 Kia ora kato no mai haere mai, greetings and welcome to this EHF Live session. Edmund Hillary Fellowship is a collective of entrepreneurs, scientists, storytellers, creatives and investor change makers who want to make an impact globally from Aotearoa, New Zealand. Under this session today you are going to hear from Kate and Harman and Matthew is going to curate the whole session. It's a 90-minute session but firstly these are informal sessions and they are planned in a way that when you leave here after the 90 minutes you feel you know the fellows and our guest speakers on a personal level and you can understand what they're trying to do here in New Zealand and then you can connect with them directly afterwards. The recording will be on our website for you to download and watch and to send on to other people. So stay muted while the conversation is going and then Matthew can curate some Q&A and you can also put comments and questions in the chat as we're going along. Over to you Matthew. Kia ora Michelle, thank you so much for hosting this space. I'm just going to open us with a quick kata kia. Kia hōra, te marina, kia whakapapa, pōnama, mawana, kia hararara ma tātou i te ranginai, aroha atu, aroha mai, tātou i ai, tātou katoa, hi i u taikei. Basically that's just saying, may peace be widespread, may the sea be like a greenstone, a pathway for us all this day. They're shown respect for each other, for one another, to find us all together. And I'd like to open up with that kata kia, really simply because of the fact that, you know, I think climate and biodiversity is something that we're all dealing with as individuals. And in particular, it's hard sometimes to understand the work on hama and i are doing, but it really is about water security at the end of the day, because it is such the lifeblood of the way that we live, you know, we talk about the divine principle of the amount of water that's made up in the world is almost identical to the amount of water that's made up in the body. And so, you know, today I will give you a quick overview of what we're going to cover, and then I'll, and then we'll jump, we'll kind of jump straight into it. So can everybody see my screen? If you're muted, then I can't hear anything. Yes, we can see it. Great. Okay, so we'll start with some introductions. We, we're really privileged to have a forward by Owen Gaffney, who's also part of the fellowship. I'll take some time to set the context. And from there, Kate's going to cover off really what our commitment is to, to the titi o waitangi. We're going to cover off the, the planetary accounting work and the work that Kate's doing and recontextualising the, for us, I guess, from, from Haman and I's perspective, and why are we so interested in planetary accounting is that we have looked at climate from the perspective of waste and carbon, but really it's so much more important than that when you look at the planetary accounting boundaries. And Kate has created a framework that actually allows us to bring that down to a project level. And from there, what we're going to do is apply some of that work of her work to a practical example, looking at both what is the status quo and what is a circular system look like. And at that point in time, Haman's going to take, take us through what does it look like to build, I guess, an integrated waste treatment system that's fully circular at a regional level. And looking at examples around agriculture and around how by collaborating and opening up our discussions across an industry, across industry verticals and across councils, we can actually look at climate change holistically in a region. From there, we're going to go into a question time and we'll do an experiment. Hopefully people are kind of familiar with Mero now that we've been in the pandemic and we'll get to do some interaction and then cover off kind of how we want to work with us before just closing karekia. So that will be the overview for today. And into introductions. Dr Kate Maia, we first came across Kate's work when we were looking at the incredible work that she'd done at Becker as head of sustainability there. And Haman and I were fortunate to meet Kate inside of the Creative Accelerator Climate Exchange Acceleration Program that's just ended. And from there, we realised like how much her work was relevant to what we were doing. And then my co-founder, Haman, we met, I guess at the beginning of his EHF journey and he's now based in Christchurch, New Zealand, his maute of his family and two daughters. Just absolutely privileged to be able to work with him on this journey. And myself, Matthew Jackson, toku ingoa, Toho i nehe, Tameki Makare e Wai anahu anu. I was born in Blenheim, which is where we're going to be building a demonstration plant, just a little bit to the side of that in Nelson. My heart cries because of the challenges we're seeing with Waikato River at the moment. And much like Kate loves her time on a mountain, Tonga Rero is where I live to snowboard and love my time, but now I respect the place I live in, which is Tameki Makare in Auckland. So with that, I'm just going to hand or share my screen again and let us open this space forward from Owen Gaffney. Owen is, he has been involved in creating the Planetary Boundary Guidelines, works at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. He's also, oh my gosh, I can't even, I can't even recall the number of things that he's involved with when it comes to communications around climate change. But he's on the Institute for Climate Impact Research and the Global Commons Alliance. So a bit of a mouthful, but it's incredible the work that he's doing. And we're just really privileged to have him be involved in and providing it forward. So I'll share my screen and let's see if we can get that up. Action. Hey, hi there, Kate. Hi there, Matthew. Hi everyone at EHF. Wonderful to be here. So it's been 13 years, 13 years since the publication of the Planetary Boundary Framework back in 2009, which was a landmark achievement for the first time we had an earth system framework for a stable operating system for humanity, for civilisation, a stable operating system for humanity, and that we know that for the previous 10,000 years that's been the only state we know that civilisation can thrive. And what's interesting about the boundaries framework is that it wasn't a single boundary identified, it wasn't 1,000 boundaries identified, it was nine boundaries identified as the key priorities for humanity. But then as it was published we also announced that we crossed three of those boundaries related to climate change, biodiversity and biogeochemical cycles, our use of phosphorus and nitrogen in agriculture mainly. Since 2009 the boundaries have been updated in, full boundaries assessment updated in 2015 and there we showed that in fact a fourth boundary had been crossed relating to land use, particularly deforestation. And now here in 2022 two new papers have emerged announcing that we've crossed two more boundaries, one for novel entities, you know chemical pollution, plastics, and the second for water use, for soil moisture as the water cycle is changing as a result of human activity. So there we have it, so we have nine planetary boundaries, we've now transgressed six of those boundaries, we're in the danger area, this is now priority for humanity to come back within a safe operating space which is why it is so important that we work to downscale the boundaries at national levels, at regional levels and at the level for companies and businesses to operate within boundaries. This is why the work being done on any downscaling is absolutely critically important, some of the most important work being done on earth today. Thank you. Well I don't know about you but when I sent that through to me this morning I was just a little bit shocked. In terms of the context setting for today's session I was referring to the fact that now novel entities and biological flows of crossing these boundaries then that land system change is just becoming out of control. When you look at what's happening in our media, what we're asking the question of is we'll look ultimately who is going to be paying the cost for that change and how do we actually create new systems both to procure different outcomes but also from a new economic framework not have a direct impact on all of our economy in a way that will bankrupt our rate payers. Right now the reality is it's affecting everybody and we're Haman and our other our team member Marcus is based. We're seeing major political issues when it comes to the use of infrastructure and really what we're trying to say is that from a circular