Laurie Arthur is a farmer in the heart of Australia’s bread basket, the basin of the Murray River, who was kind enough, when I was trying to understand water, to explain how water works for farmers.

Arthur lives out in the wide open country east of Adelaide and north of Melbourne — flat, irrigated farmland where his nearest neighbor is 12 miles down the road, and where his white farm truck is often flanked by squads of kangaroos, who have no trouble keeping pace as he drives from field to field at 40 or 50 mph.

Arthur lives comfortably in a world most of us never visit, and even have a hard time grasping. He farms 10,000 acres. That amount of land is impossible to visualize, but its scale is easy to bring down to Earth.

He took me to a single 150-acre field, which seemed to spread out in all directions toward the horizon. (You could park five Wal-Mart Supercenters, including their full parking lots, on that one patch of dirt.) That single field has a perimeter of 2 miles.

It is 1 percent of Laurie Arthur’s land.

If the land Arthur is responsible for cultivating is hard to grasp, the water he uses to make it blossom it is truly astonishing.

To raise a single year’s crop, Arthur uses 1.6 billion gallons of water (6 billion liters) — a big slug of water. It’s enough to supply all the water needs for a town of 40,000 people, for a year.

One guy, with one farm, using as much water every single day as a city of 40,000 people.

Laurie Arthur has the charm and wry humor we find so irresistible in Australians — the disarming confidence that comes from being self-reliant, the bemused understanding that in the developed world, farmers are far more alien creatures than, oh, astronauts.

He has introduced himself at school parent events as a farmer, and had fellow parents turn to him matter-of-factly and say, “Oh, you’re a water waster, then.”

What is Laurie Arthur doing with all that water, anyway?

He’s raising food.  Rice, to be specific.

In a year when everything goes right, Arthur raises 20 million pounds of rice, using those 1.6 billion gallons of water.

Is that good, or is that cavalier?

Well, with enough water to supply a city of 40,000 people for a year, he raises enough food to feed a city of 100,000 people for a year — all 100,000 people, 3 meals a day, for 365 days.*

Arthur smiles. “How much is the right amount of water to feed a city of 100,000 people?”

Today is World Water Day. The point of World Water Day is to draw attention to our favorite, our most familiar, and our most taken-for-granted resource. There is a delightful irony for water folks in the fact that World Water Day is itself mostly ignored by everyone outside the world of water. (Could we start a day to draw awareness to World Water Day?)

Every person on Earth revels in water every day, in some fashion — whether we celebrate water or not.

This year, the theme of World Water Day is the connection between water and food. Although most of us never think about water when we tuck into an omelet, or a turkey sandwich, or a dinner of salad, steak and rice pilaf, there is no more intimate connection than that between water and food.

The connection is so close, that for water folks there is a handy rule of thumb: In the developed world, 1 calorie of food requires 1 liter of water to produce.

A large tomato has 33 calories — it required 33 liters of water to grow (almost 9 gallons).

A 12-ounce can of Coke or Pepsi has 140 calories — so it required 140 liters of water to produce; 12 ounces of soda requires 37 gallons of water — if you reach back and include the water necessary to raise the sugar in the soda.

A medium-sized McDonald’s Big Mac Value Meal — Big Mac, medium soda, medium fries — has 1,130 calories, so the food required 1,130 liters of water, about 300 gallons.

The standard daily U.S. diet of 1,800 calories requires about 475 gallons of water to produce — every day, for every American.

The 1-calorie-1-liter benchmark is a rough average. It takes far less water, for instance, to grow a pound of tomatoes than to grow a pound of beef.

What’s handy about the rule is that it is a great way of waking up to how much water our food requires.

The average American uses 99 gallons of water at home each day — real water, for showering and dishwashing, for toilet-flushing and making lemonade.

The average American uses another 250 gallons of water a day at home for electricity — the electricity that each American uses, just at home, requires 250 gallons a day to generate. That’s real water too, of course, we just never see it.

And the average American uses another 475 gallons of water day for food.

The food you eat each day requires five times the amount of water to create as the amount of actual water you use each day.

And that’s true for the whole world. Food — farming — is the most important part of the world of water.

Worldwide, farmers use 70 percent of the water used each day.

And farming is not very efficient. The general rule of thumb is that farmers waste half the water they put on their fields. In the world of water, that “wasted” water has a very precise meaning. It means that half the water farmers use doesn’t increase their production at all — they could, with better management, use half the water they do and produce the same amount of food. Or they could use the water they are using and grow twice the amount of food.

But that inefficient use of water is actually good news.

In the next 35 years, we’re going to add 2 billion people to the world. For every hundred people already here, we’re going to add 29 more. They are going to be thirsty, and they are also going to be hungry — which, as we’ve seen, is a form of thirst.

Current farming methods in many places are so water-inefficient that there’s plenty of room to produce more food without having to use more water.

In fact, one of the most dramatic stories comes from the farms of the United States.

Water for irrigating U.S. farms peaked in 1980 — more than 30 years ago, when there were 80 million fewer people than today.

U.S. farmers use 15 percent less total water today than in 1980, and they produce 70 percent more food. U.S. farmers have increased their “water productivity” by 100 percent in 30 years.

That’s exactly the kind of progress we need to make to have both enough food for 2 billion more people, and enough water.

So what about Laurie Arthur, the Australian farmer who uses enough water for a city of 40,000 people to produce enough food for 100,000 people?

By almost any standard measure, Laurie Arthur is doing very well.

In the U.S., remember, our food requires five times the amount of water as the actual water we drink.

In the “city” Laurie Arthur is supplying, the ratio is the opposite: The food for each person he’s feeding would require half the amount of “real” water that person would use in a typical day.

Using the 1-calorie-1-liter rule, Arthur is doing even better.   Every liter of water he uses produces not one calorie of food, but six calories.

