “Mindfulness, Religion and Social Communication” over “Small, slow and big data for Sustainable Development” to “Migration, Ethnicity and Identity,” with special case studies on Thailand, Myanmar and China. After further peer review, a selection of the best conference papers will be published either as special issues in academic journals or considered for book series.

In addition, Action4Climate winning films were showcased in one afternoon as well as presentations on “the Mekong Land Forum”, “Indigenous People and Communication”, “Migrant Workers and Communication”, and “Human Trafficking.”

About 100 participants, coming from ASEAN and other Asian countries like China, India, the UAE, and Taiwan, in addition to scholars from the US, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, The Netherlands … engaged in lively discussions on the above topics.

The following questions guided the discussions and deliberations:

a) How do you make a complex subject like sustainable development or climate change simple and understandable to a general audience? 

b) What are the main opportunities and challenges you face when trying to communicate to your audiences on the need for sustainability or climate action? 

c) What is communication for sustainable development, or climate change communication doing right? What is it doing wrong? How can it be more effective? 

d) What kinds of messages have you used that successfully motivated and engaged people to care about sustainable development or climate change? 

e) How do we bridge the gap between communication for social change awareness and action? 

f) How can what you do be scaled up and replicated? 

g) How do we broaden the discussion and diversify the movement? 

h) How can we communicate the outcomes of our conference and what needs to happen next to citizens around the world?

Prof. Jan Servaes presented a set of recommendations for a research/academic agenda for the future of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (2015-2030): https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/start-sustainable-development-goals-academicresearch-agenda-servaes?trk=prof-post

The conference was hosted by the Regional Center for Social Science and Sustainable Development (RCSD) at Chiang Mai University in partnership with the Asian Congress of Mass Communication (ACMC), BGreen Project, Connect4Climate, RMIT Melbourne, Southeast Asia Research Centre (SEARC) and the Department of Media and Communication at City University of Hong Kong, and Wageningen University. Additional support was received from UNESCO’s Communication and Information Sector both in Paris and the Bangkok office, and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

Building Resilience in the Face of Climate Change and Drought: A 2016 Priority

Sundrentched fields in South Africa. Photo Credit: Max Thabiso Edkins

In a country where the average rainfall is 495mm as compared to a global average of 1033mm, South Africa is recognised to be a water scarce country. South Africa is a water-constrained country because of low and unpredictable supply, coupled with high demand (we use 98% of our available water resources) and poor use of existing resources (dripping taps, acid mine drainage and sewerage pollution).

Low and unpredictable supply is a common experience in the townships and informal settlements where Afrika Tikkun operates its Youth Development Centres in Johannesburg and Cape Town. In those areas, water is frequently cut for days and weeks, twice or more a month. This is even worse in households in provinces like Mpumalanga and Limpopo, 63.1% and 61.4% of whom reported on the most frequent interruptions of water services (lasting between 2 and 15 days at a time).

This is a well-documented and highly contested reality for people living in rural areas and informal settlements, who experience “intense inequity in the delivery of water”. Research recently commissioned by the South African Council of Churches show South Africa has worse inequality now than at the end of apartheid.

After 21 years of democracy, those areas which lack water and sanitation mirror apartheid spatial geography: Black and poor former homelands, townships and informal settlements are the areas. This lack of access to water and sanitation has an impact on other rights including rights to dignity, health, and safety. For instance, in many parts of Diepsloot, raw sewerage pours into the streets day and night. This has severe health implications.

Water needed for survival. Photo Credit: Mohamed Bahloul

According to Statistics South Africa's most recent general house survey, only 46.3% of South Africans have access to safe drinking in their houses. Approximately 20.5% of households do not have access to ‘RDP─standard’ sanitation (e.g. flush toilets connected to a sewerage system or a septic tank).

Most of South Africa’s water is used by business, especially agribusiness (57%), mining and other industries (7%). Based on an assessment of the provision of water services by the South African Human Rights Commission, 23 municipalities (9% of the total) were in a crisis state, with an acute risk of disease outbreak; and a further 38% were at high risk, with the potential to deteriorate into a state of crisis.

At the moment households receive 6 kilolitres of free water per month, or 25 litres a day. World average water consumption is 173 litres per person per day. The free basic allowance is enough to flush the toilet twice for a family of eight. Director of the Centre for Civil Society at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, Patrick Bond shows however that the price of water has more than doubled since introducing the free basic water making it one of the most expensive waters in a third world country.

8 Benefits of Using Alternative Transportation

Whether you’re traveling to work, vacation, or just for a night out, before you reach for those car keys consider these eight benefits of using alternative transportation. Jumping on a train, saddling a bike, or sharing a ride could have payoffs for your health, the planet, and your pocketbook.

Inspiring Action for Climate Change

The world is experiencing unprecedented population growth, and, so too are the demands being placed on our environment – including increased production, accelerated use of natural resources, and spreading urbanisation.

Landfill sites globally are filling at a rate that we cannot sustain, and the great pacific garbage patch continues to increase in size every day. The role that waste plays in Climate Change are many, including toxic runoff into waterways and ground water, and methane emissions that are up to 23 times more dangerous that carbon dioxide. The incineration of waste releases carbon dioxide and dioxins into the atmosphere, all of which add to increasing levels of greenhouse gases.

In order to mitigate these issues, we need to reduce consumption and reuse and recycle waste.

While it is extremely important to be aware of the issues around Climate Change, it is also important not to focus on them too much as it can halt action, by disempowering people at the very thought of the scale of the problem. I want to promote the positive actions that people are taking right now to stop Climate Change, to inspire a more sustainable planet.

Back in March of 2012, I was lucky enough to win the “How are you greening your life?” competition, held by Connect4Climate. This was a great stepping stone for me personally, to be a part of a strong community that gives us all the chance to have a real impact on Climate Change by working together to find solutions and act. Being recognized for my work gave me the added motivation to continue on my project, and inspire as many people as possible to live more sustainably. This is an area that I am passionate about, and I have dedicated my life to for the last three years.

Dan Phillips builds entire houses from recycled materials for single mothers and low income families

Dan Phillips builds entire houses from recycled materials for single mothers and low income families.

My project is called Retrash, which is a book with a simple goal – to inspire the world to rethink waste, and in turn create positive social change in better spending habits.

The book is a result of a collaboration of 82 designers and artists from 20 countries around the world who are leading the recycling and upcycling movement. This movement of people is more than just about reusing waste, they each have a philosophy and a way of living that is sustainable and creates awareness around the impact we humans have on our environment.

Jennifer Lara creates stunning tank tops from reusing old T-Shirts.

Jennifer Lara creates stunning tank tops from reusing old T-Shirts.

Each entry in the book features the story behind the creator, detailing why they do what they do, where they source their materials, and the ideas behind why they reuse waste. I have been an avid recycler/upcycler myself since I was young, and I feel very honored to be a part of such a positive and inspiring movement.

Through the book we can reach people globally, with ideas on how to reuse waste so we can all take action and integrate these ideas into our everyday life. We can also then change spending habits to reduce consumption of packaging and excess products that we don’t really need.

Gilles Eichenbaum creates these gorgeous lamps from old kettles.

Gilles Eichenbaum creates these gorgeous lamps from old kettles.

You can be a part of this movement and take direct action against Climate Change by helping us get this book to print. We only have seven days left to raise funds to make this project a reality. Show your support by pre-ordering the book here.

Nathan Devine is based in the Blue Mountains, Australia as is the founder of Retrash.com – a platform dedicated to inspiring a more sustainable planet.