perspective if we cross over boundaries and start to look from a procurement lens on all of the planetary boundary guidelines we'll start to look at different solutions and in the case of Canterbury we can see that they're dealing with issues around odour, they're dealing with issues around the capital cost of new infrastructure, the emissions liability and across the country we need to transition to more clean and green energy right but at the same time we're facing major problems in our primary sector right we're seeing this agricultural greenhouse gas footprint is now becoming something that's really relevant for and is actually going to start costing farmers over the next three or four years. We have a major mental health issue with our farmers who have been criticised and scapegoated but actually are some of the most land loving people that I've ever met but we are seeing nitrates in our water harming public health and seeing expecting new water regulation and the consolidation of water infrastructure to make a huge difference on the way that we're managing infrastructure in New Zealand because actually we've seen major issues when it comes to the discharge and the management of our wastewater systems in New Zealand as well and really seeing significant blowouts in regional budgets when it comes to renewal of infrastructure and building infrastructure but when it comes to building that infrastructure we're still building it based on what we would consider last generation or industrial control system, industrial generation systems and so really you know we are facing a crisis that we're going to need to think differently about the way that we build new systems and what consequence that will have so today we're going to talk a little bit to Kate about how she sees or what her worldview is when it comes to actually looking at systems not looking at them just from a climate lens and a carbon perspective but actually what it's a more holistic way of looking at how do we solve climate when it takes into consideration biodiversity and I think that's more than enough for me actually the stars of the show here today are Kate and Hamann and I'd love to hand over to Kate to start to take us through a little bit about the planetary accounting network. Thanks Matthew just trying to find my unmute button and share my screen. Kia ora tato, it's really nice to have been invited by Matthew to come along and take part in this karero today. I guess just reflecting on that video it's nothing new you know that I operate in this planetary accounting space full-time planetary boundary space full-time but I have to say that just hearing that update from Olin was a little bit emotional actually I think every time I kind of go back and update slides that are more than a year or so old the dial has shifted so fast that it's it's quite alarming and actually I was chatting to my eight-year-old about it a couple of weeks ago and he said you know ma'am I don't want to be a planetary accountant when I grow up because it's just really depressing and I think you know while I try to you know I think we all need to just maintain a really forward looking attitude it does sometimes actually get to me like that and that was one of those moments but really cool that that you that he sent that through for us. I just want to I guess start today by sharing this Fokutoki te Porahita o te Putaiau which means the life circle of the environment and so it goes kietou te rangimarei o te rangi etuihone o papatonuku etakatone o te taeau e afine kiranga i atato tihai wa moriora and what it sort of the meaning translates to say that it's really only when the spiritual world and the heavens and the physical world are brought together by the active participation of the katiaki of the guardians can there be true peace and and well-being and I guess that's really the the basis for all of the work that I do. The you know I think I was talking to an incredible lady last week from Nati Toa when I was up in Wellington for the the accelerator program and she was talking about her ancestors who were so in touch with the environment that they could accurately predict the weather about three years out three not three years that would be amazing but three weeks which is still pretty incredible I I'm actually I live in Wanaka and as Matthew alluded to I'm a pretty keen skier and I don't even trust the weather forecast a day out you know that we're doing with these you know quite advanced computer models and you know I think the the problem with this is this Fokutoki is that it's really true that we can only sort of succeed if we can all participate in that katiaki and that guardianship but actually that's very difficult to do these days life has become so removed from the environment you know our clothes arrive in buildings on hangars you know we go into air conditioned sheds or supermarkets to get our food and so although I think there's this huge drive you know from from consumers and businesses to shift the dial and move into that sustainability space it's actually really difficult to do that and I think there are there are two two major problems I think the first is that many people are still very focused on climate and actually don't even understand that full perspective of the planetary boundaries but then even for those that do understand it actually they don't have the tools to do anything about it I as as Matthew mentioned I was the sustainability director at Becker until recently and so I spent a lot of time speaking with business leaders over the past few years about their sustainability aspirations and challenges and you know the message is really consistent is that they're really struggling to make the right decisions and also they're terrified of kind of coming out and talking about sustainability because there's this huge movement in businesses being accused of greenwashing by making sort of unsubstantiated claims I've also spent a lot of time talking to central and local government mostly in New Zealand over the past couple of years but it's it's really similar they're also struggling and from that perspective it's it's really how to prioritise and take a really systemic view of the problem there's I think becoming more and more clarity that that's what's needed but it's really difficult to do and actually I was just chatting to some of the sustainability leads at Dunedin last week and they said you know it's so hard because we want to do this but then we're like well what if there are unintended consequences and how can we really understand what the outcomes of the different decisions we make are going to be and then you know speaking to consumers and I've actually run some really interesting focus groups with consumers like quite recently and for them it's you know this they're motivated to to make better choices but actually it's really hard to do that and they're really concerned that you know they don't feel enabled to make to take action but they're not seeing businesses or governments move at the pace that's needed and so there's you know this this sort of three three different sort of player groups if you like all facing these really big challenges and I think from my perspective you know I've been working in the sustainability space for about 15 years and really as soon as I started working in that space I was like man the you know what I've what I've learnt about sustainability through the science and what we're seeing people do in reality is just not really related at all and I was you know really really quite concerned about that and I actually started tinkering around in my spare time trying to create a little tool that would help help to address this but actually you know the problem is is huge it's a huge gap and a really complex problem and so in 2013 I left my job as a sustainable building designer and started to say well what could we actually do about this in real terms and almost immediately landed on the Planetary Boundaries framework and you know it was that ah somebody's actually you know put the numbers around this you know my background is engineering and I love I love numbers and I think at that stage felt like if we could just quantify sustainability would would all be okay and you know and then you know I guess it just emphasises that disconnect that the Planetary Boundaries was published in 2009 and it wasn't until I actually went from the business world into the academic world that I heard of heard of them because I you know it was it was such an exciting thing for me to say okay well we've quantified it so so now what do we do and I think the Planetary Boundaries work is perhaps the most important sort of publication