Environmental performance in real estate

Today, environmental performance in real estate has become a major concern for many players. Water and fluids in the buildings management represents such a major point of this performance. The corporate real estate (SIMI) which runs from 5 to 7 December 2012 in the Palais des Congrès de Paris is an opportunity to analyze the changes in the sector and to the launch of Ocea Smart Building, the new entity of Suez Environment, expert real estate performance management.

Environmental performance in the real estate concerns all types of residential and tertiary buildings and must be parsed through the habits of consumption of the inhabitants and the occupants. Water and fluids management is one of the levers of this environmental performance. Beyond the water, the building is the economic sector the most energy intensive of our country with nearly 46% of the total final energy consumption. It is in this context and against the predominant weight of the building in the energy consumption of the country surrounding the Grenelle 1 and especially the Grenelle 2 environment, complemented by the thermal regulation 2012 proposed programs to large scale energy consumption reduction of the buildings.

GDF SUEZ / REDUCED FRANCK / MICHELE BOURGEOIS ARCHITECT DPLG

Ocea Smart Building, real estate performance management expert
Born in July 2012 for the rapprochement of three subsidiaries of Suez Environnement (CASCO, Isiom and Lyonnaise des water PRO), Casco Smart Building today is the only actor to cover the whole value chain, from the collection of the data until the restitution portal and business intelligence. This new player is positioned on the market of the real estate performance management to help measure and analyze consumption, reduce the environmental footprint and finally to comply with regulatory standards.

Better manage its water consumption
Social landlords and owners will have to make available to the tenants, modern tools to individually control their consumption. Today, the challenge lies in the mastery of the charges relating to the fluid (cold, hot water, electricity, gas, heating). Ocea Smart Building has put in place a service "warning leak" that can generate on average more than 10% of water through fast shipments of mails and SMS. Another solution, an ISI Habitat portal that offers multi energy control to control the distribution of loads through the implementation of meter remote reading of energy consumption of water, gas, electricity, heating, temperature. This device allows a daily consumption of homes online tracking and alert the donors and the residents in the event of abnormal consumption. Beyond these technical tools, personalized support is also set up with for example the communication of instructions and behaviours (economic and environmental) to be followed by the inhabitants.

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When the water turns as a writing medium

Who would have imagined that one can write about water a day? We all know that water is a liquid, it can not be frozen, use it to write messages statement then the impossible. But scientists have met this challenge by developing the experiences to write symbols on the water. Panorama of the different techniques developed.

The concept of hydroglyphes
During a demonstration, scientists from Harvard and the Merrimack High School students presented a quite amazing concept that allows to write actually with water and that the scientists have named "hydroglyphes". During the experiment, the participants placed a self-adhesive foam (in the form of a letter of the alphabet, for example) on the bottom of a box of Petri dishes. However, this last is inherently hydrophobic, meaning that it tends to repel water. Once the foam is placed, the experimenters have installed container under a Tesla coil. This device allows to achieve very high electrical voltages then causing a purple spark accompanied by a noise loud enough. This operation makes the driver air and pushes oxygen to combine with the plastic material. The surface of the plate is then hydrophilic (water attracting)... except obviously the surface obscured by the adhesive shape (which is then removed). The message is thus printed in water and may remain so for 1 month...

The principle of standing waves
Another way to use the water for recreational purposes, the AMOEBA (Advanced Multiple Organized Experimental Basin) device dating back to 1997 that is to surround 50 generators of waves in a pool. These generators work just moving up and down a controlled manner to give a particular form in the water thanks to the cylindrical waves that form pixels. These pixels are combined to form all the letters of the alphabet or symbols. This technique could find its way into fun as arts such as amusement parks.

A cascade of words
In the same idea, Julius Popp, an artist as recognized in the field of the art in scientific research has discovered the existence of sensors for dropping water droplets to write the words in the air through a screen liquid where every drop of water becomes pixel. Assembly and the rate of fall of drops of water to form letters, words that scroll as a generic without end. Signs that become messages and random slogans fade one after the other... A beautiful cascade of words.

Lessons from Hurricane Sandy for Bay Area business leaders

AppId is over the quota AppId is over the quota  Likely seawater inundation of Bay Area from an intense 100-year storm (1% probability in any given year) today (blue) and with 150 cm sea level rise (red). US Geological Survey, 2010

By Jeffrey F. Mount, geology professor and founding director of the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences

As you read this today, Hurricane Sandy is colliding with cold air from Canada and creating an impressive storm in the Northeast.

Strong onshore winds and an intense low-pressure system are causing storm surges as high as 13 feet in Lower Manhattan, threatening to swamp the subway system. On the land, 5-10 inches of rain is flooding creeks and rivers and overwhelming stormwater systems.

This combination of too much runoff heading to the ocean and too much water surging in from the ocean will continue to cause dramatic coastal flooding this week. Worse, the combination is centered on the most densely populated part of the Northeast coast, setting the stage for maximum economic damage and disruption.

The San Francisco Bay Area business community should be taking notes. This trifecta of high tides, storm surge and intense rain is also a Bay Area scenario. Scientists and a host of government agencies have been warning about such an event for years.

