India Education Diary Bureau Admin in Developing Capacities of UNESCO Designations For Sustainable Development informs that there could be no future without focusing on the nexus between heritage and the creative economy. In a move to help in that direction, UNESCO designated sites to the proclamation of 2021 as the International Year of Creative Economy for Sustainable Development.
Developing Capacities Of UNESCO Designations For Sustainable Development
The Fondazione Santagata for the Economics of Culture has just released the report of a survey conducted with the support of the UNESCO Regional Bureau for Science and Culture in Europe, in order to assess the impact of the first 5 workshops conducted under the initiative “International Academy on UNESCO Designations and Sustainable Development” (2015-2019). During this fruitful experience, the Academy convened approximately 130 professionals working for UNESCO designated sites from about 50 countries across the world and generated evident positive impact on capacities to contribute to local sustainable development, both directly and indirectly.
The International Academy on UNESCO Designations and Sustainable Development is a capacity-building programme conceived and launched in 2015 by the Santagata Foundation for the Economics of Culture and UNESCO through its Regional Bureau for Science and Culture in Europe, as part of the interdisciplinary and intersectoral programme of the latter.
The International Academy aims to contribute to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda through strengthening the capacities of managing authorities and other local practitioners working with UNESCO designations, with special focus on World Heritage properties, Biosphere Reserves, Global Geoparks, elements inscribed in the Lists for Intangible Cultural Heritage, and Creative Cities. The project was made possible thanks to the annual contribution of Italy to the UNESCO Regional Bureau for Science and Culture in Europe.
The Academy experience helped participants to envisage and pursue new partnership opportunities in their respective local contexts at different levels: within the governance framework of single designated sites; across different policy sectors (e.g. culture, environment, tourism, agriculture, creative economy); between different designations in multi-designated areas or in close territorial proximity; as well as between different designated sites in different countries or territorial contexts.
One of the key findings of the survey is that none of the selected UNESCO designated areas were immune to the heavy socio-economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting the necessity to develop appropriate responses to the crisis in the sense of sustainably leveraging cultural and natural assets for recovery. This was reflected in the capacity-building priorities that the respondents indicated for future workshops of the Academy, focusing especially on: i) how to effectively sustain economic growth while ensuring social and environmental sustainability; ii) increasing the preparedness, resilience, and recovery of the sites in face of emergencies; iii) supporting the construction of a strategic, integrated, and participatory management framework with a view to achieving middle and long-term objectives.
On this basis, the UNESCO Regional Bureau for Science and Culture in Europe, together with Fondazione Santagata are working to prepare the 6th workshop of the Academy, which is tentatively scheduled in October 2021 and will focus on the nexus between heritage and the creative economy in UNESCO designated sites, in the wake of the proclamation of 2021 as International Year of Creative Economy for Sustainable Development.
Leading scholar says region must place more importance on liberal arts, not just science and engineering, to build better societies by Anna McKie could be an unprecedented way of covering the recurring issue of underdevelopment not through traditional knowledge but by using the art and humanities knowledge. Let us see what is proposed as per the very words of a Professor: ‘certification’ mania hobbles Middle East development.
Professor: ‘certification’ mania hobbles Middle East development
April 8, 2021
Students in the Middle East and North Africa are too often more interested in “acquiring” a degree than developing the understanding that should come with it, a leading scholar has warned.
Safwan Masri, Columbia University’s executive vice-president for global centres and global development, said too many young people were steered into courses focused on science and engineering when critical thinking and intercultural understanding were desperately needed across the region.
Source: iStock
Speaking at Times Higher Education’s MENA Universities Summit, Professor Masri said future leaders being trained in institutions across the region were “not fully prepared to lead”, the product of “technocratic societies led by a global technocratic class”.
“Students – and the parents who bankroll them – are often more interested in acquiring professional certification than truly understanding the world and the role of an educated citizen within it,” said Professor Masri.
“Here in MENA, young people fortunate enough to attend university are almost unilaterally steered into STEM training.
“But STEM competency is only half of the equation. We need people who also know how to organise societies, articulate and secure alignment on political ideals, and build robust civil societies that expand rights and freedoms to historically marginalised groups.”
