Via i megaprogetti ! Arrivano i teraprogetti
E’ iniziata l’era dei terascandali
The Globe and Mail, sabato 2 gennaio, 2016
L’epoca dei progetti governativi giganteschi ci domina. Mai nella storia dell’umanità sono stati impegnati così tanti soldi da così tanti governi per costruire così tante cose gigantesche. La domanda per il 2016 è : “Governi e Aziende saranno in grado di evitare gli errori delle grandi opere del passato?”
Si stima che gli investimenti previsti per le infrastrutture creeranno “il più grande boom degli investimenti nella storia umana”, lo afferma Bent Flyvbjerg (*), professore di Economia e commercio all’università di Oxford che valuta che l’otto per cento di tutte le spese governative, ovvero una cifra stimata tra 6.000 e 9.000 miliardi di US$ a livello planetario, sono destinate a megaprogetti. “Se consideriamo come progetti i provvedimenti per stimolare l’economia lanciati da Stati Uniti, Europa e Cina” scrive, insieme alle previsioni di spesa per il clima e la difesa, “… allora possiamo parlare in termini di progetti da migliaia di miliardi e quindi di ‘teraprogetti.’… Progetti di questa misura possono essere paragonati con il PIL delle prime venti nazioni nel mondo, simile in grandezza alle economie, per esempio, dell’Australia o del Canada.”
Per un po’ di tempo i megaprogetti sono stati fuori moda. Nei vent’anni precedenti la crisi economica del 2008 molti governi si sono allontanati da enormi infrastrutture ferroviarie, elettriche o di urbanizzazione e hanno generalmente favorito iniziative locali: basta con le torri CN [torre a Toronto per le telecomunicazioni alta più di 500 metri, N.d.T.) e le ferrovie ad alta velocità. Gli aiuti dei paesi occidentali al terzo mondo si sono spostati da dighe e super-autostrade focalizzandosi nello scavo dei pozzi, nella distribuzione di reti anti-zanzara e vaccinando bambini – iniziative localizzate che evitano la corruzione, le spese eccessive e i risultati economici ambigui dei grandi progetti, ma anche evitando di affrontare le serie carenze infrastrutturali, come la dipendenza asiatica dal carbone o la mancanza di adeguate autostrade per trasportare merci in Africa.
Due grandi decisioni alla fine del 2015 garantiscono che i progetti molto costosi torneranno per davvero. A novembre il G20 ha concordato ad Antalya, Turchia, di espandere l’impegno per ripristinare la crescita economica prevedendo migliaia di miliardi nelle infrastrutture – un impegno che include la promessa del governo canadese di raddoppiare le spese sulle infrastrutture a 125 miliardi di CDN$ entro i prossimi 10 anni.
Poi a dicembre 2015, al COP21 sul cambiamento climatico a Parigi, 195 Paesi hanno promesso investimenti per l’efficienza energetica, la protezione contro i cambiamenti climatici e per sviluppare tecnologie che riducano le emissioni di Co2, per un totale di 13.500 miliardi di US$. Un’analisi dal Gruppo di Ricerca dei G2o che ha sede a Toronto, intitolato “Mobilitare Fondi per il Clima”, stima che mantenere il riscaldamento globale entro il limite di due gradi fissato dall’ONU richiederà finanziamenti per infrastrutture nei paesi sviluppati di 3.000 miliardi di US$ all’anno nei prossimi dieci anni.
Il Summit di Parigi non si è minimamente avvicinato a impegni del genere, necessari per fermare la tendenza del riscaldamento globale. Ha invece creato un punto di partenza sul quale i Paesi del mondo si sono accordati sul principio che per evitare la catastrofe climatica è indispensabile l’investimento di grandi capitali privati e pubblici in progetti coordinati diminuire le emissioni di CO2 e proteggere le città e i terreni agricoli dai danni provocati dal cambiamenti climatici.
E gli impegni assunti a Parigi includono un espansione del Fondo per il clima verde, indirizzato a sostenere economicamente la protezione del clima e i progetti energetici verdi nei Paesi in via di sviluppo, con un impegno di 10 miliardi di US$ per il 2015 (inclusi 300 milioni di US$ dal Canada), ma si prevede che si raccoglieranno 100 miliardi di US$ all’anno entro il 2020. Non salveremo l’atmosfera riducendo le nostre ambizioni o abbandonando l’industria (come preferirebbe un ramo del movimento ambientalista) ma costruendo ancora più in grande: i grandi progetti ci hanno messo nei guai e si spera che ci toglieranno da lì.
