It is with much pleasure that I can now introduce our next speaker. So it's just started raining outside, but this heavy rain is not at all probably the extreme weather effects that we will hear about right now. The weather, the talk that we are being presented next will deal with extreme weather effects and how they are linked with climate change and how we even know about that. Our speaker today is Freddie Otto. She's Associated Director of the Environmental Change Institute of the University of Oxford and she's also the lead author of the upcoming IPCC assessment report AR6. And without, with no further ado, I give you the stage ready. Please. Okay, thank you. Yeah. Hi. It stopped raining here in Oxford just about, but it's definitely flooded. So that might actually be something to come back to and talk about with respect to climate change. So whenever we hear or whenever today an extreme weather event happens, we hear about hurricanes, wildfires, droughts, etc. The question that is immediately asked is, was this, what is the role of climate change? And to answer that for quite a long time, scientists gave an answer that we cannot attribute individual weather events to climate change. But, sorry, okay. But this, because the first, the one answer that people were giving were that, well, you can't attribute individual weather events or they were saying, in a, yeah, in a world where climate change happens, of course, every extreme weather event is somewhat affected by climate change. And the latter is trivially true, but that does not obviously provide much information because it doesn't say anything about whether the event was made more likely or less likely or what the role of climate change was. And the first answer that you can't attribute individual events is not true any longer. And this is, and why that has changed and how that has changed. And what we can say is what the content of this talk will be. So, ultimately, every weather event, extreme or not, is, if you absolutely boil down to it, is unique. And they all have many different causes. So there is always a role of just the natural chaotic variability of the climate system and climate and weather system that plays a role. There's always a causal factor in whether the, where the event happens, whether it's over land, over a desert, over city, over forest. But also, man-made climate change can have an influence on the likelihood and intensity of extreme weather events to occur. And so what we can say now and what we mean when we talk about attribution of extreme weather events to climate change is how the magnitude and likelihood of an event to occur has changed because of man-made climate change. And in order to do that, we first of all need to know what is possible weather in the world we live in today. So, say, we have a flooding event in Oxford and the question is, what is this climate change or not? So the first question is, we need to find out what type or what kind of event is the heavy rainfall event that leads to the flooding. So is it a one and ten year event? Is it a one and a hundred year event? And in order to do that, you can't just look at the observed weather records because that will tell you what the actual weather that occurred is. But it doesn't tell you what the possible weather under the same current climate conditions are. And so we need to find out what is possible weather. And to do that, we use different climate models. So we simulate under the same climate conditions that we have today, possible rainfall events in December in Oxford. And we might find out that the event that we have observed today is a one and ten year event. And so if you do this, look at all the possible weather events, you get a distribution of possible weather under certain conditions, which is shown in the schematic on the slide here in the red curve. And then you know that when it rains above, say, 30 millimeters a day in Oxford, then you have a real problem with flooding. So you define that this is your threshold from when you speak about an extreme event. And so you have a probability of this event to occur in the world we live in today. Of course, that does not tell you the role of climate change because in order to know that you would also you will also need to know what with the likelihood of this event to occur have been without manmade climate change. And so and but because we know very well how many greenhouse gases have been introduced into the atmosphere since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, we can actually remove these additional greenhouse gases from the climate models atmospheres that we use and simulate a world that would have been exactly as it is today, but without the greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels. And in that world, we can then also ask the question, what are possible heavy rainfall events in December in Oxford? And we might find that the event that we are interested in is in that world, not a one and 10 year event, but a one and 20 year event. And because everything else is held the same, we can then attribute the difference between these two likelihoods of occurrence of the extreme event in question to manmade climate change. And so with this fake example that I've just used, we would then say climate change has doubled the likelihood of the event to occur because one that was one and 20 year event is now one and 10 year event. So that is basically the whole theoretical idea behind attributing extreme events. And this method can be used. And so for example, with our initiative that's called World Weather Attribution, we have looked this year at the extreme heat in in Siberia at the beginning of this year that, amongst other things, led to temperatures above 38 degrees in the city of Verkhoyansk, but also led to permafrost thawing and large wildfires. And that event was made so much more likely because of climate change that it's almost would have been impossible without climate change. So when we did the experiments and the models, it's a one and 80 million year event in a world without climate change. And it's still a relatively extreme event in today's world, but it is possible. So this is the type of event where climate change really is a game changer. Another event that that we have looked at is Hurricane Harvey that hits the Houston in Texas in 2017 and caused huge amounts of damage with the rainfall amounts abroad. And several attribution studies doing exactly what I've just described found that this type of so this extreme rainfall associated with hurricane like Harvey has been made three times more likely because of climate change. And colleagues of mine, Dave Frame and his team have then used this study to figure out how much of the economic costs with this hurricane can be attributed to climate change and found that of the 90 billion US dollars that were associated with the flood damage from Harvey, 67 billion can be attributed to climate change, which is in particular interesting when you compare that to the state of the art economic cost estimations of climate change in general, which had estimated only 20 billion US dollars for 2017 in the US from climate change. And of course, not every year is an event like Harvey, but it shows that when you look at the impact of climate change in a more bottom up approach, so looking at the extreme events, which are how climate change manifests and affect people, you get very different numbers as if you just look at large scale changes in temperature and precipitation. But of course, not every extreme event that occurs today has been made worse because of climate change. So this is an example of a drought in Southeast Brazil that happened in 2014, 2015, where we found that climate change did not change the likelihood of this drought to occur. So it was a one in 10 year event in 2014, 2015. And also without climate change, it has very similar likelihood of occurrence. However, what we did find when we looked at, okay, what else has changed? Why has this drought that has occurred in a very similar way earlier in the 2000s and also in the 1970s with much less impact we looked at other factors and found that the population has increased a lot over the last or over the beginning of the 21st century. But in particular, the water consumption in the area and the water usage has increased almost exponentially. And that explained why the impacts were so large. So this is what I've just said is sort of basically the very basic idea and how in theory these studies work and how and some results that we find. In practice, it is usually not quite as straightforward because while the idea is still the same, we need to use climate models and statistical models for observational data to simulate possible weather in the world we live in and possible weather in the world that might have been that is in theory straightforward in practice. It's often relatively difficult. And what you see here is how the results of these studies look when you don't use schematic. And if you're not a hydrologist, this might be a bit of an unfriendly plot, but it's basically the same as the schematic that I've showed in at the beginning. But just plotted in a way that you can see the tails of the distribution particularly well, so where the extreme events are. So on the x-axis, we have the return time of the event in years on a logarithmic scale. And on the y-axis, you see the magnitude of the event that finds what our extreme event is. And this is actually a real example from heavy rainfall in the south of the UK. And you can see here in red, each of these red dots that you see on the red curve is a simulation of one possible rainfall event in the south of the UK in the year 2015. In the world we live in today with climate change. And the dashed line indicates the threshold that led to flooding in that year. And on the x-axis, when you go down from the dashed line, you can then see that this is roughly a one in 20 year event in the world we live in today. And all the blue dots on the blue curve are simulations of possible heavy rainfall in the south of the UK in 2015 in a world without man-made climate change. And you can see that these two curves are different and significantly different, but they are still relatively close together. And so the event in the world without climate change would have been a bit less likely. So we have roughly a 40% increase in the likelihood. But still other factors like, yeah, just the chaotic variability of the weather. And also, of course, then other factors on the ground where our houses build in floodplains and so on play an important role. So this is the actual attribution step. So when we find out what the role of climate change is. But of course, in order to do that, there are a few steps before that are crucially important and absolutely determine the outcome. And the first step, the first thing to find out is what has