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This is a very opportune time to be investing in sustainability management software!

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Greenhouse gas emissions

Photo credit James Jordan

I wrote about SAP’s launch of their Sustainability Performance Management software recently. This is a space which is of massively growing importance given the increasing regulations around greenhouse gas emissions, for example.

I was heartened then to hear in a recent discussion with SAS that their Sustainability Management software was launched in April 2008!

For background, SAS are a business analytics software company with with an enviable record of 34 years growth and profitability reporting global revenues of US$2.31 billion in 2009 up 2.2% over 2008. SAS invested 22% of 2008 in R&D (an unusually high figure in the industry) have over 11,000 employees, and 45,000 customer sites in 100 countries. This is a significant company with a serious track record in research and development.

No surprise then that their solution, like the SAP one, is also very comprehensive, encompassing industry templates (GRI, CDP, IPIECA, etc.), customisable pre-built KPI dashboards, reporting, forecasting, scenario modeling (using the AMEE universe of data for scenario analysis – [disclosure – AMEE are a GreenMonk client]).

And, according to Alyssa Farrell, Marketing Manager for SAS Sustainability Solutions, the software is extremely inter-operable:

SAS also recognises that organisations may have other technologies in-house, so our software can be adapted to whatever environment they may already have. SAS has read/write access to any ERP system, we work within the Microsoft Office environment, so you can even use Excel to pull down SAS Analytics. SAS recognises that there is not one solution for everybody and so all the different solutions from SAS recognise that we need to work within this very complex technology application environment.

SAS have had some big customer wins with their Sustainability software:

With Microsoft and CA also entering this space, I think it is fair to say, Sustainability software is here to stay. In fact, Groom Energy Research reported that climate venture capital investment in Enterprise Carbon Accounting (ECA) firms topped $46m last year, the number of companies offering carbon software solutions grew from 40 to 60 over the course of the year and they predicted that the emerging US market for carbon reporting software is set to grow seven fold over the next two years.

Obviously aware of these trends when we asked Alyssa about pricing, she responded:

The way that our solution is priced is scaled to the size of the organisation [or a division of an organisation] and recognising that it is an early market and we need to get out there and seed our customers, this is the time to buy SAS for Sustainability!

Now, it would seem, would be a very opportune time to be investing in sustainability management software!

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15 Green Predictions for 2010

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Looking into my crystal ball

Photo credit seanmcgrath

It is the end of the year – that time of year when everyone rolls out their X Predictions for 2010 post and, in that regard, GreenMonk is not going to be any different!

Well , maybe slightly different, some of the following predictions are more like hopes and aspirations on my part than likely outcomes!

  1. There will be an increasing emphasis on sustainability initiatives as organisations understand their financial benefits
  2. CSR reporting will become mandatory for large companies in the EU
  3. Companies will more and more look to IT to help them with their energy efficiency programs
  4. An heightened legislative emphasis on carbon reporting will spur the development of more carbon reporting software
  5. There will be greater and greater integration of carbon reporting functionality into ERP and financial reporting applications
  6. Standards will be agreed for energy and water footprint labels for products and services
  7. Water and energy footprint labels will be made mandatory in the EU
  8. At least one smart grid rollout in the US will fail spectacularly due, in large part, to poor stakeholder communications
  9. More and more Smart City initiatives will come on stream as cities aim to become more sustainable
  10. Mainstream car manufacturers will start to release plug-in hybrid and electric vehicles
  11. At least one major mobile phone handset manufacturer rolls out mobile phones with built-in environmental sensors (for crowd-sourced environmental data viewable in realtime with an Augmented Reality browser)
  12. Bluefin tuna stocks will crash in the atlantic
  13. It will be a record year for ice loss in the Arctic, Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets
  14. It will be a record year for damage from hurricanes in the Atlantic and typhoons in the Pacific
  15. 2010 will be the warmest year on record due to the combined influence of El Niño and global warming

    16. and a bonus prediction for good luck:

  16. The US will finally pass climate legislation limiting CO2 emissions (but it won’t go far enough!)
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SAP’s Sustainability Performance Management software launched

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SAP BusinessObjects Sustainability Performance Management

I wrote a piece on SAP’s new Sustainability Performance Management (SPM) tool a few weeks back. At time of writing it was very much in the realms of speculation as the product was, as yet, unreleased.

Last Thursday, Dec 10th, SAP announced the release of the software and having been given a preview of the software the previous day by SAPs Charles Zedlewski, I thought it time to circle back with an update on my previous speculations.

