[MUSIC] So I'm a research fellow at this institute called Luc Hoffman Institute. And besides being a little bit difficult to spell cuz there are too many letters there. It's also very amorphous, so it has an office in Glan and then we have fellows, which are spread kind of all over the world. And there are six fellows right now, and most of them are doing research in something to do with conservation. But I work on cities, which is a growing area of interest for the WWF, so I'm gonna talk a little bit about that. So WWF, I'm sure you are familiar with their conservation efforts. They work in that area, panda is their symbol, they have a global presence. They're very well-known. But they also have a growing interest in cities, so the program that I'm working with, it's called the Earth Hour City Challenge. It's basically this large program where the cities report their footprint reduction actions and commitments. So why is WWF interested in this? Obviously, the key reasons I think most people here understand, cities are the primary habitat in which human beings live. So if you want to change the way we live, if you want to change how we behave, we essentially have to change cities. And that is the reason why the battle for climate change, or peak resource extraction, or any of these problems that we face right now is going to be won or lost in cities. If cities don't transform, then we won't be making a large progress in a lot of the other areas that we work on. But cities are also adaptive systems. They're also complex, adaptive systems, which means that if you want to see change happening in cities, it's not something that can be planned or predicted using the normal evaluation criteria. So, in cities you can have a lot of inertia to change, there can be a lot of resistance. But at the same time, there can be these pressure points, or trigger points, where if you actually do jump across those, then you can see immediate transformations right away. And so, one of the things that we wanna try to do is, try to find these positive pressure points, where we can start seeing immediate change in the cities that we live in. So what is the Earth Hour City Challenge? The Earth Hour City Challenge is a global program where cities are reporting carbon footprint reduction commitments and actions. So, in the last iteration we had 166 cities reporting from 17 different countries. They basically come in and report on this platform called the carbon platform. What they're going to do is the next year in terms of reducing their carbon footprint, and what are their commitments for the next year and also for the next following few years. So how much overall deduction they're gonna do, and what are the key actions that they're gonna take in order to achieve those commitments. This platform is being run by Itclay and it has, besides the 166 cities that are a participating in the Earth Hour City Challenge, it also has reporting from a lot of different cities compiling to other international programs. There are 524 cities reporting data on this. Although there is some level of standardization, there isn't a lot of standardization in their reporting across the board. So not everyone is reporting everything. And some of the data being reported as complying to different senders as compared to some of the other data that's being reported. So in order to sort of appreciate and find find good examples for urban transformation. Every year the Earth Hour City Challenge selects a global capital. So last year it was Seoul, and this was announced the World Congress in Seoul in April 2015. Cape Town was the winner before that, and Vancouver was the winner before that. In some ways these cities are leaders in the fields in which they're acting but this is also not a generalized comment on the overall sustainability of the city. This just means that this city is being very ambitious towards getting the carbon footprint reductions that we need and also that they're actually making some progress towards those commitments. So there are some actions being reported which are concrete and actionable. Also, the actions that are reported are not necessarily limited to energy related actions. So there are lot of actions that are reported which are related to food. Localization, for instance, there's some water related actions. There's the obvious ones relating to transport and heat and energy in buildings. Bu basically, the only thing that ties all of these actions together is that the cities, when they report them, they try to make an estimate of how much carbon they can deduce by applying any certain action. So, that's kind of a string. But otherwise these actions almost come from all areas of urban footprint. Besides selecting the global capital every year, every country also gets to select a national, or the country doesn't, but the program selects a national capital each year. So Gothenburg was the winner in Sweden last year. So we've been getting data from cities in this platform since 2010. So it's been three years since cities have been reporting data, and now we want to go back and look at this data and analyze, what are the most effective ways for cities to achieve footprint reduction? And actually go back and feed some of this information back to the cities and tell them, what are the steps that they can take in order to achieve footprint reduction in cities. And that's where this research project comes from. So now we are starting a research project, which looks at this data and some of the other data, and hopefully we will be able to identify, what are the key leverage points? What are the key areas in which we are getting effective footprint reduction from cities? What are the key things that we can do that actually inspire the kind of change that cities are trying to inspire? And hopefully we'll be able to look at it from all dimensions. So not just the hard interventions but also some of the soft drivers of change. What are the key behavioral change incentives that can be put in place in order for people to adapt the kind of practices that we want them to adapt? So the key objectives of this research project are essentially to identify some of these leverage points, or these trigger points, where transformative change can immediately happen, so we are really interested in transformation. We are looking at intermental change as well, but also we want to identify things that the cities can go back and implement right away. So what is something that you go and tell the mayor of Shenzhen city that he can implement in two years that is going to have a massive impact on the lifestyles of people living in cities all over the world? And maybe serve as an example for low footprint living in cities? So that's basically our key objective with this research project. When we are talking about these leverage points or these high leverage points for cities, obviously every city exists in its own natural social and economic context, so there are a lot of variations across the board. So, you can just go to the city and tell them, this is the kind of thing that you can do and then apply it to cities all over the world. So one of the important things that we'd have to have coming out of project like this would be some sort of typology of cities. So that's something that we wanna work on in a little bit more rigor than what's out there in the literature so far. So we wanna look at the typology of cities and see how we can inform different type of cities to achieve different type of causations. I'll talk about that a little bit more later on. And obviously we wanna tell the cities, what are the high-leverage action points? What are the soft drivers of change? So not just the hard action points but also the soft drivers of change. And then we want to have some commentary in there