Their current flagship project, the hippo roller, though not much more than a tough plastic barrel and pulling handle, is beginning to have an immense impact on the role of women in developing societies.

In many small villages a large proportion of a woman’s day is spent fetching water. This design allows a single person to transport a much larger amount of water much more quickly with much less effort (I might be able to push a car, but I could never carry one on my head). The beauty of this invention isn’t just in the immediate benefit of more water, but in the benefits that flow downstream (all puns intended) of freeing women and children up from this back-breaking work and giving them time to focus on education and self-improvement. This then has a massive cumulative beneficial impact on the rest of the village. All this just from applying a very old solution (the wheel) to a very old problem. Social change through re-inventing the wheel.

In a similar vein Engineers Without Borders have been applying advanced design to alleviate a growing problem in Dafur refugee camps. The problem is that collecting firewood is becoming an increasingly dangerous activity. The area immediately surrounding the camps has been denuded of tinder so the women have to go further and further to gather the wood required to feed their families. This has the double-whammy impact of both increasing malnutrition as less meals are cooked and increasing the chances of being mugged or raped by the marauding gangs in the outlying areas.

The solution the clever kids from Berkeley designed to meet this problem is beautifully simple – make a more efficient stove. The more efficient the stove, the less fuel you need to cook the same amount of food. The less fuel you need, the less time needs to be spent scavenging. The less wood that is removed from around the camps, the less the resources get depleted. The less the resources get depleted, the more people the area can sustain. That’s what I call a virtuous circle.

Another not-for-profit I’ve been lucky enough to be involved with, Inveneo, have a more high-tech solution, but a similar understanding of how to trigger these positive feedback loops by introducing efficiency gains early on in the process. Even though you may pay more for the hardware, if you draw down less power the downstream benefits are magnified to dwarf the initial outlay. By improving the power consumption of their hardware and software Inveneo manage to make computing infrastructure affordable enough for poor societies to sustain the ongoing costs themselves.

What ties these all together is maximizing the efficiency of resource utilization – getting more results from less input. But what makes it even better is that the beneficial results seem to be exponential. The savings fan out as the compounding effects of the initial efficiencies multiply.

The eureka moment for me was realizing that changing the world needn’t involve a lot of hard work – it’s all about leveraging small efficiencies. Archimedes knew this when he said “give me a fulcrum on which to rest and I will move the world.” By increasing efficiency at an early stage in a process the benefits compound along the way, giving us the lever required to shift the direction of our resource depleting way of life.

Logicalis have put together some advice on how to reduce the impact of IT on the environment. The suggestions range from reducing hardware requirements through virtualization and other consolidation techniques to old favorites like double-sided printing, video-conferencing, electronic forms and turning off your desktop at night.

One idea I hadn’t really thought of was the impact of data archiving strategies (or Information Life-Cycle Management as they grandly title it) on energy usage. Data needs hard drives need power. Choosing what to compress, archive and delete can have a major impact.

If you don’t think that powering down your PC at night can make a difference Global Action Plan’s recent report might open your eyes as it shows that the environmental impact of IT is almost identical to that of the much-maligned aviation industry.

Ultimately, as with so many environmental issues, the best solution is to make sure that the people who make the decisions are the same as (or at least aligned with) the people who are impacted. I’m not saying sys admins should go and live in the semi-submerged Bangladeshi delta. My advice is much simpler – make sure IT departments are responsible for their electricity bills. The most striking statistic in the “An Inefficient Truth” report (PDF 1.3MB) was that not only do 68% of IT departments not pay for the energy their systems consume, 56% of them don’t even see the bills.

Making environmentally sound decisions isn’t about warm fuzzy feelings – it’s about hard-nosed, joined-up, economic thinking.