18 THE NEXT... MAKEOVER
LONDON

ANOTHER YEAR, another lucky Olympic city. But as Rio celebrates bagging the 2016 Games, Londoners are wondering whether their own event four years earlier will serve as an inspiration or a warning.

Billed as the largest logistical exercise in Britain since the Second World War, London’s Olympic preparation involves the regeneration of 2.5km2 of the city’s neglected East End. Formerly a landfill and sewage dump, the Lower Lea Valley site is being transformed into an elaborate urban park and post-Olympics will offer 2,800 homes and 80,000m2 of office space, as well as lavish sport and education facilities.

Bad news has dogged the project from the start, mostly in the form of funding shortfalls. In January this year, the government was again forced to bail out two major projects to the tune of €1.5bn after private sector investment failed to materialise. It’s not all bad news for the British taxpayer – the losses should be recouped when the Olympic Village and the Media Centre are sold off after the Games – but it has made a big hole in the €3bn contingency fund.

Private sponsorship for the Games has also slowed since September 2008. Despite high-profile signings of Holiday Inn Hotels & Resorts and Visa this summer, the London Organising Committee (LOCOG) has still failed to make much of a dent in the €170m it needs to balance its administrative budget.

But if the recession has put paid to hopes of attracting private money, it’s been a boon for other parts of the Olympic project. Competition among suppliers has combined with low inflation and reduced VAT to keep costs down – indeed, the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) says it has already made savings of €1.8bn on the infrastructure spend.

The ODA is also congratulating itself on keeping construction on, even ahead, of schedule. Two sailing venues on the south coast have already been completed, and the London site is in the second building phase. The next target is for most of the structural work to be finished by the end of July 2010, including the Olympic Village, the 80,000-capacity stadium and the Zaha Hadid-designed Aquatic Centre.

The biggest challenges for next year will be logistical. The ODA will more than double its workforce at the Olympic Park to 10,000, while LOCOG will start the process of recruiting 70,000 volunteer workers from across the country. Whether this can be done without busting the €10.3bn budget remains to be seen. Memories of the Millennium Dome fiasco are partly to blame for local mistrust of grandiose projects in east London, but both the Labour government and the opposition Conservatives say they’re confident of success.

With less than 1,000 days to go to the opening ceremony, it looks as though for once sceptical Londoners might be pleasantly surprised.

19 THE NEXT... SPACE
YOU!

SCIENTISTS ARE getting more excited about the prospect of humans colonising space rather ran just passing through it.

Recently, international space missions have found evidence of ice on Mars – a sign the planet could sustain extraterrestrial life. This, argues a report in Scientific American, could provide for colonists on landing, reducing the need to transport weighty materials from earth. Meanwhile a deep hole on the moon that could open into a vast underground tunnel has been found for the first time, by Japan’s Kaguya spacecraft. The discovery strengthens evidence for subsurface, lava-carved channels hundreds of metres wide that could provide space for an underground lunar outpost. The tubes’ ceilings could protect astronauts from space radiation and meteoroid impacts. Oh, and European astronomers recently detected 32 new planets outside our solar system, offering fresh hope of the existence of Earth-like planets that could harbour life. It could be time to start packing.

20 THE NEXT... FOOTPRINT
WATER

RELENTLESS POPULATION growth, voracious economic expansion and climate change are putting unprecedented pressures on global freshwater supplies. And while the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development forecasts that half of the world’s population will inhabit areas experiencing severe water stress by 2030, few of us truly understand the profligate rivers that flow behind even the most workaday services or products.

Water footprinting, an indicator of direct and indirect water use, hopes to change all that. The embryonic concept entails measuring volumes consumed or evaporated and/or polluted, and heavy-hitting Carbon Disclosure Project’s intention to improve general reporting transparency.

Unsurprisingly, the water footprinting trend-setters hail from the food and beverage industry, Coca Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé and Unilever, among them, but legions are poised to follow suit.

“For many, water hasn’t become material yet,” says Stuart Orr of the WWF’s Freshwater Programme, which recently contributed to a widely praised water footprint report for brewing giant SABMiller. “However, the more you understand about this issue, the more you realise you really don’t want to be at a point where it is material, because then it is absolutely too late.”