Still, even on a well-run farm, with a man who thinks about water all the time, the water required is mind-boggling.

A single, appealing mound of Japonica rice on your dinner plate tonight requires 14 gallons of water to produce. Imagine that fluffy pile surrounded by 14 gallon jugs of water. It seems truly astonishing. But it’s a window on how removed we’ve become from the work required to get us our food — and the water, too.

Every day is world water day, we just don’t realize it.

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* If you doubt the math that 20 million pounds of rice is enough to feed 100,000 people for a year — the short version works like this. That comes to 4 pounds of rice per person, per week — and one pound of dry rice provides about 3,200 calories. So four pounds is 12,800 calories, or 1,800 calories a day. Not that you’d want to eat rice three meals a day, for a year — or that you could survive nutritionally on it. But Arthur’s point is that he raises enough calories to feed a city for a year, and he’s right.

Technorati Tags: agriculture, australia, Charles Fishman, IBM, Smarter Water, world water day

Today, as a scientist with IBM Research, Vortman’s job is to come up with breakthroughs that enable water utilities to conserve water and money, while at the same time providing the water that consumers want and need. She leads a team at IBM Research – Haifa that designed a new system for monitoring and managing water pressure that could provide a model for many cities and communities seeking to deal with tight water supplies and growing demands. IBM has put the system to work for the Sonoma Country Water Agency, which serves more than 600,000 customers in Northern California. The first pilot is being done with the Valley of the Moon Water District, one of the distributors of the agency’s water. “We found that if we can manage the pressure in a flexible way, everybody can benefit,” says Vortman.

IBM has been working with the water agency for several years to help it improve efficiency and balance the needs of consumers and the natural environment.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The latest work with the agency, which is led by IBM Research – Haifa, is aimed at addressing a conundrum in water management: how do you keep pressure at the right level for users without worsening leaks and wearing out equipment? The answer, according to Vortman, is that water utilities have to view their systems holistically and manage them more precisely. They must view the water system as a complex entity and come up with a way of optimizing it to produce the most efficient and effective results–just like you optimize a transportation system, an electrical grid or a company’s supply chain.

In the past, Sonoma kept the pressure high on the entire water-delivery system so it wouldn’t get complaints from customers. But that put a lot of stress on their equipment. Vortman and her team tapped data analytics to help address the problem. Using the agency’s existing pressure and flow meters, they have mapped the system and created a statistical model integrated with hydraulic simulation that they use to simulate what happens when pressure is increased or decreased in specific areas. Using the simulations as a guide, the agency’s engineers manually adjust pumps and valves spread throughout the county.

The system was installed in October, and, already, Vortman says, it has helped improve the agency’s efficiency. The agency avoided massive pressure spikes, which happened before, to deal with localized pressure deficiencies. Vortman and her team are now working on refinements that will make it easier for the agency to spot the location of leaks in pipes and other equipment so they can be fixed quickly and affordably.

For Vortman, better water management is more than just a job; it’s a quest. “Every country has to come up with new ways of dealing with water. Analytics can help,” she says.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Sonoma County Water Agency

By Peter Williams

CTO, IBM Big Green Innovations

During the past year, we’ve seen extreme weather conditions, from crippling drought in many parts of the United States and Europe to floods in Italy, Thailand, China and more. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, climate change may increase the probability of some ordinary weather events reaching extreme levels or of some extreme events becoming more extreme – so in essence, we can expect a continued rise in extreme weather condition and events.

Even without climate change, floods are not rare; in fact, they are the most common natural disaster in the United States. Although we typically have some advance warning of their arrival, thanks to satellite forecasts, there is always the possibility (and likelihood) that a flash flood will behave in unpredictable ways, causing untold damage. To add insult to injury, dry, desert lands are often the hardest hit by floods, in areas where water is the most precious.

Clearly, we can’t fight the weather. Floods and droughts are a fact of life. We can, however, better predict how they affect us and protect ourselves from harm. Most flood modeling systems look at the main stems of large rivers. These forecasts provide valuable information, but often times the real action is in the thousands of small river branches and the tributary networks where flooding actually starts.

The computing power required to forecast the behavior of tens of thousands of river branches was simply not available in past decades. Today, using new flood prediction technology, we can predict the behavior of millions of river branches simultaneously. IBM and the University of Texas are using this modeling technology to predict the behavior of the 230 mile-long Guadalupe River and more than 9,000 miles of tributary networks in Texas. In only one hour, the system can generate models for up to 100 hours of river behavior.

Armed with this sort of knowledge before floods strike, cities and counties can draw up better response or preventive plans. And that kind of information can also be linked to other data regarding the structural condition of levees, so that targeted evacuation orders could be issued if necessary.

The value of technology in water management isn’t limited to cities — there are clear applications for data analytics in agriculture as well.

Although agriculture is an inherently risky business due to unpredictable weather patterns, farmers can minimize the risk with data analytics. In fact, many are already doing so.  Looking at historical weather, crop yield and irrigation data, they can design their activities to take advantage of natural weather patterns and have a better understanding of the exact amount of water each type of crop needs. Sun World, a California fruit grower, has used data analytics to reduce fuel and water consumption, as well as labor costs. By analyzing financial data and increasing the use of drip irrigation systems, the company cut water use by 9% over four years’ time. A redesign of grape trellises – which didn’t require workers to bend over to pick the fruit — increased productivity and reduced physical injuries and the number of pickers needed at harvest time.  This kind of “precision agriculture” can save water (and thus energy), improve crop yield (more crops with less water), and reduce runoff.

As one Pennsylvania farmer told the Altoona Mirror, “[Farmers] are big risk takers and weather’s a big risk we just have to deal with every year.”  But with the help of data analytics and flood modeling systems, weather doesn’t have to be a force to contend with or a challenge to overcome — it can be an energy source harnessed for good.