Il problema, nell’Epoca dei teraprogetti è che i governi non sono in grado di gestire nemmeno progetti da pochi miliardi di dollari. I mega progetti infrastrutturali hanno il costante primato di superare il preventivo iniziale, sono terminati generalmente in ritardo, spesso con la presenza della corruzione, sia per i governi che promuovono i progetti, sia per le grandi imprese d’ingegneria che li realizzano. I progetti ambientali hanno un record ancora peggiore: una dei pochi esempi di difesa contro l’innalzamento dei mari, il Progetto MOSE a Venezia, sarà terminato con vent’anni di ritardo e con un costo supplementare di 2 miliardi di US$.
Come nota il Dr. Flyvbjerg, la gestione dei megaprogetti non è migliorata durante i 70 anni presi in considerazione, e ciò dipende dal “modello demolisci – ripara”: promuovi fino ad una crisi, poi spendi ancora di più per salvare il progetto. Dice che modelli migliori stanno emergendo, ma pochi li conoscono.
Per quanto il mondo possa anche avere bisogno di questi bebè da migliaia di miliardi di dollari, prepariamoci all’epoca dei terascandali.
(*) http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/community/people/bent-flyvbjerg
Bent Flyvbjerg explains megaprojects to The New Yorker: http://nyr.kr/1aIAd8X
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaprojects_and_Risk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bent_Flyvbjerg
Move over megaprojects, here come the teraprojects
The Globe and Mail, published )
The era of the enormous government project is now upon us. Never in human history has so much money been committed by so many governments to build so many very big things. The question of 2016 will be whether our governments and corporations can avoid the horrendous big-project mistakes of the past.
Currently budgeted infrastructure-project spending will bring about “the biggest investment boom in human history,” according to an analysis by Oxford University business professor Bent Flyvbjerg, who estimates that 8 per cent of all government spending, or between $6-trillion and $9-trillion (U.S.) worldwide, is now committed to megaprojects. “If we consider as projects the stimulus packages launched by the United States, Europe and China,” he writes, as well as climate and defence commitments, “… then we can speak in terms of trillion-dollar projects and thus of ‘teraprojects.’ … Projects of this size compare with the GDPs of the world’s top 20 nations, similar in size to the national economies of, for example, Australia or Canada.”
Megaprojects had long been out of fashion. During the two decades before the 2008 economic crisis, many governments shifted away from enormous rail, electrical and city-building initiatives and generally stuck to local, incremental things: no more CN Towers and high-speed rail lines. Western foreign-aid spending shifted away from dams and superhighways and focused on digging wells, handing out mosquito nets and inoculating children – pointillist initiatives that avoided the corruption, overspending and ambiguous economic outcomes of big-brush projects, but also avoided confronting serious infrastructure shortfalls, such as Asia’s dependency on coal or Africa’s lack of goods-shipping highways.
Two big decisions at the end of 2015 guaranteed that big-money projects will return in a big way. In November, the Group of 20 countries agreed in Antalya, Turkey, to expand their commitment to restore economic growth by pledging tens of trillions in infrastructure spending – a pledge that includes the promise by Canada’s government to double infrastructure spending to $125-billion (Canadian) over the next 10 years.
Then, in December, the UN Paris climate summit saw 195 countries pledge investments in energy efficiency, climate-change protection and low-carbon technology totalling $13.5-trillion (U.S). An analysis by the Toronto-based G20 Research Group, titled Mobilising Climate Finance, estimates that keeping global warming within the UN’s two-degree limit will require infrastructure finance in developing-world countries of $3-trillion a year within the next decade.
The Paris summit did not produce anywhere close to the sort of spending pledges required to stop the warming trend. But it did mark a starting point, in which the world’s countries all agreed that the only way to escape climate catastrophe is for both public and private sectors to spend big money on co-ordinated projects to roll back carbon emissions and to protect cities and farmlands from the climate damage that will occur.
And the commitments that were made in Paris included an expansion of the Green Climate Fund, intended to pay for climate protection and green-energy projects in developing countries, which saw pledges of $10-billion (U.S.) last year (including $300-million from Canada), but is expected to raise $100-billion a year by 2020. We won’t be saving the atmosphere by scaling back our ambitions and abandoning industry (as one branch of the environmental movement would prefer), but by building even bigger: Big projects got us into this mess, and big projects – we hope – will get us out of it.