actually happened. Because usually, when we read about extreme weather events, or when we hear about extreme weather events, you see pictures and newspapers of flooded parts of the world. And so you don't usually have observed weather recordings reported in the media. And the same actually is true for us. So when we are, so we work a lot with the Red Cross, and they ask us, okay, we have this large flooding event, can you do an attribution study? Can you tell us what the role of climate change is? Then we also just know, okay, there is flooding. And so the first step is we need to find out what is the weather event that actually caused that flooding. And that is not always that straightforward. And this is what you see here on this map, on this slide is a relatively shark example, but not an untypical. So it's of an extreme rainfall event on the 10th of November, 2018 in Kenya. And on the left hand side is one data product of observational data of observational rainfall data that is available. And on the right hand side is another product showing this same event. And the, the scale, which I failed to say on the slide is in millimeters per day. And so on the left hand side, you have extreme rainfall of above 50 millimeters per day, which is considering that, for example, in, in my hometown town of Kiel, there is about 700 millimeters of rainfall per year. You can see that 50 millimeters in a single day is very heavy rainfall. Whereas in the other data product, you don't see as much rain, you still see large rain, but it's not quite not in the same magnitude. And it's also not exactly in the same place. And so given that most countries in the world do not have an open data policy, so you can't actually get access to the observed station data, but you have to use available publicly available products, like that you have shown here, you have to know and you have to work with experts in in the region to actually know who hopefully have access to the data, to actually find out what has happened in the first place. But of course, if you don't know that, or there is not always a perfect answer to that question. It's very difficult to do an attribution study. Assuming though you have found a data product that you trust. The next question then is, what is actually the right threshold to use for the event? So if it's if you have flooding that was pretty obviously caused by a one day extreme rainfall event, then that would be your definition of the event. But it could also be that the flooding has been caused by a very soggy rainy season. So actually, the really the real event you would want to look at is a much overall much longer time scale. Or if the flooding occurred mainly because of some water management in the rivers and has actually flooded further upstream, your spatial definition of the event will be very different. And so and what you see here on this plot is an example of heat wave in in Europe in 2019. And there, what usually makes the headlines is the maximum daily temperature. So the if it's a broken so you could use that as a definition of the event that you're interested in. But of course, what really causes the losses and damages from extreme events is not necessarily the one day maximum temperature, but it is when heat waves last for longer. And especially when the night temperatures are also high and not just the daytime temperatures. So you might want to look at an event over five day period instead of just the maximum daily temperatures. Or and this is sort of why I've shown the the pressure plot on the right hand side, which is really just an illustration. It's not terribly important what's on there. But there are of course, different weather systems that can cause heat waves, especially in the area here in the south of France, it could be a relatively short lift. High pressure system bringing bringing hot air from the Mediterranean, or it could be something that is caused from a long time stationary high pressure system over whole of Europe. You if you want to take that into account, obviously also your event is different. And there is no right or wrong way to define the event, because there are legitimate interests in the maximum one daily temperatures, legitimate interest in just a specific type of pressure system and interest in what actually causes more excess mortality on people would would be the three day or longer type of heat waves. But whichever definition you choose, it will determine the outcome of the study. And here are some typical results of attribution studies. When you look at them in a slightly more scientific way and slightly less. Just the headline way is the ones that I've shown earlier. Because of course, what also is important is not only how you define the event depending on the impact, and depending on what what you're interested in the extreme event and what observational data you have available. But of course, there's also then the question of what models, what climate models do we have available. And there's always some trade off between what exactly caused the event and what we can meaningfully simulate in a climate model. And then all climate models are good for something and bad for other things. So there always need to be a model evaluation stage. So where you test if the models that you have available are actually able to stimulate in a reliable way the event that you're interested in. But even if you have done all this, it can sometimes be that the models and the observations that you have show very different things. And so the heat wave in Germany, in 2019, which was on which was also on the slide before is an example of that. Well, we when we look at the long term observations of of extreme of high temperatures and see how they have changed over time. We find that because of the change in climate we have observed, the likelihood of this type of heat wave has increased more, but yeah, about 300 times. So what you on the you see this in the blue, the black bar, the black bar in the middle of the blue bar on the left hand side at the very top where it says DWD, that's the Deutsche Wetterdienst observations. And we see that where this black bar is about, again, a logarithmic scale about 300 times more likely. But of course, because we have only only 100 years worth of observations, and that and summer temperatures are extremely variable, there's a large uncertainty around this change. And so we cannot from the observations alone, we cannot exclude 100,000 times change in the likelihood of this heat wave. But similarly, also not a 20 times heat wave. But what the main point is that in all the climate models, and all the red bars that you see on there, are the same results but for climate models. So where we have compared today's likelihood of the event to occur with the likelihood in the world without climate change. And you see that the change is much lower. And of course, climate change is not the only thing that has changed and that has affected observed temperatures. But other factors like land use change and things like that are much smaller in the size than the climate signal. So they cannot explain this discrepancy. So this means that the climate models we have available for this type of study have obviously a problem with the extreme temperatures in a small scale. And there are effects that we don't yet understand. And so we can't say, okay, this heat wave was made 10 times more likely, but we can only say that with our current knowledge and understanding, we can say that climate change was an absolute game changer for this type of heat wave, but we can't really quantify it. On the right hand side is a much nicer result on the top one, which is for extreme rainfall in Texas 2019. And nicer result, I mean now for scientists. So in a scientific way. So there we have in blue two different types of observations from the heavy rainfall event. And they both show pretty much exactly the same result. And also the two climate models that we had available that passed the model evaluation tests show an increase in the likelihood of this event to occur that is very similar to that in the observations in terms of order of magnitude. And so in that case, we can just synthesize the results and give an overarching answer, which is that the likelihood of this event to occur has about doubled because of manmade climate change. And the last example that I that is here is for drought in Somalia in 2010, where not only the observations are extremely uncertain. So from the observations, you could say we could have both an increase in likelihood or a decrease in likelihood by a factor 10. But also the climate models show a very, very mixed picture where you can't even see a sign that that is conclusive. So in that case, you can say, well, we can exclude that climate change made this event more or less than 10 times, yeah, more than 10 times or less than 10 times more likely, but we can't say anything more. So we can exclude that it's a complete game changer like we have for heat waves, for example, but that's about the only the only thing that you can say in for a result like this. So this was sort of the most detailed scientific stuff that I would like to show, because I think it's important to get some background behind the headline results that that would just be climate change double the likelihood of this event. So there are always four possible outcomes of an attribution study are priori. And that is because climate change affects extreme weather in two ways, basically. One way is what we would call the thermodynamic way, which means that because we have more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the atmosphere overall gets warmer. So you have on average an increase in the likelihood of heat waves, a decrease in the likelihood of cold waves. A warmer atmosphere can also hold more water vapor that needs to get out of the atmosphere as rainfall. So on average, from the warming alone, we would also have more extreme rainfall. But then there's a second effect, which I would call the dynamic effect. And that is because we've changed the composition of the atmosphere, that affects the atmospheric circulation. So where were the systems developed, how they developed and how they move. And this effect can either be in the same direction as the warming effect. So it can be that well we expect more extreme rainfall, but we also get more low pressure systems bring rain, so you get even more extreme rainfall. But these two effects can also counteract each other. And so if you can expect more rainfall on average, but if you don't get the weather systems that bring rain, you either have no change in likelihood and intensity, or if the dynamics win, you have actually decrease in the likelihood of extreme rainfall in a particular season or region. And so this is why our priority that can always be for outcomes. It can be that the event was made more likely, it can