News & Media: Infrastructure & Investment

The Economist

WHEN Egyptian politicians discussed sabotaging the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam in 2013, they naturally assumed it was a private meeting. But amid all the scheming, and with a big chuckle, Muhammad Morsi, then president, informed his colleagues that their discussion was being broadcast live on a state-owned television channel.

Embarrassment apart, it was already no secret that Egypt wanted to stop the largest hydroelectric project in Africa. When Ethiopia completes construction of the dam in 2017, it will stand 170 metres tall (550 feet) and 1.8km (1.1 miles) wide. Its reservoir will be able to hold more than the volume of the entire Blue Nile, the tributary on which it sits (see map). And it will produce 6,000 megawatts of electricity, more than double Ethiopia’s current measly output, which leaves three out of four people in the dark...

EXCERPTS:

. . . A sense of mistrust hangs over the dam’s ultimate use. Ethiopia insists that it will produce only power and that the water pushing its turbines (less some evaporation during storage) will ultimately come out the other side. But Egypt fears it will also be used for irrigation, cutting downstream supply. Experts are sceptical. “It makes no technological or economic sense [for Ethiopia] to irrigate land with that water,” as it would involve pumping it back upstream, says Kenneth Strzepek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. . .

. . . How much water Sudan uses in the future, and other variables such as changes in rainfall and water quality, should determine how the dam is operated. That will require more co-operation and a willingness to compromise. Disagreement between Egypt and Sudan over such things as the definition of “significant harm” bodes ill. But all three countries will benefit if they work together, claims Mr Strzepek, citing the dam’s capacity to store water for use in drought years and its potential to produce cheap energy for export once transmission lines are built. . .

Read the article in The Economist.

Photo: Landsat-7 satellite image of the bend in the Nile River and adjacent farmland (Photo courtesy of Jesse Allen, NASA)

Peter Dizikes | MIT News Office 

Perhaps you have heard the adage “think globally, act locally.” An MIT-led project taking that idea to heart has demonstrated a new method for getting local citizens and leaders to agree on the best ways of managing the immediate and long-term effects of climate change.  

The New England Climate Adaptation Project (NECAP) got local citizens and officials in four coastal towns to engage in role-playing games about climate change tailored to their communities, while conducting local polling about attitudes and knowledge about climate risks. In so doing, the project helped the towns reach new conclusions about local initiatives to address the threats posed by climate change— which in coastal communities may include rising sea levels and increased storm surges that can lead to flooding.

“One hour of conversation can completely alter people’s sense [and show] that this is a problem they can work on locally,” says Lawrence Susskind, the Ford Professor in Urban Studies in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), who led the project and has now co-authored a new book detailing its results. “There are a bunch of things local governments can do, and people can do for themselves — that communities can do.”

The findings stem from years of research and organizing in four places: Wells, Maine; Dover, New Hampshire; Barnstable, Massachusetts; and Cranston, Rhode Island. The new book on the effort, “Managing Climate Risks in Coastal Communities,” has just been released by the academic publisher Anthem Press.

Among the many findings of the project is that residents of these coastal communities were typically far more concerned about the consequences of climate change than local politicians realized.

“People in official positions really underestimated the extent to which [citizens] were worried about what climate change might mean to the town, what their vulnerabilities were,” Susskind explains. “If you asked, ‘What percentage of people do you think believe climate change is a problem right now?’ most officials would have said less than 10 percent. Our polling results were about 60 percent.”

The scenarios that the MIT-led team presented to people in each place involved ranges of probability regarding potential events. And yet, Susskind emphasizes, certain types of climate responses, like building better storm drains, may be necessary in almost any scenario.

“Lots of uncertainty doesn’t mean you can’t decide or know what to do,” Susskind says. “There are no-regrets actions you can take, where you won’t regret spending the money, time, or effort later.”

Four towns, many issues

The scholars chose the four towns because each hosts a center for the National Estuarine Research Reserve System, a branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That made it simpler for the project leaders to make connections with local political leaders and convince them to participate in the climate adaptation project.  

The book is co-authored by four project leaders, including Susskind, who heads the Environmental Policy and Planning Group at DUSP as well as the mediation group he founded, the Consensus Building Institute (CBI); Danya Rumore, visiting assistant professor at the University of Utah; Carrie Hulet, a senior associate at the CBI; and Patrick Field, co-managing director of the CBI and an associate director of the MIT-Harvard Public Disputes Program.

