This was a summer to remember! Swedes are normally not spoilt with sunshine and we know how to complain about too much rain and too many mosquitoes. But this year most of us got more than we bargained for. July was extraordinarily hot and dry, it shows on satellite images. Major Tom agrees from his spaceship; Sweden has turned dry and brown.

The weather is always unpredictable, some may say, and next year we could find ourselves back in umbrella and long-john mode. This may be true in the short run. But this summer has shown us a glimpse, and a very hands-on experience, of the future. Climatologists, scientists and well-known weathermen like Pär Holmgren left no trace of a doubt: the stable ‘heat dome’ over Sweden (värmekupol) was linked to the ongoing process of global warming.

Very recently, researchers linked to the Stockholm Resilience Centre warned about the jittery behaviour of our climate. Some rather complex interactions between the atmosphere, the land masses and our oceans may create “tipping elements” in the planet’s temperature. We may therefore – the researchers suggest – be heading for a faster warming than earlier predicted; towards a permanent ”hot house” of 4-5 degrees above the pre-industrial mean temperature. As a matter of coincidence, this was exactly the temperature rise recorded in Sweden during the month of July, compared to the long-term average.

What we have seen this summer is most likely a first serving of what is to come. Thanks to this extreme summer, we can also start to grasp the consequences of a warmer world also in Sweden. And I’m not thinking about how to chill our bag-in-box-rosé on the beach.

Wild fires have spread across Sweden, at a scale never witnessed before. Tens of thousands of hectares of forest land have gone up in smoke, with inhabitants of entire villages having to flee. Our “arctic wildfires” made headlines all over the world. This said, ours were nothing compared to the massive wildfires still raging in California or the fires in Greece that left almost a hundred people dead.

The Swedish agriculture has taken a huge blow; with crops devastated in large parts of the country and livestock being sent to slaughter as the feed supply dries up. Swedish agriculture is largely rain fed with rather small acreage under irrigation. So when there is no rain, there is no crop. Farmers with irrigation installations have in some places been barred from using them due to water scarcity.

The groundwater levels in small reservoirs have been low or very low throughout Sweden which has not only created problems for the agriculture, but also for municipal drinking water supply. This year, over 100 municipalities introduced irrigation bans or other measures to save on the drinking water supplies. Even Stockholm, drawing water from the huge basin of Lake Mälaren, noted capacity problems as people were filling up their swimming pools and watering lawns in the early summer months.  On the national level, the agency Livsmedelsverket has issued recommendations for water saving, and the drought has been a real test for national crisis coordination. As if this was not enough, the national food agency warned that the warm weather can increase the risk for cyanobacteria, adding water quality risks to the shortage of supply.

All these “new “ water-related problems of 2018 almost made me forget the “old” climate challenges. We still have to deal with increased flood events due to heavy rainstorms, and with the sea level rise.

All doom and gloom? At least we can give the Swedish Environmental Protection agency right. In a 2016 report, the agency predicted that climate change will pose serious challenges to our current conventional water infrastructure.

In some ways, we should be thankful for this summer. It was a wormhole in the time warp; an exclusive pre-screening of a not very distant future. It is also a necessary wake-up call. We need to get serious about reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. For water management, the summer of ’18 tells us that “business as usual” will not be an option. On the whole, water will become more rare, unpredictable and expensive, and our infrastructure will have to follow new design principles. Designs that are more resilient and less wasteful. Designs that promote the principles of reduce and re-use; designs that don’t presuppose that we mix our precious water with human faeces. Designs for a warm, but also sustainable, future society.

Fold up your sleeves. Welcome back to work!

David Nilsson

Director, WaterCentre@KTH

Report on PhD mid-Seminar on Algae Blooms and the Baltic Sea.

Based on my current research on algae blooms, the Water Centre has kindly invited me to post a blog on my mid-seminar which took place on April 16^th at the Division of History of Science, Technology, and Environment.