be that it was made less likely, it can be there's no change, or it can be that with our current understanding and tools we can't actually answer the question. And so this has been possible to do now for about a decade, but only in the last five years really have many, many people or many scientists started to do these studies, and so there is actually a relatively large, yeah, there are lots of attribution studies on different kind of extreme events. And what you can see on this map here is what the news and energy outlet Carbon Brief has put all these studies together, and you can see in red where climate change made, they played an important role in blue, where climate change did not play a role, and in gray that was an inclusive, inconclusive result. This is very important though, that this is not representative of the extreme events that have happened. This just represents the studies that have been done by scientists, and they have, and they are of course biased towards where scientists live, and also towards extreme events that are relatively easy to simulate with climate models. So there are lots of heat waves in Europe, Australia, and North America, because that is where people live. And on this next map, I have tried to put, to show the discrepancy between the extreme events that have happened, and those for which we actually do know the role of climate change. So here in red are death associated with extreme events since 2003, so since the first event attribution study, and it's death from heat waves, storms, heavy rainfall events, and droughts primarily in different parts of the world. The bubble is always on the capital of the country, and the larger the bubble the more death due to extreme events in those years. And in black overlaying that are those deaths for which we know the role of climate change. So that doesn't mean that the deaths are attributed to climate change, but it means that they are there, we do know whether or not, and to what extent, climate change played a role. And you can see that in most of the European countries, the black circle is almost as large as the red one, so for most of the extremes of most of the death associated with extreme events, we do know the role of climate change, but for the, but for the, for many other parts of the world, there are no or very small black circles, so for most of the events and the death associated with them, we don't know what the role of climate changes. And I've used death here not because I'm particularly morbid, but because it's an indicator of the impacts of extreme weather that is relatively good comparable between countries. So this means that with event attribution methods that we have developed over the last decade, we now have the tools available to do, to provide an inventory of the impacts of climate change on our livelihoods, but we are very far from having such an inventory at the moment, because most of the events that have happened, we actually don't know what the role of climate change is, and so we don't know in, in detail and on country and scale and on the scale where people live and make decisions what the role of climate change is today. There's another slightly related issue with that is that the extreme events that I've used to create the map I shown before with the death of climate change, with the death of extreme weather events, they are from a database called EMDAT, which is a publicly available database where losses and damages associated with disasters, technological disasters, but also disasters associated with weather are recorded. But of course they only can record losses and damages if these losses and damages are recorded in the first place and so what you see on this map is in grey and then overlay with different with different circles are heat waves that have occurred, they have occurred between 1986 and 2015 on this map, but you could just draw a map from 1900 to today and it would look very similar and that shows lots and lots of heat wave reported in Europe and in the US India, but there are no heat waves reported in most of sub-Saharan Africa. However when you look at observations and also we see that extreme heat has increased quite dramatically in most parts of the world and a particular hotspot is sub-Saharan Africa. So we know from when we look at the weather that heat waves are happening but it's not registered and it's not recorded so we have no idea how many people are actually affected by these heat waves and so we then of course don't do attribution studies and don't find out what the role of climate change in these heat waves is. So in order to really understand the whole picture we would also need to start recording these type of events in other parts of the world. And so my very last point before I hope that that you have questions for me is of course everything I've said so far was talking about the hazard. So talking about the weather event and how climate change affects the hazard, but of course that is not the same or translates immediately into losses and damages because whether or not a weather event actually has any impacts at all it's completely driven by exposure and vulnerability. So who and what is in harm's way. And I've already shown I've already mentioned the example early on with the drought in Brazil where the huge losses and damages were to a large degree attributable to the increase in water consumption and that's therefore in order to really find out how climate change is affecting us today we not only need to define the extreme event so that it connects to the impacts but also look into vulnerability and exposure, what is changing, what there and what are the important factors. But we can do that and so we have really made a lot of progress in understanding of how climate change not only affects global mean temperature which we have known for centuries and and how it affects large scale changes in temperature and precipitation which we have also known for a very long time but we now have actually all the puzzle pieces together to really understand what climate change means on the scale where people live and where decisions are made. We just need to put them together and one lens or one way of where they are currently put together is for example in courts and so because it's obviously people who experience losses and damages from climate change and so one way to address that is going through national governments, local governments hoping for adaptation measures to be put in place but if that's not forthcoming quickly enough there is the option to sue and so this is one example which is currently happening in Germany where a Peruvian farmer is suing RWE to to basically pay their share of a adaptation because of a largely increased flood risk from glacier melt in the area and they want RWE to pay from their contribution to climate change via their emissions and then have some funding for the adaptation measures from them and that is one example of where these kind of attribution studies can be used in a very direct way to hopefully change something in the real world and with this I would like to end and yeah leave you with some references and hope you have some questions from me for the lecture I have, before we get to Q&A I have to apologize for the name of the production for the viewers, I think we had some production sound on the ears in the meantime that shouldn't be the case well we don't have any questions from the chat until now but maybe one question from me the last example was a case of a complaint about the borderline basically is that a approach that we would see more often in the future that means that people or organizations are trying to get away from the borderline to take the right path sorry to interrupt, I just realized that we are still in English talk I'm sorry for that no worries so your question was if we are going to see more international court cases where across countries across nation states we have climate litigation and this type of litigation that I've just shown as the example is in so far an exception as in German law a company is also responsible for the damages caused outside of Germany which is not the case for example for companies in the US or so so and this is why Lujia sued RWE and not for example ExxonMobil but these type of cases where this Lujia cases in example are we see a lot of them an increasing number of them each year and they are difficult to do across nations because this the German law is exception on that case but there are other ways like for example why are human rights courts that can be done across nation states and that is also happening so it's at the moment it's still legally not super straight forward to actually win these cases but increasingly a lot of lawyers working on that so that we will see a lot of change on that in the coming years okay thank you in the meantime there appeared some questions from the chat and from the internet I will go through them first question is are the results of the individual attribution studies published as open data in a machine readable format so all the studies that that we do that I've done with my team with World Weather Attribution so there all the all the data is available and it's available on a platform that's called Climate Explorer so that should be machine readable so and this is deliberately because yeah because we we want to make it as transparent as possible so everyone can go away use our data and redo our studies and find out if we've made any mistakes but this is not the case for all the studies that exist because most of them or many of them are published in peer-reviewed journals and not all peer-reviewed journals have open data and open access policies but increasingly journals have so if you for example go to the Carbon Brief website and look at the map of studies that you have for links to all the studies and a lot of them have the data available okay maybe a follow-up to this one the next question is are the models somehow available or usable for a wider interest public or is APC required? I'm not quite sure what the APC means so the model data is publicly available from and this is one reason why in we have been able to do these studies because until relatively recently model data was not publicly available and only scientists working in a specific country could use the model developed in that country but now all the model data is shared publicly and people can use it so it's definitely there and usable it just requires some expertise to make sense of it but it's yeah people can use it okay the next question is to what certainty can you set up the counterfactual models which are an important reference to the to your percentage value and what data are the base for these models? So the counterfactual simulations are so the climate models we use are basically the same models that are used also for the weather forecast they are just run in lower