about, what indicator systems we can use to measure or monitor this change? So how can we make informed commentary about how these changes being achieved and whether progress is even being made or not. And this is a project that brings together academic interests and practitioner interests. So, one of the key tenets of Lou Kauffman Institute is to bridge this divide between practitioner and academia. So, the outputs of this projects are not just going to be peer-review publications, which you usually get out of academic projects. But we will be developing the root of [INAUDIBLE] knowledge product, which speak directly to the practitioners working in the city. The WWF offices all over the world are working very closely with cities in order to bring them on board with this program. So, the project in a way is also being designed by extensive input from all of these practitioners and stakeholders. So, the knowledge products that are going to come out of this research project are going to inform the actions that the cities will be taking in the immediate future, hopefully. So now I'll talk a little bit about this typology of cities and how we want to go forward with it. So one thing that I feel that Elena brought up as well and that I think is lacking is a concrete rigorous vision of a good in cities. So what does sustainable life in cities looks like? In order to that, we have to look at cities in different climatic and geographical environments. And then make a commentary on, what is the ideal condition for these cities to exists 10 years from now, 20 years from now or 50 years from now? How can a city like Dubai in the Middle East be sustainable? Whether it can be sustainable or not, if their external energy inflow's acquired, then what shape must those inflows take? So, we wanna look at all of the different types of cities on the basis of natural capital that's available to the cities. And then do a typology of cities on the basis of how, with the available natural capital, they can achieve a sustainable form. And then building on that, we want to do some scenario work which looks at different types of evolution in technology and in social behavior. So, in one scenario we can look at a condition where we are maybe in a technological world that's not progressing extremely fast. And maybe there's not a lot of adoption happening, but we also want to look at breakthrough scenarios. So some academics that we are working with are people who are imagining cities 60 years from now. And these are cities which are basically full of buildings that are growing themselves. They're of being built. So, the way the scenario works, we want to have a picture of sustainable cities in the future in any given climatic or geographical scenario. And once we have that idea of what that final city type is going to look like, we want to look at current city types. Not just in terms of the available natural capital, but also in terms of the socioeconomic conditions, and see how the cities today can go to this final city type, and then define these transition pathways for them. So, [COUGH] essentially what we'd be doing wouldn't be a typology of cities, but it will be a typology of transition pathways. And then once you have these transition pathways, then we can maybe try to do some informed work around, what are the key high leverage points that can inform these transition pathways? So that's part of the WWF knowledge project that we want emerging out of this research project. And at the end of the next two and half years, we want to be able to go back to the cities and tell them that, if you are this type of city, then this is one way in which you can achieve sustainability [COUGH]. So, this is basically a schematic that summarizes this. So, you have the current typology C, and you have to final typology F, and then you go from C to F. And then, we have this whole database of reporting reported commitments and actions in the carbon platform. And we're going to analyze that fight. What are the key sectors in which we can get effective transformation faster and at a cheaper cost? And that's gonna inform the identification of high leverage points along these transition pathways. So that's one of the areas in which the research project is moving forward. So the other area that I'm gonna talk about has to do with We Love Cities campaign. So is a campaign that's associated with the Earth Hour City Challenge program. And essentially the cities go out there and ask the citizens to go online and work for their city to be the global capital of the world. So the cities organize events around this. They organize online campaigns around this. And this is a program that has a massive engagement, at least at the online level. So last year there was something 300,000 people around the world [INAUDIBLE] for their cities. And there were 30,000 people who took the next step besides [INAUDIBLE] for their cities and actually provided written suggestions on how the cities can improve the standards of living and at the same time get footprint reduction in cities. So, this is one platform in which we are getting some engagement from the cities in terms of informing how the cities can move forward. And we want to use this to actually try to do maybe something more concrete, and something that looks like citizen science. So we want to enrich the engagement a little bit more. And the way we want to do it, we want to use the survey in the next step, in the next year, in order to identify key motivations for the citizens that compel them to action on the carbon footprint reduction front. And at the same time, we want to see, what are the campaign strategies that are working for cities and that are allowing cities to motivate their citizens to come online and take part in this exercise. So, on the one hand we are asking the citizens, what are the key motivations that would motivate? For instance, are these abstract motivations like climate change, at the global level, or peak resource extraction, or are these completely economic motivations? For instance reduction in your energy bill? What are gonna be the key motivations that will compel you to act? And some of this might look like it's obvious, but often with studies like that, you get results which are counterintuitive. So it will be good to get this exercise conducted at a mass scale and get some analysis of the motivations of citizens in terms of how they get the footprint reduction. And then the results that we get out of this exercise will inform the next stage or the next development of the We Love Cities campaign. Where we will probably develop some sort of app to increase the citizen engagement, and maybe use some of the tools related to geolocation. And try to get the citizens more engaged in reporting on where they're actually cutting down on their carbon footprint. Whether they are driving less, whether they are using less energy in some other manner, whether they're eating more locally. And the idea is to basically get the information from [INAUDIBLE] study to gamify that experience. So maybe we will set it up in a way where the citizens actually get some sort of citizen brownie points for engaging with the campaign. So that's basically a summary where their project is going so far. This is a program that works in multiple ways, so you can engage with it at all sorts of different levels. As a research project it will be a multidisciplinary research project. So if you're interested in some parts of it, if you think there's something on which we can collaborate, please contact me. Otherwise, if you're just interested in it as a citizen, you can go check out the website and [INAUDIBLE] for your city or provide suggestions on how your mayor can do a better job. And that's basically it, thank you. >> [APPLAUSE] [MUSIC]