Professor Masri, an expert on the contemporary Arab world and the head of Columbia’s study centre in Amman, Jordan, said the solution had to be a greater embrace of liberal arts education across the region.
He acknowledged that this “won’t be easy” because generations of Arabs “have been indoctrinated with hyper-nationalist propaganda, exclusionary rhetoric and dogmatic religious discourse at the expense of critical thinking and questioning skills”.
“Progress cannot be achieved without deprogramming and reprogramming this mindset, to learn to coexist with different points of view and ways of life,” Professor Masri said.
“Unless liberal arts training is more highly valued in this region, the region’s ambitions will be thwarted. We must achieve balance. We must help students – and the parents who fund many of them – understand the crucial interplay between content [of academic training] and context [understanding of society].”
At the summit, held online in partnership with NYU Abu Dhabi, Professor Masri also argued that at a time of geopolitical turmoil and “historic levels of misunderstanding” between countries and the people within them, knowledge diplomacy led by universities “may be our last and best tool if we are to rebuild a broken world”. He highlighted Columbia’s decision to maintain its global centre in Istanbul even in the face of increasing persecution of academics.
“The solution wasn’t to give in, we contended, but to dig in – to support academics and students, to continue to share knowledge,” Professor Masri said.
But Professor Masri expressed concern about the “weaponisation” of knowledge, highlighting that while Gulf states’ attempts to exercise soft power by funding Middle East studies centres in Western universities ostensibly had “no strings attached”, there were “uncomfortable stories” of researchers at these centres coming under pressure after writing about issues such as human rights and democracy.
A better model of knowledge diplomacy, he argued, was that of the Covid vaccines, which were the result of thousands of researchers crossing the globe over decades, generating the knowledge that informed the vaccines’ designs.
“The Covid vaccine represents decades’ worth, perhaps even centuries’ worth, of university-generated knowledge – distilled down to little more than an ounce of liquid, all concentrated in a single shot,” Professor Masri said.
“This medical and scientific breakthrough will reconnect the people of the world.”
James Rowntree, vice president at Jacobs, asked this question in Infrastructure Intelligence blog: What does it take to be smart? It is in everybody’s mind these days.
12 March 2021
Collaboration between city leaders, asset owners, investors and the tech sector is crucial in realising the benefits of smart cities says James Rowntree of Jacobs.
The term ‘smart’ has been used for some time now to broadly describe the adoption of technology by a city or infrastructure owner. The expression has begun suffering from overuse, particularly where the public experience of the result has been anything but smart, in the literal sense.
Many cities and infrastructure owners have made technology investments over the years to automatically monitor or control things such as streetlights, water levels, utility distribution and traffic flow. However, these are relatively modest interventions when put in the context of ‘Industry 4.0’, the much-heralded fourth industrial revolution and the impact that real-time data and advanced analytics could have on how our cities and infrastructure assets operate in the future. If the hype is to be believed – and there’s good reason for it to be – then the future of smart is potentially transformational. The big challenge though is how to get there – and who pays?
The use cases for smart cities are multiple, varied and growing, as anyone who has visited any of the international smart city exhibitions will be able to testify. It’s clear that relatively benign sensors that periodically transmit data today will be replaced tomorrow by real-time interactions which will allow for advanced applications, such as connected and remote healthcare, and connected ecosystems for things like autonomous vehicles.
Whilst many of today’s use-cases will operate on current networks such as LoRaWaN and 4G, 5G is widely seen as the tipping point technology that will enable a lot of the next generation, disruptive use-cases to be realised. However, a challenge for cities and infrastructure owners is that predicting these use-cases is a little like trying to predict in the early 2000s the vast array of applications we now use on our smart phones. Creating a business case for a ‘smart’ entity is therefore not easy.
Connecting people and place
For anything to be smart it needs to be digitally connected and whilst satellite technology is developing, this invariably means hardwiring everything back to fibre. This then introduces the value of connecting people as well as things. Both local and central governments are actively encouraging reliable fibre-to-the-home connectivity for all citizens, recognising the value of closing the digital divide and giving people better access to 21st century jobs, opportunities and services.