It turns out that I jumped the gun a bit when I posited that:

SAP have taken the next logical step with their Sustainability report. They have productised it!

The current version of the SPM will not output a sustainability report similar to SAP’s hugely innovative one of earlier this year although executives I talked to would not rule out that coming in future versions.

What the SPM will do for organisations is reduce the amount of time spent tracking down, collating data and creating reports. It can automatically collect KPI data across all sustainability dimensions (economic, social and environmental) from a variety of sources, so customers can move beyond manual data collection and spreadsheet-based recording.

The library of nearly 400 KPI’s includes a variety of sustainability metrics, including those based on the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) standard as well as the Walmart sustainability index. If you require customisation (and what organisation doesn’t?) building your own custom KPIs or editing the installed ones is quite straightforward.

The data can be pulled from existing SAP apps within the organisation, it can integrate with 3rd party systems or information can be entered manually and then quickly reported either internally or externally. Audit trail functionality helps ensure integrity and transparency of the data.

Two further things I would like to see from this application are:
1. The ability to output at the touch of a button a Sustainability Report similar to SAP’s recent one and
2. An on-demand option (on-demand is SAP for SaaS!) – an on-demand version would ensure that organisations are always using a version which is abreast of the latest green regulations

Having said that, this is a very solid looking v1 with an intuitive UI and a very comprehensive back-end.

I have a call with SAS this afternoon to learn more about their SAS for Sustainability Management product – it will be interesting to see how it stacks up beside SAP’s SPM.

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(Lack of) Sustainability in the Mobile industry

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(Lack of) Sustainability in the mobile phone industry

View more documents from Tom Raftery.

I realised recently that although I have referred to the talk I gave in Barcelona on Mobile Sustainability (for the Mobile 2.0 conference) in a couple of posts I never talked about the talk directly here, so now it is time to redress that.

I have posted the slide deck above so you can follow along with the slides above and my explanation below.

Slides 1-3 are simply my introducing the topic and myself (along with my contact details).

I started off with a bit of a background:

  • Slides 4-6 I start to talk about some of the reasons why sustainability is important. Climate change, for example, is real and is recognised as real. Even that last hold-out, the US government, has now admitted it is real and have set up the United States Global Change Research program to study the effects of Climate Change on the US.
  • Slide 7 – New studies show that the impacts of climate change are likely to be worse than we anticipated
  • Slide 8 – The polar ice caps are shrinking far faster than anyone predicted
  • Slide 9 – Climate change is affecting animal populations today
  • Slide 10 – Climate change is affecting the world’s river systems, and thus access to water for many people globally today
  • Slide 11-13 – This is having devastating effects on people in South America, the Middle East, and Asia (and agriculture in Australia and California)
  • Slide 14 – NGO’s are warning that the humanitarian systems, already stretched thin, will be overwhelmed

Then I went on to discuss the business case for sustainability today:

Having set the stage (we need to be more sustainable, and look, there is a strong consensus that there is a business case for it too), I started to bring the talk around to the subject of the Mobile industry:

  • Slide 24 – Quote from Smart 2020 report saying ICTs could deliver emissions reductions of at least 15% by 2020
  • Slide 25 – While there are 1 billion PCs in the world today, and 1.4 billion Internet users, there are 4 billion mobile phone subscriptions
  • Slides 26-29 – Examples of Green handsets from Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson. I made the point here that in many cases the ‘Green handsets’ being produced by manufacturers are simply so they can ‘tick that box’ in the annual report. Sony had 57 handsets on their website. 1 was green. Green handsets should be the rule, not the exception.
  • Slides 30-33 – I checked out the websites some of the main mobile operators. 3 have no mention whatsoever (that I could find) of sustainability on their corporate website; the websites of Telefonica and O2 had Sustainability sites but they could both stand a lot of work, while Vodafone’s Sustainability site was the best of the mobile operators which I examined (that’s not to say it couldn’t stand some improvement too!)
  • Slides 34-36 A quick look at some of the Sustainability apps which have been developed for the mobile platform – slim pickings, tbh!

So having shown how poorly this industry is doing in terms of sustainability, I posited a few what-if’s:

  • Slide 38
    What if manufacturers made phones which lasted 6 yrs not 6 months? Rent, not buy?
    What if manufacturers made non-toxic handsets?
    What if manufacturers standardised to usb chargers?
    What if mobile operators switched to e-billing?
  • Slide 39
    What if carriers avoided unnecessary duplication in mobile networks, (would lead to a savings of 300gWh pa in UK alone)
    What if everyone pushed sustainability down supply chain?
    What if developers used mobile platform to build apps which ‘made a difference’?
    What if grid computing client apps were created for mobiles?
    Other?

