Dispatch from inside Masdar

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As an intern at Masdar Institute, I’ve witnessed firsthand how real and possible a drastically improved world is. Masdar serves as a real-life experiment of how our sustainable future might look like. Solar energy generated by a 10-megawatt solar photovoltaic plant as well as panels mounted on the institute’s buildings provide nearly all of the […]

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UN: Innovation needed to feed people of the future

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Strong crop yields, higher productivity and slower growth in global demand should contribute to a gradual decline in real prices for agricultural products over the coming decade, but nonetheless, prices will likely remain at levels above those in the early-2000s, according to the latest Agricultural Outlook report produced by the OECD and the United Nation’s Food […]

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Khalifa hydroponic farm’s paying off

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As spring turns into summer, the Khalifa fund’s investment in Abu Dhabi hydroponic agriculture is beginning to pay off. The Khalifa fund for enterprise development was Launched in 2007 to help local enterprise in Abu Dhabi. At the beginning of 2015, Ahmad Kalfan Al Romaithi revealed that Dh 130 million (approximately 35 million US dollars) […]

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Earth is in the midst of its 6th mass extinction – wake up call, folks

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Is humanity as a species threatened with extinction? Is global warming resulting in irreversible climate patterns that are destroying animal and plant species at rapid rates, especially in the Middle East? These questions are causing great concern to scientists now studying the rapid extinction of many species of animals on earth during the past 100 years. A […]

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Meet the High Atlas botanical superhero

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Two cellphones. Three numbers. Thirty to forty phone calls a day. A road trip-based work life, which, for seven years, has been separated from luxuries like regular hours, weekends and sleep. Needless to say, Dr. Abderrahim Ouarghidi, 40, is a busy man. Officially the High Atlas Foundation’s director of programs in Marrakech, Ouarghidi, who focused […]

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Going organic in the Land of Milk & Honey

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As I strolled through the aisles of a large supermarket chain recently, I was overwhelmed by the quantity of mass-produced, industrialized food products lining the shelves. Stacks and stacks of processed food items, replete with refined, nutrient-devoid, artificially preserved, chemically altered and/or genetically modified ingredients, as well as produce grown using environmentally and biologically hazardous […]

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Over-Stressed Arabian Aquifer – Beyond Repair?

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More terrible news from/for the Arabian Peninsula: The Arabian Aquifer System is the most over-stressed groundwater system in the world. Using data gathered by NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites, two new studies by the University of California, Irvine, came to conclude that 21 of the largest 37 aquifers on earth studied have exceeded their sustainability […]

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