After developing climate-change scenarios for each town and conducting research on local political priorities and infrastructure, starting in 2012, the MIT group developed a role-playing game tailored to each town, and conducted debriefings on the issues as well. Citizens who participate study the local climate scenarios and potential responses, and try to reach consensus on plans of action. An investment of a few hours can suddenly make hundreds of community members more informed and willing to consider the need for climate response.

“The science doesn’t dictate things, but it informs things, and it leads to interesting conversations about what the policy for their own community should be,” Susskind says.

In Dover, for instance, the effort helped clarify the need to act on local concerns about flooding from the town’s river, and about the capabilities of the town’s storm drains; dredging the river and updating the drains are now higher priorities, along with having more generators on hand for emergency response activities. In Barnstable, where sea level rise, flooding, drought, and storm damage are all problematic issues, the project clarified the need to add water supplies and make the electrical grid more sustainable.

In Wells, where sea levels are projected to rise by 2 to 5 feet by 2099, the project highlighted the need for seawalls and a buyback program for privately owned coastal land that could absorb flooding. In Cranston, flooding is a major issue — following floods the town experienced in 2010 — and the project revealed that 86 percent of residents are concerned about climate change. Possible measures include engineered barriers and expanded wetlands, but the project also reveals a need for continued public education programs about the affordability of possible responses.

Still, acting sooner rather than later, Susskind suggests, will usually turn out to be a wise investment.

“Don’t be convinced that was a one-time flood,” he says. “It’s going to happen sooner and more often than you think, and the cost could be enormous without some effort to manage risks. And maybe as a community you say, ‘Bad things are going to happen unless we find some way to reduce our vulnerabilities.’”

Adaptation, as well as mitigation

The MIT-led project dealt with climate adaptation, the response to climate change risks. As Susskind acknowledges, that is only one part of the climate-action picture; the issue of climate mitigation — that is, preventing climate change from happening to the fullest extent possible — is also vital.

And while the role-playing games were limited to smaller communities, Susskind acknowledges, he thinks this approach can work in much larger municipalities as well, based on similar work he has done in Maryland and other places.

“I don’t think there are any problems of scaling up,” he says.

Other scholars have found the project and its results to be valuable. Judith Innes, a professor emerita of city and regional planning at the University of California at Berkeley, calls it an “eye-opening book” that offers “hope and guidance to policy makers and citizens who want to act before it is too late.”

The researchers have put many materials online, available for public study. However, Susskind says, there is no substitute for participating in the project’s games in person, to work through issues of evaluating a town’s needs and negotiating over them.

“The whole point politically is to organize a constituency for change in each locality, and that requires face-to-face interaction,” Susskind says. “There’s no substitute. I design different games for different places. You have to tailor it so that people get a sense they’re learning something about the place where they are. It’s about empowering a community to feel we can and should be working to anticipate and manage climate risks.”

Photo: Wells, Maine 

by David L. Chandler | MIT News

John E. Fernandez, a professor of building technology in the Department of Architecture, has been named as the new director of MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI), a campuswide initiative launched in 2014. Fernandez succeeds Susan Solomon, the Ellen Swallow Richards Professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, who has served as the Initiative’s founding director.

“I’m honored to be taking over from such an eminent scientist,” says Fernandez, who has served on the MIT faculty for 16 years. “It’s really humbling to hear her talk about her work and be given the opportunity to extend the reach of the ESI.”

Fernandez’s appointment was announced today in a letter to the MIT community from Provost Martin Schmidt and Vice President for Research Maria Zuber.

“Professor Fernandez approaches this role as a world expert on high-performance, sustainable building materials, as a leading scholar on the resources and infrastructure of cities — home to more than half the human population — and as a practicing architect who has led the design for more than 2.5 million square feet of new construction in cities from Washington, D.C., New York, and Los Angeles to Jakarta, Tokyo, and Shanghai,” Schmidt and Zuber wrote. “A member of our faculty since 1999, he founded and directs the Urban Metabolism Group, a highly multidisciplinary research group that studies how intelligent design and technology can reduce the resource intensity of cities.”

Since its founding in May of last year, ESI has awarded nine seed grants for research projects, on efforts that include promoting sustainable consumption in cities, improving methods for safe mining on land and at sea, and improving air quality and plans to mitigate global climate change. Such highly multidisciplinary projects can be difficult to fund through traditional channels.