that that there is because it really sets out the challenge very clearly we need to respect these nine priority areas if we have if we want to avoid you know fundamentally changing the planet the problem is that this is an incredibly important health check but it actually doesn't really help to unpick what to do about it and so you know and I'm talking about you know this this downscaling there's a you know there's a need to take these from that global scale and say okay well what do we do about it and I think the best way to sort of understand that challenge is to imagine you were going to visit the doctor and the doctor would you know measure your heart rate and your blood pressure and whey you and then you know imagine if you turned to you and then shock ahead and said oh you know it's very bad news you're you know you're a beast your blood pressures through the roof you have tachycardia and then said okay thank you have a nice day and sent you out the room and I think you know the the Planetary Boundaries is that health check says you know we have a really big problem and this is where the problem is and here are our focus areas and so what I set out to do once I discovered it is to say well okay so what is the prescription what is the what are the tangible actions that we need to do so that we can translate that to the scales that we actually make decisions because I'd say nobody in the world is making decisions at at that global scale and so I came up with a framework that I called planetary accounting that helps people to determine what they can do to play their role in returning us to within the planetary boundaries and so it works at at every every different scale addressing that business level those government levels and and those individual levels and so I was working on this and then I thought man this is this is pretty neat I think this could be amazing but who am I to try and translate this incredible global framework that was developed by all these incredible scientists and so I actually started calling them up and said I'd like to come and visit you and get your input on this on this framework and there was such a positive response from the global scientific community it was actually blew my mind how warm and welcoming everybody was and so my husband quit his job and we packed our children into a caravan and we spent a whole year travelling around Europe to go and visit all of these incredible scientists and so I got to spend a couple of weeks with Will Steffen and and Johan Rockstrom in Johan Rockstrom's office for a few days working and so I got to be a fly on the wall for some meetings and man he he's a pretty incredible person but also took the framework around social scientists Catherine Richardson at DTU who's also one of the lead authors of Planetary Boundaries, the Water Footprint Network Nitrogen Footprint Group to really get make sure that it was really scientifically rigorous what we were doing but also that it was really connected into the science social sciences around behaviour change and how you can actually you know take science and put it into action with businesses and governments and people so the way that it works is it basically translates the outcomes of the planetary boundaries into global budgets now it looks really nice and simple with the a little pink arrow as if that was a kind of a linear translation and behind there is a pretty complex diagram of chaos but what it means is that there are these global budgets and environmental currencies that we can use a little bit like carbon accounting with science science-based carbon accounting so like carbon accounting we can say look we want to avoid global warming of 1.5 degrees and so here's a global budget and then we can start sharing it up and we can look at the carbon footprint of a product or a project or a company or a person and compare that with those global limits planetary accounting lets you take that approach across all of the planetary boundaries and so I guess for those of you who don't sort of sit in the environmental accounting space there's there's two reasons that what this that planetary accounting really is is a bit game-changing what you can do at the moment is you can either do something like a life cycle assessment or you might have heard of environmental product misclosures where you get a whole host of complex environmental data and lots of complicated metrics but there's no context and actually to be honest you really frankly need a PhD in environmental accounting to even understand it at you know face value even with that there's no context to say are these numbers good or bad you can only compare them to is it better than another product or you can take you can get quite good context around carbon but then you get a really narrow lens for decision-making and so planetary accounting simplifies that broader environmental data and puts the context around it so that it can be as straightforward as carbon accounting but with that holistic planetary lens. I'm not going to speak to this slide in a lot of detail I'm just going to whizz through it but basically just to give you an idea of the variety of things that you could do with it you know you could take the Paris Agreement negotiations and expand them to biodiversity and all of these other indicators there's actually a report called the Safe Operating Space for Aotearoa that translates the planetary boundaries to to New Zealand and you know sends a message that well we're well well beyond them which is no surprise but you know planetary accounting would help to inform roadmaps for national action plans or you know future scenarios and roadmaps at city or regional level we're doing some neat work around some complex systems like global food models you know how would you meet nutritional needs within the planet's limits put financial value against each of those currencies you can do you can use it for sustainable product design for corporate science-based targets that go beyond carbon really to look at the impacts of local action and we're doing a really neat program called Planetary Facts that I'll tell you a little bit more about later on but the the neat thing about it is that it isn't just able to operate at these different levels but it actually brings them all together so that what we can do with these really big you know national and international scales can connect up with some of that local action and we're all sort of pushing the dial in the same direction. I'm going to pause here and pass on to Himan who is going to share a bit of a case study which I'm quite excited to see because I haven't I haven't seen where this has got to so over to you Himan. Thank you so much Kate and I'm going to take some help from my colleague Matthew here so Matthew if you could just share a screen then I could jump into it right so the fascinating thing about the work that Kate has been doing is when we were engineering a solution there were some things that we knew intuitively but which we struggled to quantify and today we can look at the work that we're doing with the filter of the planetary accounting network based on the planetary boundaries and begin to recognise what those impacts are and this is important because it then helps us to recognise what are the practical interventions both from an operational perspective from arguably a political perspective and an engineering perspective can be done to devise the solution that is hopefully a little better and has less of a negative impact on our natural world so as a starting point we look at a farm and this makes sense contextually in New Zealand because the primary sector is one of the largest generators of employment and also a key part of New Zealand's exports but that being said also the single largest emitter so definitely a sensitive industry to be speaking about but I thought a worthwhile place to start so if we look at the left of this farm system we see that we have inputs that go into a farm primarily in the form of fertilizer and water Matthew if you could reduce that screen a little bit please this zoom out slightly and so so this water and fertilizer that goes into a farm but when we look at what's happening before the time that fertilizer gets to the farm gate we see that there is mining for minerals and fossil fuel and mining as an activity obviously has an impact on land use it leads to land use change because of toxic waste these are I think what in the planetary accounting framework I referred to as novel entities there's also a negative environmental footprint from the combustion of fossil fuel but I think that's a concept everyone understands very well the parts that