resolution so which I guess most of this audience knows what that means so the data points are further apart so that it's not so computing intensive and these models they are they are tested against observed data and so that is how we do the model evaluation so that is then simulations of the present day and for the counterfactual we know extremely well how many greenhouse gases have been yeah included into the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial revolution so that there is a very large certainty with that number and we remove that from the models atmosphere so the models have exactly the same setup but a lower greenhouse gases lower amount of greenhouse gases in their atmosphere and then are spun up and run in exactly the same way so the but of course we can't test the counterfactual and so that means that we assume that the sort of the the weather will still the same physics will still hold in the counterfactual and that the models that are developed using using present day represent the counterfactual which is which is an assumption but it's not a completely unreasonable assumption because of course we we have now decades of model development and have seen that in fact that indeed climate model projections that have been made 30 years ago have actually come to have been realized in pretty much the same way on a large scale that they have as they had been predicted 30 years ago and so that that assumption is not yeah it's not a big assumption so the counterfactual itself is not a problem but of course also the present day model simulations they are not they are very far from perfect and there are some types of events which state-of-the-art climate models just can't simulate and so where we can where we can say very little so well for example for hurricanes we can say with with high certainty about the rainfall associated with hurricanes the hurricane strength itself and the frequency of hurricanes is something which is very difficult to simulate with state-of-the-art models so our our uncertainty there is much higher okay and then well some one one question that that emerges from all this is of course if we know this much and way more than than in the past how are politicians still ignoring that information and how can we can can we convey that into their minds well if I knew the answer to that I would probably not be standing here but but actually doing doing politics but I think it takes a frustratingly long time for things to change and things should change much faster but we actually these last two years have shown huge progress I think in terms of also putting climate change on the agenda of every politician because and that's largely due to the Fridays for Futures movement but also to degree I think due to the fact that we now actually know that the weather that people experience in their backyard and pretty much independent of where that backyard is is not the same as it used to be and so people do experience today climate change and I think that that does help to bring a bit more urgency and of course well I've said everyone has climate change on their agenda which was very different even two years ago where there were lots of people who who would never talk about climate change and their political agendas is played no rule it doesn't mean that it's it's it has the right priority on on that agenda but it's still a huge step forward that has been made and so I think we do know some things that do work we just we have to just keep doing that yeah I don't think I can say more I don't have magic wand to change it otherwise maybe some some other point of impact one of the question is is it possible to turn the results of attribution studies into recommendations for farmers and people who are affected in a financial way by by extreme weather and how to change agriculture to reduce losses from extreme weather effects yes absolutely so that is one of the one of the most useful things of these studies is well on the one hand to raise awareness but on the other hand if you know that a drought that you have experienced that has led to losses is a harbinger of what what is to come then that is incredibly helpful to know how to that agriculture practices might need to be changed or that insurance for losses from agriculture might need to be changed and so this is this is exactly why why we do these attribution studies because not every extreme event is always because has always shows the fingerprints of climate change and if you if you know which of the events are the ones for climate change is a real game changer you also do know where to put your efforts and resources to be more more resilient in the future and for financial losses it's just on the one hand yeah you can use these studies to find out what your physical risks are for your assets and how they and of course this everything that I've said comparing the counterfeiture with the present we can do and we do this also with the future so you can also see how in a two degree world the the events likelihood and intensities are changing and of course you can then also in a less direct way use this kind of information to see to assess what what might be other risks from where might be stranded assets what what are other risks for the financial for the financial sector for the financial planning what where could liability risks be and how could they look like so there is because extreme weather events and their changes and intensity and magnitude is how climate change is manifesting it it really connects all these all these aspects of where where the impacts of climate change are okay last question for today I hope I can get that right I think the question is if there are study if there are studies on our how we cultivate fields in in agriculture how does this impact the the overall climate in in that area the example here is is it only an increase in water consumption was directed to Sao Paulo might there also be a warm wall created by monoculture in central brazil so yeah I don't know details but there are but land use changes and land use does play a role on the one hand it affects the climate so if you have if you have a rainforest you have a very different climate in that location as if there is savannah or plantation and and also of course if you have monocultures um you're you're much more your losses are larger usually as if you have different types of of of agriculture because because in a monoculture everything is in exactly the same way vulnerable and and so that yeah so that that does land use change plays a hugely important role with respect to the impacts of of extreme weather and that's one thing to look at when I was saying talking about looking at vulnerability and exposure and of course also changes in the hazard are not just because of climate change but also because of land use change and you can use exactly the same methods but instead of changing the cu2 or the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere of your model you can change the land use and then disentangle these different drivers in in hazards okay pretty auto thank you very much for your presentation and for the Q&A it was a pleasure to have you with us and yeah if you have any questions any more questions I guess there are ways to contact you I think your email address and contact details are in the far plan if you for all the viewers that that want that have way more questions and I don't know do you have access to the 2D world and do you explore that given that I don't know what you mean probably not okay but it would be that can also be changed yeah it's it's the replacement for for the congress place itself but anyway if if you viewers and you people out there I have any more questions contact Friddi Otto and thank you again very much for your for your talk and yeah have a nice congress all of you


Hello and good morning, good afternoon or good evening depending on where you are joining us from. Welcome to Engineering for Change or E4C for short. Today we are very pleased to bring you the latest in E4C's 2014 webinar series. Today's webinar was developed in collaboration with Elliot Kotek, who is the content chief and co-founder of Not Impossible Labs, and Kofi Saname, the founder and catalyst at Volab. My name is Chitra Satti and I will be moderating today's webinar. When I'm not doing this, I work with American Society of Mechanical Engineers, where I am the managing editor for ASME.org, the official website of ASME. I would like to take a moment now to tell you a bit about today's webinar, 3D printing and development, impact and challenges. 3D printing is already changing the world. In Amsterdam, architects are building what might be the first 3D printed house. Surgeons in Holland have implanted a 3D printed skull and a woman with a rare disorder. Harvard researchers recently unveiled what they say is the first 3D printed battery. A team of people from around the globe have teamed up to create 3D printable prosthetics, and a California-based company is gearing up to send the first 3D printer to the International Space Station in August. 3D printing developments dominate technical news, but we are particularly interested in how this rapid manufacturing technology is utilized to improve quality of life in low resource settings. Specifically, what is being printed and why? How it's impacting the end users? And what are the limitations and implications to underserved communities worldwide? To answer some of these questions, we have invited today's presenters, Elliot Kotek and Kofi Saname. We thank you for joining us today. Before we get rolling, I would also like to take a moment to recognize the coordinators of the E4C webinar series, Janna Aranda and Mike Maeder of ASME, Holly Schneider-Brown and Steve Belch of IEEE, who work on developing and delivering the webinar series. Thank you, team. If anybody out there has questions about the series or would like to make a recommendation for future topics and speakers, we invite you to contact us via the email address visible on the slide, webinars at engineeringforchange.org. Before we move on to our presentations for today, we thought it would be a good idea to remind you about Engineering for Change, or E4C, and who we are. E4C is a global community of over 20,000 technically-minded members and more than 140,000 social media followers such as engineers, technologists, representatives from NGOs, and social scientists who work together to solve critical humanitarian challenges, whether in water, energy, health, agriculture, sanitation, or other areas, faced by underserved communities around the world today. We invite you to join E4C by becoming a member. E4C membership provides cost-free access to a growing inventory of field-tested solutions and related information from all the members of our coalition, including professional societies like ASME, IEEE, ASCE, SWE, and ASHRAE, plus