It may not appear so on a map, but the Bay Area has half of California’s shoreline. Unlike the rest of the state’s coast, most of that shoreline is along reclaimed lowlands that are prone to flooding from the bay and surrounding creeks – the same as waterfront cities in New York and New Jersey.

A major storm in the Bay Area would put more than 140,000 people at risk of serious flooding, along with $30 billion worth of public assets that include the Port of Oakland, two major airports and 800 miles of roadways.

Though they are not hurricanes, California experiences its own form of tropical storms known as the Pineapple Express. Scientists call these storms “atmospheric rivers.” They tap into energy and moisture from the tropics, producing winds and rainfall rates that match the fury of Hurricane Sandy. When these storms combine with high tides, much as Sandy has, they can cause widespread flooding along the coast in the Bay Area.

Many regional and local planning agencies have sounded the alarm: the Association of Bay Area Governments; the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; the Bay Area Council; the Metropolitan Transportation Commission; CalTrans; the California Ocean Protection Council; the Environmental Protection Agency; and the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board. In addition, all nine Bay Area counties have identified this flooding scenario as significant potential hazard in their general plans.

Meanwhile, the business community has been passive – ensuring nothing will get done. This may be because so much of the Bay Area discussion on flood risk has been in the long-term context of sea level rise resulting from climate change.

Yet all of the flood studies have shown that the risk today is high. Sea level rise will only make matters worse.

Bay Area business leaders should map this week’s whopper storm in the Northeast onto their own coastal turf. As California’s version of Sandy rolls in and overwhelms the Bay Area’s meager flood defenses, businesses like Oracle, Cisco, Intuit, Lockheed Martin, Google and Facebook will find themselves unable to do business, possibly for a long time.

It makes good business sense for these businesses to move aggressively to manage their coastal flood risk.

Further reading

Association of Bay Area Governments interactive flood maps.

Adapting to Rising Tides, a collaborative effort to plan for big storms and rising sea levels, led by the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Cloern, J.E., N. Knowles, L.R. Brown, D. Cayan, M.D. Dettinger, T.L. Morgan, D.H. Schoellhamer, M.T. Stacey, M. van der Wegen, R.W. Wagner, and A.D. Jassby, 2011, Projected evolution of California’s San Francisco Bay-Delta-River System in a century of climate change, PLoS ONE, 6

Hanak, E., J. Lund, A. Dinar, B. Gray, R. Howitt, J. Mount, P. Moyle, B. Thompson, 2011, Managing California’s Water: From Conflict to Reconciliation. San Francisco, Public Policy Institute of California. 482 p.

Heberger, M., H. Cooley, P. Herrera, P.H. Gleick, and E. Moore, 2009, The Impacts of Sea-Level Rise on the California Coast, California Climate Change Center, CEC-500-2009-024-F, Sacramento, California, 101 pp.

Knowles, N., 2010, Potential inundation due to rising sea levels in the San Francisco Bay Region. San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science.

NRC (National Research Council), 2012, Sea-level Rise for the Coasts of California, Oregon and Washington: Past, Present and Future. Committee on Sea Level Rise in California, Oregon and Washington. National Academies Press.

#GIVINGTUESDAY

If you are thinking about how to give back this holiday season, check out some of our partners who have joined to #GivingTuesday by supporting our campaign holiday 100 wells in Ethiopia.

Our friends of Bonobos launch charity: collaboration to build at least two wells in Ethiopia's water. Buy any Blue item in their Collection and they will give $5 for clean water. Visit their site to see some of their offerings, including their very buzzed on pants, shirts and a charity: water brand iPhone case.

Events Stir for match.com are together cause of mind nationwide on #GivingTuesday to help fund charity: water well in Ethiopia. Tonight they'll hold events happy hour in 17 cities across the country, giving every cent of ticket sales to charity: water holiday campaign.

This holiday season, other World Computing decided to collect the $125,000 to fund projects of water in Ethiopia. In order to achieve their goal, they are donating $5 to charity: water for every new follower of their #GivingTuesday @macsales Twitter account. Keep an eye on their mycharity: page 'campaigns' water as well as to monitor their progress!

If you want to just make a donation to charity: water, we have a few options this holiday season. Visit our donations page for more information. 100% of every dollar you give will fund water projects in developing countries.

How you will spend your #GivingTuesday?

A brand new technology supported by Google

 

The first projects we ever built were six wells in a refugee camp in Uganda. We wanted to prove to our donors that their money was spent exactly how we said it would be, and where it went.

Us is entered in an electronics store and buy a GPS handheld for $100. We have taken to Uganda, went to each project and six plotted points on Google Maps ™. And then we made public information on our Web site as well as photos for everyone to see. We have done this since then.

Fast forward six years later and we have now more than 6 994 water projects in 20 countries, serving more than 2.5 million people. And even if we continued to map each unique project of the water, we do not believe their location is good enough plus. We want to know if each of them is working right now in real time.