Algae blooms have been present in the Baltic Sea for a long time, but they have not always been a regular feature in the broader cultural and social imaginations that exist in and around the Baltic Sea Catchment Basin. That people in Sweden know and care about algae blooms today partially stems from the foundation of HELCOM (an intergovernmental organization tasked with protecting the Baltic Sea) in 1974 and the large algae blooms of 1988. Of course, earlier algae blooms have also been important, including blooms from around the 1920s or 30s that caused an illness reportedly known as Haff-sjukan.

To a certain extent, therefore, my research attempts to contextualize or historicize this interest in algae blooms, but it also seeks to understand how people experience, relate to, communicate about, and value algae blooms and their causes and effects. Some research I’ve done up to this point explores how monitoring algae blooms came into being, how monitoring takes place, and in what ways monitoring efforts communicate contamination and disgust. Also, an article that I’ve recently published, “Are Dead Zones Dead?: Environmental Collapse in Popular Media about Eutrophication in Sea-based Systems,” tells a story about how different understandings of algae blooms in the Baltic Sea contribute to alternate ways of conceptualizing the health of the Baltic Sea, in this case, whether as collapsing or collapsed.

It was a pleasure to share some of this work I’ve been doing with colleagues and other scholars for my mid-seminar. Invited discussant, Heather Anne Swanson from Aarhus University detailed her thoughts on my work with algae blooms and my ongoing efforts. She gave me some really good advice along with others in attendance. I learned a lot from everyone who was involved and would be happy if any readers of this blog would like to contribute or share their experiences related to algae blooms with me as well. For example, I’ve had a difficult time finding out detailed information on Haff-sjukan. But, of course, I’d be just as interested in your latest sailing adventure or your own research that relates to eutrophication, algae, or de-oxygenated marine environments (sometimes known as bottendöd or “dead zone”). Please email me if you’d like: jessep@kth.se.

Besides addressing the questions and comments given to me at the seminar, I hope to research differences in the cultural values given to algae and algae blooms and how nutrients become pollution among other issues.

Scholars at KTH research waters and what happens in them in all sorts of ways. I am happy to be part of this diverse group and hope that my research will shed further light on the social and cultural relationships that people develop with algae blooms in the Baltic Sea.

Jesse D. Peterson
PhD Candidate

The short homemade video below shows a couple of spotted garden eels in action. You can go visit them yourselves, like I did, at the Aquaria Water Museum in Stockholm (which unfortunately closes down for good during 2018, so hurry!). Garden eels live in colonies of up to thousands of individuals on sandy bottoms in tropical and subtropical waters. They dig a burrow, hide about two thirds of their body (the fish is up to 40 cm long and 14 mm in average diameter) and peek up to catch foods that pass with the current. They apparently stay in the same burrow their whole life (except when mating when they move their burrow closer to a partner’s burrow).

Video: Lina Isacs

The garden eel above is in this text for two reasons: 1) I had no other water-related picture at hand when I sat down to write, 2) the mere thought of it makes me happy. Having thought a while about whether these were good enough reasons, I realized they both might fit for illustrating the topic I’d planned to write about. We’ll see if you think the same.

The bread. Since many years back, I use to start a five-week course that I teach with the following experiment. It aims to make students get some of the main points of the whole course in about 45 minutes:

From a paper bag I pick up a freshly baked bread. I tell the students I’ve bought it the same morning from a local bakery with local ingredients from organic farming, and I pose this question: “What’s the value of this bread?”. The students are not silent for long but start asking immediately what I mean. “Value? What do you mean by value?”, and I use to answer as sweeping as I can and then, instead, I divide the students into three big groups, about 20 in each, and say, “You, over there, are to discuss what you think the bread is worth and decide collectively about its value, and then write the value down on this piece of paper”, which I hand them while continuing. “And you, here in the middle, you too will discuss the value together in your group, but then, without telling anyone else, write down the value yourselves, individually, on this piece of paper, along with your name. And lastly, you, over here, without talking to anybody about it, write down what you think the bread is worth, followed by your name.” To make it more fun I use to say they don’t have to use their true names if they don’t want to, just as long as they remember what name they used, which always seems to appeal to some of the most creative (I’ve had Sten Sture d.ä., Stevie Wonder and a few other celebrities in the classroom).

