low carbon

 

The Prime Minister has today announced a long-term strategic partnership between Qatar and the UK as part of the UK Government’s commitment to forge new partnerships between hydrocarbon producing countries and consumer countries to help the move to a low carbon economy.

The Carbon Trust - set up by the UK Government in 2001 and one of the world’s leading experts on low carbon technologies - has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) on a new Low Carbon Innovation Partnership to set up a new £250m Qatar-UK Clean Technology Investment Fund and to investigate the creation of a Low Carbon Innovation Centre in Qatar.

Thanks for this alert from Anna Smee at the Responsible Business Club. Perhaps LCW researchers should be interesting Quatar in our work?

 

 Action researcher, Gill Coleman creating a learning history with a MAS Intimates employee.

We are engaged in a learning history process to describe the development, construction and start up of the Thurulie low carbon factory (see video) in Sri Lanka which has been built by the Sri Lankan company MAS Intimates to supply lingerie to Marks and Spencer as part of the latter’s Plan A.

MAS Intimates in Sri Lanka has a longstanding reputation for innovative products and manufacturing and an equally longstanding concern for creating high employment standards. The company is a significant player in the Sri Lankan economy with considerable economic and political power. The wider Sri Lankan context presents both challenges and opportunities: wage and skill levels are relatively high and to compete in the global economy leading companies need to offer added value, often through contributing an ‘ethical’ dimension-social and environmental-to the supply chain.

The Thurulie factory has been designed to minimize energy through a set of design features that create a building appropriate to its tropical environment. The main green features of the building are:
- designed to sit lightly on the site, with minimum disturbance to ecology, on two floors to minimise footprint
-  ‘returned to nature’ at night
- set in a cool micro-climate to maximise thermal comfort and air quality, using native plants
- carbon neutral, using green power - hydro and solar PV
- low operating energy, using evaporative cooling, and natural lighting supplemented by LED task lights
- structure of re-usable steel framework and timber flooring to upper floors
- reflective roofing and partial green roof, to minimise heat absorption
- walls and roads built using cement stabilised soil with low embodied energy
- rainwater harvesting tanks to collect storm water
- anaerobic treatment system for waste water

As our theoretical orientation would suggest, the creative adoption of these technical features has only been possible because several stakeholder groups have collaborated to design and build this factory:
* Strategic thinkers within MAS looking for opportunities to add ethical value to the supply chain and strengthen relationship with a key customer;
* Marks and Spencer, whose need to create a novel strategic position in the UK high street aims to ensure that the goods it offers, and thus its entirely supply chain, reach high ethical and ecological standards. (See Plan A);
* A centre for energy studies at Moratuwa University in Colombo, whose members have been developing energy-saving practices in the tropics for many years, linked to an architect colleague with a passion for green design;
* A project management group able to act with energy and creativity to realize these strategic objectives in practice;
* A senior management team in MAS with a strong ‘can-do’ culture willing to give freedom and space to support innovation;
* A highly skilled and responsive building contractor able to respond flexibly and speedily to their client’s unusual requirements.

We have interviewed representatives of all these groups and at the time of writing are developing a draft learning history which we will take back to Sri Lanka for collaborative exploration in July.  The purpose of this learning history is to help those involved in a project reflect and learn, so that future projects may benefit from the experience.  Everyone involved has been extremely busy getting the factory to completion, and so it has been difficult to reflect on what has happened.  Further, each person involved has their own perspective, and it is difficult for individuals to have an overview and see how the different contributions have fitted together.  So our first objective in this visit is to help them in thinking about this, and noticing what has gone on.

We also have a second important purpose as part of the wider Lowcarbonworks research project.  Given the challenges of climate change and the importance of reducing carbon emissions, we wish to engage a wider audience in understanding interaction of technology and contextual factors in the achievement of a low carbon future. What has been achieved at Thurulie is important, and clearly demonstrates the systemic complementarity between several approaches to low carbon  with contextual factors including organizational strategy and inter-organizational relations in the supply chain, economic opportunity, national cultural conditions and the individual knowledge and agency of several important champions. We believe that the story of Thurulie offers important lessons for both business and policy audiences and contributes to our academic understanding of the adoption of low carbon technologies We hope the story will encourage business audiences to emulate it in their own original projects.�

Lowcarbonworks is an action research project aiming to tackle barriers which inhibit low carbon innovation. Our starting point was food and drink production as this sector is a heavy user of energy and has plenty of scope for further efficiencies.

Researchers from different disciplines from Bristol, Manchester and Bath Universities are working with industrial partners and other innovators in the public sector. They are working on a variety of projects logged in the Projects section.

A core principle underlying our projects is shared learning. We are not starting with answers but learning with partners. Some of these are focussed on running successful businesses, others may be creating the conditions for communities to flourish. What we aim to do together is to create further win/win opportunities for low carbon innovation.

This website is designed to encourage shared learning and inquiry. It also offers an opportunity to grow a wider community of people interested in working with us, formally or informally, virtually or face to face.

