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Sustainable innovation needs societal change
By Stephanie Longeway. This is an excerpt of an article originally published on Waterloo News.
“The climate crisis is our biggest existential threat,” said the University of Waterloo’s President, Vivek Goel, in his opening address at the Waterloo Innovation Summit on Friday, April 21.
It’s no coincidence that the Summit, centred on sustainable transportation, took place on the eve of Earth Day.
The calls and commitments to reduce our carbon emissions have never been louder, but our global energy related CO2 emissions continued to climb in 2022.
“Innovation is essential. We will not meet the targets for carbon neutrality without technologies that do not exist today,” Goel continued. “We also know that it is not just technology alone [that will be the solution]. We need the right sets of policies and regulations. We also need to think about behavioural patterns and adoption of new technologies. That’s where collaborations and connections across disciplines will be important to think about these issues.”
This half-day event was hosted by the University of Waterloo, in partnership with MaRS Discovery District, who welcomed almost 200 sustainable transportation experts and innovators to the MaRS Centre in downtown Toronto.
The setting was also no coincidence. MaRS, like the University of Waterloo’s Velocity and commercialization programs, helps to accelerate innovation into business solutions for global impact and economic growth.
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Yung Wu, CEO of MaRS Discovery District told the audience that Canada has an opportunity to make a global impact through the innovation economy. “The talent and intellectual property being developed at academic institutions and being flowed through to innovation hubs to commercialize … that’s the launch pad to achieve success in Canada.”
Wu added that in addition to talent and commercialization ecosystems, coalitions and collaborations between institutions will help to launch new technologies and break down the barriers of behavior patterns and policy that Vivek noted as an imperative for change.
Innovation is an essential solution — if it's adopted
“Technological adoption needs to be done in conjunction with technological progress,” said Markus Moos, director of the School of Planning at Waterloo. He was part of a panel on infrastructure, policy and access for sustainable travel.
The panel discussed the connection between land use and transportation. Currently, many of Canada’s communities and infrastructure are designed around personal vehicle travel. Markus noted that in communities that design and subsidize sustainable systems, like public transportation or more rail options, you see people switch behaviours and adopt new models for travel. “What we subsidize as a society is ultimately the choice framework people will operate in.”
This theme was reiterated in the panel discussion on the mass adoption of electric vehicles (EVs). The moderator Tyler Hamilton, senior director of climate at MaRS said that creating infrastructure like more charging stations and optimizing power grid efficiency to support more EVs on the road will be the hurdle to counteract “range anxiety”.
Mabel Fulford, director of Innovation Partnership at Peak Power is hopeful and reports that adoption is growing fast along with demand. “The utility sector will be forced to keep up.”
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Having the support of regulators is also an important factor that came up in the panel discussion on Canadian made innovations.
Ribbit uses pilotless flight technology to create a more robust supply chain by deploying small autonomous airplanes that fly cargo shipments into remote communities. Jeremy Wang, COO and co-founder said that when he first started out, he had thought regulatory issues would be the biggest hurdle but soon discovered that Transportation Canada was really supportive. The Velocity company has since flown test flights with Transport Canada’s approval to demonstrate proof of concept.
Remi Desa, CEO and co-founder of Pantonium, has found government adoption one of the biggest hurdles for his on-demand transit model. Pantonium is a MaRS backed company and offers a solution for municipal transit systems. He said that municipalities are slow adopters because they are risk adverse and not use to working with new, smaller companies. They found success working with a bold municipality, Fort Erie. This successful case has opened the door to more municipalities willing to attempt something new.
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Working together with government partners and commercialization hubs, these businesses have been able to bring their innovations to market to benefit of the environment, economy and society.
This theme of connectivity and cross-disciplinary collaboration was top of mind for many speakers and guests at the Summit. Attendees came from all sectors across Canada including private companies, researchers from academia and institutes, all three levels of government and community organizations.
It will take all of these groups, working together, to make meaningful change and encourage technology adoption.
Coalitions, connections and collaborations
There may be no better example of collaboration than the Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Aeronautics (WISA). It is the worlds’ leading hub for sustainable aviation and aerospace research, technology and education. Its focus is on interdisciplinary inquiry, cross-sector partnerships and experiential learning to build a sustainable future for the sector.
As Goel noted in him opening remarks, “it is easy to suggest we just need to reduce transportation,” but the pandemic showed us that there is a human need to be with others and travel will always be a part of our future."
Read the full article on Waterloo News.
Waterloo wins prize at energy-efficient home contest
Members of Warrior Home (l-r) Richard He, Isabel Crant, Adriana Ceric, Anna van der Heide, Pierre Roy, Renee Champion, Asjad Khan, Talina Sen Smet and Rebecca Damsteegt pose with their award at the Solar Decathlon in Colorado.
A student design team from the University of Waterloo took home one of the top prizes from an international competition to design and build highly energy-efficient homes.
Warrior Home, which is made up primarily of engineering undergraduate students, finished first in the engineering category, one of 10 categories at the Solar Decathlon Build Challenge sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy.
Winners in the two-year contest, which featured university teams from as far afield as Vietnam, India and Australia, were announced at a showcase event in Golden, Colorado this weekend.
The Waterloo team, which includes more than 50 members, is redesigning and retrofitting a 130-year-old house in Kitchener to become a net-zero, energy-efficient home for an Indigenous family.
The project was undertaken in partnership with the Kitchener-Waterloo Urban Native Wigwam Project (KWUNWP). Work on the two-storey house, which was donated to the KWUNWP by Waterloo Region after sitting vacant for several years, is expected to cost about $150,000.
Fifty-seven teams qualified for the finals, with Ball State University in Indiana finishing first overall, followed by the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.
Tuesday's notes
Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs (GSPA) has announced that the planned in-person Ask Me Anything event, scheduled for Thursday, April 27, has been postponed.
GSPA recommends attending today's virtual Ask Me Anything event, which is scheduled to take place from 10:30 a.m. to 12 noon.
The Department of Classical Studies will host the two-day workshop Ethnicity and Ethnic Constructs in the Long History of the Ancient Mediterranean and Black Sea this week.
"Rather than a static or natural form of belonging, ethnicity is an ongoing site of social production and negotiation," says the event abstract. "It can be both the source and the product of identity. Our workshop will explore how ancient societies defined, constructed, and leveraged ethnic belonging. How did (or does) ethnicity work alongside other social categories, political exigencies, and cultural imaginations? What is changing about our traditional historical questions, if anything, when ethnicity is foregrounded in the analysis? Case studies will range from Archaic Greek colonization over Herodotus’ representation of the Persians, representations of wise men and pirates, Hellenistic Judaism, the iconography of others in Roman Egypt, and Christian concepts of identity in the Later Roman Empire."
The event will take place in the German Reading Room (ML 245) on Wednesday, April 26 and Thursday, April 27.