After the conclusion of the fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, South Korea this past weekend, Minister Bev Oda announced that the Canadian International Development Agency has become part of the International Aid Transparency initiative. This agreement facilitates the improvement of Canadian and international foreign assistance by openly sharing aid data using universal codes. This announcement comes after EWB has been pushing IATI for the past year. The press release is available here: http://www.acdi-cida.gc.ca/acdi-cida/ACDI-CIDA.nsf/eng/NAT-11281180-LX3
Much jubilation!

As you may know EWB is embarking on its second annual Perspectives Challenge which is both a fundraiser and a unique insight into the minds of EWB members across the country. Our first two perspectives from the Waterloo Chapter are up and we'll update this list as more are added:

• Rob Reid
• Matt McLean

As Canadians, we get under 17% of our electricity from burning coal. As engineers, we see coal-fired steam engines as an antiquated invention being phased out in favour of more viable energy sources. In the US, however, nearly half of their electricity still comes from coal-fired plants. For the people of the Appalachia, coal is more intimately connected still as the coal industry continues their long-dominance in the region, most recently with the practice of mountain-top removal mining physically altering the landscape. This method of mining involves blasting entire mountains from the top down to more easily access coal-rich strata. The overburden is pulled into adjacent stream valleys by 22-story tall machines called draglines during mining, and about a third is pulled back to the mountain site after the mine closes. Because the US Clean Air Act requires coal to be washed to reduce associated SOx emissions, tailings are also retained on site behind earthen dykes. Currently, 3000 km of rivers have been filled with the overburden of the 180 000 hectares of mountains they have been mined.

Last Wednesday, an art group called the Beehive Design Collective visited the University of Waterloo to present their newest poster entitled “The True Cost of Coal: Mountaintop removal and the fight for our future”. The poster is a culmination of two years of research, a long drafting and reviewing cycle, and the combined effort of eleven artists working at once. The massive scene (about 2 metres high and 5 metres long) chronicles the history of coal production in Appalachia from colonization to possible futures, looking from immediate realities to underlying systems and incorporating aspects of society, economy, and environment.
An excerpt from the poster “The True Cost of Coal” by the Beehive Design Collective

Although the poster features feats of mechanical, electrical, geological, and chemical engineering worthy of “Big Things with Will Zochodne”(the Iron Warrior column), it brings into question the role that engineers played at the time of the events portrayed and should be playing going into the future. Engineers do not orchestrate the economic, political, and legal systems that determine what industries will be profitable and which people will benefit from them, but we do facilitate their development. When talking with friends deciding whether to work for big companies with records of environmental and social destruction, a common argument is “If I’m not working there, someone worse will be”. While this may be true on the individual level, as a profession engineers have a lot more say. Whether we decide to look through the PR strategies of industry, become educated on true costs, and advocate for technology beneficial to all society or be pawns simply facilitating project implementation is a decision that is up to each of us and all of us.

For those wishing to learn more about mountain-top removal mining, alternative energy sources and socioeconomic structures, or to obtain a copy of “The True Cost of Coal” poster, Beehive offers access to copyright-free graphics and other materials at their website; www.beehivecollective.org.

As we welcome another crop of plummers to campus, we also welcome our elected officials back to the House of Commons. Although the election buzz has died, now is the time the real work will be done and the occasion demands some attention.

An interesting thing happens when people or governments are thrown into a times of economic hardship. They tend to cut back higher-risk investments and invest in lower-risk options. For a government, this can mean cutting down “socially progressive” programs, which are seen an expendable or just “nice to have”. For a few examples, a low-risk policy might be “lower income tax by 1%” and a higher-risk option might be “set aside healthcare funding to ensure phys. ed. in high schools”.

This logic may appear sound at first; investment in low-risk policies is the safest way for the country to hold its ground during hardship. However, we know that low-risk investments are severely limited in the amount they pay back. If low risk-investments were the safest way to profit then we would only make those types of investments. However we know that prosperous societies invest heavily in "socially-progressive, nice-to-have areas". This is because an economy is an attempt to quantify resource availability to facilitate their optimal use; it reflects reality. To make real gains, work must be done both on directly making the “numbers” economy work and improving the reality of the society and environment behind the system. Government investment in social programs forces money to flow through the economy and raises investor and consumer confidence. It can fill the vital role of getting the “reality” part of the economy ready to go when the “numbers” part has crashed. During the Great Depression, a time of historic failure of the "numbers" side of the economy, government intervention in the form of Roosevelt's New Deal and wartime industrialization was required to create the situations for people to work and prosper.

The logic of cutting back high-risk social investments may have been why a lot of voters were silent this election as such topics as the environment, the many wars being fought around the world, and Canada’s reputation on the global stage (losing its seat in the UN security council and reputation as a peacekeeper, falling behind on climate change and other environmental issues, striking down legislation to require Canadian mining companies to follow the law abroad, etc) were barely mentioned in the election. Addressing these and other social issues is not just a “nice to do” thing for a government; it has real implications for millions of people all over the world and our own economy. As young Canadians we have the greatest stake in getting the government to function optimally for our own economy and our nation’s role in the global village. Obviously things are more complicated than this article depicts, but these are issues that we should be thinking about.

