Speaker: Alexandra Lybaert, Ghent, Flanders, Belgium
How (and why) are you taking action on climate change solutions in, for, and with your community?
Alexandra Lybaert: Hi, my name is Alexandra Lard. I'm from Belgium and I believe that uh real climate action starts with awareness showing what we usually can't see. And that is why together with a group of people, um I created uh the Little Lily. Uh The Little Lily is a small 3d printed digital canary birds that tweets when the air quality isn't good enough, especially CO2 and, and other pollutants. Uh so that the Children and the teachers in classrooms know when to open a window. But uh once they open a window, they very soon asked me but uh Alexandra, what is the air quality um that comes out of a tail pipe of a car? And so I realized it it was not very practical to have um a device connected to uh a plug. And so we developed a version of the Little Lily uh that is independent so that we could show to Children uh how much CO2 and how much pollution um a diesel car is producing and how much CO2 an electrical car was, was polluting to make it really visible and to make people think about the small actions like walking or cycling to school can have an impact on their, on their environment. Now, after the episode of Little Lily, I started working for the Flemish government, uh more specifically in an area where we deal with the waterways and with the transport of goods over those waterways. And I realized that uh on these waterways, we have the same invisible problem, uh ships uh are also producing an invisible air pollution. And so I thought, well, what if we could just apply this device, put it into the tailpipe of the ships and real time like a like a smartwatch. Uh The shippers can have information about the ship's fuel, use the co two emissions, the real time conditions of water levels, wind, uh waiting times and bridges, etcetera and use this information real time to take jointly with the shippers decisions on how to reduce fuel jointly together while keeping the flow of goods moving. And so uh my, my idea is that by creating a clean shift platform, we could help the entire shipping industry to lower its environmental impact, to make it very easy and simple to reduce it and to report on it. But more importantly, to create a platform where they can jointly work together on uh financial solutions to make sure that the next generation of ships can be entirely clean. Uh Because I believe that working together, we could create a cleaner and uh healthier environment.
Who or what inspires/inspired you to care about climate change and climate solutions?
Alexandra Lybaert: Hi, I'm Alexandra Lard from Belgium. And my inspiration comes from a very personal experience. Um a couple of years ago, I was in hospital with a very severe lung infection. And as I struggled to breathe, I realized how much we take it for granted, the air we breathe. So at that moment, I wanted to understand what the air was, we were breathing in and it motivated me to take action. So I started reaching out to lots of researchers and professors globally. And one of those professors was Ben Barra in Kings College in London. It's an engineer with a medical background as well. And he discovered that in order to motivate people to take action, uh you have to make air quality, personal relevant and actionable. And so since that interview, this has been my guiding principle uh to create tools for the people to make the air quality visible and make it actionable, whether it's at home by opening a window or by walking to school or by driving a bit slower or using um a different fuel in the ship. It's all about reducing emissions to improve air quality because very often people hear about climate change in complex terms. But what if we would make it personal? What if we could give people the tools to see and understand how climate action is actually improving the environment around us? Now, with little Lily, we made the air quality visible in the homes and uh with a clean shift platform, we want to improve uh the emissions of ships because by doing that, we can create a cleaner and healthier future one step one ship, one community at a time.