Under the “Other” heading go ideas like creating Augmented Reality applications for handsets with sustainability related information, or what if the phone makers included pollution sensors (for example) in handsets. With the ubiquity of handsets and with most handsets having inbuilt Internet access, it wouldn’t be long before realtime information on air quality worldwide would be available. Combine that with an Augmented Reality app so people can visualize live their air quality and you would very quickly see changes in people’s behaviour.

Finally, I concluded with two quotes to show why this is critical:

  • Slide 40 – From the 2007 IPCC Climate Change Synthesis Report [PDF Warning]
    As global average temperature increase exceeds about 3.5 degrees C, model projections suggest significant extinctions (40-70% of species assessed) around the globe.
  • Slide 41 – From the Chair of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri
    If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.

The thing to remember here is that Rajendra Pachauri is a George Bush appointee. He was appointed Chair of the IPCC because his predecessor, Dr. Robert Watson was deemed by the American fossil fuel industry (and in particular ExxonMobil) to be too outspoken.

Rajendra Pachauri and the IPCC’s quotes are the conservative point of view.

Mobile phones are ubiquitous. There are in excess of 4 billion of them. They are now for all intents and purposes hand-held computers, increasingly with an Internet connection. Shame on us all if we don’t leverage this incredible resource in the battle to mitigate the effects of climate change.

UPDATE: After I gave this talk, Vodafone, in conjunction with Accenture, issued a report called Carbon connections: quantifying mobile’s role in tackling climate change [PDF Warning]. In this report Vodafone claim that:

mobile technology could cut Europe’s annual energy bill by at least €43 billion and effect a reduction in annual greenhouse gas emissions by at least 113Mt CO2e by 2020. This represents 18% of the UK’s annual CO2e output in 2008 and approximately 2.4% of expected EU emissions in 2020.

The report goes on to say that the opportunities for carbon savings come from two main areas – Smart machine-to-machine (M2M) services (Smart Grids, Smart Logistics, Smart Manufacturing and Smart Cities) and Dematerialisation (i.e. video-conferencing, online shopping, etc.).

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SAP’s new Sustainability Performance Management tool could be a real game-changer!

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SAP BusinessObjects Sustainability Performance Management

Sustainability reporting is a bit all over the place. Standards, such as they are, are many, not widely agreed on, and are loosely observed.

One of the better sustainability reports to emerge this year was SAP’s. Unlike the staid PDF documents most companies put out, SAP’s is a website which allows reasonably deep linking ( here’s the section on SAP’s 2008 Carbon Footprint, for example – notice how you can change it to see footprint by region, KTon or Kg/employee, and get extra info by rolling the mouse over the charts). SAP also rolled out a discussion area where people can comment on SAP’s materiality and the Sustainability report.

Hugely impressive stuff from SAP and extremely innovative.

SAP regularly in discussions around sustainability make the point that while their carbon footprint of almost 500,000 tonnes per annum is significant, the combined footprint of their clientbase is 10,000 times their own! SAP are taking the line that while it is important for SAP to reduce their own emissions, helping reduce their clients carbon footprint could produce a far better long-term planetary outcome. As long as companies remember that, as I have said before, the correct order is Planet first, then People, and then Profit.

SAP have taken the next logical step with their Sustainability report. They have productised it!

Now the technology to produce a sustainability report similar to SAP’s will be available to all SAP customers. The app will connect into most ERP apps to pull out the data for Sustainability Performance Management reporting so being an SAP customer is not a pre-requisite for getting this to work, as far as I understand it.

The app comes with a library of 100+ sustainability framework reporting KPI’s, it comes with a ton of scorecards and dashboards for reporting, which allows companies to focus on improving sustainability performance as opposed to gathering data and compiling reports.

The product is not finalised yet and won’t be made available for another month or two but if it delivers on half of what it promises, it is a potential game changer in the world of sustainability reporting.

I hope to interview someone from SAP shortly to get more details on SAP’s Sustainability Performance Management tool, and as soon as I do, I will post the interview here.

