Ebola pandemics: interconnectivity, poverty traps and vulnerability

The Ebola pandemic is officially out of control. The situation in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone gets worse day by day. Just for Liberia and Sierra Leone, at the end of September 2014, it is estimated that there are approximately 8,000 total Ebola cases (21,000 total cases when corrected for underreporting).

With the current level of interventions, it is forecasted that on January 2015, without substantial changes in community behavior, a model estimates that Liberia and Sierra Leone will have approximately 550,000 Ebola cases (1.4 million when corrected for underreporting).

One of the most important measures required is appropriate management of corpses – waste management during pandemics is a key-element in the effort to contain the viruses’ expansion. Leaving dead people in the streets or simply transfer them to open dumpsites is a certain contribution that make things much more difficult. Up to now, no one knows what is the fate of corpses, so we better get prepared for the worst case.

The news about the expansion of Ebola cases in USA and Europe are also striking. The so-called “advanced” security measures in USA and Europe proved completely incapable to stop the Ebola expansion. Many holes in the current protocols and inefficient preparation and training   were identified. Austerity measures left their footprints in emergency care too, creating additional barriers to an appropriate response. And the psychological weakness of “it is impossible to happen to us” has made an important contribution to the delays in identifying the infected nurses.

This is not a business as usual case. It is a serious global health risk, a pandemic that challenges our ideas and concepts regarding vulnerability, international cooperation and poverty.

First, speaking for Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guiana, it seems that weak governance and administrative structures in national and local healthcare systems are completely unsuitable to manage such a pandemic, despite the heroic efforts of healthcare personnel and the contributions of volunteers, like the “Doctors Without Borders”.

Second, international aid mechanisms and tools are incapable to coordinate a global effort to control the pandemics – this is not the first time we realize it, but for sure it will be probably the worst for the last decades. International response to Ebola came too late and it is too weak.  And there will be a very high cost for it.

It is time to realize that in our interconnected world, where decades millions of people travel by airplane, cars, trains on a daily basis, no border can stop the expansion of pandemics, unless they are immediately spotted and controlled.

It is time to realize that as long as many countries are trapped to the so called “poverty trap” no citizen in rich western societies can feel safe.

We certainly know that the lack of a sound waste collection and disposal system creates health problems – now we realize that during pandemics, this is a lethal lack. Have a look at the recent Waste Atlas report  and you will find that 50 huge dumpsites serve more than 60 million people - what are waiting for closing them? They will never be closed by local efforts due to the poverty trap.

It is time to understand that global interconnectivity is growing exponentially faster than global cooperation and appropriate institutional development. The current international aid tools correspond to the Cold War Era, while the current global risks correspond to the post 9/11 world. The same pattern identified in climate change discussions (too slow, too late) is again identified in Ebola response.

The Ebola drama just started – let’s hope that besides the thousands of losses that are expected, it will also create a wave of change for our outdated international cooperation systems. And this is mostly for the developed countries that should take the lead and implement a new system of global cooperation patterns and initiatives.  Otherwise, no one is safe!

Smart waste management: Power to the people!

This post is the second one which is dedicated to address the issue of waste management in global cities and megacities. In the previous one (see waste management in global cities ) I concluded that we need to apply Complexity Theory techniques in order to manage waste management systems in global cities. In this one, I am going to give some practical views on how to do it. 

In a recent lecture I delivered in Brasilia, Brazil, during the XII Conferência das Cidades, at November 29 of 2011, I was presenting different possibilities to utilize modern technologies for a better urban waste management.  The lecture was really successful and after the conference I received several invitations to deliver it in different audiences. 

I closed my lecture saying that “after all, if the combined use of social media, internet, SMSs and mobile phones delivered the collapse of Mubarak and other non-democratic regimes during the Arab spring, I am sure we can use the same tools for a radical improvement of waste management in our cities”. And this is exactly my point regarding complexity management in global cities and megacities.

Few months ago, I was reading an excellent article in Scientific American, with the title “the Social Nexus”, written by Carlo Ratti and Antony Townsend. In this article I discovered several smart applications that are already applied in different parts of the world and their purpose is to improve, monitor and control the urban environment. 