Technorati Tags: agriculture, Analytics, flood prediction, river modeling, Smarter Water

Today news of a brand new global charity called Energy Aid will start spreading around the world. Given that nearly half of the world’s population lacks access to modern sources of energy, the charity has an impressive mission to provide universal energy access. This means people in the world’s poorest areas including South America, South Asia and sub Saharan Africa could have their lives changed forever if they had access to energy for heating, lighting, cooking, communications and mechanical work.

With IBM and international development charity Practical Action already on board as founding partners Energy Aid plans to provide investment and resources including data, technology and skills to support charities and agencies running or planning energy projects in the target areas.

In the lead up to the global launch building a solid business case for the charity was key. A vital element of this planning was research conducted by myself and a team at the London School of Economics. We went out to visit and study organisations in India and Peru that could engage with Energy Aid in the future and make our recommendations on how Energy Aid could add value.

We analysed five case studies through site visits and interviews. The organisations were grouped into either partner organisations which illustrated how Energy Aid could contribute to existing issues, or peer organisations which illustrated how similar organisations went about achieving their objectives.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Following our research Energy Aid finalised its business model now has three key strategies: an awareness campaign launching in 2012 dedicated to raising the issue of energy access in the public conscience, an open source of data, resources, technologies and research and a fund to raise and invest money into deserving long-term game-changing projects.

We are looking forward to seeing how Energy Aid develops over the next year and hope the issue of universal energy for all continues to grow in prominence with businesses and individuals.

We are not alone. Sustainable energy is an increasingly global concern with 2012 announced as the “UN Year of Sustainable Energy for All,” with Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon giving a personal commitment towards the cause, and the UN Earth Summit Rio 20 in June 2012 will focus on alleviating energy access.

Technorati Tags: charity, csr, energy, Energy & Environment, energy aid, sustainability, water

Technorati Tags: IBM, Rio

Update:

Here’s Ginni Rometty, IBM’s senior vice president for Sales, Marketing and Strategy (and IBM’s next CEO) talking about how to build a smarter city.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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9:00 a.m. Special Address: Economic Recovery, Urbanization and The City, by Alfonso Vegara Gómez, President, Fundación Metrópoli.

Cities have transformed themselves with such intensity. The challenge of the 21^st Century is to build a better urban environment.

“We can’t build cities in the conventional way. We would destroy the planet.” We have to use smart technologies and ideas to build cities in a sustainable way, and a way that provides jobs and economic growth.

In the future there will be super cities and mega metropolitan areas. Between Washington DC and Boston, for instance. We’ll need new transportation systems. The cities in the corridor will share talents.The same in Europe: From Lisbon to Madrid; ultimately you’ll get a huge cluster of connected cities in Europe. “This is the new scale in which you can compete.”

Some exampled of smart cities: Singapore, the new city state. They bet on a port economy. They have smart transportation. They attract talent focusing on IT, media and bio-med. In compact urban spaces they have combined expertise and creativity.

Bilbao, Spain. It integrated all of the systems. It integrated art with urban architecture. Bilbao hasn’t been successful in attracting talent. This will be a big challenge. It has to compete with other cities in a knowledge economy.

The challenge is to build a new urban development park, which will include all of the modern elements: architecture, art, communications, and improved infrastructure.

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9:30 a.m. A Conversation with: Pablo Allard, Decano de Arquitectura y Arte de la UDD y Asesor Senior de Reconstrucción Urbana; Dr. Néstor Bercovich, Coordinador ECLAC, Plan Regional para la Sociedad de la Información de América Latina y el Caribe ECLAC; and Wilson Ferreira Junior., President, CPFL Energia.

Bercovich: We need to rethink the state so we can rise to the challenges of urbanization. A wide variety of stakeholders need to cooperate and innovate.

The free market has created distortions in the social fabric of cities. There’s a huge disparity in wealth and services. This needs to be addressed.

Smarter platforms are the base from which we make the systems of cities and regions work better. For instance, broadband needs to be made available widely and affordably.

Allard: Urban centers, if they’re smarter, can begin to address some of the inequities. They can be a source of economic opportunity for the people of the favelas.

In the future the rate of population growth will go down, and that will make it possible for personal income to come up. Latin American cities will get wealthier and offer new opportunities. “We will have a population that demands a better quality of life.”

“Favelas are full of small entrepreneurs who will make the most of the opportunities that are offered to them.” Little by little, they’ll reach the middle class.

But we need smarter systems in the cities to make this possible.

The context:

Pablo Allard, dean of architecture and art, Desarrollo University, Chile, talks about why he’s “addicted to smarter cities.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

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10:30 a.m. Special Address: Smart Investments in Cities: Managing for the Long-Term, by Luciano Coutinho, president, The Brazilian Development Bank.

The quality of life in cities and the city ecosystem constitute key factor in innovation going forward. Traditionally we saw that innovation was is driven by three pillars: big private companies, government subsidies and universities. But that’s the old paradigm. Now there are additional factors: cities, NGOs and society.

If we can make cities more efficient we can increase their creative output. A smart city doesn’t just need to be efficient. It needs to have quality of life and creativity. “A city is an ecosystem that encourages innovation and creativity.”

Technological progress will increase in the coming years. Mobile computing is going to be an important factor. Broadband access is increasing greatly. We need to deploy sensors, and large scale databases.

All of this makes information about what’s going on in the city and how it’s working widely available to everybody.

“The city is becoming a new thing.”

In Latin America and Brazil, cities are a bigger factor than they are in other areas of the world. We have 34 cities in Brazil with 45% of the population, and Rio and Sao Paulo have 25% of the GDP of the country. “We need to reinforce the mid-tier cities and prevent them from falling into the same traps as the mega cities, with their traffic and pollution problems.”

We’re at a critical moment in Brazil. We must have a high level of performance and competitiveness. Our public services must be more efficient and more creative.