we're beginning to struggle with are the way we farm today and that's not just New Zealand but around the world industrial agriculture also leads to a depletion and soil quality it leads to a degradation in the ability for soil to provide nutrients to plants it depletes the ability of cohabiting microorganisms in their ability to keep soil healthy so that could also be quantified as a biodiversity loss and the tragedy of all of this is the typical human response then is to use even more fertilizer and more water to solubilize this to add it to soil in the belief that that is what will lead to consistent or a higher crop yield but that isn't true and then you have the flow on effects out of farm which are now understood in terms of the nitrogen use the phosphorus use and also the waste that are produced by primary industry there's also within regional framework the need for these farms to send their produce to cities and these cities then have requirements of infrastructure all their own and here typically what we'll find is that there is green waste infrastructure there are wastewater treatment plants there's an energy requirement of a council to operate these facilities and there's obviously a footprint associated with this energy use and this is again has an impact in terms of essentially greenhouse gas emissions and those can be found either in terms of the actual emissions from the waste that goes to landfill but also in the energy use to manage and operate such systems so this is business as usual this is what happens on a day-to-day business this is a day-to-day functioning of the way we live but when we look at it in the context of planetary boundaries we begin to see that these impacts are now felt on local ecology there is water use there is a decrease in biodiversity there is an increase in emissions these emissions are both in the form of carbon dioxide which we understand conventionally but also in the form of methane and nitrous oxide which have significantly higher global warming potential as compared to carbon dioxide and there's also the persistence of these novel entities that are created either through the direct use of these products or in the manufacturing processes to create these products that linger within our natural environment for unimaginably long periods of time so this is business as usual this is what is happening in the 21st century and while the problem statement isn't new and while it's great to apply the planetary boundaries as a guideline to inform what we do the question we often get asked is well what can we do it's it's all about the economy stupid and that's the part which we've begun to recognize is is something that we're all struggling with so there is business as usual there's everything that we know conventionally there are the entire systems that are set up everything that we're familiar with and while we're cognizant of the fact that our current way of life is not sustainable we often grapple with what a potential solution could look like so here we've taken a stab at it it's it's something that we're seeking to do uh in New Zealand it's it is what has essentially brought me to to New Zealand as an admin to any fellow and in the hopes that we can create an alternative means and a method of dealing with our organic waste particularly such that we might form one small part of a solution that enables us then to live within the planetary boundaries right so in such a system what we perceive it to be now that's our logo at the top but that is what we're using as a placeholder for an integrated waste treatment plant or an IWTP so as the name suggests what an IWTP does is it processes all the organic wastes that are available within a region now while I won't delve too much into the technology of this IWTP and how it works what it seeks to do essentially is utilize a conventionally well understood process of biomethanation but with a little bit of operational and systems engineering that allows it to deal with the vagaries in the supply chain of biomass or or available organics and also with changing weather conditions such that there is a slightly more consistent level of operation now such a system what it does is the inputs to this integrated waste treatment plant come both from the city level which includes the likes of the green waste and the wastewater sludge that comes from councils but also the waste from farm which includes manure which includes crop residues which includes some degree of spoilage of produce and also significantly from the primary sector a large part of the waste that the primary sector generates so examples of this in New Zealand would be dairy processing sludge it would be awful from meatworks it's things like muscle shells and fish heads and in some cases entire fish that that don't meet human consumption standards it includes crop residues of which the significant quantity is burned every year so all of this then gets sent to the IWTP in the region and here it is about what is locally available because again we recognize that there is an environmental cost associated with the transport so we would like to minimize this as far as possible and all these inputs go to an IWTP and like I said at the start it works in a conventional biomethination process but it puts out essentially energy and a digested and this digested is in essence the nutrients that are required on farm however since this is organic in nature and it also contains what we would call good microbes these seek to address the imbalances that have been created in our natural systems help to restore organic carbon in soil help to create a healthy environment for other microorganisms and other smaller creatures to migrate back to soil and also reduce the amount of water use on farm and so here what we begin to see is that we can with a little uh with a slightly more considerate approach be sensitive to our local environment and start living within the planetary boundaries while still meeting the requirements that we have in terms of managing our organic waste ensuring public health metrics are met ensuring that we have portable water supply and without an overreach in terms of what we can achieve through some fantastical technological intervention to do something that will suddenly save us because technology is going so fast that I think is a fallacy it's important to pull that out it's what the planetary accounting network and the planetary boundary guidelines serve to show us is that we need to engineer the way we live to comply with what the biophysical limits of the earth are and through such what on the face of it seems like a simple intervention we can collapse the need to send any of our waste to landfill we avoid the emissions associated from the landfill itself we avoid the emissions associated with the transport of waste to landfill and we avoid the wasteful practice of intensive mining that is required to support the kind of industrial agriculture that we take for granted as a way of life today and this is a rather simple example in terms of realistically what is happening in New Zealand some of you may be aware some of you might not but there are several regions in New Zealand where waste is transported over 300 or 400 kilometers to a landfill in another region and that's because some regions somewhere has consented the use of a landfill and another region elsewhere has not and so therefore the only option then is to transport waste from one region to another to dump it into a hole in the ground tragically that's going to make no real impact on what it means for the council that's sending its waste elsewhere when it just speaks to the nimby or the not in my backyard culture that is so pervasive across the globe really with that we can now look at perhaps taking any questions that the audience may have is there any specifics that anybody would like to ask Kate or Matthew or myself then we're happy to to answer these can I uh so I'm just going to do a small experiment small experiment Kate and Haman thank you so much for that talk I am going to share the mirror board in the chat and I'm taking a risk but you know we we're so we're living on um you know in this environment where we have to operate digitally so I'd love it if we could get some interaction here I highly encourage you to participate by clicking on this link that I've just shared with everybody now I'll give you another one just in case that one doesn't work so share screen one of the things that happens in these spaces is that there's so many people but so many questions and what I'd really love to do is to see if there's any groups of questions okay so um I am unlocking a little question board