One small step that Engineers Without Borders is taking is to push the adoption of the international standard for reporting aid projects, the International Aid Transparency Initiative, or IATI. This system, already adopted by numerous national governments and NGOs, is projected to increase aid effectiveness by facilitating scrutinization of spending, allowing better coordination among the thousands of aid NGOs, and reducing the time people spend reporting to donors. Moreover, by making the whole system leaner, it should reduce bureaucracy to pay for itself within 1-2 years. This makes it a plan that makes sense for both politicians who believe low-risk policies are what Canada needs and those who favour more progressive policies. If you’d like to learn more or help push this initiative, you can visit farn.ca. With the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in South Korea happening this November, Canada has a big chance to start working its way to being seen as a positive global citizen and a fantastic place to live.

Also make sure your voice is heard in the provincial elections coming up in October. Visit vote.ca.

Greetings first-years and welcome to Waterloo Engineering!

As you begin your post-secondary academic career here at Waterloo, you will quickly find yourself busy. Between fighting with JobMine to apply for hundreds of jobs, trying to make your C++ script compile, trying to find and actually talk to the right person in Needles Hall for whatever issue, you will undoubtedly become quite frustrated.

In 2000, two Waterloo engineers were equally frustrated but it wasn’t because they bombed their GENE midterm or because none of the pH meters in their lab were calibrated. It was because in this day and age, where we have put people into space and on the moon and can make robots small enough to travel in a human body to find disease, there are still hundreds of millions of people living and dying in environments with poor healthcare, inadequate public infrastructure, insecure food and water, and limited opportunities to work and learn. There is enough wealth and industrial capacity to adequately provide for every person in the world but it isn’t fairly distributed. Over 3 billion people, about half the world’s population, makes a living with less than $2.50 a day, a measure of impoverishment.

In 2000, George Roter and Parker Mitchell, graduates of mechanical engineering, who could have gone on to jobs making 100 times more than those 3 billion people, decided to try and do something about it. They started an NGO called Engineers Without Borders (EWB). They figured that poverty was just another problem, and as engineers, they could find an optimal solution. After trying, failing, and learning in places from Malawi to India to the Philippines, Parker, George, and EWB learned what they had really gotten themselves into. Engineers tend to work best inside well-defined boxes with a few parameters to optimize and constraints to consider, and that’s what most of your next five years of your engineering education at UW will look like. However, to address a complex problem such as global poverty, EWB learned that it had to go outside that comfy box and look at aspects of economy, society, ecology, policy, sociology, psychology, and history to find solutions.

Today, they are a leading development NGO, known for critical analysis of other development NGOs, the Canadian government’s aid programs, and of themselves. They no longer believe that building infrastructure or teaching people how to use technology is the best way to eliminate poverty, but focus on building human development and data collection management programs to build capacity in recipient country’s government services and workforces. They currently work in Burkina Faso, Ghana, Malawi, and Zambia, on projects related to agriculture development, water and sanitation, and governance and rural infrastructure.

They also recognize that poverty, as a globally-connected problem, requires a global solution. In addition to our African program work, EWB is also on the ground in Canada improving engineering education at universities around Canada, educating the public on issues around poverty and trade injustice, advocating for more effective aid programs, and generally encouraging people to make a link between their actions and how people and environments around the world are affected.

If you’re the kind of person who likes to work hard on big problems that matter, EWB can help you learn, grow and contribute to the global community we’d like to create and be proud of. You can learn more on our website (woohoo you're here!) and by coming to our first general meeting which will be announced shortly.

Please check out our Winter 2011 Newsletter where we highlight what we have accomplished in the term and what we want to achieve in the future.

We have quite the day planned for EWB Day this Friday; I hope you can drop by at least one of our events.

Our Giant Art Attack will greet you early Friday morning. It will be huge, and it will be epic. We’ve collected a ton of coffee cups, and are ready to put it all together. Thanks for the help with giving us your coffee cups! Be sure to come by the hill in front of E5 at some point on Friday to see it yourself.

From 9 am to 11 am in South Campus Hall we are giving you a chance to get a cookie! All you have to do is spin a wheel, and text the phrase you land on to a random person on your contacts list. The theme will be aid transparency, so no need to worry about an embarrassing text to your ex. Hopefully it will spark an interesting discussion between you and your random friend.

The main event begins at noon in the SLC courtyard. You will get the chance to splash out poverty by throwing a bucket of water onto a very brave EWB exec. All you need to do is to pledge to perform a socially minded action. The poor souls (aka the EWB exec team) will stay outside until the painted letters P O V E R T Y are washed off their bodies. There is nothing better than seeing somebody getting splashed with cold water in freezing weather.

Next up we will be giving away FREE ICE CREAM in the SLC from 1:30 to 3. Too bad its not hot chocolate right? (Just ask anyone who just got splashed what they would rather have.) It’s funny how a good thing in one situation is not a good thing in another. It is like how sometimes aid with good intentions can not be as effective as other aid. There are so many factors involved in determining good aid, it is almost impossible for anyone but the recipients to know what is best. EWB tries to work around this by working directly with local governmental organizations. And we are always questioning if we have the best approach.