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11:00 a.m. A Conversation with: James W. Breyer, partner, Accel Partners, Luciano Coutinho, president, The Brazilian Development Bank, and Marcelo Haddad, executive director, Rio Negócios. Discussion leader: Marcus Regueira, founding partner, FIR Capital.

Breyer: I’m interested in investing in Brazil. We think through the cultural attributes of great entrepreneurs. Is there a common characteristic?

“The people we like to back have passion, think about long term impact and think about building high impact team from the beginning.”

We’ve seen many of these characteristics in Brazil. We see entrepreneurs building strong teams of co-founders. Every location is a little different. In Silicon Valley today we’re finding very young breakthrough technologists. When I first met Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook I took him out to dinner and I offered him a glass of wine, but he said he was not yet 21. He’d have a Sprite.

Brazil will be one of our three most important countries for investments in the coming years.

Coutinho: In Brazil, we need to create an ecosystem for entrepreneurship. The Brazilian capital markets are still a step behind. “We need to create an atmosphere for entrepreneurship by young people. That’s vital to creating smarter cities.”

Regueira; What we need for venture capital to take off in Brazil is a quarter of a billion dollar exit.

Breyer: The city and country have to minimize the difficulties for young people to get going. One thing we have lost in the US is the idea of allowing small businesses to thrive without uncertainty and significant regulatory overhang.

You need a partnership between great entrepreneurs, people who come in early to help them scale the company—without losing the entrepreneurial spirit, and also partnerships with large and important companies.

“The first trillion dollar valuation company could come from Brazil.”

Here’s the video of the panel:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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11:30 a.m. Special Address: How to Build a Smarter City, by Ginni Rometty, IBM’s senior vice president of sales, marketing and strategy—and next CEO.

“Brazil is a country full of natural resources. We think of information as the world’s next important national resource.”

We’re heard a lot about why people should build smarter cities. My focus today is on how.

So how does a city actually get started? Over the last year or so, we’ve reviewed thousands of Smart City initiatives. We’ve identified three common steps that are taken in successful projects.

–By instrumenting different city systems, the city can leverage data as a strategic tool to understand the performance of those systems, and be in a position to managing them better–responding to changes in those systems more rapidly and effectively.

–Once a city has developed that solid foundation, they can start to think about integrating key processes within and across systems.  You can take the data and use it across departments and functions.

–Cities can start to optimize their systems and transform service delivery. Analytics become key here. “You can start to re-imagine the art of the possible.” It’s not just about using analytics to examine the past, but to predict the future.

Value goes up with each of these three steps.

We have also identified key leadership skills for Smarter cities.

–The complexity of cities requires us to understand the city as a system-of-systems and manage it accordingly.

–“We need to build a culture of analytics versus gut-check decision making.”

–Managing and coordinating across city systems will require all city leaders to collaborate with one another, with local business leaders, and other influencers in new ways.

I hope that we’ve been able to provide some guiding principles here that we’ve learned from hundreds of Smarter City engagements, and that have opened our eyes as to what it takes for cities to be successful.

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Noon: A Conversation with: Jorge Gerdau Johannpeter, chairman of Gerdau, Gerdau Steel, and a private sector leader in Brazil’s economic development; and Kenneth Schwartz, dean, School of Architecture, Tulane University. Discussion Leader: Ginni Rometty, IBM’s senior vice president for sales, marketing and strategy, and the next CEO.

Schwartz: Tulane was impacted by Hurricane Katrina. We had to shut it down for months.  Now we’re back and the city of New Orleans is back. We’re both building more sustainably and smarter.

We’re using the school of architecture and technology from IBM to see if we can achieve significant carbon use. We’ll take what we learn to other buildings on the campus.

Instrumentation was relatively easy. Integration was harder. We had to get our school, IT and facilities to work together.

“We think of buildings as the building blocks of cities.” You can experiment in buildings and a university campus and then model solutions that you can use city wide.

Gerdau: We started a movement to build the economy of Brazil based on using management technologies.

The public sector is inefficient.

“What decides a country’s wealth today is its management competency.”

Cities have to be build and rebuilt by seeing them as an integrated unit. Technology is important for gathering information, but it’s not enough.

You need to do management with efficient technology. But it only works when your have good governance aligned with strategy.

Political will is perhaps the biggest challenge. I like to talk to government leaders. I feel there’s lack of policy. We have to transform cities. It requires the kind of strategic thinking I don’t see now.

We have to get our communities involved so they see this is the way forward. Maybe it’s in our education. Time is being wasted. How can we harness all of this?

“We have to change culture.”

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12:15 p.m. Key Observations from Sam Palmisano, IBM’s CEO.

We operate in 170 countries and every political system. All societies are going through a transition. The same goes with companies. You can be optimistic or see it as concerning. How do some do it better than others?

Your have to re-prioritize. You have to take things that were done one way in the past and come up with new approaches.

Mayor Paes of Rio surrounded himself with professional managers. “Good management is the key to getting things done.”

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Breakout session

Emergency Management: Learning from the Leaders

Moderator: Guru Banavar, CTO, Global Public Sector, IBM; Pedro Almeida, Director, Smarter Cities Strategy, IBM Brazil; Pablo Allard, Dean of Architecture and Art, Desarrollo University; Carlos Roberto Osorio, secretary for Conservation & Public Service, City of Rio de Janeiro; and Pablo Escudero, general director, Madrid Police Department

Banavar: There’s an impression that more disasters are happening. Part of it is that because of modern communications, we know more about what’s happening. But it’s true for floods, perhaps caused by global warming. There are also man-made disasters, such as nuclear disasters. These kinds of massive events require a long term planning, preparedness and response system.

Factoid: $265 billion total global economic losses due to natural disasters in the first half of 2011.

We can do a lot to prevent these kinds of losses.

