Clean coffee #2
I’ve written before about how in Climate Action Tech, we’ve been trying a thing — Clean Coffee. It’s a lightly facilitated discussion for folks with an interest in tech and sustainability to bring questions, and get some feedback or pointers from others.
You can read more on the Climate Action Tech publication post covering it, but the idea is to make it accessible, and have a conversations without needing to travel.
We did okay this time —with people from Indonesia, the UK, and France and Germany, and Serbia.
We post the notes and links we discussed after the session, without much editorial — they’re mainly there as as reminder for people who dropped in who might want to come back to them, and give an idea of what came up during the talks.
You can see Alicia’s notes from the last session here.
Topics we covered
The emoji after each question show how many votes each topic received. We used to work out what to talk about:
- What tools can I use to help have conversations that beyond week to week delivery in a service or product? I don’t have a way to talk about climate in groups at work, and I’d like a way to be able to contextualise what we’re doing in that respect — Chris 🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽
- If I wanted to hire someone to help think this through, what kind of budget do i ask for it come from? Is it a training thing? A risk thing? — Chris 🙋🏽 🙋🏽
- What is the understanding about repair, maintenance, and how that relates to remanufacturing? Any need for clarification (Isabel) 🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽
- What positive outcomes have people seen in the technology space with respect to addressing climate change (Tom J) 🙋🏽🙋🏽
- Who is doing work across tech / climate / maintenance, care or stewardship that I should know about (please)? (Naomi) 🙋🏽 🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽
- In a large multinational organisation, what the best point of leverage to get business commercial discussions about greening the data centres? (Bash)
Links related to topics:
Topic 1: What is the understanding about repair, maintenance, and how that relates to remanufacturing? Any need for clarification (Isabel)
Festival of maintenance is a response to the idea that we commission things for short term, without thinking about the longer term.
Is covers maintenance in all forms — codebases, products, mental health.
A mental for thinking about products at the end of their life, and what happens to them:
Here’s the thesis it came from:
https://www.mistraurbanfutures.org/en/thesis-defence-isabel-ord%C3%B3%C3%B1ez-pizarro
And here’s the full, 3hr long youtube video of her thesis defense:
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyF18twAK3I
What can tech learn from more established fields like architecture?
There’s an increasing body of work, where ideas of architecture end up being applied when building services or new products.
A good introduction post here, long is City is my Homescreen from Dan Hill:
“By aligning all these disciplines — and engaging with others, such as economics, political science, communications — it can help form plans, polities, projects and products across an appropriately diverse range of paces and scales. It also moves design into a more productive position, of both strategy and responsibility.”
The closest thing to a business model canvas in the sustainability sector so far:
https://www.threebility.com/sustainability-impact-canvas
Further projects in this field:
https://therestartproject.org/
Topic 2: Who is doing work across tech / climate / maintenance, care or stewardship that I should know about (please)? (Naomi)
Anna Sing — anthro supply chain specialist
BEAM Magazine — “A bit like Wired Magazine, but as if the planet mattered”
https://medium.com/thebeammagazine
Jeremy Grantham ‘Hicksian profit’: https://www.morningstar.com/videos/870606/watch-jeremy-granthams-race-of-our-lives-speech.html
Open source modelling of environmental impact for products:
LCA: http://www.openlca.org/openlca/openlca-features/
LCA data: https://nexus.openlca.org/
http://www.openlca.org/openlca/openlca-features/
A relatively intuitive framework for talking about this an applying numbers
From TU Delft:
An alternative to doing bottom up, time intensive life cycle assessments — top down, reducible to a single value. A bit like using Cost of Delay to quantify he comparitive value of product decisions.
Pre-calculated numbers available in free data spreadsheets, also in an app, for scenario planning are in the app.
A framework for applying it in a workshop session — choose area to apply ecocost analysis to reduce ‘hot spots’.
Topic 3: What tools can I use to help have conversations that beyond week to week delivery in a service or product? I don’t have a way to talk about climate in groups at work, and I’d like a way to be able to contextualise what we’re doing in that respect.
World Cafe as a format for setting up a group convo — facilitation
Representing different stakeholders
The closest thing to a business model canvas in the sustainability sector so far
https://www.threebility.com/sustainability-impact-canvas
Consequence Scanning — a new agile event worked on with the Responsible Tech gang
Chris’s pics from the test run of the event at Responsible Tech
Michael Bloomberg — ex mayor of new york’s new thing — aimed at larger companies. Some
Task force on Climate related Financial Disclosures
TCFD: https://www.fsb-tcfd.org/publications/tcfd-2018-status-report/
Four main pillars:
Governance
Metrics & Targets
Scenario Analysis
Risk
Also related
Etsy have started reporting finance and sustainability integrated reporting
Sector specific guidance to adopt this approach (warning — pretty dry, based on accounting)
https://www.sasb.org (sustainability accounting standard board)
Design research, for example:
https://research.chalmers.se/en/publication/4308 now I see that unfortunately it is not available in digital there… but I have a physical copy if it sounds interesting (Isabel)
Tools for integrating user research and co-creation.
(liz)
Topic 4: What positive outcomes have people seen in the technology space with respect to addressing climate change
Mass adoption of meat alternatives:
Even in America — Burger king adopting the impossible meat free beefburger
Greggs Vegan Sausage roll craze in the UK
Asian Renewable Energy Hub: https://cleantechnica.com/2018/10/12/macquarie-group-investments-in-11-gigawatt-asian-renewable-energy-hub/
Cheap renewables: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/25/coal-more-expensive-wind-solar-us-energy-study
‘Coal is on the way out’: study finds fossil fuel now pricier than solar or wind
POW to POS (etc) in crypto: large energy savings
“Planetary Health Diet”:
Carbon Majors report: https://b8f65cb373b1b7b15feb-c70d8ead6ced550b4d987d7c03fcdd1d.ssl.cf3.rackcdn.com/cms/reports/documents/000/002/327/original/Carbon-Majors-Report-2017.pdf?1499691240