Finally we will be in the Arts Quad from 11-3 with a picture petition. Essentially its where you take a picture of your self with a message asking the government to improve our Aid Transparency by Signing on to the IATI. The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) is a new initiative which aims to make information about aid spending easier to access, use and understand. This will help those involved in aid programmes to better track what aid is being used for and what it is achieving – from the taxpayers in donor countries who provide the money, to those in developing countries who benefit from aid spending. Improving transparency also helps governments in developing countries to manage aid more effectively, so that each dollar goes as far as possible in fighting poverty. [1]

Thanks for reading and I hope I'll see you on Friday!

Source: http://www.aidtransparency.net/

For our second Picture Challenge we asked you to submit a picture of something that you find frustrating or something you don't understand. Some of the chapter members had a few thoughts, as well as our African Programs Staff Learning Partner Erin Antcliffe. She had this to say:

"I'm frustrated that none of the girls from my village have graduated from primary school, and most of them have dropped out to help around the house. I'm frustrated that even if they wanted to continue school, they would have to move out of our village since there is no junior high or high school in the area. Even the primary school is very poor quality, which encourages the girls to drop out before they finish."

Sarah Legg is a returned Junior Fellow from this past summer. She shared her thoughts on what she finds frustrating: "Seeing tons of NGOs with varying ideas and motives and agendas getting in the way of hard-working Ministry of Food and Agric staff that are just trying to do their job, but instead have to be accountable to these random projects! (Disclaimer: this NGO (SEND) in my picture is actually doing some pretty great stuff...)"

Thanks to Erin and Sarah for sharing their thoughts!

We’ve all at some point of our life been a target of the popular and accessible mantra of “reduce, reuse and recycle”. For many of us, this is how the concepts of environmental awareness and sustainability were incepted into our minds. These slogans are continuing to promote the importance of environmental responsibility but unfortunately consumers do not form the bulk of the problem. When one considers the entire life cycle of a product that is deemed “recyclable”, the consumers only represent the intermediate section. The post-consumption process is almost completely out of sight to the average individual. For example, the 20% of water bottles that actually get put in the Blue Box are often shipped overseas to be recycled in countries like India and China. Moreover, at our current state, the water bottle actually gets “downcycled” i.e. the recycled product is not the same as the original (closed loop) but rather is made into products that can’t be recycled. In an evolved form of our world, perhaps in the near future, sub-optimal products should actually be upcycled to increase the purity of a commodity, decrease toxicity etc. Imagine a process that extracts antimony from a plastic bottle and puts a much safer and less toxic product back into the hands of the consumer.

When William McDonough and Michael Braungart, authors of Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, presented their goal: “create a diverse, safe and healthy world, economically, equitably, ecologically and elegantly enjoyed.” to the White House, most officials expressed incredulity since it seemed too good to be true and more make-belief than pragmatic. Unfortunately, we have grown accustomed to limitations and restrictions in terms of the resources that are available to us and are foreign to the idea of abundance (abundance in the form of innovation or even abundance in the form of energy that can be derived from the sun). Even as engineers, we almost always envision ourselves in this finite box that has infinite limitations and that it would be our responsibility to magically solve this highly non-linear system. I’m definitely not implying in any way that we are short of problems, but that innovative solutions do exist. For example, the problem of waste is not its sheer quantity but the fact that it’s non-biodegradable or non-compostable. If everything went back to the biosphere, then waste would not be the menacing heap it continues to remain. Waste could be for once embraced and littering would not be discouraged.

Nature itself can be a significant source of design inspiration, and it doesn’t issue patents (although admittedly that doesn’t stop companies from issuing them). When Ford’s Detroit site, with an 80 year history of car manufacturing, was faced with the ultimatum to revitalise the plant or abandon it, the company’s CEO turned to William McDonough. The site was transformed into an industrial park with an abundant plant life where wastewater was purified by the sun’s natural energy. More windows were installed to allow the entry of natural daylight and a stronger emphasis was placed on waste flow. Although the capital costs were relatively high, it paid off in the long run as the company saved approximately $45 million due to the establishment of a much more efficient local ecosystem. This cradle to cradle approach of extending the life cycle of a product beyond its consumption all the way to its disposal has garnered tremendous attention primarily because it is successful on a business scale, proving to be a valuable long term investment. There are a lot of people with ideas out there but very few who can actually factor in some business sense into their models.

We live in a capitalist society and one of the ways of enacting positive environmental change is by making those changes economically appealing. To a person interested in making a profit, the very idea of a building that produces more energy than it requires and purifies its own water would only be amazing if it yields a high return on investment. This calls for engineers with a strong business sense who can market such ideas, prove economic viability and ultimately deliver results. As our culture continues to torture itself, it is evident that we should question our intentions during the design stage and consider going back to the primordial conditions in order to imbue our designs with inherent intelligence.