We’ll look at four types of events: natural disasters, terrorism, industrial accidents and large-scale events like protests and riots, but also the World Cup and the Olympics.

The density of communities in coastal communities has  been increasing, and those populations are the most vulnerable

Four stages for managing disasters: Mitigation, such as building codes; short-term preparedness, responding to warnings; response with full situational awareness of what’s happening; recovery and long term rehabilitation.

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Breakout session

Emergency Management: Learning from the Leaders
Second installment

Moderator: Guru Banavar, CTO, Global Public Sector, IBM; Pedro Almeida, Director, Smarter Cities Strategy, IBM Brazil; Pablo Allard, Dean of Architecture and Art, Desarrollo University; Carlos Roberto Osorio, secretary for Conservation & Public Service, City of Rio de Janeiro; and Pablo Escudero, general director, Madrid Police Department

Osorio: We have two major challenges in Rio. We have a history of natural disasters mainly caused by heavy rains and flooding and mudslides, and we have a history of dealing with large scale events.

We were very poorly prepared to face natural disasters.

Every five or six years on average we have a major natural event, but we have flooding every year. We have had two big events in the past two years. It seems to be a pattern. It could be global warming.

In the past we’d say it’s god’s will. We just reacted.

The city decided to approach the situation head on. We felt it was our obligation to meet the challenge in a different way.

They mayor who is 42 started his political life as deputy mayor in part of the city. He was in charge of the region when it had a disaster about 14 years ago.

When he became mayor, he was the emergency response plans and felt it wasn’t enough. Early 2009. He ordered a study.

We had a major disaster–incredible rain. More than 70 people died here. We used the plan to some extent, but not enough

We decided to have an emergency response center but later decided to make a city operations center to handle a wide variety of situations.

We had an organization with many fiefdoms, but, in order to respond to disasters, you have to cooperate. They mayor made people work together.

So we have become much more agile.

We’re facing big events coming to Rio, including the World Cup and Olympics. They’re a big challenge for us. They’re big and complex events. The operation center is a major tool to enable our preparations and response.

This year, we had the Rock in Rio festival with 700,000 people. The last edition was 2001 and was a total disaster. Nobody could move in the area. But this year the operational part worked well. We reacted very quickly, and the operations center was instrumental. We think we’ll be ready for what’s coming.

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Breakout session

Emergency Management: Learning from the Leaders
Installment 3

Moderator: Guru Banavar, CTO, Global Public Sector, IBM; Pedro Almeida, Director, Smarter Cities Strategy, IBM Brazil; Pablo Allard, Dean of Architecture and Art, Desarrollo University, Chile; Carlos Roberto Osorio, secretary for Conservation & Public Service, City of Rio de Janeiro; and Pablo Escudero, general director, Madrid Police Department

Allard: In Chile we had the large earthquake and tsunami, and it was also widely dispersed. We had more than 700 kilometers of land affected. The disaster affected the three main metro areas in Chile and many smaller cities. Five major highways were broken. Many buildings fell—even some built in the past few years. More than 500 people died. 370,000 houses were destroyed or damaged.

The neighboring communities had to come and help the ones that were affected.

First response, lasted 33 days. It was coordinated by the emergency ministry.

Reconstruction is expected to take four years.

I worked on the reconstruction.

We opened a voluntary record for families that had suffered damage. This helped us relocate them. They received vouchers.

We arranged for houses to be rebuilt by private companies. These projects were subsidized.

Six months after the catastrophe we had 60,000 emergency houses built, where people could stay while their permanent houses were built.

It was a huge management challenge. We had to track people’s identity and map it to their location and what was being done for them.

We invited companies to present different kind of building systems. We had a fair where the families could go and chose the type of house.

We had voting by the people to chose the best designs. The winners started quickly.

But we also wanted to use the rebuilding to create smart options. We studied the risks in locations by the coast.

For places that were especially vulnerable, we designed the houses to be resilient to quakes and tsunamis.

By this September we had more than 60,000 houses built and more than 200,000 under construction. We expect to have all the houses built in February 2014.

Lessons:

–Be prepared for the worst case scenario.

–Manage the expectations of the people after the disaster.

–Communicate complexity and time frame.

–Reinforce local capacity and leadership.

Here’s Allard talking about why he’s a “smarter cities addict.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Emergency Management: Learning from the Leaders
Installment 4

Moderator: Guru Banavar, CTO, Global Public Sector, IBM; Pedro Almeida, Director, Smarter Cities Strategy, IBM Brazil; Pablo Allard, dean of Architecture and Art, Desarrollo University, Chile; Carlos Roberto Osorio, secretary for Conservation & Public Service, City of Rio de Janeiro; and Pablo Escudero, general director, Madrid Police Department.

Escudero: We created an emergency response system in 2006 that turned into a crime fighting system as well.

Here’s a look at Madrid’s emergency management system:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Technorati Tags: Brazil, IBM, Rio de Janeiro

Here’s Sam Palmisano’s speech:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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The Start:

2:20 p.m.      Welcome by Ricardo Pelegrini, General Manager, IBM Brazil

Two years ago, IBM started talking about a smarter plant. “Today, it’s an urgent necessity for cities to be smarter.”

Around one million people worldwide migrate to cities every week. By 2050, 70% of the world’s population will be living in cities. This urbanization represents great economic opportunities and also important social and environment challenges.

Nowadays, cities consume 75% of the world’s energy, release 80% of polluting gases and waste 20% of their water due to leaks and inefficiencies in the infrastructure. “The good news is we can change our cities to make them more sustainable, and achieve growth and progress at the same time.”

Technology is available that can be used to enhance urban security, decrease traffic jams and avoid the waste of energy and water.

In the next two days, let’s analyze how cities are modernizing their systems and their infrastructure to encourage economic development, generate innovation and improve the education of the population.