There is now a very good body of evidence that points to the positive social and economic benefits of fast and reliable digital connectivity. Cities in particular have an opportunity to promote digital connectivity as a platform for creativity and innovation that in turn is attractive to inward investment and growth.
Unlocking the value of infrastructure
Similarly, owners of linear infrastructure assets see the opportunity to use their networks to promote the laying of fibre, unlocking not only operational use-cases and additional revenue streams for themselves but also providing a social value benefit through connecting people in harder to reach areas.
The starting point is therefore to be clear on the outcomes to be achieved. The challenge for any city or infrastructure owner is to get digital connectivity where they need it and to build use-cases around the technology they intend to adopt.
Both urban and rural communities are generally reliant on the established telecom network providers expanding their fibre and mobile networks, although the timing and geographic reach of these plans is principally driven by their own commercial considerations rather than the specific priorities of a city or infrastructure owner.
More recently, given it can be highly revenue generative, there are increasing numbers of private investors seeking to realise value from fibre ownership and governments are actively encouraging this in certain jurisdictions. The good news is that there’s a lot of cash available for investment in digital connectivity if only the right business cases can be established.
Infrastructure Intelligence
Putting forward the case for change
To be both smart and to realise the benefits of connected citizens, public authorities are highly reliant on this private investment from either established or new telecom network providers. In turn, that private investment depends upon being able to secure anchor revenues to justify an investment case.
For public authorities who can navigate state aid and public procurement regulations, they can attract this investment by either providing a future anchor tenancy commitment or encouraging others to do so. This all comes down to being able to develop their own credible business cases that clearly capture future connectivity benefits.
Defining and banking these future benefits is therefore key to being able to attract investment. Whilst technology companies are spending billions on research and development and there’s a highly impressive array of technologies on the market, cities and infrastructure owners need to understand those that will truly add value. Technology remains nothing more than an interesting idea until such a time that it becomes accessible and deployable in a way that creates tangible value for the end user.
For a city or infrastructure owner, it’s the consequences of this technology on business processes, people and training that needs to be clearly understood as part of the overall business case. These important points are often lost in the excitement of the technology but matter hugely to the ultimate buyer.
To realise the benefits of becoming truly smart – where city and infrastructure operations are a fusion of the physical and cyber worlds – is highly complex and requires the alignment of interests across the technology, telecommunications and investment sectors in collaboration with the city leadership and asset owners.
James Rowntree is vice president – telecoms and digital infrastructure – at Jacobs.
T_HQ DATA CENTERS‘ article on Looking to a circular economy by designing green data centers by Joe Devanesanexplaining how to meet the rising data demands of AI & IOT applications whilst helping us discover how an interconnected data centre ecosystem can reduce costs and mitigate risk.
19 February 2021
Can more sustainable data centers be designed that employ green energy and circular technology strategies?
Solving the massive energy consumption dilemma by data centers has been an ongoing challenge for the data industry. Data centers are being constructed and pressed into service at a rapid clip worldwide, but the significant carbon imprint of these projects are causing design teams to study how to minimize the environmental impact of the construction process and enable more green, yet still cost-efficient data center designs.
The astronomical levels of energy output required by data centers is raising concerns among green energy advocates, government administrators, and the data center industry itself. Notable service providers including technology giants with their own centers have started working with companies like CarbonCure, which makes a low-carbon “green” concrete material for the tile-up walls that frame data centers.
Cultivating a circular economy
Concrete’s durability and strength are ideal for industrial construction, but the production of cement requires the use of massive kilns, which require large amounts of energy, and the actual chemical process emits staggeringly high levels of carbon dioxide. CarbonCure’s method repurposes the CO2 emitted by large refineries and chemically mineralizes it during the concrete manufacturing process to make greener and stronger concrete.
CarbonCure’s method is a step towards cultivating a circular economy, where materials are part of an inverted logistics chain, tracking the source and the waste produced, and repurposing them so that they contribute back towards the sustainability of the project, while cutting down on the environmental footprint.
As solutions like CarbonCure’s prove their feasibility as well as the potential to optimize costs, data center customers, especially the bigger corporations that consume more energy, will begin feeling the pressures to adopt environmental practices and corporate social responsibility policies that are in-line with sustainability best practices available in their region.