academic supporters like MIT's D-Lab, international development agencies like USAID, EWB, USA, and Practical Action, as well as access to passionate, engaged community working to make people's lives better all over the world. Registration is easy and it's free. Check out our website, engineeringforchange.org to learn more and sign up. The webinar you are participating in today is one installment of the Engineering for Change webinar series. This free, publicly available series of online seminars showcases the best practices and thinking of leaders in the field who bring innovative ideas and technology to bear on global humanitarian and development challenges. Information on upcoming installments in the series, as well as archived videos of past presentations can be found on the E4C webinars webpage, engineeringforchangewebinars.org, that's the link on the slide. If you are following us on Twitter, I would also like to invite you to join the conversation with hashtag E4C webinars. E4C's next webinar will be on July 24th at 11 a.m. EST on the topic of off-grid energy solutions. We'll be discussing solar lanterns and debating the difficult question of our solar lights or turn off at scale. Stay tuned to the E4C webinars page for updates on the presenters and registration details. If you are already an E4C member, we will be sending you an invitation to the webinars soon. As you may have noticed, we are using a new webinar platform. We are excited to introduce you to a few of the new features the software has. On the screen you are now seeing, we have outlined the different widgets that you will see on the dashboard at the bottom of this screen. The group chat is where you will interact with your fellow attendees and post any comments about the webinar. The Q&A widget allows you to submit any questions for the presenters. The help widget is for you if you are having any technical difficulties with resources on how to use the software and FAQs. Share this allows you to share the link of this webcast with your friends and colleagues through 13 popular social media sites. The Twitter icon allows you to post directly to Twitter. And lastly, the survey icon allows you to take our survey and tell us what you think of this presentation. I know this is a lot, so always feel free to scroll over the icon for a reminder. A few housekeeping items before we get started. Let's see where everyone is from today. In the group chat window, please type your location. Take a moment to read some locations as they come in. You can use the group chat to type any remarks you may have as well as to interact with your fellow attendees. During the webinar, please use the Q&A window accessed by clicking on the Q&A widget located at the bottom of your screen to type in your questions for the presenter. Any technical questions or administrative problems can also be handled through this widget. If you encounter any troubles viewing or hearing the webinar, you may want to try opening webcast elite up in a different browser. Also feel free to access the help widget for technical help. At the bottom of the screen, you will also see a survey widget. Please make sure to take a moment to fill out our short survey. We will leave the survey open for a few minutes after the webinar. Your opinions are invaluable to the webinar series. Without your comments and suggestions, the webinar series wouldn't be what it is today. Following the webinar to request a certificate of completion, showing a professional development hour for this session, please follow the instructions on the top of our page engineeringforchangewebinars.org. Today's presenters are Elliot Cotech and Kofi Sineme. A former biotech VC and M&A attorney in Australia and New York, Elliot holds a law degree, a BSc in Pharmacology and Toxicology, studied dramatic writing and acting at New York's the Lee Stratisburg Theater Institute and completed UCLA's professional program in screenwriting. The content chief and co-founder of Not Impossible Labs and editor-in-chief and co-founder of Beyond Cinema magazine, Elliot has personally interviewed close to a thousand of the world's leading personalities. Born in 1980 in Tagore, Kofi is architect and anthropologist. He manages and finances Volab, which has become a unique place that enables the pooling of resources and the mixing of different populations adopting low environmental footprint uses. He is an incubator for technological products that aims to create a virtuous cycle for innovation in Africa. Kofi develops the strategy and plays the role of monitor to this little community, which now has about 20 very young members. Now without further ado, I will turn it over to Elliot for his presentation. Thank you teacher. So hi everybody, my name is Elliot. I wanted to just quickly take you through some of the reason why we do what we do over here at Not Impossible. Where we started was with my business partner and my co-founder, Mick Ebbling. If you put him into Google, you'll see his good talk on something called the iRider that I'll let you know a little bit about in a minute.  So I like to think that you got the more internet friendly version of the two co-founders because if you put my name into Google and press images, you get this kitten's tons of them, which of course on the internet is one of the greatest names of all time. With Mick and I, what we did is we started a company that was basically founded on the principle of technology for the sake of humanity. We look at the latest tech and the lowest tech and try and either apply it to the human condition and the human experience or repurpose old tech for the sake of humanity looking at ways that can be used that haven't been used before. The whole story of Not Impossible started really with a graffiti artist named Tim and a pretty unlikely source for any technology platform to begin. But this graffiti artist had ALS and was completely shut into his own body with locked-in syndrome and was still using this kind of old technology that we saw in places like The Diving Bell and The Butterfly or other films and books where people are completely locked in. They're presented with a tool that was a sheet of paper with a bunch of letters on it and were asked to blink their approval through the range of letters until they filmed something and that was their tool for communication and that hadn't changed in dozens of years in decades until Not Impossible came along. What we did was we basically got a group of hackers together and brought them to Mixhouse in Venice Beach and they took some old spectacles, some old sunglasses from the Venice Boardwalk, hacked open a PlayStation 3 camera, added some IED and some wire and a couple of zip ties and in a couple of hundred bucks were able to manufacture a solution that enabled this artist who was completely paralyzed to be able to use his eyes to draw on a computer screen. So essentially it was using the pupil as the tip of the pencil and as he blinked to shut, when he blinked shut very hard it turned on the pencil or put down the cursor and when he blinked hard again it raised the cursor or raised the pencil and then he moved his eyes and then the recognition software recognized his eye movements and enabled him to draw. It was an incredible experience to witness but really enabled someone who doesn't have access to communication tools to be able to communicate again and this is pretty much the guiding principle of everything we do is that anyone who's lacking access in terms of physical ability or geographic access or financial access that are disruptive in a way that enables these people to communicate or create or somehow other engage with the community at large and with the internet community around the world. The iRider was incredibly successful and without trying to be we managed to garner a bunch of press around it and a lot of awards and that's what led to the next instalments of what we're doing. In fact, the iRider itself with ALS being a progressive disease has necessitated that we advance that technology and so we're now replacing the blink mechanism with a sink mechanism which means that instead of blinking or fast blinking to turn on and off that cursor we're moving to a system that recognizes EEG waves and so the brain writer which has been developed you'll see a very early incarnation of it a longer foil bucket as someone said but it's embedded currently in a Nike headband and will be embedded into a baseball cap but it's electrodes that sit above the skin and it's completely non-invasive and it enables people to continue to draw and create by turning it on and off by calibrating it with brain waves and then to use their eye movements to continue to write and create and that launches a week from now at the Barbican in London so if any of you are in England I encourage you to come out to the Digital Revolution show at the Barbican it's an incredible assembly of technologies and it's the largest exhibition of its kind it's going to run from 2014 to 2020 in eight or nine different countries but we will be in a part of the exhibition that is available freely to the public whether or not made by a ticket which is consistent with our whole ideology of access that's a quick snapshot of what the exhibition will look like and those two boxes on the right-hand side with orange triangles will be places that you can either roll up to or walk up to and actually experience using the brainwriter to play a video game so you can get the whole transition you can get the experience from a very real, very personal level we are using 3D printed components in that but really the reason why we are here to chat about what we have been doing is this project called Project Daniel Project Daniel for us has been a whirlwind we began the story about July last year you will see this time magazine article that was dated in April but someone brought it to make my co-founders attention last July we read it and basically it was about this doctor who operates out of the Nuba Mountains Dr. Tom Katana he is the only doctor servicing an area that has a population of about a million people it's in the very bottom tip of Sudan and these people were fighting with South Sudan but when the borders were drawn for that new country they were left on the north side of that border and so since then they have been subjected to bombing raids by the government of Sudan who are trying to evict them from their native lands the president of Sudan is the same person responsible for the Tsar for atrocities and so he remains the only leader in power who has war crime convictions against him so he has been bombing this area where there is this lone doctor basically servicing these people the hospital itself is primarily solar powered so there are not a lot of resources around but another part of that article was about this boy Daniel Omar who was 14 when a bomb took both his arms he ducked behind