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2:55 p.m.   SmarterCities: Crucibles of Global Progress, Sam Palmisano, CEO of IBM

We have come to Rio because it is a compelling example of a new kind of actor that has appeared on the world stage – the smarter global city.

We face many challenges today. “It can seem as if the world is getting the better of our leaders.” But we see that progress is still happening and it’s being driven by forward-thinking mayors and other innovators in business, universities and non-governmental organizations in cities.

How is it that mayors are getting things done, while other leaders seem stuck?

–“These city leaders are non-ideological. They get things done.”

–Smarter city leaders think in terms of systems. An example is Rio’s intelligent operations center, which  coordinates information from more than 20 city departments.

–Smarter city leaders think – and manage – for the long term.

Amidst all the tumult in the world today, there is another model taking shape. This new generation of leaders is seizing upon the vast quantities of data their cities generate to drive growth and sustainability. “The flip side of every crisis is a vast new opportunity for progress.”

I believe future historians will look back on this moment as the dawn of a new golden age of innovation, widely shared economic growth and global citizenship.

So, let’s use the next two days to think together about what this new urban age could be and then roll up our sleeves for a collaborative work session on how to build it.

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3:20 p.m.   Special Address: The SmarterCities Agenda: The Transformation of Rio de Janeiro, by Eduardo Paes, mayor of Rio

“People talk about the triumph of the city, because it’s the place where people can fulfill their destinies.”

Cities start with services that meet people’s needs. Smarter cities provide a better way to organize and interact in positive ways. Technology progress allows use to got to places we never could go before.

The creative class gathers in cities, and promotes its development.

But there are huge challenges, such as violence and environmental impacts. We face many challenges. We in Rio see these problems on a large scale.

We have prioritized the improvement of services, so we have focused on investments in technology. I monitor the progress of the city with technology every day.

I don’t know how earlier mayors were able to manage their cities without the help of these technologies.

We have been able to increase the collection of taxes without having to increase taxes, for instance.

In future days we’ll reach even higher steps.

Our intelligent operations center allows us to integrate many of the operations of the city so we can provide better services. We have been able to organize ourselves in the face of chaos—when big storms come.

For 400 years public authorities weren’t able to respond to floods and landslides. But now we can mitigate these catastrophies. We can manage risks. We can coordinate better.

We simulated heavy rains and flooding. The control center connects the mayor’s house. I had to wake up at 5 a.m. and participate in the simulation. It was sunny, but we simulated a storm. This is the kind of capability we’ll have.

We have weather information coming in. We have 400 video cameras around the city, and more are coming. IBM scientists created a high tech tool for modeling weather in the city and predict where the rains will fall, so we can react.

Thanks to the control center, we now can have constant awareness and monitoring of what’s going on in the city.

We leaders can sleep because the control center never sleeps. “It’s driving change for the way we manage the city.”

All the departments are connected up 24/7 and they’re aware of what’s going on, and they coordinating their activities. It shows that humans do need to work together.

Rio had a brain drain for a while, but now it has the capacity to attract back and retain these talents. It’s no longer just a tourist spot. Now foreigners are leaving places where there’s a crisis and coming here for opportunities.

We’re developing public-private partnerships.

Rio’s doors are open.

We hope that Rio will be one of the smart cities of the world.

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3:45 p.m. Eduardo Paes, mayor of Rio, talks with Sam Palmisano, CEO of IBM and Fareed Zakaria, CNN host.

Paes:

“Every city needs to decide what it wants to be. After Rio lost the capital of the country it spent 40 years about what we weren’t any more.”

“Cities are where the world is run.”

Every city has its own assets. In Rio, the environment is key. People decide to move here or invest here based on it.

“For a while, it was very popular to be a gang leader in some of our communities. They felt they were robbing from the rich and giving to the poor.” The situation got very bad.

Now we drive the criminals out of the favelas, one after another. Then we bring in the police and social services. We can transform society.

20 years ago people would say don’t touch the favelas at all. These days, we have a different situation. We can’t have more favelas. We can provide housing for the people. We have to provide transportation so they can get to work faster. Today, it might take 3 hours for poor people to get to work.

We have 600 favelas, They won’t go away. We’ll leave people where they are and bring them public safety, public works and social work.

In 2020, we’ll have all the favelas urbanized.

Palmisano:

You’re going to create a modern transportation system. I encourage you to think of it end to end, coordinate the different modes of transportation, so people can make connections and save time.

“This is systemic thinking. It’s a total system, not just a collection of separate elements.”

Predictability is key. People need that.

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Here’s a video of the panel discussion:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Here’s a look at how IBM worked with the Rio to set up an intelligent operations center:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Nearly a year since inaugurating its city operations center, Rio is working with IBM to add new capabilities to city’s emergency response system by giving citizens information that will help them better manage their daily lives.

The new automated alert system will notify city officials and emergency personnel when changes occur in the flood and landslide forecast for the city. Under the previous system, notifications were manually relayed. The new alert system is expected to drastically reduce the reaction times to emergency situations by using instantaneous mobile communications, including automated email notifications and instant messaging, to reach emergency personnel and citizens.

The new alert system, developed by IBM’s Software Labs, can track the receipt of messages to ensure response is immediate and effective. Because responses to each emergency are tracked from start to finish, the alert system also provides a wealth of data available for analysis after the fact.

Another benefit Rio citizens can enjoy today is access to daily data feeds from the Rio Operations Center. The Center’s profile on Facebook and Twitter provide frequent updates on weather and traffic, as well as recommended alternative routes around the city on days of special events including concerts, soccer matches and festivals.

Citizens can follow the Rio Operations Center updates on Twitter @OperacoesRio and Facebook at Centro de Operações Rio.

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4:50 p.m. Special Address: The Transformation of Mega Cities, by  Johnny Araya Monge, mayor, San Jose City, Costa Rica.

