Tag - Kate Cooper
TEDxWarwick: Feeding the City, Feeding the Mind
Click on the image to see the video of my TEDxWarwick talk.
The full text of is below, along with a sample of the few slides I used:
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Kate Cooper’s slides for the Birmingham Sustainability Forum on 10th September 2012
Here are my slides for the Birmingham Sustainability Forum meeting on 10th September 2012:
And here is a pdf of them (without builds): The New Optimists & Birmingham City Council Sustainability Forum 10th Sept 2012.
Birmingham Sustainability Forum: Feeding the City
The New Optimists Forum has uncovered a lot of issues facing what it takes and will take to feed a city population, Birmingham’s in particular.
So I’ve been asked to kick off the next Birmingham Sustainability Forum on 10th September, 6pm in the Banqueting Suite at the Council House — it’s on Feeding the City.
Given the sheer volume of info we’ve gathered, I’m spending quite a bit of time thinking through what to say. It seems to me that there are three main areas up for grabs to discuss:
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“I think we’re possibly on the brink of a revolution”
Kate Cooper from new optimists kicks off tonight’s event with a short presentation giving some background about the New Optimists Forum.
There’s a year long scenario planning process about food futures in Birmingham. She asked scientists “what are you optimistic about?” And 80 replied and became a book launched in 2010.
“How can we get regional scientists to help us solve the really big challenges in the 21st century.”
Climate change, resource depletion, population pressures. These problems are too big, how do we begin? They happen on large scales, both time and geographically and they require disparate governments to cooperate. So it’s no surprise that we’re stuck.
Doing nothing is not an option. – Sir John Lawton.
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#TNOfood: What a distributed energy supply system could mean for Birmingham
Tonight you can follow and join an intriguing conversation via #TNOfood and/or on this blog:
Imagine it’s 2050. Imagine 50% of Birmingham’s energy supplies generated inside the city — and by a carbon-negative process fuelled by the waste we all produce.
Imagine a local community , owning their own energy supply system. What impact would it have on family life?
And what would the word “ownership” mean? How would that affect individuals? Communities? Today’s vested interests in energy supply?
The feasibility and impact of such a system — more accurately, systems — is being talked about tonight at the New Optimists Forum at Aston Business School.
At the Business School will be (from the top, left to right): geographer Dr Stefan Bouzarovski, lawyer Catherine Burke, horticulturist Simon Coles, economist Dr Corrado Di Maria, Cofely Business Manager Ian Forsyth, the engineers behind the technology, Professor Andreas Hornung and Dr Lynsey Melville, Sandy Taylor who’s Head of Climate Change at Birmingham City Council and economist Professor Michael Waterson.
Making the evening run smoothly is yours truly, Kate Cooper. Nick Booth and Max Woolf from Podnosh are providing social media reporting along with cameraman Jon Turner.
If you want to know a tad more about the technologies being developed at Aston University by Andreas and his colleagues, take a look at this brief video:
Factor analysis at #TNOfood 23 May 2012: what are the factors?
The group are now doing a quick and rough rating of factors (pdf) to create two lists.
On a scale from 1-10 factors the group are rating factors that are important and predictable (ie they need to feature in all the scenarios we draw up). For example, population size, both globally and locally, is an important and predictable factor.
The group is also rating factors on a scale of 1-10 that are important but unpredictable (ie a variable factor). Low or high food prices is an important but unpredictable factor.
Photo by Podnosh: Rosemary Collier, Director of Warwick Crop Centre
Kate Cooper’s slides at #TNOfood 23 May 2012
Kate Cooper is explaining how the New Optimists project started, the big economic, environmental and social challenges facing the world – and how this relates to food supply for the city of Birmingham in 2050.
Here are Kate’s slides on possible food futures for Birmingham in 2050:
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Food scenarios for Birmingham in 2050: where we are at in May 2012
This evening I’m at the University of Warwick for the fourth New Optimists Food Forum.
14 Warwick scientists and social scientists are gathering to continue the work on scenario planning food supply for the city of Birmingham – and considering the scenarios we need to plan for now to ensure sustainable, affordable food supply for the population of Birmingham in 2050.
So where have we got to so far? Here’s a slide summarising the progress to date (click on the image to view at full size).
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What choices technology and planning give us with supply and consumption of food. #TNOfood
- GM foods – there is a mis-education around the implications of GM foods because we wouldn’t really know the impact until 20 years into the scheme.
- If there was a choice between no food or GM food people would go for GM food
- We have a luxury in this country that we have a choice about GM food so is it our responsibility to test it out to find out what the effects are before we have no choice.
- Fridges and freezers changed the way we store food.
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Supply and demand: Are we efficient in the way we buy food #TNOfood
Is the way food is supplied to us the problem with out market or is the way consumers shop the issue?
- If we take over the food market what would that look like to for supplies?
- Supermarkets play a huge part in making food safe – they have to protect their brand.
- If we kill off food miles by growing all our own food will kill off economies in other countries and negate the changes we’ve made for the world.
- Could we kill off our own market place by making it too hard for companies to import food with tough quality standards about the appearance of our food?
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