a tree but his arms were wrapped around it and while his body was protected his arms were ripped off and Dr. Tom performed the WNPutation and when we read about this we decided that this was something that we thought we should be able to help with given today's technologies and on the not impossible website then ours a South African inventor really a carpenter who had locked his own fingers off and he had designed what's known now as Robohand which is a 3D printed prosthetic hand very basic and mechanical in its function and we thought that that would be the perfect tool, something mechanical not electric because as we all know scarcity of electricity in places like Sudan would mean that if the arm had a robotic component then it would probably get thrown away if the charge was lost so it had to be mechanical so we brought a team of different people to what was then our offices in Venice Beach and we had a make weekend and that make weekend included people like Brooke Drum who's the CEO of printer bot, one of the early 3D printing consumer 3D printing companies with models ranging I think from about $250 upwards so again fitting within our philosophy of access we brought Richard Van Ars out from South Africa we brought some engineers down from San Francisco a couple of precision engineers from a company called Pressipart in upstate New York and we brought all these people together and we worked on the prototyping of a 3D printed prosthetic there's a photo of Richard Van Ars on the left is the original inventor of the Robohand but what we wanted to do is to tweak his designs and have him tweak his designs to make the tool the 3D printed prosthetic for him a little bit more durable for the Sudanese conditions we then like sent a team of four people so it was Mick Ebbling who's my co-founder and not a medical it's good to know but he's not medically inclined no medical training just someone who's pretty handy around a Home Depot or a Bunnings or whatever that equivalent warehouse type scenario is in your part of the world and he went with a photographer a videographer and a logistics expert to get to Sudan he went first to Richard Van Ars since South Africa spent another week with him kind of as a Mr. Miyagi yoga type figure learned as much as possible about putting these ones together and putting them on people who need them and then they got to a place called Yida which the UN called the most challenging refugee camp in the world the house is about 70,000 people and that's where we found Daniel what was interesting is the project was called Project Daniel as a result of the story but we didn't know whether we'd actually find Daniel himself so it was kind of a coup that Dr. Tom located Daniel in Yida and we were able to connect with him in South Sudan in Yida but Daniel was a little bit skeptical at first he had been offered other lins before other prosthetics before and they really hadn't been up to speed but this one a 3D printed prosthetic limb you'll see most of it is 3D printed the only part that's not is the core cone the cylinder in the middle that is actually around Daniel's stump and that part is an orthoplastic a medical grade breathable plastic so that can go directly on to the skin whereas most prosthetics require silicon stockings or a thick sports sock that can be placed directly against the skin and then all the 3D printed components are then attached to that to that cylinder to that core it really acts quite simply the mechanical function is driven by cables that wrap around they come through almost like ligaments through the fingers through the phalanges travel their way up around the cylinder around the outside of the arm basically get tightened as tight as possible against the straight arm against an elbow so as the elbow bends it acts as a fulcrum point and draws the cables in which draws the fingers closed so it's really just an open shot mechanical hand but it provides that degree of freedom obviously for someone who has had both his arms removed to be able to feed himself again you'll see in this top shot on the left that's a shot of him feeding himself that's some sugar on a screen that's him feeding himself for the first time in two years what we love about this is in terms of the change aspect of it is it doesn't just free him up or give him the tool to enable him to feed himself but it also means the other young boy whose role it was in his community to provide for him and feed him after him in all sorts of different ways is now freer as well and can use his time more in tune with how a boy his age would spend it Daniel's a happy teen he plays soccer he can get bratty when we introduced the computers to the area he wanted to play games on them and play music on them even with his stumps moving around on a tablet and so it was pretty cool to watch and these hands were then assembled we thought here's the top right photo the team of people basically went around and grabbed a few people that were recommended by Dr. Tom and trained them how to 3D print and put together these prostheses and so that was the most rewarding part of the journey to do it, making another arm for Daniel then making another arm for this boy Mohammed who's in the shot here with Daniel and then as we as the team left Sudan and got back to LA there were photos of two additional people who had arms made for them by the trainees so this proved to us that the project was scalable that it was feasible to build out to other countries we left all the equipment behind for them and set up what was in essence the first 3D printing prosthetics lab and training facility in the world again it led to a lot of press from Time Magazine and Independent and The Guardian and all these different places and it's had these numbers of media impressions and the reason why this is important for us as a business is that we believe that if you do things for some people about them then it makes it hard to inspire others to do the same and because we're about access and about enabling people to see that they don't need permission to innovate that these tools are available to them and these files are available open source that means that more people can get helped around the world we don't want to be the ones going around making arms for people we want people to be inspired enough and that's led to requests coming from different places around the globe it looks like we now have commitments from sponsors to take the Daniel Labs or the Not Impossible Labs to 3 other countries around the globe within the next 12 months and we're hoping for another 12 regions after that by the end of the second anniversary of Daniel feeding himself so something we like to ask people to think about when we speak is because of this ability to have access to both the tools and the files is to ask you who your Daniel is who's that person in your greater community the person you pass by every day or the person who's a friend of a friend who just needs a hand quite literally no pun intended but there are people out there who can benefit from very simple technologies who otherwise wouldn't have access to them so we ask you to consider who your Daniel is so think about that it's kind of this basis of permissionless innovation we didn't coin the term or coin the phrase and it's been the subject of some interesting discussion but basically with the tools that are available to us now and the ability for everybody to communicate with each other now using the internet using these community forums using things like we're using today with E4C is that there's really no excuse if you have any inclination there's no excuse not to try and innovate no one needs to give you approval there doesn't need to be an institution or a business around it the tools are available to everybody and everybody can find their community online regardless of whether they're the type of people who would otherwise leave their houses or have access to communities of other innovators in their proximate geographies so anyone can do it it's available to anyone to try and kind of indicative of this point is that one of our teams that is working with us at the moment is doing a project that we call at the moment the Robot Walker everything we do we name after a person but we haven't found the person for whom we're building the Robot Walker yet other than we know that it's for children but so as long as it's not a boy named Johnny we will probably stick we will probably change the name to anything else around that person but we've got a team of 16 year olds who are helping build the first Robot Walker which is basically a GATE G-A-I-T trainer to help kids with cerebral palsy learn to walk in a fraction of the time it takes with traditional physical therapies there are devices to it currently but they're in the range and the realm is about half a million dollars a piece which means it's prohibitive for most rehabilitation hospitals to own more than one so we want to create something disruptive that costs a tenth of that so that 10 times as many kids can be on these machines and learn how to walk more more quickly, more rapidly the exoskeleton part of the device the part that actually joins to the leg is also 3D printed and is being 3D printed by a lab for us on the east coast as we speak but again this is just one of our projects we have a puff sipped mouth for a quadriplegic who wants to go back to school and can't afford the tools that are on the market at the moment so we're hoping to get a mouse for him that is operated with his tongue and with puffing and sipping actions and again components of that are 3D printed we're working on voice recognition softwares for people with ALS tools to recognize retinoblastoma in children so to try and prevent eye cancers in kids under 5 or the damage caused by them and we have a content platform that we just launched a month ago at notimpossiblenow.com and what we do there is we don't just tell the stories of our own projects and how we're helping people with technology and with repurposing technologies to help people but we also put out a call to action on that site where people can join our community and so if you have cause if you know someone who needs help and you just can't quite crack the code of how to help that person then we put it out to our community of innovators like to call them dynamoes and doers people who have the education whether they're MIT neuroscientists or mechanical engineers or electrical engineers but also people who are just cheerleaders and project managers and people who like to see things happen so they come to the site and can either submit a cause or join a team and get active and actually use their skills you know on the site in a Google Hangout session for an hour or a week or so to advance a project that uses technology for the sake of humanity the other guiding principle we have is help one, help many again we tell one story