down here that you should be able to see now and if you can see my screen you can see you can grab these little question marks and you can go and drop them onto the board so what I'd really like is if you can grab your question marks and drop them into the location that you have a question or a challenge or or something that you're interested in for us to talk about and we'll start to see whether there's any groups there okay um and my request is that we we do this for two minutes and you've got three question marks so yeah let's get to it great to see some visiting artists stop that share for the time being and go back to conversations and take some inspiration from Michelle who was being at the beginning of this was very good at curating a listening space I don't even know what to say to be honest with you about from referring back to Dallas who was the one that curated the bookshelf in the background around a lightning talk that she had to do the other night where somebody she was doing some coach training with somebody and they um their slides messed up they're like hey can you can you throw up a lightning talk and she ended up doing off the car for lightning talk on the New Zealand and Ireland rugby game coaching government uh government employees in Singapore around how to use agility so yeah I don't know I have to learn something from the way that she was able to masterfully interlude and take on the lightning talk so quickly I can see in the background still some movement going so we'll give another 30 seconds oh I may not have dropped or locked all of the boards sometimes these experiments go well sometimes they don't don't worry if you break anything guys it's all fixable okay we've seen any trends yet so we've got some questions around sludge okay I'm going to bring that board up and um share screen for a second and then give us into back into this talk um okay so but from from what I can tell looks like we've got questions around nutrients waste water sludge and actually more questions about the technology um does anybody want to come off mute and ask uh the question about their technology that they were interested in sorry I'll just jump in um hi Kia ora I'm Nikki Solomon my question is is the technology that that is being suggested here anaerobic digestion or something different yes it is okay and so um I guess then my question is obviously you know there is there are projects happening around the place that are um including aerobic anaerobic digestion and so so I guess my question is are we talking about anaerobic digestion but assessed more holistically within the planetary accounting framework or are we talking about a next generation anaerobic digestion or I guess what's different is kind of my question yes fantastic question Nikki thank you so what's different is yes there's is a risk that we end up trying to create bioenergy solutions at a very large scale which is what has typically happened in other parts of the world and then they become dependent on certain market interventions and those don't necessarily lead to the desired outcomes for us the desired outcome at a primary level is to address the organics part of the story so looking at it as the first lens is in terms of waste minimization but also in terms of emissions reduction and then thirdly also in terms of the nutrient return to natural living systems in terms of what's different technologically I can't divulge much but it's simple and interventions essentially to address the challenges around very large-scale anaerobic digestors which then typically can work on only one type of feedstock and are then sensitive to any changes to the digestive environment either in the form of a contaminant or a reduction in supply so here it's about building it to a minimum viable size so how small can you go that's one second to address the variability can you process more than one feedstock so you can process different types of organics in a single system does that answer your question sufficiently yes that's great thank you and sorry I should have I don't want to take too much time but just quickly to explain the context I'm leading a program initiative in Hawkes Bay which is about bringing food producers more manufacturers than growers but probably we have to expand the scope together to collaborate around sustainability particularly value from waste and so bio energies kind of on the radar obviously but the complexities that you guys have identified are kind of where I think we get stuck so yeah I'd be really keen to pick up the conversation subsequent rather than taking taking your time now but thank you that that's a great answer thank you thank you we'll touch any more questions so any more questions on technology there was one two three four five six people that put something there so has anybody else that would like to ask a question on that prior to moving off to looking at sludge or or nutrients hi i'm Tony Moore Christchurch City Council just a real quick question you've obviously proposed you've got a new technology or solution there and I just wonder if you could share where it's been used and what the results have been so is it actually built in play running operating and and how that's going hi so we're currently in the process of building our first technology demonstrator for a council in New Zealand I don't know if I have liberty to name names that probably differ to Matthew for that but yes we're building our first technology demonstrator in New Zealand as we speak yeah I'm happy to cover that as well hey thanks Tony that's a really good question it is also one of the challenges that we have and why we're trying to apply a new lens to this because we found over the last 12 months to try to address climate change conversations inside the council is actually quite difficult through what we would consider the RFP process so while we're looking at anaerobic digestion in New Zealand it actually hasn't had a big uptake because of the fact that their the perceived return on investment is very low so we don't see anaerobic digestion in industry because of the fact that they're processing and mold processing a single feedstock and then they don't want to necessarily to take a feedstock from a council to combine it whereas and if you look at what the intention of the Edmund Hillary Fellowship is itself is to bring you know patent ideas and you know UN sustainable development goal focus projects to New Zealand to incubate them in New Zealand environment and export them back to solve global problems and so you know one of the challenges we see as well as it demands background as a part of a significant consortium in India that has built and is building right now an anaerobic digestion system that's nearly 200 tons in scale so so when you're asking that type of question we see two types of results depending on kind of where somebody's come from is it's as it hasn't been built here before and therefore is it proven or it hasn't been built here therefore it's not proven and if we won't accept it and what we're saying actually and especially inside of the climate accelerated program with with creative HQ was actually we need to take a step back and stop procuring our solutions based on the same frameworks and think about them and more from an agility perspective and look at what is the problem that we're trying to solve and how can we solve that iteratively rather than trying to solve it all at once so for example in Canterbury you know we have a dairy producer that wants to get rid of death sludge and we have a council with a grimoire system that that needs to be replaced you know how can we work collaboratively with industry and council and then environment Canterbury for example where there's a nitrates issue to say how are we all going to come together to to leverage the R&D budgets that are coming out of out of government around emissions reduction waste reduction process heat and sustainable land use to do new types of projects right leveraging you know leveraging the the aims that council has the the R&D that can be done out of a out of a site like Lincoln the community you know where the industry is going we need to reform so there's this momentum to do this type of work but you know for example with with the council we would say what we're interested in is a piece of land in a waste stream and then we'll take care of the rest and those private public partnerships really haven't been proven in that waste industry space yet and so you know there is a lot of things to take into consideration that and that don't really get asked through that traditional procurement process and that's why we're holding these types of talks to