Sep 20, 2007

Environmentally-Friendly Projects Can Make for Good Development

by Laura Starita

The science behind global warming has reached the status of indisputable. Equally indisputable is the fact that economic development around the world will continue, and that both individual companies and the countries in which they reside will do what is in their best economic interest. Those two factors seem incompatible, but they needn’t be.

A number of recent articles show the economic promise behind development projects that keep the environment in mind. The Economist described the ways in which some architects today are borrowing from nature to create ‘biomimetic’ structures that are carbon neutral—or even carbon positive—in their impact. The ideas range from a desalination plant in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, which copies the way in which beetles collect condensation on their cooled-by-the-ground backs for drinking, to an indoor rain forest residing on a landfill, the biomass from which throws off heat used to warm the rainforest during cold months. The Washington Post also profiled a planned project in Maryland to reuse wastewater for the cooling systems of a few local power plants, thus utilizing the waste from one system for the production of another.

Though the examples given feel futuristic and concentrate primarily on making developed-world initiatives less environmentally taxing, there is huge potential to leverage some of these ideas for the developing world. Currently the bulk of the burden of environmental degradation is felt by people living in poverty, with negative impacts on economic development and health alike. The people around the world who lack for clean water, sewage systems, heat or electricity are those who live in poverty, and some of the things they do to combat that lack—such as burning wood, coal or animal dung in open fires in unventilated spaces—not only cause 1.6 million respiratory disease deaths a year, according to the Lancet, but they further pollute the environment.

Yet imagine the good that could be done by leveraging beetle-inspired technology to bring drinking water to those living in water scarcity? The impact could be huge, both in terms of development and preservation.

Economist: Borrowing from nature

Washington Post: System Would Use Effluent to Produce Power

The Lancet: Energy and Health Series