Then, before handing in the pieces of paper, I tell everyone to return to their seats, and say “Now, this time it’s an auction, where the one with the highest bid has to buy the bread from me, I mean – really”, and ever since the second time I did this experiment I always add that I mean it, for real, “Because, the first time I did this the students thought it was a joke, which it isn’t – you really have to pay the amount you state, if your bid is the highest.” They are then told to write down a value on the same pieces of paper, next to the figure they already have, without talking to each other, and that when they’re done, they are free to leave the room for the upcoming break, while leaving their paper piece to me on their way out. “The winner will be announced after the break.”

A moment of bewilderment (or excitement) then always follows, when the students look around at each other, laugh and fidget for a bit, before taking action, pressed by the 15 min pause looming.

During the pause, I prepare some statistics. In an excel sheet, I write down the bid of those who made a collective choice, make columns with each individual’s bid from the two exercises, and calculate the average from the three types of individual values I now have – the ones from those who made an individual choice after having talked to their group, the ones of those who didn’t talk to anyone before writing down a bid, and the bids from the auction, which includes everyone in the class.

After the break – when it’s unusually easy to get them back in the classroom – I show them the results, focusing on the differences between the four values, before revealing the winner.

Each year, the tendency is the same: the auction’s mean is always the lowest, between 1,5 and 2,5 times as low as the highest, and though not every time, the highest mean is often the bid made collectively.

So what do I want to say with this? I let them buzz in pairs a couple of minutes. Then they easily spot the traditional methodological problems of what environmental economists call “non-market valuation”:

• The hypothetical setting makes people overstate the value.
• For the collective value case, peer pressure makes people want to seem better than they are, especially if those with the loudest voice are strongly engaged in environmental issues (which most of these students are).
• For the individual value cases, norms about that one should act environmentally friendly make you state a higher value than what you’re actually prepared to pay.
• There’s a difference between “value”, “worth” and “what you want to or can pay in money”.
• Some can’t afford to pay the amount they think the bread is actually worth.

At this point, I use to ask them what type of value the auction value is supposed to imitate, and when I say “the market value”, the discussion takes a bit of a turn, and to be honest I might use to talk a bit too much myself from then on. “The difference between the market price and the higher values you stated, what does it represent? What did you consider then that you didn’t consider during the auction?” If someone mentions “positive externalities” I use to think I’m superfluous, but things like “biodiversity”, “animal welfare”, “emission costs” impress. Some insights, however, needs a bit more time than what we have left of the lecture, and although I don’t think I ever manage not to at least try to, I use to spare the more philosophical reflections to later in the course.

The value of water. So what does this have to do with water? The thing is that I’ve done kind of the same thing in my research, but with “real people” and a real environmental problem. In my PhD project, we met stakeholders from the area called “8 fjords” at the Swedish west coast, where marine water quality has deteriorated severely during the last decades, which is closely linked to the local cod being nearly extinct. The project treats the question of how to describe the value of that which we value in nature, but which is hard to measure in classical value terms (money).

In this project, our case-study participants were first asked to state how much they would like to pay in tax per month to make a water quality improvement come true. They were then given the task to collectively decide about the relative importance of different values, such as future generations’ needs, preservation of species, private property rights, to take a few examples.

To make the story short, we really made an effort to counteract methodological problems like those listed above. Even so, the difference between what people perceive to be “the value” of something and what they include in an amount they are willing to pay was significant. Most importantly, not even their stated willingness to pay fully captured what they perceived as “the value” of the water quality improvement.

As obvious as this may seem to most, existing methods within “conventional” environmental economics nevertheless have problems taking this into account. And to me that is not so strange. How would you describe the value of the priceless, making it visible to decision-makers – consumers included – when evaluating or forecasting the environmental and social impacts of a project, or of a private enterprise?

That’s what I and many other environmental economists currently struggle with. Especially if you tend to be intrigued by the two sides of human nature – the one being lazy to the point of not even daring to search for a relevant photo to include in an article you’re happy to have been asked to write, and the one which is recurrently moved to tears by the mere knowledge that species like the garden eel exist and thrive; even species that you never even get to see.