“I’m delighted to be passing the reins to such a well-qualified and distinguished scholar,” Solomon says. “John Fernandez has a deep understanding of MIT’s strengths across a very diverse suite of environmental challenges, and he brings a clear commitment to excellence and breadth. I’ll be looking forward to seeing him take ESI to the next level.”

Fernandez says ESI’s broad scope is illustrated by the very different backgrounds of its first two directors. “I’m very optimistic about the vision for ESI,” he says: If this initiative can embrace leaders from fields as different as atmospheric science, architecture, and building technology, “It speaks to the breadth of MIT, and the commitment to the ESI.”

Fernandez’s research looks at the environmental consequences of societal activities — which tend to be concentrated in the world’s cities. “Decisions that architects and planners make can have huge ramifications, because the built environment accounts for the consumption of enormous quantities of energy and materials,” he says. Such environmental consequences, he says, “should be integral to a designer’s thinking process.”

“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has shown the built environment to be one of the major contributors to global emissions,” Fernandez says. “What is less well known is that a majority of raw materials extracted and processed are used in the construction and operation of buildings, roads and other large-scale infrastructure. For that reason, much of my work has been focused on understanding the environmental benefits of resource-efficient buildings and cities.”

Since more than half of the world’s population now lives in urban areas, Fernandez says, he has focused on systems involved in the functioning of modern cities, from buildings and transportation to the delivery of food, water, sanitation services, and goods — and the resource intensities associated with these services. The research outcomes from his group contribute to a field known as “urban metabolism,” because it treats the city as an interconnected whole, rather than focusing on individual components or economic sectors. This is best done through a multidisciplinary approach.

In the work of the ESI, Fernandez says, “many solutions will require multiple perspectives” — which underscores the importance of communication and collaboration among disciplines, and an understanding of different modes for tackling problems through science, engineering, design, and policy.

Fernandez sums up his vision for the Initiative by considering the three components of its name: environmental, solutions, and initiative.

On the environment, he says, “the priority is to progress beyond the discussion of the uncertainties about climate change, to delve deeper into research that tells us more about the consequences of climate change, and to do research in targeted ways that will tell us about the kinds of risks we are facing.” Researchers tackling those issues should be provided with resources to do their work, but also to help them in communicating “a very simple but unequivocal message that the science of the climate is well-established and the most conclusive it can be, and is telling us very dire things that we should really pay attention to.”

The second priority, Fernandez says, lies in solutions. It’s essential, he says, “to propose pathways toward mitigation and adaptation in every aspect of society, with regard to every important human activity, enlisting engineers, scientists, architects, economists, political scientists, and others, and with regard to all regions of the world.” For example, hundreds of millions of people live in coastal cities, which face significant threats from sea-level rise. Designers need to converge on integrated solutions with other disciplines to enlist multiple systems for adapting these cities, he says “so that we’re not approaching this in a siloed way.”

The initiative part of the ESI’s name, Fernandez says, “is the part that I hope will bear important short-term and local results for MIT. I believe this initiative has the critical responsibility to initiate action across diverse communities at MIT.”

The ESI, Fernandez adds, should involve all sectors of our community — undergraduate and graduate students, postdocs, faculty, researchers, and staff. “We will be working to initiate a great many actions for the environment, both local and global,” Fernandez says. “Some will be very targeted and modest, and others extraordinarily ambitious, broad and sweeping.”

One example of a way in which Fernandez hopes to implement this agenda, he says, is in funding student projects, including some that might relate directly to residential life: “Support for even very modest but very immediate grassroots projects, where it’s right there in front of you, is something I’m very keen to launch as soon as possible,” he says.

Jennifer Chu | MIT News Office

"Grey swan" cyclones — extremely rare tropical storms that are impossible to anticipate from the historical record alone — will become more frequent in the next century for parts of Florida, Australia, and cities along the Persian Gulf, according to a study published today in the journal Nature Climate Change.

In contrast with events known as “black swans” — wholly unprecedented and unexpected occurrences, such as the 9/11 attacks and the 2008 financial collapse — grey swans may be anticipated by combining physical knowledge with historical data.

In the case of extreme tropical cyclones, grey swans are storms that can whip up devastating storm surges, beyond what can be foreseen from the weather record alone — but which may be anticipated using global simulations, along with historical data.