The world’s urban population is already larger than the rural population. By 2050 it will be more than 70%.

Our big challenge will be to design a new urban paradigm. We want cities that are more democratic, more sustainable and more competitive. In the knowledge-based society, this means smarter cities. So we need smarter administration of the world’s cities.

We’re talking about the transformation of mega cities. ‘Mega cities are now a mega problem.”

All of the cities with 12 and 15 million inhabitants are in the Third World, or emerging nations. Poverty and social inclusion are part of the mix. This makes city administration very difficult.

We have the capacity to avoid such large cities being developed. We need a new paradigm for cities. We need to break down the definition of what is city and what is countryside, and what environments are protected.

It seems smart to encourage development of second-tier cities. Ideally countries should have a network of intermediate size cities and towns that are interconnected.

“Think of cities as a habitat, a space shared with plants and animals.” There should be agricultural areas, ecological protected areas and urban areas blended together.

In Costa Rica, we’re trying to reverse some of our old ideas about urbanism. Many cities were created around the idea of the freeways. These cities are spread out—they’re inefficient.  They also lead to social segregation. “A city must be a shared territory for all.”

We’re promoting growth in high-density ways, so the city is more compact. “The compact cities are always the most successful ones in the world.”

We’re using a lot of renewable energy sources, and we’re aiming to be carbon neutral as a nation.

We’re repopulating and transforming the downtown part of the city. It was abandoned. It was taken by gangs and drug leaders. We’re now rebuilding the social tissue of the downtown. We’re also promoting urban forests, using native trees along streets and avenues.

We’re putting in a tramway, and creating pedestrian streets. We’re rehabilitating the area where gangs and drug dealers were. “Thousands of people are walking downtown and it’s booming.”

The context:

Here’s Costa Rica President Laura Chinchilla talking about establishing a responsible country:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Update:

6:00 p.m. Special Address: At the Intersection of Globalization and Urbanization, by Fareed Zakaria, CNN host.

I want to paint the broader picture for you. At the end of the day it’s all about improving the living standards of people around the world—giving people access to the American Dream or the Brazilian Dream.

Growing up in India, I was fascinated about the wealth, the opportunity, the dynamism of America. That’s what attracted most people to America. Behind it was the freedom and rule of law and the constitution.

Today in the US you see a lot of pessimism. But the American Dream is alive and well in Rio, in Shanghai. This is where the optimists are.

You’re seen a switch from closed systems to open systems, from isolation to engagement. These changes unleashed political stability and a reduction in warfare; economic convergence—globalization and the adoption of best economic and business practices; and technological connectivity—the information revolution.

It unleashes enormous opportunities. Brazil has been able to take advantage of these changes and plug into the global economy and play.

The challenge for the future is this extraordinary opportunity. Everybody is moving through this at the same time. A lot of people in Asia and Latin America prospered. Governments just had to do simple things, and they got economic growth.

Now you have reached some degree of saturation of the easy path to rising per capital GDP. We’re entering a more challenging phase.

“This is the final phase of industrialization. Everything in your society has to be modernized. Everything has to be smart.”

It’s a lot more than supply and demand. You have to straighten out your infrastructure, your legal system. You have to improve productivity growth.

You have to deal with traffic and pollution. You can only deal with that with improved labor productivity. That’s increasingly difficult to do it because you live in a competitive world. “You’re in a competitive race with other cities around the world.”

To see where real growth is happening, don’t look at the mega cities of the world. There are a few exceptions, like New York and London, because of the financial industry. The real growth is in the 600 middle-tier cities underneath them. They may form themselves into clusters, tapping new transportation and communications infrastructures.

In the US, American companies like IBM are doing extraordinarily well in this global world. They master the shifts in technology. But the average American worker, the American city—they’re struggling.

People in the United States will have to adapt like hell. I’m optimistic, though.

Look at all the things happening around the world. It’s easy to get gloomy. But the pressures of globalization are forcing innovation, productivity gains and better governance.

“Ultimately this is going to have a beneficial effect.”

“This is all about unleashing human talent in away that we’ve never seen before and on a scale we’ve never seen before.”

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Here’s Fareed’s speech:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Here are wrap-up comments by Bruno Di Leo, IBM’s general manager for the growth markets.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Technorati Tags: Brazil, IBM, Rio de Janeiro

What seems like a random question was actually a something that was being asked this week by leaders from government and business that attended the Smarter Cities Roundtable in Nairobi this week. Stakeholders from the Kenyan government, private sector and civil society gathered to identify Nairobi’s most significant challenges in order to frame discussion on technology could ease the city’s transitional growth.

In the next 20 years, Nairobi’s population – already the largest on the East coast of Africa – is set to exceed that of these three mega cities in coming years. The Kenyan capital’s population will balloon by 65 per cent over the next decade to stand at between 8-10 million, presenting a unique challenge to a city that is already struggling under to accommodate the needs of its residents. The main challenges are transportation, utilities, safety and security and urban planning.

So as leaders from government and business look for best practice from other cities for how have tackled their urban challenges, the examples of Rio, London and Singapore are actually more relevant than we might have suspected.

A simple drive through Nairobi today will expose you to some of the issues at hand. The IBM Commuter Pain study has already flagged Nairobi as the fourth most painful commute in the world, with some residents reporting traffic jams lasting as long as 90 minutes to cover just five miles. The pollution from the clogged and congested traffic as well as the condition of the roads and sidewalks makes walking or cycling almost inconceivable.

As Christian Schlosser, Chief of the UN-Habitat’s Urban Transport Section put it “there are basically too many cars on roads designed for ten times less traffic.”

And with a lack of investment in public transport systems, 75 percent of vehicles in Nairobi travel passengerless.

The parking situation in Nairobi is no better. IBM’s first parking survey released recently showed that drivers in Nairobi take an average of 31.7 minutes to find a parking spot against a global average of 19.8 minutes.

