Brown Bag Lunch: Thinking inside the Box
Date: Thursdag 1st February
Time: 12.00 - 13.00
Speaker: Christian Pleijel
The presentation in pdf:
The benefits of staying inside the box (pdf 3.0 MB)
These slides are illustrations to a presentation of the "Water Saving Challenge", a seven month project financed by the European Parliament, managed by Christian Pleijel at KTH.
The presentation includes models, ideas and findings to better understand islands, their need for and possibilities to conserve freshwater. It reflects upon islands a "boxed societies", places well delimitated from the world around them, with precise borders, distant places by their own, apparently "off". To avoid running dry, islands have a bad habit of thinking outside the box: they dig deeper drills, install bigger desalination plants, invest in underwater pipelines to the mainland, bring water by barges... But what if (part of) the solution is inside the box?
Pleijel's book "How to Read an island"
(which can be downloaded here) (pdf 5.0 MB)
gives basic knowledge on Europe's 2,460 islands. The experiences from the Koster island led to the present project, involving eight islands: Ithaka and Tilos in Greece, vis and Lastovo in Croatia, Sein and Houat in France, Cape Clear and Inis Oírr in Ireland. Describing these islands as systems with three layers, it was possible to conclude that they can save from 15 to 55 per cent of the water they use. The project will present its result in Zagreb's Europa House on the 2nd of March, and will be published in a booklet.
