AUTHOR

By Robin E-H. Hoard, H&S.CO – Climate

ID. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7960-9780

This was to be a talk given before the Portland State University, Impact Summit Pitch Fest in Portland, Oregon in early February 2018. Unfortunately, it was not picked. I fear the reason may be the subject matter: a future living with early warning systems, hardening human settlements, and giving survival options to people who want to stay in place as climate change progresses.

Good afternoon, My name is Robin Hoard. Who am I? I an the program manager for the H&S.CO – Climate.

What am I doing here? I’m here to talk about climate change and the future of civil defense.

Why am I qualified to talk about this subject? Although I’m not an academic, I am a citizen scientist, writer, inventor and entrepreneur. And as an entrepreneur, I see no clear-cut answer to the problem of climate change. To find an answer, I call on three things: my learning disability, my family history of almost a thousand years, and my career in telecommunications and computers.

• The learning disability gives me the ability to see what others cannot. The flip side is that I face problems that others do not.
• The family history gives me the perspective of generations, both past and future. This helps me think about the long-term impacts of climate change.
• The career in telecommunications has exposed me to computers, systems, and communications, and has taught me how they can serve people.

To fight global warming and climate change on the local level requires a change in thinking. We need to consider how to develop easy-to-use tools. Tools that can be deployed and used by local groups to mine information about the Earth. Tools for at-risk communities that want to stay in place during climate and environmental changes.

Tools that can aid in those groups’ understanding of environmental and climate changes. Tools that can help them deal with those changes.

At H&S.CO – Climate, we develop the tools that help others to mine information about the Earth. Local communities can use our intelligent aid as a tool to ask three basic questions: What is happening to our climate and environment? What does it mean? And what can we do about it?

What is the tool system and how does it work? The prototype system is called Intelligent Aid Climate (IAC). This system uses a network of air, water, and soil sensors. The sensor network gathers information from the surrounding area, and IAC stores that information. Over time, it records changes in the local environment. Some of these changes will be normal for the area – set changes – and others will not – non-set changes. Non-set changes may rise or fall and not return to any set range. These are the changes IAC is interested in.

But recording and tracking data is just the first stage. In the second stage, IAC performs projections for both the set and non-set ranges. In the third stage, IAC tries to match the projections with the types of weather, climate and environmental conditions that will take place. Will the climate become hotter, drier, colder, or wetter? How will this affect the local environmental conditions where you live, work, and play?

In the final stage, IAC provides suggestions for climate and environmental mitigation, as well as adaptation and sustainability strategies matched to the projections from stage three. These recommendations will help local communities understand how to protect themselves in the face of climate change.

Where will it be used? As a North American, you personally won’t need it. You have both the US Weather Service and Donald Trump. Other parts of the world aren’t so lucky. IAC is meant for the parts of the world that need it: Africa, Asia, the Middle East, the Pacific Islands, South America, and parts of Europe.

Why would someone use it? Because the pressure of climate change can cause already tense situations to spiral out of control. Syria is the most current example. Before the global refugee crisis, ISIS, or the civil war, there was an environmental crisis of over-used and mismanaged natural resources, made worse by climate change. When communities became destabilized because of climate change, this opened the door to many unfortunate and unforeseen events.

Without access to comprehensive environmental and climate data, at-risk communities become destabilized. People are first displaced in their own country, then overflow into the world as global refugees. Civil wars develop, regions become unstable, and foreign terrorists, intelligence services and military forces soon enter the picture. Syria is only the latest example. We’ve seen this happen before, in Ethiopia in the 1980s, Somalia in 1990s, Sudan in 2000s, and now Libya and Syria.

It’s not just less-developed countries on the line; developing countries can slip backwards, and developed countries will find it hard to stand alone.

What really matters is to understand the philosophy behind this project: the value proposition, and what it means for our investors, business partners, customers and end-users. But it goes beyond that. For our social investors, this project is an impact investing program. An impact investing program generates both a social or environmental good as well as a financial return. Our social and environmental impact delivers workable climate and environmental mitigation, adaptation, and sustainability strategy to at-risk communities.

The financial return is based on an Open-Source model, such as that used by Red Hat and Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux. Both companies use open source methodology to create and update their product, and provide a version that’s free to download and install. Alongside this, they offer a premium version and subscription services for new software releases, patches, and help desk support.

The H&S.CO – Climate plans to follow this model, selling the IAC hardware tool with a premium software version and a subscription service for releases, patches, and help desk support. For our partners, this project offers four levels of involvement. NGOs may be interested in business development and partnership to reach new audiences. Or they may want to extend their existing development and relief work, using IAC to add a climate change mitigation, adaptation or sustainability strategy to their current programs.

In the US, they could do this under the US Philanthropic Facilitation Act. Our use of circular economy ideas can be viewed as an extension of their core non-profit goals and beliefs. For academic institutions, this project is a chance to see decades of research put to good use.

To accomplish all this, the project needs the goodwill that only business partners on a different level can supply. We must seek the endorsement of the First Nations peoples in Canada, American Indian tribes in the US, and other indigenous cultures and people around the world. This is the only way to success, as I mention in my LinkedIN post “Civilian Defense in the Age of Climate Change”:

“Here as elsewhere, we are trying to define an unknown – climate change – by using metaphors to a known example, the last major human global conflict. How can we face the unknown and pretend it’s something we did before from the lessons learned, examples used, or if the metaphor even fits? Is it not when armies, navies, countries or cultures try this that they fail and fail badly? We are led by developed nations that have never learned the limits of the carrying capacity of their cultures in relationship to their countries’ size. Much older human cultures have learned the hard way to the limits of their growth and the success of their adaptability.”

For our partners and customers, they gain power by owning and using a system that can back up their observations about changes to their local micro-climate and environment.

• Open source tool by specification and design.
• Hardware designed to be rugged, lightweight, modular, scalable, and suitable for bare base or remote field deployment. An add-on energy sustainable power module adds longevity.
• Circular economy thinking recycles computers into a cluster platform. This mimics server capabilities, has a low carbon footprint, and reduces end-user costs.
• Sensor array network monitors air quality and weather; water quality and contamination; and soil moisture, chemicals, and contamination.
• Low capital expenditure (CAPEX) and operating expenditure (OPEX) costs for end users.
• Easy deployment and operation by local communities with limited technical background.
• Scientific and risk reduction software answers three questions: What is happening to our climate and environment? What does it mean? What can we do?
• Regional Tier 1 and 2 support network staffed by local groups.

For me, this project is a chance to change the world, and to add a page to my family’s 951-year history.

By using Open-Source methodologies, we hope to open our IAC prototype as a test-bed to an interested international community. We want to create an ecosystem of users, developers, contributors, competitors, and to establish an open global marketplace for intelligence aid tool systems for climate and environmental changes.

Thank you