Energy management is also a problem today in Nairobi – energy fluctuations are common, with Nairobi experiencing 11,000 blackouts every month. Inefficient utility systems also lead to higher energy prices which impair economic development.

Security remains a constant worry for Nairobi’s residents in a city where 9 out of 10 calls to state emergency services go unanswered and residents are increasingly turning to private security and ambulance providers when they are in trouble.

The roundtable discussion this week provoked a pivotal discussion on how to get both public and private sector to pull together to meet a joint objective of transforming Nairobi into a Smarter City. For example, it emerged during the discussion that both public and private sectors are currently building emergency control rooms in Nairobi in separate, uncoordinated projects.

In a country known for its quick and transformative adoption of modern technologies to its own unique needs, the roundtable was quick to latch onto the low hanging fruits.

Tony Mwai, IBM’s Country Manager who hosted the event, gave a concrete example of how technology could provide an innovative solution to some of Nairobi’s congestion problems. With over 70 per cent of the population already on mobile networks, the density of mobile signals could be used to indicate where congestion is heaviest.

Another area of interest in the discussion was how social media could help to strengthen the relationship between government departments, citizens, private sector companies and civil society organizations.

The round table session was moderated by noted financial analyst Aly-Khan Satchu and was attended by high level policy makers and CEOs from a number of sectors including: Dr. Bitange Ndemo, Permanent Secretary for Information; Eddy Njoroge, Managing Director, KENGEN; Wolfgang Fengler, Chief Economist, World Bank; Steven Oundo, Architectural Society of Kenya; Christian Schlosser, Chief of Urban Transport Section, UN-Habitat, Lucas Ndolo, KK Security and local entrepreneur Esther Passaris.

The final outcomes from the roundtable discussion will be shared with the wider public in a white paper and video film later this year.

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Here’s a minidocumentary about how IBM’s Corporate Service Corps has helped Kenyan government leaders transform government services.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Kenya

Robert Atkinson, president of the non-partisan public policy think-tank ITIF, today moderated a panel of experts on emerging technologies in the fields of health care, transportation and energy at IBM’s Frontiers of IT Capitol Hill briefing.

Here’s the Washington Post’s Post Tech blog curtain-raiser on the event.

Recently considerable attention has been drawn to the emergence of “Big Data”—large scale data sets that businesses are using to unlock new value using today’s computing and communications power.  As a McKinsey Global Institute study recently showed, Big Data offers a wide range of commercial opportunities in virtually every sector of the economy for the United States.  To take one example, the authors estimate that better use of big data in health care could generate an additional $300 billion in long-term value, with approximately two-thirds of that coming from a direct reduction in national health care expenditures.

The use of Big Data should not be confined to just the private sector; data offers incredible new opportunities to the public sector as well.  Policymakers have the opportunity to use Big Data to improve government in areas such as public safety, public health, public utilities and public transportation.  ITIF has discussed many of these opportunities before.

Consider the following:

• Electric power utilities can use data analytics and smart meters to better manage resources and avoid blackouts,
• Food inspectors can use data to better track meat and produce safety from farm to fork ,
• Public health officials can use health data to detect infectious disease outbreaks,
• Regulators can track pharmaceutical and medical device safety and effectiveness through better data analytics,
• Police departments can use data analytics to target crime hotspots and prevent crime waves,
• Public utilities can use sensors to collect data on water and sewer usage to detect leaks and reduce water consumption,
• First responders can use sensors, GPS, cameras and better communication systems to let police and fire fighters better protect citizens when responding to emergencies, and
• State departments of transportation can use data to reduce traffic, more efficiently deploy resources, and implement congestion pricing systems

Better use of data can help government agencies, from city agencies to federal bureaucracies, operate more efficiently, create more transparency, and make more informed decisions.  And government can use cloud computing to more efficiently develop online systems that provide anytime, anywhere access to information. However, government officials should do more to spur uses of data. Taking advantage of these opportunities will require federal government leadership, such as the Department of Commerce creating a data policy office to spur data innovation and overcome obstacles to adoption, all the while protecting privacy.  And going forward, government agencies will increasingly have to deal with issues such as data security and identity management, so these issues do  not become impediments to successful utilization of data analytics. Local governments can help pioneer the use of data as well.  For example, the city of Boston city sponsored the development of a mobile app “Street Bump” to automatically determine where potholes are based on data collected using citizen’s smart phones equipped with GPS and accelerometers. Tools like these are helping create “smart cities” and build a world that is alive with information.

Although there have been many successes in this area, much more can be done.  For example, in homeland security, law enforcement must deal with a changing threat landscape.  While corporations and individuals can increasingly use better technology to communicate and store data security, criminals can also use these same tools.  As a result, law enforcement is increasingly confronting the “Going Dark” problem where they have less access to investigative data, not because of a lack of legal authority, but because of technological hurdles.  Yet while law enforcement may have a reduced ability to intercept some types of communication, they now have many more sources of data, such as transactional data, to use to detect threats.  As ITIF discussed at an event in 2010 following the Christmas Day terrorist attempt, the intelligence community still needs to develop better analytical tools to “connect the dots” and allow intelligence officers to do a better job. Similarly in many other sectors, Big Data offers government opportunities to reinvent how to operate effectively.

Overall, more investment in data infrastructure and analytics will enable government to better provide and efficiently deliver values and services to its citizens.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, Robert Atkinson

Click here to view the embedded video.

As DC Water discovered, bringing greater intelligence and connectedness into its operations would go a long way toward creating a truly integrated and smarter water system; and, most importantly, satisfying its thousands of customers.

And as all the FOAK projects are proving, it is the dynamic nature of this close interaction with IBM clients and the changing forces of the real world that drives innovation and brings it to market at an ever-quickening pace.