The problem, in the Age of the Teraproject, is that governments are still really, really bad at managing even mere billion-dollar projects. Huge infrastructure projects have a consistent record of coming in over budget, very late and often with significant levels of corruption, both in the governments involved and within the big engineering firms that carry them out. Environmental projects have an even worse record: One of the few city-sized defences against ocean-level rises, Venice’s MOSE Project, will be finished two decades late and $2-billion over budget.
As Dr. Flyvbjerg notes, megaproject management has not improved over the 70 years of his analysis, and still relies on what he calls the “break-fix model:” Plow ahead until a crisis arises, then spend more to rescue the project. Better models are emerging, he says, but there are few who are aware of them.
As much as the world may need these trillion-dollar babies, we should be ready for the age of the terascandal.
Bent Flyvbjerg explains megaprojects to The New Yorker: http://nyr.kr/1aIAd8X
The Trouble with Megaprojects
By Jacques Leslie
Until last Monday, when engineers began hoisting its two-thousand-ton cutterhead to the surface, Bertha, the world’s largest tunnel-boring machine, was stuck a hundred and twenty feet below the streets of Seattle, too damaged to move far forward and incapable of going in reverse. The machine, which weighs some seven thousand tons and is about as long as a football field, is the centerpiece of a two-billion-dollar project to build a stretch of underground highway two miles long, two lanes wide, and two levels high. But, in December of 2013, after only four months and a thousand feet of digging, Bertha overheated and was shut down. Attempts to fix it set off a cascade of other construction problems, helping to secure the tunnel’s reputation as one of the biggest megaproject fiascoes in history.
The extravagant scale of the disarray in Seattle may seem exceptional, but among megaprojects—commonly understood to be projects that cost at least a billion dollars—the size of the undertaking is nothing special. According to Bent Flyvbjerg, a management professor at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, megaprojects have come to constitute eight per cent of global gross domestic product. China is most responsible for this explosion—according to the scientist Vaclav Smil, the country used more cement between 2011 and 2013 than the United States did during the entire twentieth century—but many nations have contributed. The projects include not only tunnels, bridges, dams, and highways but also airports, hospitals, skyscrapers, cruise ships, wind farms, offshore oil and gas rigs, aluminum smelters, communications systems, Olympic Games, aerospace missions, particle accelerators, the Affordable Care Act Web site, entire cities—the list goes on and on.
Some of these projects are properly conceived and implemented—the nearly completed London Crossrail, which includes twenty-six miles of tunnels beneath London, will probably qualify—but they are the exception, according to Flyvbjerg. More common are worthy but poorly executed megaprojects, or megaprojects that never should have been attempted in the first place. The “iron law of megaprojects,” he wrote in a 2014 paper in Project Management Journal, is that they are “over budget, over time, over and over again.” Nine out of ten megaprojects experience cost overruns, and most take much longer to build than expected. What results, Flyvbjerg says, is the “survival of the un-fittest”: the least deserving projects get built precisely because their cost-benefit estimates are so misleadingly optimistic.
Superlatives are at the heart of our infatuation with megaprojects—the irresistible attraction of building the world’s tallest building or biggest cruise ship. And, as Flyvbjerg noted in his 2014 paper, megaprojects have broad appeal: engineers are delighted to develop new technology, politicians revel in the visibility they reap from building monuments to themselves, and everyone else—developers, bankers, lawyers, consultants, landowners, contractors, and construction workers—is happy to claim a share. If a project is an aesthetic success—like, say, the Sydney Opera House is (despite its fourteen-hundred-per-cent cost overrun, which derailed the career of its architect, Jørn Utzon)—the public may embrace it as an icon.
But the scale of megaprojects often leads to their undoing. Atif Ansar, a colleague of Flyvbjerg’s at Oxford, says that because such projects take so long to build—more than eight and a half years for the average large dam—they are vulnerable to a kind of entropy, in which even unrelated events can produce huge setbacks. The planners of Pakistan’s Tarbela Dam, for example, projected seven-and-a-half-per-cent inflation during construction, but the project took eight years longer to complete than expected, by which time inflation had jumped three hundred and eighty per cent and the total cost of the dam had quadrupled. The U.S. Defense Department is poised to spend eleven billion dollars modernizing its health-care-management system, but its acquisition standards virtually insure that the information technology it selects will be antiquated long before the system becomes operational. “Time is like a window through which black swans can fly,” Ansar told me, alluding to the so-called black-swan theory, which explains how unexpected events shape history. “The bigger the window, the more likely the birds fly in.”