As professor Carlo Ratti put it “ Truly smart—and real—cities are not like an army regiment marching in lock­step to the commander’s orders; they are more like a shifting flock of birds or school of fish, in which individuals respond to subtle social and behavior­al cues from their neighbors about which way to move forward… Rather than focusing on the installation and control of network hardware, city governments, technology companies and their urban-planning advisers can exploit a more ground-up approach to creating even smarter cities in which people become the agents of change. With proper technical-sup­port structures, the populace can tackle problems such as energy use, traffic congestion, health care and education more effectively than centralized dictates. And residents of wired cities can use their distributed intelligence to fashion new community activities, as well as a new kind of citizen activism.”

Then I visited the web-site Trash Track. In this web-site I discovered some impressive visualizations of an experiment that was done just to demonstrate that for waste management there is a huge potential available if we use the modern technologies and the interconnected citizens in an appropriate way. Please visit the web-site and you will be impressed as I was, I am sure about it. And allow me to congratulate proffesor Rati and his team from the Senseable City Lab for this excellent initiative which opens new horizons for waste management. 

So, as you can imagine, this is more or less my main idea: to manage the complexity of waste management systems in global cities and megacities with the power of the already interconnected people. Or in another phrasing, to replace the traditional top-down approaches to planning and infrastructure delivery with a bottom-up approach that is based on crowd-sourcing. 

In urban areas, where a lot of people are using mobile phones, laptops and tablets, where smart phones do release new unimagined possibilities of interaction and rapid information, we can use them in order to have substantial improvements in waste management! But even where smart phones are limited and simple mobile phones are available, the power of SMS is enough to deliver crowd – based monitoring and improvements of waste management.

Especially to the areas of street cleaning, collection, recycling and waste prevention, there can be radical improvements with limited cost! And this is exactly what we need during this period of global financial instability! The power of massive social collaboration is something that can be proven more powerful than any advanced technologies for collection and treatment of waste - and still it is ignored. We  must start thinking in a different way and we have to do it now!

There are just two pre-conditions for that.

A.      To give citizens all the tools to do it (not so difficult and definitely affordable) and, most importantly

B.   To inspire them in order to have a continuous feedback from them, to make them real human sensors of the problems in waste management, to create the right atmosphere and motivate people in order to increase social participation and interest for waste management.

After all, the only way to use the potential of new technologies is to provide a meaningful and interactive citizenship. But this is supposed to be the core purpose of any urban governance, right? 

Let’s try to think that way. I am sure we have a lot to learn and much more to deliver. And I am sure that managing complexity with a network of thousands human sensors will be much more effective than ignoring it, as we usually do today. 

I am just 4,74 persons away!

After some weeks away, I am back to blog again. I just finished a long travelling schedule (actually I am on my way back home) and few minutes ago I was reading something really important, that I would like to share with my readers.

I am sure that most of you are familiar with the term "six degrees of separation". In case you are not, this is a study made in 1967 by the psychologist Stanley Milgram. He asked 296 volunteers to send a message by postcard, through friends and then friends of friends, to a specific person in a Boston suburb. He discoovered that on average, using 6 persons as intermediate points, they finally made it, although they had no idea of the address of the person. The result of the study was that our world, even in 1967, was interconnected. Using friends of your friends, with six steps on average, you can contact almost anyone worlwide!

A new study, recently completed and based on Facebook data analysis, says that in our era the average steps required are reduced from 6 to 4,74!

The sample was 721 million Facebook users, more than one-tenth of the world’s population. The findings were posted on Facebook’s site Monday night (see http://www.facebook.com/data) .

The experiment took one month. The researchers used a set of algorithms developed at the University of Milan to calculate the average distance between any two people by computing a vast number of sample paths among Facebook users. They found that the average number of links from one arbitrarily selected person to another was 4.74. In the United States, where more than half of people over 13 are on Facebook, it was just 4.37.

As the researchers conclude “When considering even the most distant Facebook user in the Siberian tundra or the Peruvian rain forest a friend of your friend probably knows a friend of their friend.”

Just two comments from my side.

First the world is much more interconnected that we actually understand. And this is something that has not yet been utilized for the improvement of waste management, through massive social collaboration! As we have discovered working on the project "Globalization and waste management" with ISWA colleagues, it seems that interconnectivity and flow of ideas, trends and culture is a key-issue for the waste management practices in the most interconnected parts of our world, the megacities!

Second and last, this interconnectivity does not mean that the whole world is one. Changing the view, you can easily conclude that you will never reach the world without 5 more persons to act as intermediate media! Or, as Milgram said "the result could also be evidence of psychological distance: that we were actually, on average, five “worlds apart.”