[Disclosure – SAP talked to me about their Sustainability Performance Management at SAP TechEd 2009. They paid for my travel and accommodation to attend this event]

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September 28th Energy and Sustainability show

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Here is today’s GreenMonk Energy & Sustainability show. I had a couple of problems with the audio setup starting out so the show started a couple of minutes later than normal. Unfortunately, for some reason the quality of the video recorded by Ustream was atrocious (as you can see above – no idea why that was, must look into an alternative for next week). In the meantime, the links from the shownotes below may be of use.

This being the week following the GridWeek conference in the US, as expected there are many Smart Grid references!

03:35 Tom Raftery: Are we doing better now?
03:35 Joe Garde: thats it tom
03:36 Joe Garde: audio on!
03:36 Tom Raftery: Sorry about that
03:37 Tom Raftery: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/28/philippines-storm-death-toll
03:38 Tom Raftery: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/2009/sep/28/philippines-philippines
03:38 Tom Raftery: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/6236690/Met-Office-catastrophic-climate-change-could-happen-with-50-years.html
03:41 Tom Raftery: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxCQHn-w0Bw
03:41 Joe Garde: all was fine
03:41 cgarvey: Worked OK, yup
03:42 cgarvey: The video’s site is http://co2isgreen.org/ for further info (if you want to do that to yourself!)
03:42 Joe Garde: shocking Tom
03:43 Tom Raftery: http://understory.ran.org/2009/09/15/breaking-activists-drop-70-banner-off-of-niagra-falls-to-tell-canadian-pm-no-tar-sands-oil/
03:45 Tom Raftery: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/09/ibm-proves-smart-grid-reduces-energy-use-by-15-reveals-key-to-success.php
03:46 Tom Raftery: http://green.venturebeat.com/2009/09/16/ibm-launches-software-to-standardize-accelerate-smart-grid-startups/
03:47 Tom Raftery: http://www.greentechmedia.com/green-light/post/smart-grid-stimulus-wait-for-it-doe-says
03:48 Tom Raftery: http://green.venturebeat.com/2009/09/23/siemens-silver-spring-announce-smart-grid-interoperability/
03:49 Tom Raftery: http://green.venturebeat.com/2009/09/22/trilliant-abb-partner-to-make-smart-grid-technologies-interoperable/
03:49 Tom Raftery: http://green.venturebeat.com/2009/09/22/silver-spring-networks-gobbles-up-greenbox-to-become-smart-grid-powerhouse/
03:50 Tom Raftery: http://green.venturebeat.com/2009/09/14/itron-teams-with-openpeak-for-more-advanced-home-energy-use-management/
03:51 Tom Raftery: http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/releases/smartgrid_092409.html
03:51 Tom Raftery: http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSTRE58L59720090922?feedType=RSS&feedName=environmentNews
03:53 Tom Raftery: http://en.cop15.dk/news/view+news?newsid=2177
03:53 Tom Raftery: http://www.businessgreen.com/business-green/news/2250179/south-korean-utility-spend-4bn
03:54 Tom Raftery: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327271.900-better-world-global-green-heroes.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=environment
03:56 Tom Raftery: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6851682.ece
03:58 Tom Raftery: http://www.triplepundit.com/2009/09/better-place-renault-let-a-100000-electric-cars-bloom/
03:58 Tom Raftery: http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2009/090921b.html?mtxs=rss-corp-gcnews
04:00 Tom Raftery: http://www.apple.com/environment/
04:01 Tom Raftery: http://www.triplepundit.com/2009/09/ebay-greenhouse-gas-emissions-reduction-target-15-percent-by-2012/
04:01 Tom Raftery: http://www.triplepundit.com/2009/09/nissan-tackles-the-silent-electric-car-problem/
04:02 Tom Raftery: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/25/technology/25bulb.html?_r=2&src=twt&twt=nytimesscience
04:09 cgarvey: Thanks again Tom!
04:09 Joe Garde: cheers tom
04:09 Tom Raftery: Thanks everyone for your time, interest and contributions

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If you go down to the woods today, you are in for a big surprise…

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The dramatic footage in the BBC video above documents on of nature’s great spectacle’s – hungry Grizzly bears feeding on the some of the hundreds of millions of salmon who return from the Pacific Ocean to the mountain streams where they were born. This amazing event has occurred every year without fail since time immemorial. Except this year.

Reports are starting to emerge out of the Pacific Northwest that this year the nears haven’t shown up.

According to reports:

Ian McAllister, Conservation Director of Pacific Wild, a non-profit conservation group on Denny Island, near Bella Bella, said he’s heard similar reports.