Yet megaprojects seem to be practically recession-proof. In fact, the 2008 global economic slowdown likely spurred megaproject construction, since the governments of some countries—among them China, India, and the United States—saw investment in infrastructure as a way to stimulate growth. Moreover, many large corporations are virtually locked into megaprojects, because only mammoth undertakings seem capable of nudging their bottom lines. “It’s very simple logic, but it’s not necessarily smart,” Flyvbjerg told me. Megaprojects, he wrote in his 2014 paper, citing a Times Op-Ed, are “the ‘Vietnams’ of policy and management: ‘easy to begin and difficult and expensive to stop.’ ”
The Seattle project neatly corroborates Flyvbjerg’s findings. It is now due to be completed at the end of 2017, two years behind schedule, and Bertha’s delays have only added to the steadily mounting and still uncalculated costs. When the machine’s foundering led to calls for construction to be abandoned, officials summarily dismissed them. “There’s no turning back,” Tim Burgess, the president of the Seattle City Council, said in December, 2014. Instead, workers spent more than a year digging an eighty-three-foot-wide shaft down to it. Because Seattle’s water table is high, millions of gallons of water had to be pumped out from the site as the shaft was formed. The pumping, in turn, may have caused the surrounding land, in one of the city’s prime tourist areas, to settle by an inch or more; occupants of nearby buildings complain that cracks have begun appearing in their walls.
Last week, a massive crane, built specifically for the job, completed the two-week-long task of lifting to the surface key parts of the boring machine. When repairs are complete—not before the end of August “in the best of circumstances,” according to the project’s contractor, Seattle Tunnel Partners—the parts will be lowered back into the tunnel and reassembled. In the meantime, water will continue to be pumped around the shaft, possibly causing more subsidence. Buildings sit above most of the remaining tunnel route, so if Bertha fails again workers won’t be able to dig a new shaft to reach it. The only alternative—performing repairs from within the tunnel and through the machine’s long tail—would require even longer delays.
Bertha’s problems are not a complete surprise. In 2010, The Stranger, a Seattle alternative weekly, published an article called “What Could Possibly Go Wrong,” answering the question this way: “The tunnel-boring machine gets stuck.” The machine works best when it digs into a uniform substance, but the earth around the tunnel, known as fill, is highly variable, with complex combinations of soil types, pieces of metal and concrete, and possibly even boulders and car bodies. An engineering consultant hired by Mike McGinn, Seattle’s mayor at the time and an opponent of the tunnel, warned that the site’s poor soil conditions and high water table posed unprecedented risks. But a consultant hired by the city council, which favored the tunnel, concluded that the risks were manageable.
Flyvbjerg finds much of this familiar. He writes that megaproject planners are often outright dishonest, systematically overestimating benefits and underestimating costs. He cites an unusually candid comment that Willie Brown, a former speaker of the California State Assembly and mayor of San Francisco, made in a 2013 newspaper column. Referring to huge cost overruns during the construction of San Francisco’s four-and-a-half-billion-dollar Transbay Transit Center, Brown wrote, “We always knew the initial estimate was way under the real cost…. If people knew the real cost from the start, nothing would ever be approved. The idea is to get going. Start digging a hole and make it so big, there’s no alternative to coming up with the money to fill it in.”
Unfortunately, false cost-benefit estimates have a way of elevating big projects over more cost-efficient, less environmentally disruptive ones. At Oxford, Flyvbjerg directs a program that teaches megaproject managers how to make cost-benefit forecasts more accurate, but accurate budgets alone won’t clarify which projects merit approval. The decision is often as much about social, aesthetic, and even patriotic concerns as about economic ones; the last three skyscrapers to have claimed the title of “world’s tallest,” in Dubai, Taipei, and Kuala Lumpur, were intended, at least in part, to draw attention to their countries’ modernity. The projects suggest the allure of the grand and grandiose, as if their true function were to deliver reassurance that the human arc is upward.
The trouble with megaprojects is that their glitter can conceal the benefits of less imposing alternatives, for big isn’t necessarily best. In 2009, McGinn, a Sierra Club activist with little political experience and modest financial backing, was elected mayor of Seattle. He had campaigned against the tunnel, arguing for a cheaper option: a plan, already found feasible by an advisory council of city and state stakeholders, to develop the city’s light rail, expand bus service, and repair and reorganize streets. Pro-tunnel forces—including Washington State’s Democratic Governor, Christine Gregoire; Greg Nickels, McGinn’s predecessor as mayor; construction unions; and the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce—painted McGinn as an obstructionist, eventually winning unanimous approval from the City Council for the tunnel. In 2013, McGinn lost his bid for reëlection, but his opposition looks more prescient with each new crack that appears in the buildings above Bertha.