Although our staff and our local partners visit our programs often, it is simply not possible to visit each project often enough to make sure that the water flows all the time. Thanks to the Google Global Impact Award, we will be able to go hope this function of projects over time, namely that they are.

But just to know the State projects is not good enough. If a failure occurs, it must be a system in place to ensure that it attaches quickly. This is why an important part of this pilot project will be to continue the training and establishment of local mechanical programs everywhere in the world that can ship to the communities within their reach and make repairs. This will create new jobs and small businesses in places where they do not now exist.

We know the data will discover new challenges, but we are excited and committed to meet their head on. We used Google Maps ™ to innovate over the past six years and today we are incredibly excited to work with Google on the sensor technology remotely, this time to further increase the transparency of our donors and deliver the water more effectively than ever before, the people who most need.

 

An interview with Rick Smolan

We met Rick Smolan six years ago. He was working on a book project entitled Blue Planet Run - a sophisticated collection of photos and stories about water resources of our planet. He asked to use one of our photos from a well in Ethiopia in the first pages of the book, and we have been friends and fans of their work since then. Now, we are pleased to be part of the next Rick book project, the human face of large data. With this new adventure, he began to make large amounts of information to life through Visual narration - something we know many here to charity: water.

When the launched book, Rick team donated $ 1 for every download of the Big data application and raised $ 50,000 to fund projects of drinking water in Ethiopia. Then, they launched an iPad on iTunes App and 100% of the profits will support charity: water.

You can support charity: water projects by downloading the Big data app for $2.99 here. 100% of the profits to fund drinking water projects around the world.

Here is an interview with Rick - it has shared with us what it looks like to interpret large data for a living and how we can apply it to our work on the ground.

My son of 10 years recently heard talk me on the phone about this project and asked me asked me what is large data. I said: "Imagine if all mankind sought through a look all of our existence and all of a sudden, the scientists allowed us to open a second look. You get not only more information, more data; literally, you get a whole new dimension. You get the depth and perspective, of 3D vision. It is given large, not just information but a new way to see or retrieve the sense of a sea of information. "In words simple, large gives us a whole new way of looking at things.

Our team is inspired by their efforts to raise awareness of the fact that one in nine people do not have access to a basic human need, such as the clean, safe water. It seemed an obvious choice to support charity: water by donating all proceeds from the the human face of large data iPad app to their noble cause. And the fact that 100% of our donation will directly fund projects in developing countries was a sweater.

The ability to collect, analyze, triangulate and visualize large amounts of data in real time, is that something the world has never had before. This new set of tools-so-called "Big Data" otherwise - has begun to emerge as a new approach to address some of the greatest challenges of the world and we thought it would be the perfect time to generate a global conversation reflected on a set of emerging technologies that could truly change the world.

The iPad has changed the ways people consume and the experience of content, and we have felt it was important to take advantage of this exciting new medium in a way that has not been made before. The human face of large data iPad app is one of the most innovative ways we used technology to tell a story. It will feature all the stories in the book as well as interactive content that allows the reader to go further and learn more about these fascinating stories. The $ $ app costs $2.99 and is available for download (iTunes). 100% of profits from downloads will be donated to charity: water.

We have spent months find photographs and compilation assignments for professional photographers that we have shipped all over the world. The images have an incredible sense of privacy - are people in over 30 countries and in all cases, the theme is on the data, sometimes great and sometimes little time to be great, is in contact with such an incredible array of human life in the world today.

You can learn more on campaign in the face of human data Big for Ethiopia by visiting their mycharity: water http://mycharitywater.org/the-human-face-of-big-data site

We did. $ 3 000 000 + was raised to charity: ball

Monday evening was unforgettable. We hosted our annual charity 7: gala ball at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City and more than 1,800 of you have joined us. Seth Meyers of Saturday Night Live hosted the evening and we collected more than 3 million $ in a single night. We want to say thank you to all those who, based in New York and celebrated with us.

The Waterwalk is a constant to each charity: ball, but this year we have built around a circle in the middle of the room scene. We asked the guests to walk a fraction of the distance that people in developing countries walk to bring water home to their families. For each person who walked, W Hotels and TOMS has donated $ 250 for projects of water in India. We raised $500,000 through the single Waterwalk.

We're not fans of galas long sit-down, congestion nasal, but instead of this, we treat the night as a big party... a big party. We are above all trying to new things to charity: water for this year, we tried a completely new concept during the auction. Years, abandon us the model traditional sale of holiday packages, watches and handbags and our auctions live became a pure giving event. But there was one thing that always bugged us - price tags have remained high. The auction worked and always, we raised funds, but it alienated many of our customers. So this year, we decided to turn upside down the concept and start low. We began the auction and asked the guests to join a minimum of only $200. And then they had the opportunity to climb to levels of $500, $1000, $5000 and $50,000. It worked. In 25 minutes, we had $800,000 in pledges in addition to 200 people.

Here are some photos of the evening:

Photos by Adam Mason, Audrey Rudolf, Josh Wong/guest of a guest, Matthew Borowick, Nancy Borowick

We would like to thank our amazing corporate partners and key supporters for making this evening possible.

Special thanks to the following people for making the charity: possible ball.