“I’ve talked to stream walkers [who monitor salmon runs] who have been out for a month and have yet to see any bears,” he said. “There are just no bears showing up. I hear that from every stream walker on the coast.”

Mr. McAllister said it used to be easy to visit salmon streams in the Great Bear Rainforest, a large area of protected forest on the central coast, and see 20 to 30 bears a day feasting on salmon.

“Now you go out there and there are zero bears. The reports are coming in from Terrace to Cape Caution … the bears are gone,” he said.

“And we haven’t seen any cubs with mothers. That’s the most alarming part of this,” Mr. McAllister said.

He said the problem is that chum salmon runs in the area have collapsed.

While there are strong runs of pink salmon into rivers on the central coast, chum, which are much bigger fish that spawn later in the year, are the key food item for bears preparing for hibernation.

Without an adequate supply of big salmon late in the year, said Mr. McAllister, bears do not have enough fat to survive the winter in their dens.

“The lack of salmon last fall, coupled with a long, cold winter, is what’s at the root of this,” he said.

“River systems that in the past had 50,000 to 60,000 chum have now got 10 fish,” he said. “The chum runs have been fished out. We’ve seen the biological extinction of a [salmon] species, and now we’re seeing the impact on bears.”

If these initial reports turn out to be accurate, there is absolutely no doubt that this is a man-made disaster. The salmon have been completely over-fished leading directly to the deaths of thousands of bears over winter in their dens.

There is very little we can do to fix this in the short-term. In the longer term, fishing and bear hunting in this part of the world needs to be seriously re-thought.

On a more personal basis, if you want to help, avoid eating pacific salmon – this will reduce the demand and hopefully help the numbers recover. A great resource if you like to eat fish but are concerned about global fish stock collapse is the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch. This is an online searchable database of sustainable seafood. It also has sustainable seafood recipes, downloadable pdf pocket guides and a sustainable seafood iPhone app!

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TRIRIGA – “like a kitchen towel for stimulus funds!”

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Kitchen Towel

Photo credit renaissancechambara

When I published my video interview of Hara’s CEO Amit Chatterjee, John Clarke, Director of Climate Change Solutions, TRIRIGA left the following comment:

I agree with Amit’s ‘carbon diet’ analogy as it highlights the need for organization to move to a state of ‘carbon heath’. Achieving true carbon health requires a comprehensive strategy focused on the operational and resource efficiency of an organization. Organizations focused on sustainability must move beyond the environmental reporting to evaluate operational changes and investment opportunities that reduce their environmental impact.
Organizations need software that moves beyond carbon accounting to deliver management and reduction components. The software should weigh an organization’s environmental impacts to identify underperforming facilities, processes and assets, analyzes the financial and environmental benefits of capital investments to develop the ideal diet and automate preventive maintenance activities to keep critical equipment operating at peak resource efficiency.
For the sake of transparency, I work for a company that has this kind of software, and I’m happy to discuss the topic with anyone who’s interested. Feel free to reach out.

I was intrigued so we had a chat with John yesterday about TRIRIGA (I forgot to ask why the name is in all caps!).

TRIRIGA started off in 2000 as a technology spin off from the largest design build firm in the casino construction industry (!) and have grown to a 211 person company since then. According to John, TRIRIGA has more than a third of the Fortune 100 using its software to manage their global real estate portfolio. They have identified this space as having huge opportunities because buildings currently represent 48% of carbon emissions globally and energy represents one third of a buildings operating costs.

In 2006 TRIRIGA received feedback from its customer advisory board that they needed to build technology to measure their environmental impact and optimise capital spend relative to carbon abatement on top of the existing software. In response they extended their software to capture energy, waste, water, direct-to-air emissions, and they embedded the Greenhouse Gas protocol to capture the carbon associated with all of this data.

With this data mapped against the real estate portfolio it is possible to identify under-performing locations.

As John put it

If you consider a company with identical buildings in Chicago and New York, same square footage, same equipment, same opportunities for replacing insulation, etc. so you have got the exact same abatement options. When you consider the CO2 emissions associated with the energy in Illinois versus New York (one being predominantly coal-fired, the other having a combination of energy sources including nuclear which has a much lower carbon co-efficient) and then you associate also with that the cost of energy in those two facilities that will identify that the same capital investment in two different locations will have a significantly different return to the organisation depending on the environmental and economic impacts.