Lina Isacs

Doctoral Candidate at Water and Environmental Engineering

https://www.kth.se/profile/lisacs

Where nothing ever grows
No rain nor rivers flow
Do they know it’s Christmastime at all?

I grew up with Band Aid and Bob Geldof. Their 1984 song ”Do they know it’s Christmas” is one of those soundtracks of my youth; the songs you’ve heard so many times that you’ve stopped listening. Like so many other everyday things, they blend into the wallpaper and you stop noticing what’s special about them.

But the other day, I accidentally really listened. Band Aid sings about starvation, vulnerability, and… water. The song came about to raise awareness, and above all money, for the famine in Ethiopia brought about by drought. Geldof and his friends did a lot to bring attention to the drought problem. But now more than 30 years later, water is still a huge global challenge. For reaching SDG6 on water and sanitation, drastic increases in capital and O&M expenditure will be needed if conventional technology (read piped water and water-borne sanitation) is to be employed. In 2016, a World Bank team calculated the annual investment need to around 200 Billion USD per year up to 2030. That requires a 300% increase of sector investments.

Clearly we need to rethink water and sanitation solutions to meet SDGs. As the head of UNESCO Irina Bokova pointed out recently, we need to engage science and innovation much more. Maybe we have just gotten so used doing things the same old way that we have stopped noticing that we could do things differently. Just like Bob Geldof’s song, our WASH technologies have blended into the wallpaper.

So how have we at WaterCentre@KTH confronted this need for innovation in the past year?

First of all we have tried to make our own university a more open place for the exchange of ideas, and water knowledge in general, with the surrounding society. We have organised meetings engaging with practitioners and entrepreneurs, with politicians and bureaucrats, with students and school kids, with other citizens and of course with other scholars. Examples are our lunch seminars, a science fair at the Nobel Museum, the seminar and workshops held in at our launch in March and of course, a website, our LinkedIn-network and this Blog. Our communicative efforts go far beyond the presentation of results. To make a difference in society, we must also listen and not just speak.

Secondly, we have pushed for collaborations where our job is to create new and ‘crazy’ combinations of expertise. We have brought together KTH experts in business management, energy, nanotechnology, chemistry, biology and robotics, city planning, history, computer science and electronics… and yes; the occasional water engineer. All this to find new approaches to water challenges in society and “open up” designs that have been closed for a very long time. In our collaborative efforts we have worked together with our long-standing partners City of Stockholm, IVL, and SEI. We have also strengthened our relationship with a diverse set of organisations like Water Aid, Jehander AB, Värmdö municipality and Race for the Baltic.

Thirdly, we have worked hard to leverage resources for innovation and research that will make an impact. Just like all researchers, we have submitted a string of applications as part of wide consortia and entered many other types of processes aimed for catalysing new research and innovation projects, in Sweden and globally. One of the positive outcomes of our catalytic work is a deepened collaboration with City of Stockholm around digitalisation in water and other infrastructure. Stockholms Stadshus AB – the holding company of the city’s utility companies in water, waste, energy, housing, ports, heating, and more – will finance a doctoral student at KTH in digitalisation and infrastructure with focus on water. This is a step towards a closer collaboration between the university and the city, and a model to ensure that we work towards societal goals.

Will this make a difference for the global challenges of water? Could a collaboration with Värmdö have any bearing on water shortage in Ethiopia? Yes it could. We are past the point in history when solutions are developed in the (post-)industrial North and then exported to the global South. As we have seen from other parts of industry, not least in mobile banking, ICT and mobility, solutions that develop in places like Kenya or India may well find a market in richer countries. Disruptive innovation in water or energy will affect us in the North as well as the South and we can learn from each other.

So as we move forward into 2018 looking for innovative, sustainable WASH solutions, the global outlook is with us also in the local setting. The importance is the quality of the cooperation and the trust we create in our partnerships. With that trust, we dare question things around us; the things that emerge out of the wallpaper; the things that we can change. And we can look into the future with curiosity and optimism.

Thanks for a fascinating 2017 – and wishing you all a Happy New Year!!

David Nilsson

Director, WaterCentre@KTH