start to reshape how we have those conversations nice thank you good explanation Matthew Matthew I have a question here from Gary so your system is primarily focused on solid organic wastes and the Nelson pilot will be a great example for others once that's going what do you think should be done with regard to recycling precious water as a non-potable water source for industry and agriculture across Te O'Rau Haman is that something you want to take yeah I'll answer that so when when we say solid organics organics by the very nature can contain considerable moisture unless we're talking about straw which has been dried and veiled so most of the organics that go to an anaerobic digester already contain a lot of moisture and in fact anaerobic digestion is not as efficient with dry substrates as it is when in substrates it contain moisture so that's one part of it secondly in terms of the water use the the tragedy with water in New Zealand currently is there should be no reason for New Zealand to struggle with water because it's blessed with perhaps one of the highest per capita availability of fresh water anywhere in the world the function of pollution in New Zealand's water system is a consequence of anthropogenic activities primarily around water use by industry and water use on farm and this is the part where as as we spoke about earlier farmers get scapegoated for so the wastewater system in New Zealand needs to be addressed the wastewater treatment in New Zealand is still rudimentary in a lot of places the fact of the matter is that council wastewater systems a lot of the time end up treating wastewater that is being discharged in from primary industry and not from from city council and these rates then fall upon city dwellers rather than the primary industry that is discharging into those water networks to begin with so there is no simple answer really to what we do with water in New Zealand but yes there's three waters reform that's coming up a lot of what happens now will determine will be determined by the technology choices that are made in terms of how that water is managed primarily so I think there are two separate conversations here but on the waste side of things what we need to recognize is that if we process organics more efficiently then we have essentially a free energy source to power a wastewater treatment system and that is something that can be evidenced in any region in New Zealand I guess if I could have a supplementary question and maybe address it to Kate I think the way you've explained the elementary systems approach to organic wastes where with some water it would be very interesting to see the intersection of that with our wastewater cycle just because we're talking about similar consumers and similar producers and I just feel it would be quite good for us to make sure that we don't ignore the two the two you know the blue and the green if you like with the blue and the brown in terms of the planetary system so maybe maybe Kate could could could draw the diagram next time and sort of show how those two intersect because we are we are using a lot of fresh water once and and if you look at tomato to y which is you know behind so much of our reform we have to to be looking at multiple uses of the water if we're going to to value it um uh correctly under the planetary system I suspect yeah I think that's that spot and it's really nice to see you Gary um but um I guess just I get to to that point uh one of the things that was most debated in the development and planetary accounting is that addressing of um sort of green blue and grey water and there's um you know I guess a couple of different schools have thought about how you how you look at water systems and you know whether green water so rain water coming down gets counted or not but actually when we are using green water we're extracting that from the natural system which I think is exactly the point you're making and so the way that we quantify it in planetary accounting does include that green as well as as well as blue so water extracted from from lakes and rivers and water aquifers and and grey water so the the water pollution I guess if you like yeah I could have long discussions to be had on this subject but yes absolutely thank you Liam I see you have your hand up yeah thank you um Kia ora koutou Liam I'm a zero waste in circular economy advocate and researcher um really appreciate the chance to have this corridor thank you really really interesting fascinating and inspiring in some ways but um I just wanted to ask around um how the system manages contaminants um the you know speaking about this novel entities issue that um we're talking about in the planetary boundaries framework because uh one project I'm involved in at the moment I've been looking at contamination of organic waste streams and in particular um sewage sludge seems to be a very risky feedstock for for for these types of systems and so I'm just really curious about how how an integrated system because I understand the rationale behind an integrated system but how you would manage once you sort of stick everything together into an integrated facility how you actually manage those novel entities not ending up coming out the other end if we're especially if we're using this in our food systems and agriculture and that sort of thing so um yeah I'm wondering if someone could speak to to that issue okay would you like to address that first or wow I think that's a a technology knowledge you want for you really thanks Liam that comes up very often and yes it's a great point it is something online for so what we focus on in terms of contaminants are largely pathogens heavy metals hormones because that's increasingly something that we observe and we are obviously mindful of novel entities as well now there are a couple of things that happen within the system which involve mechanical preprocessing thermal preprocessing there's also a dilutive factor there's an anaerobic environment and then there is a dehydration of the product at the end which then allows us to develop something which while it's still not yet tested in New Zealand it is part of the work that we're doing currently in terms of assessing its use in agriculture right so it is something that we're mindful of we know the direction we need to take and we are addressing it in a face manner yeah another element sorry just another element to add to that was that you know Haman kind of mentioned earlier on the idea that anaerobic digestion in New Zealand has traditionally been single single feed stock and then is large as possible and then when the souring occurs because of their contamination that whole entire feed stock goes into landfill so the kind of conversations we're having around modularisation and small small anaerobic digestion but still having a positive return on investment from an economic perspective as well as a positive return on investment from a planetary accounting network perspective is that those modular smaller anaerobic systems will pick up will pick up contamination and the entire feed stock will not be destroyed and so you know when it comes to minimising what goes into landfill it absolutely is along along those lines will then pick up the data out of that a data out of that system to then return information back to council or to government around actually how do you stop that contaminant coming in upstream and so you know one of the issues that we see is our build environment has never been intelligent we've we've procured solutions for lowest possible cost or cost minimisation rather than maximum value and value creation so our mindset is to turn around and make their system smart connect them back into either smart housing or industrial environments using using IoT and artificial intelligence and actually pick up those detectors so that we can put the cost back onto that back onto the system that created it so yeah it's not about just building dumb infrastructure we have to build intelligence into their systems so that they can interact because we've become we've become disconnected from our built environment and that's why we pollute it we've become disconnected from the environment which is why we we don't care for it and you know why why are we trying to bring back this matarangi Māori-witled view is that if you if you go onto a papakai now you go on to a marae you know Māori are still so connected to the environment because they're brought up in a household where we're not you're not separate from the environment therefore you're not separate from the place that you're polluting so we have to go and undo that systemic change that's occurring or that's occurred in