All of those factors help identify your under-performing locations and then when you consider the abatement options, the system will then weigh those different characteristics to determine the ideal opportunities based on your strategic goals, whether that is cost reduction with some carbon goals or carbon reduction with the highest economic saving.

TRIRIGA are IBM Partners and they have Deloitte as strategic partners (as well as Deloitte’s being a customer for all of their real estate management).

Data in TRIRIGA’s software can be tracked on either a facility basis or on a project basis (organisations can track capital projects within TRIRIGA). TRIRIGA has a set of assessment tools which evaluates the under-performing locations, a set of financial models that evaluate the financial and economic return, the environmental opportunities can be used to generate a capital project which is then used to manage the implementation (i.e bid management, LEED/BREEAM checklists, etc.). On project completion, TRIRIGA handles the commissioning (inspections of set points, etc.) and finally TRIRIGA drives a set of automated alerts and work order tasks to notify those responsible at the required intervals, whether time-based or based on some runtime reading. So pretty much a full life-cycle delivered within the TRIRIGA applications.

The US federal govt has allocated $bn’s to energy efficiency programs recently. A significant portion of that is going to public schools (govt funded schools) systems. At the same time, the 21st Century Green High-Performing Public School Facilities Act in the US senate will provide an additional $6.7bn for Green public schools. So roughly $45bn is about to be pumped into the energy efficiency of the public school system in the US. Denver public schools (a TRIRIGA customer) raised in the order of $300m in a public bond to update their schools. All of that money is under the control of the facility and real estate groups. This is not unusual, as you look at organisations who are attempting to reduce their environmental impact, you’ll see a similar trend, the money that is being allocated is being transferred from the controller to the operations group (the COO) and to the facilities group. These are the very people TRIRIGA deals with.

As my colleague James Governor (@monkchips) pointed out on the call, TRIRIGA is “like a kitchen towel for stimulus funds!”

TRIRIGA software is a Java based web app and it runs on either an Oracle or SQL Server back-end db. It integrates with most versions of Oracle, PeopleSoft, and SAP (they are a NetWeaver certified application) ERP apps.

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Mobile phones – distributed air quality sensor network?

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Since giving my talk on sustainability in the mobile phone sector at Mobile 2.0 in Barcelona a few weeks back and writing my post about how Augmented Reality on mobiles could be transformative for Green tech I have been thinking a lot about how mobiles could make a significant positive contribution to the planet.

The context behind this is that while there are 1 billion PCs in the world and 1.4 billion internet users, there are 4 billion mobile phone subscriptions and climbing. One possibility I posited at Mobile 2.0 was that mobiles could become clients for grid computing projects like IBM’s World Community Grid. This would add significantly to the compute power of the grid (but for now battery life considerations probably means this is still a few years out).

The other thought rattling around in my head was probably sparked off by my discussions with IBM execs around their Smarter Planet initiative. It occurs to me that if mobile phones had built-in air quality monitors, you could very quickly build up a real-time map of pollution hotspots. Current municipal pollution monitors are static and far too few in number to give a meaningful picture of air quality but if mobile phones had this capability, the combining of the air quality information with the GPS data from the phone would allow for pinpointing of pollution trouble spots very quickly.

Obviously for this to be effective, the data would need to be anonymized and uploaded to a central server. Also, the pollution information would need to be made freely available for everyone’s consumption. There may even be a business model there for someone to pay mobile phone users to sample air and upload the information.

A quick bit of research around this thought and I found the video above showing that not alone is it feasible but it wasn’t a hugely original idea on my part 😉

With the recent news of urban pollution being responsible for lower IQ in children and being implicated in premature births of infants and preeclampsia, there is a definite health imperative for something like this. Especially in China, where air pollution is causing massive health problems. Imagine if the Chinese authorities mandated this the way they mandated that all mobile phone chargers use usb back in 2006! Very quickly economies of scale would drive costs down and competition amongst manufacturers would mean smaller chipsets to do this.

Original Rockwell GPS receiver - image from ion.org

Original Rockwell GPS receiver - image from ion.org

For anyone who thinks that air quality monitors would be too bulky for mobile phones, just have a look at what the original GPS receivers looked like (large backpacks) and now they are embedded in most smart phones!

One final thought harking back to my post on Augmented Reality, with air quality data from mobile phones uploaded to the cloud (unintentional pun, sorry!) it would be very straightforward to create an Augmented Reality view of air quality allowing mobile phone owners to ‘see’ pollution in their immediate environment – imagine how quickly that would drive home to people the seriousness of their air quality situation.