To overcome the time-sensitive pitfalls that green energy solutions like solar and wind power encounter presently, Google created a “carbon-intelligent computing platform” that optimizes for green energy at its data centers by rescheduling workloads that are not time-sensitive, such as matching workloads to solar power during the day, and to wind energy in the evening when it is airier, for example.
But the intermittent use of renewable energy to overcome the significant carbon footprint associated with electricity, can be sidestepped altogether if more efficient energy storage means could be set up to generate and store power from green sources at data centers.
A new project in the US will showcase a potential solution from Tesla, the electric car company led by tech visionary Elon Musk. Data center technology company Switch will use new large-scale energy storage technology from Tesla to boost its use of solar energy for its mammoth data center campuses in Las Vegas and Reno, Nevada. It is a promising project in pioneering a holistic integration of renewable power, green energy storage and Internet-scale data centers.
Rich Miller writes in DATACENTERFrontier that Beyond Green Power: New Frontiers in Data Center Sustainability can easily be envisioned as these are increasingly populating planet earth.
Above picture is of Large pipes sporting Google’s logo colors move water throughout the cooling plant at the Google’ data center in Douglas County, Georgia. (Photo: Google)
More data center projects will integrate sustainability into design and construction, with early collaboration between teams to minimize the environmental impact of the construction process and create a building with low operational carbon impact, enabling more effective and cost-efficient offset strategies. Design collaboration is essential in seeking to integrate cleaner technologies into the power chain and cooling systems.
Several data center providers are working with CarbonCure, which makes a low-carbon “greener” concrete material for the tile-up walls that frame data centers. Concrete’s durability and strength are ideal for industrial construction, but the production of cement requires the use of massive kilns, which require large amounts of energy, and the actual chemical process emits staggeringly high levels of CO2. CarbonCure takes CO2 produced by large emitters like refineries and chemically mineralizes it during the concrete manufacturing process to make greener and stronger concrete. The process reduces the volume of cement required in the mixing of concrete, while also permanently removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
Waste Stream Accountability and the ‘Circular Economy’
A key priority is tracking the environmental impact of construction components, including a “reverse logistics” process to track the waste stream and disposition of debris. Asset recovery and recycling specialists will become key partners, and the most successful projects will communicate goals and best practices across the contractors and trades participating in each project. The goal is a “circular economy” that reuses and repurposes materials.
Managing packaging for equipment that is shipped to a data center facility is an important and often underlooked facet of waste stream accountability. There are also opportunities in reuse of components and equipment that that can still be productive (although this must be closely managed in a mission-critical environment).
The ability to document a net-zero waste stream impact has the potential to emerge as an additional metric for data center service providers, as customers consider the entirety of their supplier’s sustainability programs.
Green Certifications
As customers ask tougher questions about a providers’ environmental practices and corporate social responsibility policies, certifications may emerge as another avenue for service providers to differentiate themselves.
Several ISO certifications, including ISO 50001 and ISO 14001, which Iron Mountain is certified for across its global data center portfolio, focus on energy management and provide frameworks that can assure stakeholders that the provider is considering energy impact and environmental goals in audits, communications, labeling and equipment life cycle analysis.
Water Conservation and Management
Amid changing weather patterns, many areas of the world are facing drought conditions and water is becoming a scarcer and more valuable resource. Data center operators are stepping up their efforts to reduce their reliance on potable water supplies.
Sustainable water strategies include both sourcing and design. On the sourcing front, several Google facilities include water treatment plants that allow it to cool its servers using local bodies of water or waste water from municipal water systems. Data center districts in Ashburn (Va.), Quincy (Washington) and San Antonio offer “grey water” feeds that provide recycled waste water to industrial customers.
On the design front, more providers are choosing cooling systems with minimal need for water, while others are incorporating rainwater recovery strategies that capture rain from huge roofs or parking lots and store it on site, reducing potential burden on local water systems.
Matching Workloads to Renewable Energy
Google has been a leader in the use of artificial intelligence and sophisticated energy provisioning to match its operations to carbon-free energy sources. The company recently said it will power its entire global information empire entirely with carbon-free energy by 2030, matching every hour of its data center operations to carbon-free energy sources. This marks an ambitious step forward in using technology to create exceptional sustainability.