we help one person and we hope that that tool that we create to help that one person also has application to helping many others the other way this slogan I guess can be translated is that by helping one person we show that and not helping thousands when people help thousands consumers and people who consume that content seem to think that that's a job left for institutions and wealthy individuals like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett but when you can help one person and just show how these tools and how simple these tools can be then we just hope to inspire others to think about how they can help one person too so help one, help many again the principle that we try and abide by as well but if it's not impossible you can tweet us you can follow us if it's not impossible show us photos of what you're working on if it's not impossible now and certainly go and visit us at www.notimpossiblenow.com to tell us your stories because we believe that this is truly and we like to hear about what everyone's doing and promote everyone and what they're up to so that everybody's causes can get furthered like we say there's no degree of separation anymore from someone with a good idea and someone willing to implement it and it doesn't matter where around the globe you are that that can be affected especially with people with the skills that you guys have so it's been a pleasure to present this to you this morning and I really enjoy and look forward to Q&A at the end of the session after Kofi speaks as well but thank you again Thank you Elliot for a great presentation and now I'll hand it over to Kofi for his talk Hi Yes Kofi, it's all yours Yes thank you very much for the invitation and this opportunity so you give us to to present our modest initiative in Togo before talk about 3-day printing I would like to present our space Wellab this philosophy a law I take that we guide everything we do in Wellab Wellab is Wellab Wellab is a space very inspiring by the Fab Lab and the maker movement and it's also a space where we try to show the proximity between the maker movement and our African traditions so it's a space we try to bring collaboration and try to put in front this ethic of sharing between our young community it's also a space you can find tools and of course CNC machine like in every Fab Lab so Wellab is also a community we have about 20 members in our group the middle age is 19 years old we have about 30 percent of girls and in this space we make a lot of workshops on this period of democracy technology to share our knowledge and help young people to develop a technological project so the philosophy of Wellab is what we call low high tech try to do a very high technological project that in the respect of our our possibilities and our culture we use a lot of US in Wellab because we want also to do things in low cost low cost way and they they in Wellab you can come and try to share your knowledge with everyone technological project with everyone and one of the projects we develop is this Gerald project who try to make computer ourselves in plastic can so we are well known all over the world for our 3D printer projects and they were fact 3D printer and this 3D printer was the first the first one born in Africa and we have the the specificity to be also a 3D printer make entirely with e-waste and it is a machine that Adrian Boere see as the future of the 3D printing that everybody don't have the faith of Adrian Boere and a lot of people ask us how we do with this machine and how we try to solve a very urgent problem with this machine so since some months we launch a lot of programs social programs research programs to try to find a very useful application for this machine we create in well-app I would just like to present to you 3 of this programs developed in well-app the first one is the program we call Africa Ciber to the printing cafe and the objective of this program is to really democratize the access to this technology and encourage an habitual use in 3D printers in the Ciber cafe we have another program based on research that we call 3D printers conference and we try to bring together specialists in a specific domain and we present them our technology and we ask them to help us to find application in their their domain and we begin this with medicine and in live December we organize a big conference with the most known doctor of the country and after this we have a contract with our National Center of Potatoes who give us some pieces we try to we are trying to replicate the last program I would like to present to you is the 3D print educational program and the objective of this program is to put the 3D printer in the hands of the very young people because we saw that we are maybe very old ourselves to find very creative utility for this technology but the young boys and girls we have in our community who have about 14, 15 years old are very creative with the 3D printer so we launch this program and we test it in a school in our neighborhood and we have about 11 young boys and girls who are learning about drawing in 3D and print in 3D so very quickly all these many programs we try to launch to help us find application, creative application and useful application for this machine we develop in our space, thank you great, thank you so much for an insightful talk Kofi and now we will open up for Q&A and questions on the income again please use the Q&A window located below the chat window to type in your questions for the presenter so we will start with the Q&A now and Elliot maybe this is a question you can answer one of our audience has asked the robot hand is a very inspirational project and you've definitely made progress with it but was finding funding for the project challenging for you in the initial stages absolutely we have a some call it idiotic we call it reckless that we have an approach that we commit to something and then we figure out a way to do it so Nick has three young boys and I have one young boy and so we felt like this was a project that needed to happen so we set a date for it before we knew whether it was going to be possible or not and when you have a company that is called not impossible you're pretty much tasked with doing these sorts of things and so really Nick and I will both have other jobs so we were kind of putting our time in full time a pro bono on these projects at first it's now developed to a point where we can't do that anymore because it's grown into a bigger operation but we basically were putting things on credit cards while we talked to brands about coming on board and whether they believed in the mission and we were thankful that both Intel Intel came on board that very close to the time we were taking off so most of the things were paid for in advance in terms of flights and things like that and the printers and the filament and also plastic materials and then a company called Pressipart a precision engineering company that is I think Swiss has a genesis in Switzerland but we were working with their team in upstate New York and they came on board to support the project as well so we were thankful obviously that we were able to cover the cost of the project that way but we have other active projects now that don't have funding yet but we're just making them happen using primarily volunteers until a point where we're able to bring a brand on board and ensure that the project can get made and get finished in the best way possible. Thank you another question is again for you Elliot is that how do you see collaboration from engineers from obviously doctors involved how did you do that successfully and if you want to share that experience? Yeah, actually most of our projects the initial conversations take place in Google Hangouts if they're one on one they take place in Skype often but Google Hangouts predominantly and the cool thing was that we had people coming in who were physical therapists who offered a pragmatic look at hey this is going to be a tool that is going to be worn for a long period of time let's make sure that it's breathable. Others coming in and saying well the mechanics and the leverage you're getting from this Fulcrum Point can be enhanced by adding a second small cuff to tie the cabling to on the top of the tricep. So there were people who kind of came up with different ideas and then of course Richard who invented the Robohand was letting us know what difficulties he'd faced in the last couple of years as he toured the world helping people and giving them new hands to use so the body of the hand itself that it went to the Sudan is kind of more enclosed so it's a little bit more protected and basically everybody's suggestions were kind of taken on board and then the engineers were used to either the digital engineers were used to design the prosthetic and then it really was a truly collaborative process. What was the coolest thing I think was also getting on the phone to Dr. Tom and this speaks to what coffee is doing as well is that we got on the phone with Dr. Tom in the Nuba Mountains and just asked him what he had in his possession like what he had that he threw away every day what kind of materials was there IV tubing and if so did it have an elastic component to it were there needles what gauge were the needles were they able to be sterilized and potentially used as cross screws and cross pieces to bear some of the weight inside the hand how much cardboard was he throwing away every day were we able to use it for paper mache or do some other things with it and it didn't matter whether we used it ended up using ideas or not but taking that look at what was available from a waste element led to the thinking about how sustainable the practice would be and how sustainable this lab setup would be and I think we all hope that at some point the plastics that PET things like that could be easily translated into 3D filaments so that we could both take waste and use it for something purposeful like building prosthetic limbs and things like that using 3D printers but the collaboration was actually the most fun and on all our projects we start with Google Hangouts and then eventually to help the person we're helping we need to get them all in the one place Thanks This question for you as well that in terms of funding and for setting up such a massive project in Africa did you face that challenge and also did you have any political interference from powerful people what were some of the challenges you faced while setting up O-Lab and working on the 3D printer We are a very very young community and what we try to do is to be independent and do what we can do with the resources we have in our hands so we develop programs and we try to launch innovative programs but we can't I don't know how to say this we can't very in a very long way we need help if we want to change the scale to really have a big impact but what we do now is to