In the current paper, authors Kerry Emanuel, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor in Earth and Planetary Sciences at MIT, and Ning Lin of Princeton University simulated the risk of grey swan cyclones, and their resulting storm surges, for three vulnerable coastal regions. They found a risk of such storms for regions such as Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where tropical storms have never been recorded. In Tampa, Florida, and Cairns, Australia — places that experience fairly frequent storms — storms of unprecedented magnitude will be more likely in the next century.

“These are all locations where either no one’s anticipated a hurricane at all, such as in the Persian Gulf, or they’re simply not aware of the magnitude of disaster that could occur,” Emanuel says.  

Beyond forecasts

To date, the world has yet to see a black swan or grey swan cyclone: Every hurricane that has ever occurred in recorded history could, in retrospect, have been predicted, given the previous pattern of storm activity.

“In the realm of storms, I can’t really think of an example in the last five or six decades that anybody could call a black swan,” Emanuel says. “For example, Hurricane Katrina was anticipated on the timescale of many years. Everybody knew New Orleans was going to get hammered. Katrina was not meteorologically unusual at all.”

However, as global warming is expected to significantly alter the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans in the coming decades, the track and magnitude of hurricanes may skew widely from historical patterns.

To get a sense of the frequency of grey swan cyclones in the next century, Emanuel and Lin employed a technique that Emanuel’s team developed 10 years ago, in which they embed a detailed hurricane model into a global climate model.

For this paper, the team embedded the hurricane model into six separate climate models, each of which is based on environmental data from the past, or projections for the future. For each simulation, they generated, or “seeded,” thousands of randomly distributed nascent storms, and observed which storms produced unprecedented storm surges, given environmental factors such as temperature and location.

From their simulations, the researchers observed that storm surges from grey swan cyclones could reach as high as 6 meters, 5.7 meters, and 4 meters in Tampa, Cairns, and Dubai, respectively in the current climate. By the end of the century, surges of 11 meters and 7 meters could strike Tampa and Dubai, respectively.

Changing risk

To put this in perspective, the last big hurricane to hit Tampa, in 1921, produced a devastating storm surge that measured 3 meters, or about 9 feet high.

“A storm surge of 5 meters is about 17 feet, which would put most of Tampa underwater, even before the sea level rises there,” Emanuel says. “Tampa needs to have a good evacuation plan, and I don’t know if they’re really that aware of the risks they actually face.”

Emanuel says that Dubai, and the rest of the Persian Gulf, has never experienced a hurricane in recorded history. Therefore, any hurricane, of any magnitude, would be an unprecedented event.

“Dubai is a city that’s undergone a really rapid expansion in recent years, and people who have been building it up have been completely unaware that that city might someday have a severe hurricane,” Emanuel says. “Now they may want to think about elevating buildings or houses, or building a seawall to somehow protect them, just in case.”

Upper limit shift

The team also found that as storms grow more powerful in the coming century, with climate change, the most extreme storms will become more frequent.

The team’s results show that the expected frequency for a grey swan cyclone with a 6-meter storm surge in Tampa would fall from 10,000 years today to as little as 700 years by the end of the century. Put another way, today Tampa has a one in 10,000 chance of being struck by a devastating grey swan cyclone in any given year — odds that will remain the same next week, or next year.  

“Hurricanes, unlike earthquakes, are like a roll of the die,” Emanuel says. “Just because you had a big hurricane last year doesn’t make it more or less likely that you’d have a big hurricane next year.”

But in 100 years, Tampa’s odds of a 6-meter storm surge will be 14 times higher, as the world’s climate shifts.

“What that really translates to is, you’re going to see an increased frequency of the most extreme events,” Emanuel says. “Whereas the upper limit of hurricane wind speeds today might be 200 mph, 100 years from now it might be 220 mph. That means you’re going to start seeing hurricanes that you’ve never seen before.”

The group’s estimates of extreme storm intensity, while high, are not unrealistic for the coming century, says Greg Holland, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

“This is an excellent example of the type of study needed to fill out our knowledge of what is possible with damaging events such as storm surge,” says Holland, who was not involved in the study. “Although the events listed are … rare, a knowledge of their possibility helps considerably with assessing more likely events in planning.”

This research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation.

