Ecopolis
Programme Summary:
Ecopolis: it’s not a real city, but it is a realistic vision, of what our cities might be like by the year 2050.
In the ground breaking six part series, we analyse key data to come up with a possible model for urban life in 2050. And it’s not pretty. Our virtual Ecopolis is dirty, polluted, running out of food, water and fuel, and prone to blackouts.
Professor Dan Kammen is a man with a mission - to find the technologies that could turn future cities into places we can look forward to living in – without trashing the planet.
Kammen is a Berkeley Energy Professor and key member of a Nobel-prize winning team of scientists that advises governments on climate change.
In each of the first five episodes, Kammen tackles a different threat to Ecopolis, and judges four competing technologies that could solve the problem. Helped by number-crunchers from green think-tank The Centre for Alternative Technology, he must choose just one winning idea to deploy in Ecopolis:
Programme Info:
Broadcaster: Discovery Asia/The Science Channel
Distributor: DCI
Genre: Factual
Format: 6 x 60 min
Series Producer: Jobim Sampson
Executive Producers: Ali Turner and Tom Brisley
Additional details
Hungry City – as cities expand they face a crisis in how to keep their booming populations nourished in the face of possible food and water shortages.
Road To The Future – how will we remain mobile without relying on disappearing oil reserves and their dangerous emissions?
A World Of Trash – the mountains of trash that cities spew out are a toxic timebomb. Traditional incineration and landfill cause more pollution – so where should all the garbage go?
Building The Future – heating and lighting our cities is the worst offender in terms of global manmade carbon emissions. How can we fix our energy-hungry, inefficient building stock for the future?
Powering The Future – it’s the big one. Fossil fuels are a major cause of carbon emissions; and in any event they are running out. As energy use rockets, which are the new technologies that can give us clean and renewable energy by 2050?
In the sixth and final episode – Ultimate Ecopolis – Dan Kammen reviews the five winning technologies, before ranking them in order of priority. Which is the most urgent solution to the challenges we face in future megacities like Ecopolis?