Have you always wanted to build an unsustainable city but didn’t know how?
We are proud to share with you Carboun’s free 20-step guide.
Continue reading Planning the Most Unsustainable City in 20 Easy Steps
|
||||
|
Karim Elgendy The Middle East and North Africa generates slightly more Municipal solid waste per capita than the global average. Yet per capita waste generation widely between regional countries that have high levels of material consumption and waste generation and others with much lower levels of consumption. This variation is most obvious between the GCC countries on the one hand, and the Levant and North African countries on the other. With an average of 1.5 kilograms of municipal solid waste generation per person per day in the GCC, waste generation is more than double that of the average Levant and North Africa resident, which is estimated at 0.7 kilograms. One exception to this is Israel, which at 1.77 kilograms of solid waste per capita per day, is higher than the GCC average.  Karim Elgendy
 Karim Elgendy and Natasha Abaza Cities of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region share many characteristics that are not limited to their shared heritage, traditional urban form, or socioeconomic conditions. We argue that the cities of the MENA region share another characteristic; limited success in reaping the benefits of urbanization which has been taking place for over a decade, ultimately leading to unique growth in carbon emissions across multiple metrics  Karim Elgendy Since the start of the industrial age at the end of the 19th century, global surface temperatures have been on the rise due to increased carbon emissions. It is estimated that the earth’s surface temperature has already increased by an average of 0.9° C since then with obvious impacts on the global climate patterns. The pattern of such warming has varied between different regions. Even within certain regions, sub-regional variations can be detected. In the Middle East and North Africa region, for example, there are sub-regional variations in how countries have warmed between 1880 and 2019, which correlate with their proximity to the Mediterranean Sea or the Persian/Arabian Gulf.  Karim Elgendy As the last ice age ended, the earth’s climate began to warm up, glaciers and ice sheets started to melt, and sea levels rose globally. With sea levels rising, seawater (once again) flooded into the Gulf (also known as the Persian Gulf or Arabia Gulf), whose sea floor was exposed for millennia and covered in sand dunes (except for lakes and the Tigris-Euphrates river meandering across it towards the Arabian sea).  Karim Elgendy Human settlements have traditionally needed an environmental rationale to exist where they do. They needed access to freshwater and to ecosystems that have enough biocapacity to produce biological materials to sustain their residents. Settlements also required a climate that was moderate enough – or can be economically moderated – to support human habitation. But for these settlements to become thriving cities, the prerequisites above were not enough. Successful cities depended to a large extent on their integration into an efficient trade network. One historic regional example of this is the rise and fall of the city of Ma’rib, which is today a settlement of less than 20,000 people just 75 miles east of the Yemeni capital Sana’a, but for almost a millennium, was one of the region’s greatest cities.
Continue reading Cities, Biocapacity, and Trade: The Case of Ma’rib |
    |
|||