our in our culture as well so when you talk about an elementary system being a living system it's not about just an anaerobic digestion system it's not about it's about a living system connecting back into the people that utilise it and giving the tools back to those people that put those inputs and so you know we can we can dive into that work offline around how we're addressing that but yeah it's a very good question and it's it's one that has to be solved at many different levels Liam do you want to put your email address there or send it to me directly and then I can add it to an email list but Vicky would you like to unmute and ask your question Kia ora can you hear me is that working yes perfectly great sometimes it doesn't have to do the right selection on my microphones things so my I'm interested you mentioned regional a regional plant and that and you've specifically referenced Canterbury a couple of times and I'm just calling it Canterbury is an enormous region and many of the sort of systems I look at though I'm interested in around you know sort of energy supplies or water management to me many of the more sustainable options now are looking at ever decreasingly small in a more small locally located locally disseminated systems but you seem to be talking much more here about a much larger system that's bringing waste in from different streams like all the various farms I mean I went to Ashburton which is the other day which of course is one of our big more industrialised farming areas and it's good air and a half away from Christchurch and of course moving all the many of the farms at the moment don't encounter because we have such permeable soils don't necessarily have as much effluent story or collection systems as what you might have in some of the areas with lower permeability soils hence of course the problems we have because it's so straight through the ground and it goes to to groundwater but it means that there's a whole load of infrastructure required if we were to be able to collect up all that effluent on these farms and put it into some sort of transport system to get it to a centralised place so there's some aspects there that to me don't actually sound as sustainable as a more disseminated farm-based waste management system solutions and also I've been listening to a lot of regenerative agriculture podcast which some there's an ability potentially here to shift to farm systems where essentially they are managing their nutrients and their feed growth and so on without needing imports and so that in itself is completely self-contained so I'm not saying there isn't a place for for example anaerobic digestion but I'm not sure that an entire regional scaled solution with all that transport that's associated with it and collection systems and everything necessarily you know the ideal option so I just wonder what am I am misunderstanding here what you're pitching because yeah that disseminated system seems to me to have a lot of benefit from a lower energy input more resilience in longer term less carrying moisture around which is heavy of course and so on so you could answer that question thank you. Yes and I'm happy to respond to that so close to Ashburton is the town of Metzman and we've actually carried out an assessment on farm what we recognise today is that if we were to provide an on farm standalone solution then the effluent from a dairy station or from a waking station that's waking about 500 cows that effluent would be sufficient to produce would produce sufficient energy to chill the milk at that dairy station ahead of transport right so that is one example of a problem statement of something at a farm level so that is one thing that we can do and which is better for the environment as well because then you don't have that effluent pump to ponds but when I say regional level I'd also like to bring your attention to what happens at dairies where now these farmers have transported milk and now there's milk that's coming in not from 500 cows but perhaps from 50,000 cows or 100,000 cows to a single dairy plant now this dairy plant amongst all the other functions that it has uses coal to provide process heat for the boiler or dairy factories have a coal fired boiler they also produce a dairy processing slag now the problem statement at this scale what we've observed is while there is a move within the government to say that we need to decarbonise industry and this funding available and one of the options is to move from coal to electric boilers there is not enough generation capacity in that last mile of the grid there is not enough energy supply into that last mile of the grid to support an electrical boiler which will put a massive load on the electrical grid and so in such a situation it's not feasible switching to an electric boiler but you still have a massive dairy factory in rural Canterbury that's processing weight from thousands of cows that still needs to decarbonise its energy need in such a situation if you were to process the daily slag from that dairy plant itself and co-digest that with for example straw or any other crop residue or at whatever is locally available you can create an energy system which is localized which could then be part of the solution like I said it's never going to be a silver bullet this is going to solve every problem sort of a thing but that is doable so that's how it works at a regional level but yes we are conscious that we want to avoid transport scope two and three emissions is something that we talk about a lot in Canterbury there are large city councils that that truck there's large elsewhere because there's there's no means or method of disposal locally so it's horses for courses the solution can be scaled from as small as as three times per day which is our first technology demonstrator from what we've actually built in India which is 200 times per day so depending on what the need is depending on what the feedstock availability is depending on whether we're engineering a waste minimisation solution or whether we're engineering an energy solution it's where we're going to require that's really helpful and that's really clear that you are talking about disseminated and not when you said region that it sounded like we're going to put all the waste into one plant which i know some of those massive energy to waste plants to do exactly that so i know that's reassured me thank you no but but it is part of the problem and why and we're not we're not trying to pick on Canterbury but it's where it's where we see such incredible opportunity to pivot what is industrial agriculture into a more sustainable land use and specifically when you look at Canterbury creating resilient infrastructure has to take into consideration some of Canterbury's history as well so we're we're opposed to large infrastructure we don't think building 100 ton plants is the future you know we think the sweet spot is around eight to eight tonnes to 20 tonnes and to have these is is co-located as close to where that gas energy off-take could be could be utilised and so you know we're absolutely opposed to large pieces of infrastructure we don't think that's the future we think that's what's been done in Europe we don't think that can be commercially viable in New Zealand and i think we think that there's evidence of you know a hundred million dollar projects that doing that at the moment and you know and we we know we did a talk with Ariaki around resilient infrastructure it needs to be local needs to be locally owned and and it's more than that it's it's not just about locally owning it the reality is is if we don't have local if we don't have iwi involved in a you know you know and tie the water plan to a five-year plan to a hundred-year plan our procurement really isn't looking at what's the cost of water going to be in 10 years time right that's the point of the planetary accounting network and the standards associated with it it starts to ask different questions you're asking questions about how can our organics look at night trades you're asking questions about how can how is how does our procurement of an organic system actually start to impact our land use right so if we start to apply that Māori worldview then and look at context of place and well-being we're not just looking at okay well how much is the cost and what physical location does it need to be in so it's it's significantly bigger than just are we building a single plant we have to look at ownership models and we have to look at you know you know what are the what what are the underlying well-being elements of it so um i hope that provides a bit more context now i'm i'm just conscious of time