As a start or an experiment why not try adding something to the site? It’s quite easy to use once you’ve joined but for those more cautious we’ve compiled a beginners guide. (link to follow)

History
LCW came about in response to the challenge of climate change and in the context of the UK Government’s policy to reduce carbon emissions by 60% by 2050. This challenge was made more urgent by the recent Stern Review (Stern, 2006) and the fourth IPPC report.

The bid for funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council’s (EPSRC) Carbon Vision Programme was sparked by a meeting between climate change strategy consultant, David Ballard, Jonathan Aylen from the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research, Nick Morley from Oakdene Hollins, and a bunch of engineers in a “sandpit” event organised by EPSRC.

David was carrying out research into human and organisational change at the Centre for Action Research in Professional Practice at Bath University’s School of Management which now hosts this site. David could see how useful his insights and action research approaches could be to the challenge of low carbon technology transfer. Proven technologies exist which can save both money and carbon emissions but many have stalled, why?

LCW argues that:

1) The barriers to transformation do not lie in the technologies themselves but in the wider social, political, economic and organizational context; and that it is important to integrate economic and technical dimensions with social, organizational and psychological dimensions of change.
2) There is interplay between technological, economic, and human factors which creates conservatism in the system as a whole. Attempting to change one factor alone may be of limited impact. It may even be damaging if it causes the whole system to ‘lock in’ to a suboptimal path, but addressing several of these at the same time can result in a virtuous cycle of change.
3) To create change we need both awareness of the issues and a sense of agency—that we can initiate relevant change. Our experience is that while awareness of climate change issues has increased significantly, people generally feel powerless in the face of planetary level events such as climate change and the experience of human agency remains very limited.
4) However, there are moments—for example when technological, economic and political factors come together -which offer a window of opportunity; when the capacity to make change is significantly increased.

LCW is concerned to identify and capitalize on these moments. One strand is the Learning History with Local Government which identifies the ways barriers to low carbon innovation are overcome on the local scale. A second strand is to work with industrial partners through a process of action research to more fully understand the contextual issues and find ways to respond to them so that stalled technologies and other business processes are more easily adopted. A third strand is to identify the opportunities that arise when capital stock is replenished. 

References:
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (2007). Climate Change 2007: The IPCC 4th Assessment Report. Retrieved February 4, 2007, from http://www.ipcc.ch/
Stern, N. (2006). Stern Review on the economics of climate change. London: HM Treasury.

 

Quick link to Learning History blog site 

A highly interactive Learning History workshop for achieving low carbon reduction in local authorities has led to the creation of the UK’s first ever online collaborative learning history. Created and hosted by CARPP PhD action researcher, Margaret Gearty, the site is inviting comments and continuing participation from those who came to the workshop and others whom they may recommend.

Even if you weren’t able to attend the workshop in Bath in February 2008, you can read  the various stories of low carbon innovation such as the development of a district heating system in Southampton or the widespread use of biomass in Barnsley and see and hear what other people learnt.

The idea of using blogging technology, although innovative when applied to creating a joint learning history, has already established a place in higher education. For some background to how this learning movement is developing we refer you to the following paper: Exploring the place of blogs in higher education

 

Action researcher Gill Coleman, has recently returned from a visit to an eco-factory in Sri Lanka which will be supplying underwear to Marks and Spencer. Gill was impressed by the collective ingenuity and the speed of innovation achieved by the company, MAS. The idea is to create a learning history at the site to enable the company to learn from its success so that it can be replicated elsewhere.

Set up an rss feed using the orange button above if you want to be kept up to date with this project.Â

Developing Strategic Competence

In this article (click on the title to read/download) action researcher and company director, David Ballard, sets out nine complementary pathways along which organisations need to progress if low carbon transformation is to happen.

Evidence from his research suggests that organisations that lag behind on any pathway may find that more ambitious plans for low carbon innovation are thwarted.

The above download is an early draft of an article which appeared in the journal, Organisations and People in November 2007.

Margaret’s Phd project in lowcarbonworks:

I joined Lowcarbonworks just after I’d completed a Masters in Business and Responsibility at the University of Bath. Before that I’d spent 15 years working as an engineer and project manager in the hi-tech semiconductor industry. On Lowcarbonworks I’m interested in really getting behind examples of where innovations have occurred and finding new interesting ways to learn from them.

To do this I’m conducting what’s called a Learning History of innovative approaches to carbon reduction in Local Authorities. The learning history has been used with considerable success in settings ranging from Car Manufacturers to The Natural Step (a Swedish environmental education organisation).

It’s different from a conventional case study analysis in two main ways. First, by foregrounding the human story, it is not presenting a definitive, exhaustive explanation - rather it is working with multiple different perspectives that represent different levels too. So analysis, story, reflection and recollection all go side by side in the history. Second, by using an action research approach, particular attention is paid to there being value for the participants and for others influenced by the research.

So this is not extractive research. What we do with the Histories is as important as the documents themselves. Workshops, online support and other forms of engagement are being organised around the central ’story’ of low-carbon innovation in local authorities.

It’s been fascinating and inspiring to travel up and down the country this past year meeting individuals who have been involved in projects that show Low Carbon sometimes really does work!