Google can currently account for all its operations with energy purchases. But the intermittent nature of renewable energy creates challenges in matching green power to IT operations around the clock. Solar power is only available during daylight hours. Wind energy can be used at night, but not when the wind dies down. Google created a “carbon-intelligent computing platform” that optimizes for green energy by rescheduling workloads that are not time-sensitive, matching workloads to solar power during the day, and wind energy in the evening, for example. The company also hopes to move workloads between data centers to boost its use of renewables, a strategy that offers even greater potential gains by shifting data center capacity to locations where green energy is more plentiful, routing around utilities that are slow to adopt renewables.
Google has pledged to share its advances with the broader data center industry, providing others with the tools to reduce carbon impact. Continued instrumentation of older data centers is a key step in this direction.
Eliminating Diesel Generators
A backup generator at a Microsoft data center in Virginia. (Photo: Rich Miller)
Microsoft recently announced plans to eliminate its reliance on diesel fuel by the year 2030, which has major implications for the company’s data centers, many of which use diesel-powered generators for emergency backup power. With its new deadline, Microsoft sets in motion a push to either replace its generators with cleaner technologies, or perhaps eliminate them altogether by managing resiliency through software.
Eliminating expensive generators and UPS systems has been a goal for some hyperscale providers. Facebook chose Lulea, Sweden for a data center because the robust local power grid allowed it to operate with fewer generators. In the U.S., providers have experimented with “data stations” that operate with no generators on highly-reliable locations on the power grid.
There are four primary options companies have pursued as alternatives to generators — fuel cells, lithium-ion batteries, shifting capacity to smaller edge data centers that can more easily run on batteries, and shifting to cloud-based resiliency.
Fuel Cells and On-Site Power
Microsoft has successfully tested the use of hydrogen fuel cells to power its data center servers. The company called the test “a worldwide first that could jump-start a long-forecast clean energy economy built around the most abundant element in the universe.”
Microsoft said it recently ran a row of 10 racks of Microsoft Azure cloud servers for 48 hours using a 250-kilowatt hydrogen-powered fuel cell system at a facility near Salt Lake City, Utah. Since most data center power outages last less than 48 hours, the test offered a strong case that fuel cells could be used in place of diesel generators to keep a data center operating through a utility outage.
Some companies, like Equinix and eBay, have deployed Bloom Energy fuel cells to improve reliability and cut energy costs, but have powered them with natural gas. The use of biofuels looms as another potential avenue to pair fuel cells with renewable sourcing.
Energy Storage
An illustration of the Tesla Megapack, which provides 3 megawatts of energy storage capacity. (Image: Tesla)
Utility-scale energy storage has long been the missing link in the data center industry’s effort to power the cloud with renewable energy. Energy storage could overcome the intermittent generation patterns of leading renewable sources. Solar panels only generate power when the sun is shining, and wind turbines are idle in calm weather. Energy storage could address that gap, allowing renewable power to be stored for use overnight and on windless days.
A new project in Nevada will showcase a potential solution from Tesla, the electric car company led by tech visionary Elon Musk. Data center technology company Switch will use new large-scale energy storage technology from Tesla to boost its use of solar energy for its massive data center campuses in Las Vegas and Reno. It is a promising project in pioneering a holistic integration of renewable power, energy storage and Internet-scale data centers.
Talking Sustainability With Experts
Don’t miss the last installment of this series that features a conversation on the future of sustainable data centers. Data Center Frontier Editor Rich Miller discusses the topic with Kevin Hagen, Director, Corporate Responsibility at Iron Mountain, and Alex Sharp, Global Head of Design & Construction — Data Centers at Iron Mountain.
It’s a preview of the upcoming webinar where these experts will discuss sustainability strategies for greener data centers.
Originally posted on FIRE'd @ 47: After conking out for 11 hours last night, we woke up refreshed and ready to go. Breakfast at the hotel Casablanca is a modernized city, and wasn’t exactly what we were looking for on this trip, so we were pretty happy to leave and move onto the next city, Marrakech,…
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