Transcriber: Denise RQ Reviewer: Lena Clemente
Do not turn your back on things that bother you in life.
Are people hungry?
Are people not getting the right education?
Are people not getting a roof over their head?
And it was very surprising for me because I went back to my country
and having taken urban planning, I wanted to change things,
but never before did I think,
in all my education with carbon reduction, building carbon footprint,
that maybe I was on the wrong path.
I was thinking Western, that we had so much time to reduce it
that maybe it was not climate mitigation.
But the country was already on top of the climate risk.
We did not have time.
What we needed was to adapt.
And my problem with this great catastrophe when I was there
is that even in the city where I was --
you know, climate disasters are always in the rural areas, in the provinces.
If you don't see, sometimes you don't care,
but 80% of my city went underwater.
Climate adaptation is sure. Survivability is not.
I was always thinking about greening the buildings,
never thinking maybe, "How do we create a disaster-preventive future?"
Once the water goes up, there's no electricity,
there’s no water, there's no food.
So the future really was thinking, "What can I do?"
The problem with these disasters is I had this mind frame,
"If it's too big, it's not my problem! Let the aid agencies come in."
You have these beautiful pictures of people, coming in with food,
and you think, "Great! They have food for all."
But to tell you the truth, if you've seen disasters,
this generosity last for two weeks.
After that, it stops, and you don't see the misery that happens afterwards.
So what I wanted is instead of feeling
that the great problems of the world had to come from aid,
large agencies, UN, donations, that operate on a cash-burn basis,
that when the money runs out in food, in drinks, in clothing--
you give ten lunches to ten hungry people;
the next week, you'll have a hundred.
It was just not sustainable.
So what we wanted to do was find out how we could get involved.
We didn't just want to give money and our time.
We wanted to give new ideas.
If climate change is cyclical, if this happens every other year,
how can we get involved?
And so, one of the things that we really saw
was if we get involved,
we want to come up with those solutions that keep on giving.
With so little money, if we give a couple of baskets of food,
that means once it is gone, we will have to, again, get money.
So what we did was that we get to a place
where we started thinking,
"What is the biggest problem in the the evacuation center?"
Once people go there, the next problem is really disease.
So what we said is,
"We have to follow three rules of people without that much money."
First of all, all materials must be there.
We shouldn't buy expensive materials, expensive equipments.
Second is that it should take simple carpentry skills,
or you can just simply do it with simple materials.
And the third was there could be a business.
The way that we started solving it was figuring out,
"With all this women trying to wash their clothes, to keep the place clean,
what if we made it simpler for them?
what if we could put a drum, and a drum,
and if we could just let peddle power,
they could sort of come up with their own way to clean their clothes
without having to put their hand in toxic water?"
So with so much people that were in these devastated areas,
we were thinking that,
"How is it possible to help them to come up with machines
that would make their lives easier?"
We came up with what we call the bicycle laundry machine,
and really what it was, is we said,
"We will use this for disaster, but after the disaster is over,
we will give it to you.
That way, you can earn a livelihood out of it."
Instead of getting a lot of people
and spending 10 to 15 hours washing every single week,
you can just wash, and the more you wash,
the more that you can dry, and the more that you can make money.
The second thing that I noticed with disasters
is that a lot of people came in
and started giving a ton of plastic bottles,
and this is a disconnect.
The flood was caused by floating plastic bottles.
You drink it for five minutes, it takes almost a 1,000 years to get rid of it.
And so what we were thinking of is, "What's the next big problem?"
The next big problem for the World Bank was, now that the disaster was abating,
we found out that 2,900 schools were destroyed.
One school would be enough for all the money that we had saved up.
So what we did was we said,
"Instead of spending everything in one go,
can we find this limitless source?
What if something that we could start with,
If we discover how to do it properly,
then these people can be part of the solution,
rather than, you know, aid coming in, building a school, and then leaving."
One of the things we saw that was present every single place
was really these plastic bottles;
and plastic bottles are found in the most rural areas,
they're found inside inner cities,
and the nice thing about them is that they're the same shape.
One of the things that we learned in school
was really these techniques by Andres Frossi,
and what he did was he filled it with sand.
But we did not have sand.
So what we did was we put water in the mud that was abundant,
and we asked volunteers to fill it, and we asked more volunteers to fill it.
There was an abundance of plastic bottles,
but the nice thing about them
is, if you put it on the side,
and you start mixing it with chicken feathers instead of steel bars,
you are starting to form a cheap kind of reconstruction movement.
What we're saying is,
"Instead of aid agencies fixing it and only fixing a few schools,
why don't we make them part of the construction company?
Can we bid for the schools, make them employable
and rebuild the schools that have been damaged?"
So what is the greatest problem can actually be part of a great solution.
Thinking differently, how can we use use not aid, large trucks, large aid,
but human power as the greatest way to deal with these climate changes?
One of the things we noticed also is, when it floods, there is no light.
How do you give candles to everybody, if after a while the candle runs out?