For millennia, Egypt has relied on the Nile River for its agriculture. So Egyptians were understandably upset in 2011 when their upstream neighbor, Ethiopia, announced plans to build a hydroelectric dam that threatened to reduce the flow out of the spigot: the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), sited along a major tributary that contributes most of the water flowing into the Nile. Two years ago, then prime minister Mohammed Morsi even threatened to go to war.

In an effort to break the stalemate, Kenneth Strzepek ’75, SM ’77, PhD ’80 led a nonpartisan panel of 17 experts convened last November through MIT’s new Abdul Latif Jameel World Water and Food Security Lab (J-WAFS) to investigate the issue and forge a common solution. MIT Spectrum spoke this spring with the alumnus—who is currently a research scientist with the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change and the MIT Center for Global Change Science—about the “great moral dilemma” at the heart of the conflict, and the value of objective advice.

What is your background on water issues in the Nile Basin?

I did my PhD at MIT on water issues in Egypt. For the last 10 years, I’ve been working with the World Bank on the Nile Basin Initiative to come up with a comprehensive framework agreement between all the sovereign states in the region on how to manage the Nile.

What is it that draws you to work on water issues?

Water is such a metaphor for life. At one point, I thought I might go into the ministry. When I went to Africa as an MIT sophomore, I saw the great impact of water on people’s lives, and I realized water resources development was a way I could integrate my faith with my profession by providing physical water as well as spiritual water to people.

What are the roots of the conflict between Egypt and Ethiopia?

Rather than one principle on allocating water across boundaries, the UN has two principles—that all people should have equal access to water within their boundaries, and also that there should be no harm to anybody who is currently developed downstream. Egypt has been using all of this water for thousands of years; if anyone upstream uses some of it, that violates the “do no harm” principle. On the other hand, if 75% of their water comes from Ethiopia, how is it equitable that [Ethiopia] can’t take a drop? So we have this great moral dilemma.

What were the major questions you discussed?

When this dam is completed and filled, it is going to lead to some additional evaporation, and less water going to Egypt, though some suggest that joint operation of the GERD and the Egyptian Aswan High Dam (AHD) could reduce total losses. Could the impact of water loss on Egypt’s economy be offset by Ethiopia selling some of the GERD’s low-cost, clean electricity to Egypt so there would be benefits to both countries? We also knew that since the capacity of the dam is greater than the annual flow of the river, the issue of filling the dam was critical—if Ethiopia started filling the dam and there was a drought, could they stand to wait for years before resuming?

What kind of debates did you have among the members on your panel?

Most of the conclusions were quite universal. When you are not party to a debate, it’s not as impassioned for you. None of us have that history of distrust that the governments have. When Egypt says “We’ve been using that water for 10,000 years,” Ethiopians will say, “Yeah, our water!” Most of us saw that if this was all one country, there would still be upstream-downstream debates, but you could work out a win-win solution.

What are some of the recommendations you made?

The first conclusion is the need to manage the dam cooperatively with the AHD in Egypt. No river with two reservoirs of such size without a plan to operate them in concert will benefit both parties. Not to manage them cooperatively would be a recipe for disaster. Secondly, the dam is going to produce a lot of electricity, but right now there is no sales agreement or connection to export it out of Ethiopia. There needs to be a power plan in place to bring electricity to users or Ethiopia will have no incentive to let water out of the dam through its turbines so it can reach Egypt.

How have the countries responded to the report?

Both Egypt and Ethiopia have commented on the report, and although they expressed some reservations, a week after we presented it, the countries signed a declaration of principles, which is basically an agreement to agree. We can’t know how much impact our report had on that decision, but it was in their hands when they signed the agreement. They are still far away from agreeing to the specific plan to operate the GERD, but the report and follow-up discussions in Cairo and Addis Ababa have outlined a process to facilitate the technical steps towards developing such a plan.

What do you think your report achieved?

A nonpartisan, world-class, international group convened by MIT and including a number of MIT experts has outlined the technical issues facing Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt, and has helped put a boundary to negotiations among the countries. We wanted to make this public so there would be some sound technical information out there as they continue their negotiations. We have offered an objective assessment of the current situation and built connections among key water decision makers involved in the basin. I am very proud of what MIT and J-WAFS did; I pray this activity has and will continue to reduce conflict in the region.

Read more about the Grand Ethopian Renaissance Dam report at MIT News.