and you know um you know is is that sorry does anybody else still have a burning question that they that they want to kind of present and um what what it's just kind of on the top of their time they need to get it out i think we have time for one more yeah i could i could do one more just quickly um thank you um i just had a question about um digest date in general um i my understanding my sort of lay person's understanding is that digest date through the process of digest and is stripped of a lot of carbon and so it's high in nitrogen and so i'm just wondering how do we we're using that as a fertilizer how do we address you know that affecting exacerbating the nitrogen cycle which you know we already know is being exceeded as a planetary boundary excellent question again i'll answer that in two parts so uh but i'll answer the part of planetary boundary first the problem we have uh with nitrate nitrogen runoff is that the way we provide nitrogen to plants in terms of solubilised urea solutions limit the ability of the soil for the plants to actually absorb that free nitrogen plants can only absorb nitrogen when it's in the form of a nitrite or a nitrate and that requires symbiotic microorganisms in soil so there is bacterial activity there's fungal activity which converts that nitrogen into something that plants can absorb now that nitrogen cycle it doesn't rain nitrogen from the air so that's why we have the runoff in leaching from nitrogen the second part with it is in terms of the emissions thereof in terms of nitrous oxide which then is a greenhouse gas again which causes the solution of problems coming to the digested side of things your point is is excellent but that's some of the key part around our IP is that we optimize carbon nitrogen ratios of the input feedstock ahead of loading the digested and what that ensures is not going to be a far more harder digestion process it also means that we have a digestive product which if it requires a land application then will ensure that the ratios are not required he's still there he's mentioned it um well thanks thanks yeah so i just want to give the opportunity sorry sorry to cut you off Liam um just want to give the opportunity to throw back to Kate um and you know um Kate kind of i'd love you to apply and wrap us up and just kind of looking at you know apply your lens to this and then i'm really keen because these questions that have been asked are completely relevant to you know how you know how we can start to look differently at solutions and so we're really interested to find out about what we can do to to use accounting network and in real use cases yeah thanks Matthew and I think it's been such an interesting discussion and really I guess speaks to the need to be able to put some numbers around this complexity because so many other questions have been about that that difficult balancing between one impactor another transport versus you know water things like that which are really difficult to make any sensible decisions about without putting some some numbers behind um I just I guess um wanted to share um just briefly um how how we operate so that if there's you know people are keen to look at how planetary accounting might be able to help them um there's a few different ways to work with us so I run um two organisations one's called planetary accounting network um and we're a charitable trust that basically helps people to use planetary accounting but we also identify where we think planetary accounting can make the most impact and raise funds to run run projects the other is a new company called digital planetary insights which basically takes these initiatives and systems of planetary accounting to scale so pan's about four years old and we're pretty rapidly growing network of organisations so all these organizations are working with us to either use planetary accounting for their own decision making or to test and support our work and I guess one of the really exciting things that we've been working on is an initiative called planetary facts which really focuses in on the sort of supply chain and product sustainability piece so we've been developing a standard with a few quite big NZ Inc firms like the warehouse group and it's a new way of being able to communicate sustainability performance but also to quantify it so it's inspired by nutritional facts labels on food products the the neat thing about those nutritional facts labels is that they can give you consistent information about any food product in the supermarket if you go and look at eco labels in the supermarket today you'll find you know different labels on every different sort of type of food imagine if you could get planetary facts about the carbon the nitrogen the water footprint of any product not just food across all of your purchases but also as a business imagine if you just had that insight so that you could design and improve those products and develop the products that people want some of the other initiatives that we are running as well is that we're working with organisations to help them expand their corporate targets from carbon to planetary science based targets we're actually partnering with Becker to look at planetary accounting for regions and cities and how you take that lens to really develop these roadmaps to take forward and we're working on some education programs so that our new graduates actually come out with that broader systems thinking lens this planetary insights is really focusing in on that planetary facts side of things so that supply chain piece and we've just opened a beta program which is pretty exciting where companies can come and be part of the development so that they can get insights about their whole supply chain across different product categories so I guess at the moment the biggest opportunities to work with us are really to become part of the planetary facts program with PAN where you can there's an opportunity for 10 companies to work with us and pilot our labels on the shelf with real customers over the next 12 months and also to be part of our beta cohort to actually get those detailed insights about products and you know how you can actually improve the design of these so you know I think the discussion today really does just emphasise how much we really need environmental data to support decision making and so if you're interested to sort of chat with us about opportunities to take that data and apply it to projects that you're working on I'll leave my details here and I'd love to hear from any of you okay that that's really fantastic and I think Haman and I we even with our level of understanding of the whole ecosystem you know it really took us probably a few days to get our heads around how do we really start to apply planetary accounting and I think we've only just we've only just scratched the surface of it so I just want to acknowledge the work that you're doing to try to take this the standard and apply it into a into a software that's going to I think fundamentally change the way that we see and approach our world I love the work that you're doing I think it is at a level that I think if we were able to apply this framework into New Zealand it would it would begin to show the world that we're a bit of trade partner and that we would actually turn and pivot our you know we use I mean we used to be a clean green country I think that that is no longer the way the world sees us right but if we were able to use something like pan to start to pivot and turn that back around we would actually start to see that it would have a huge impact on our economy not just on our ecology so you know I really appreciate you putting your time into both helping Haman and us and and taking your time out today to explain to people what work you're doing. Haman is there any words you'd like to say in closing before I before I wrap us up. Thank you to Michelle for hosting this and thank you Kate for helping us use plan to confirm the conversation provide more context. Thank you to everyone who taught it worthwhile attending. Yeah and also for the patients during the experiment around using mirror for collaboration in the middle. I really do enjoy these chief life sessions because it does bring us into a conversation I hate so much the one-way interactions so appreciate you suffering a full what likes to play with new things. So look with that I'm just going to close this off with a karekia. Kia to te rangamari e kia rangā e na iwi o te au. That it's basically let your peace reign over on let your peace reign on all the people of the world. So thank you so much everybody for participating today and with that I'll close out this live session.