Or petromax that, when you put kerosene,
it burns and releases all kinds of toxic gases.
One other thing that we started realizing
is that there were some things that had to be done.
Instead of importing it, done by specialists,
can it be done by things that are easily found?
So what we did
was we started doing some experimentation on the plastic bottle.
Instead of just being part of our walling system,
we discovered, with the help of Alfredo Moser,
that it could be used in an amazing new way
to give carbon-free light for the next five years.
With light coming from outside,
we discovered that light going through water
will bend and light up the inside of the house.
You can play the video clip.
(Video) (Hindi) This is our place, Sitio Maligaya.
San Vicente, San Pedro, Laguna.
(Woman) This is a poor place, right next to the railroad
where houses are built very close to each other.
(Man) It's really dark here, even during the day.
(Woman 2) We don't stay indoors, we're always outside.
(Woman 3) You never know when you might trip on something
because it's dark.
(Woman 4) I just sleep, since I don't have light anyway.
(Man 2) Here they call me " Solar Demi"
because I've brightened up their dark homes.
(Man3) You punch a hole on a piece of metal roofing,
you slip in a bottle, apply some sealant, then fill it with filtered water,
add some bleach, and install it on the roof.
Make sure it's sealed so the roof won't leak.
It's that simple.
(Man) It used to be this dark before I installed the bottle.
This is how bright is is now.
(Woman) I was amazed.
I never thought a soda bottle could brighten my home
(Man 2) My electric bill really went down after I got this.
(Man 3) And this solar bottle bulb never heats up.
(Woman) That solar bottle has really brightened up my day.
(Man) So far, we've installed 643 bottles.
We want to keep going, so we can help brighten even more homes.
(Woman) It's just as bright as an electric bulb.
We used to take this bottle for granted; now, we can't live without it.
(Woman) Our home is bright now!
(Video ends)
(Applause)
Why do we always have to start by giving them loans
and making them pay for something?
Green technology is for a country that's going to be hit by climate change,
and it's the most vulnerable, it's not an option.
It is a survival thing,
but how do you bring down green technologies
to be afforded by everyone?
How can green technologies not be owned but be open source?
That way as the climate keeps hitting the country, you don't have to be there;
the money pass though you to be able to help them.
What if you just give it open source
so that anybody can rebuild their homes and their lives?
As the light comes in, what happens is that the water bends the light
like a hole in the roof, that would go in a straight line,
it bends and lights up the whole house.
Kids can be able to read,
stores don't have to spend so much;
they could put the money into goods;
kitchens, instead of women having to go from the kitchen to the bedroom,
cleaning up,
and sometimes, when you have thousands of people there,
it tends to create fires.
But the best thing of all is that it allows us to dream big.
NGOs have never been so powerful as before.
With technology that can be easily done by human hands, human powered solutions,
and mixed with social media,
we can reach out across the world.
Mang Demi, the one you saw there, is a social entrepreneur;
we give him the tools.
With those tools, he can now sell the solar bulb to other people.
if it saves 40% off your lighting bill, it saves a lot of money.
But at the same time, it creates a lot of demand,
so he can know sell his services:
for 25 cents to build it and 25 cents to install it.
He has installed 10,000 solar bulbs.
In prison cells, we do mass productions of more than 15,000 each.
If you want to light a city, by having something so simple and so available,
it makes it easy to scale up green technologies.
They make thousands of solar bulbs, we give them the same rates as outside,
and sometimes, we get volunteers
and one time, one day, on August, 30, 2011,
we were able to install 11,000 bulbs
with people going around.
Not solar power given to the people, but solar power to the people.
Is it possible that green be escalated?
Instead of windmills that are expensive,
what about if we save the same carbon
by saving 220 kilos of carbon by each solar bulb?
We're at 200,00 bulbs, and we're going to hit a million by next year.
We got the army, the first private citizen to control the army for two days,
and we got them to install 20,000 solar bulbs.
We were able to get their trucks,
and maybe here in Brazil, maybe one day, you could lend me your army
but we were able to install in 17 cities, in 20 communities,
all in two days.
Immediately they get light, which is 50-60 watts of light.
At the same time, it lasts five years.
We made training centers for everybody to learn to go.
But the best thing there
is that we're now replicating it all over the world,
and this is not even a year old.
We are now in Columbia, Peru,
India, Jogjakarta, Vietnam;
but that light, it's not just light.
It is life.
instead of people, when it floods, having to rely on food given to them,
what if you stack it on top of each other
and with the technology that we learned from another company
which is another NGO that is giving free technology out,
called Window Farms,
you could now stack it up and put plants inside.
And so what happens is that when you have sunlight,
you can now put stacks of vegetables on the side,
so no matter what happens, you will always have light and food,
even in the most desperate of times.
The thing there is that everybody thinks that big things must be done by big people
and I say no;
human-powered ideas are the best things;
and sometimes, when you put them all together,
it makes a bigger change than any aid
that can be given to a country such as ours.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)