do what we can with our resources in O-Lab and maybe if the results are very efficient that can give birth to more ambitious programs maybe for all the country or for all Africa Thanks Here's a question maybe both of you can answer since 3D printers take a long time how have you tackled the problem of stable power supplies in the context where you work both of you could answer Elliot maybe you want to answer first Yes that was definitely a concern with the prints taking a while and that's why the new printers also are so important some of the new printer models have a tool that if something happens they will stop the print and then they will restart the print when they get their power source going back on or when the filament is fixed or when some other issue like overheating the extruders is fixed but most of the printers still continue to ghost print or failed to print and so you're left with a mess of filament and having to use that time again to build something new so it is definitely a problem in the Sudan the conditions in the shed during the day was so hot that the filament was sticking to itself so basically that was hacked a solution by putting the filament up on a very high spool so that it was constantly hanging rather than just sitting at the back of the printer where it was supposed to go and then again because the filament was sticking the decision was made to print at night when most other people were not using the electricity and again it was a solar powered hospital with a backup generator and so the decision was made to do it at night and then the problem there was that the lights of the 3D printers attracted bugs so they were literally quite literally bugs in the system in the morning so we had to set up some screens to protect the printers from that as well Kofi how did you handle that? Yes, we don't have we don't have electricity every day even in WELAB that what I can see is that is Africa Yeah that's funny I was definitely afraid that was repeated to us often was TIA this is Africa so I guess indeed I can emphasize So how did you manage to work around it then Kofi did you have earlier talked about a backup generator there obviously that's probably not a practical solution so how do you deal with power outage? No, unfortunately we don't have solutions for this program we don't have generator we don't have enough resources to have an alternative for the electricity maybe we should try to find solutions with solar panels but from now we don't have solutions for this program but next Kofi another question that came in for you it's great that you're putting this tech in front of children what are some of the interesting things that kids are using 3D printing for in WELAB? We are just at the beginning of this program and what we we see is that our young members are more interested in this technology than even a fact who have the idea to create this machine is not as very interesting like Daniel for example who have 14 years old so we think that this young boys and girls will create things more efficient like us when they will have the the matrix of this machine for now they just print gadgets, badges etc but in some years if we begin very now with young young people we can hope that in some years they create things very useful and I got it to our African contest Great. A related question that came in is that you know somebody interested who's wanting to go to schools and offer a sort of seminar for kids to you how to use 3D printers how do you choose what age is appropriate one and how do you keep them interesting in the project? For either of you can answer the question We actually have this team like I mentioned in the presentation we have the team working on the robot walker who is 16 we didn't choose we didn't necessarily choose to have a team of 16 year olds they expressed an interest in working on this project because they have interest in robotics and they're part of a robotics club and thankfully there's a school that has that in California which like is rare even in even in a major city so they are like very well-versed in having access to these tools and it's pretty amazing to see and just my son is too young to to operate a 3D printer that mix sons 10, 8 and 4 and what's great to see there is that they always want to print something when they come in from school or when they visit the office and they're generally printing toys but also nuts and bolts and other things and what's great is the mentality that they want to print a toy rather than go buy a toy so I know in developing countries it's not it's not the same luxury but but here in the US it's good to see that it creates a mentality of creation and creativity rather than just a consumer mentality and I think that's going to that's going to serve some kids well and we also presented it to International Science Fair that Intel runs and just what we saw people using 3D printing for there was pretty incredible everything from exoskeletons to kind of Oculus Rift type glasses, glass casings housings, virtual reality and augmented reality so I don't know how young is too young but I think that whenever someone shows an inclination or an openness to looking at different things I think the younger the better because then they don't see the barriers that we see have a generation above Thanks, has a question for both of you it's very interesting, if the large international aid organizations have seen your work what has been their reaction? Kofi, you want to go first? Kofi, would you like to answer? Yes, can you repeat the question? If have any large international aid organizations seen your work if so what has been their reaction? No, no we don't have any international organization who who work with us we are really a marginal original for now we don't have work with any any organization we have just two years old and we are just at the beginning maybe we don't not yet very known for have this type of collaboration We're a young company too Project Daniel though because of the amount of press that received was on CNN and things like that and those sorts of media exposure that it received really did create awareness amongst some institutional operations including some facets of the United Nations and they were curious to see how much it would cost to have actually a Daniel kit like how much it would cost to have a couple of printers and filament and to integrate it when they go into a place to add this tool kit how much that would cost to the unit and the discussions really didn't go beyond that yet with that institution that that was something that they were mindful of and definitely reached out to us and then there have been other nonprofits and other entities that set up kind of medical tents and other kind of medical they'll come in for three days and do a treatment facility for three days and they were also curious to see whether this was something that could be implemented in their operations and like we say we're happy for anyone to take this technology and use these open source files and we totally believe in the open source movement in that regard that all these things can be made better and better for that local condition so we're more than happy to provide that information to people. Great thanks another question again open to both of you is that an audience wants to know can we are there any other prospects of 3D printing about from medical users and education in developing countries that are getting everywhere or is it subject to some requirements needed before use and implementation? Look for me I think it can be used everywhere we've seen people in Haiti use it to again like people in Sudan that we're introduced to of course like most people here in the US have never seen a 3D printer in operation so to bring it to a place where the education system is not as regimented the people, the trainees who are working in Sudan on this project have the equivalent of what we would think of in developed nations is like a 4th to 6th grade education and they have absolutely no trouble picking up this technology so again I don't see any access I think that's the beauty of it is that the access is not limited as long as they can get their hands on this equipment and Kelfi is showing that you can get your hands on this equipment no matter where you are, no matter what tools you have as long as you have the mindset you can make it happen but yeah in Haiti they were using it to create 3D printed umbilical cord clamps in another part of the country we saw people using it to create airwaves for people whose tracheas were collapsing or who needed some access to air you've seen it being used for as I say we've got some people using it for kind of exoskeleton devices at minimal costs and disability to kind of prototype things with minimal that are pretty complex at a minimal cost is pretty incredible so I think that's going to make sure that it has a wide use in all places if it can happen in a solar powered hospital in Sudan essentially a war zone then it should be able to happen everywhere I think we have time for one last question again open to both of you how can 3D printing technologies be harnessed to leapfrog the infrastructure problems in many developing countries would you like to comment on that Elliot or Kofi I think in country like ours where the informal sector is very big this technology can help a lot because we we are very dependent about everything we use in Africa we are very dependent for the west and with this technology we can begin to try to produce some elements we don't need to pay for with high cost and it is also a technology which is in our our culture we have the culture of this to try to do things ourselves naturally in Africa if some governments use this technology like a developing way for our nation I think we can have very good results even in infrastructure ways thank you Kofi and Elliot for taking our time today that's all we have time for today so on behalf of E4C I would like to thank you all once again for joining us today this is Chitra Seti, managing editor of ASME.org have a good day thank you thank you


Just a little tip for those of you that spend a lot of time in the terminal. For me, I've got my own custom configs for the bash shell, the fish shell, and for the Z shell, ZSH. And sometimes I want to not load my personal config because it's got so many custom functions and I've got a million aliases in my bash config, fish config, ZSH config, and sometimes I just want a very vanilla bash shell. Well, you can actually do this with bash. You can launch bash with the dash dash no RC flag and you will get a vanilla bash that does not use your personal config file. To do this in fish, you do fish space dash dash no dash config and you get the same thing. With ZSH, all you need to do is pass ZSH the dash F flag. Linux, the more you know. Peace.


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