The collaboration that produced the Climate Planning user guide is aimed at addressing climate compatible development. To produce the guide the research involved extensive surveys, interviews, and consultation with climate thought leaders. The process is defined in the image below.
So what does the guide do? It assesses a range of tools covering seven categories focused on adaptation and mitigation. Tools are analyzed by costs, extent of guidance and stakeholder participation. A current weakness is too many similar tools developed for climate change adaptation with almost all applying to early stages of policy development. The lack of implementation and evaluation tools is clearly a weakness that at the time of publication back in 2011 had yet to be addressed.
Nonetheless the effort undertaken provides a directory of Climate Planning tools which can be selected by by language and other filters including category, policy stage and keywords. A conveninet dashboard (seen below) helps in the selection process.
The site first appeared in 2011 with the authors indicating a three-year plan to provide continuous updates about the tools and their effectiveness. There are more than 100 of them. I wonder with no updates since the site’s beginning if this exercise in knowledge aggregation and sharing has failed. Or maybe it has been absorbed into the larger effort to address climate change under the IPCC and United Nations. But the effort and work rendered here cannot be dismissed and is worth a read including the conclusions and recommendations of the authors’ initial report.
One thing I felt the report was missing was a solid definition of what is “climate compatible development.” I know the purpose of the assembled tools was initially to help Developing World countries, but could there be a tool within the user guide that could help a Developed country in a policy decision process? I was thinking about how my country, Canada, is wrestling with the issue of further development of the oil sands and the building of pipelines while addressing climate change and a future low-carbon economy. The issue should Canada build one, two or three pipelines to get oil from Alberta to tidewater where it can be shipped to overseas markets?
Can any project producing and shipping oil be defined as climate compatible development? There is no doubt that environmentalists concerned with rising CO2 levels see any non-net-zero greenhouse gas producing project as incompatible. But economists could argue that income derived from oil revenues shipped to foreign markets could accelerate research and development related to reducing carbon emissions, that the carbon produced by the project could be offset by the purchase of credits from low-carbon emitters, and that income could also be spent on mitigation and adaptation projects.
This is the dilemma the governments of Canada face today. Picking short-term winners and losers with a longer-term game in mind. Right now without pipelines the people of Alberta are the losers. But with pipelines the revenue derived means the province has income to spend on meeting its net-zero climate change emission goals. It means income to the Canadian government to further invest in climate change research and development. But does a pipeline meet the criteria of climate compatible development which is by definition, development that minimizes the harm caused by climate impacts? In the real politics of global warming here in the 21st century most environmentalists would argue we cannot afford to add more carbon in the short-term because of long-term consequences.
]]>But here in the 21st century researchers at two universities, Sussex and Bristol, working with the company, Ultrahaptics (all in the United Kingdom) have built a tractor beam. As they describe it, it is a technology that “can levitate objects of different sizes and materials through air, water and tissue.” It uses an ultrasonic phased array to accomplish the task.
What is that?
They are using sound. The array described in their research paper included 64 miniature loudspeakers creating high-pitched (40Khz), high-intensity sound waves. This creates a force field around the object and through the manipulation of the sound output from different speakers within the array the object can be moved. In the experiment the researchers were able to manipulate a spherical 4 micro-millimeter polystyrene bead.
Because the beam they create is acoustic it cannot work in outer space because without an atmosphere there is nothing to which sound waves can work or react. There is no sound in a vacuum. But terrestrial uses are abundant. The array could be used in transportation, on assembly lines, or in medical applications both diagnostic (think a sound equivalent to MRI) and interventional (surgical applications with a micro-device delivered to a repair point in the body).
But before the invention can be applied to real-world needs it has to scale. So the inventors are pursuing the building of a bigger version with the hope they can levitate a football (the round kind) from a distance of 10 meters (approximately 33 feet). They also want to build a scaled-down version of the technology that could be applied to surgical and pharmacological applications.
