Once the most powerful seat of learning in Egypt, Alexandria has some catching up to do when it comes to renewable energy. Which may be why the governor has entered into an agreement with a Catholic technical institute to bolster photovoltaic education and installations.

Alexandria governor Muhammad Abbas told Daily News Egypt that the city’s partnership with the Don Bosco Institute, an Italian group with Catholic roots, is one of the country’s most important projects.

The idea to install a photovoltaic array on Don Bosco’s roof to provide energy for its own street lighting first arose in 2009, when Egypt imported its first solar cell from Germany, according to DNE.

A group of German, Polish and Italians decided to build the country’s first inverter in order to enable the conversion of DC to AC and 10 power distribution points were installed.

While one rooftop array is hardly going to ease the country’s incredible energy deficit, Don Bosco has worked with both the Egyptian Government and the European Union to officially recognize a practical educational system that it has devised.

Teaching all courses in Italian, the institute offers diplomas and certificates in various technical aspects of solar energy production, and recently opened its first electronics laboratory.

While most of Egypt’s existing solar energy developments have taken place in and around Cairo, like the Kuraymat hybrid solar plant, Abbas expressed a genuine interest in embracing solar.

He said that ” solar energy is clean and renewable and does not give off emissions,” according to DNE.

Previously, Egypt resisted developing their abundant solar resources because of the high cost of solar panels – especially when they are imported.

But now Abbas claims that solar makes sense financially since the panels last for as long as 25 years and require very little maintenance.

:: Daily News Egypt

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New scientific reports suggests that coastal flooding for Middle East and North African countries will be much worse than estimated six years ago. What countries are bracing for the severe effects of climate change? Egypt sets the stage.

In 2007, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported that global sea levels would rise between 8 inches and two feet over the next century. That was cause for concern along North Africa’s coast, especially in Egypt where rising sea levels would ostensibly drown Alexandria and much of the northern part of the country. Today, new evidence says it could be worse.

Scientists working for Environmental Research Letters believe that global sea levels will increase between 12 inches and 3 feet over the next century, or a 60 percent increase over the IPCC model.

For North Africa, this is a major worry, where much of the countries’ agricultural land is harnessed.

In Egypt, this means “Many of the towns and urban areas in the north of the Delta will suffer from the rise in the level of the Mediterranean with effect from 2020 and about 15 percent of Delta land is under threat from the rising sea level and the seepage into the ground water,” Environment Minister George Maged told a parliamentary committee in 2008 as reports began to flow over the future of sea levels.

The Nile Delta region is home to approximately half of Egypt’s 80 million people. The UN’s Environment Program says that a rise in only 0.5 meters (20 inches) would displace at least 4 million people and damage 1,800 square kilometers (700 square miles).

It gets worse still with a one-meter (39 inches) rise, which would displace at least 6 million people and damage more than double the farmland.

Efforts are already underway to limit the immediate impact of global warming in Alexandria.

In 2009, the local government spent approximately $300 million to build concrete walls to protect the city’s beaches, and in some areas sand is being dumped to help replenish deteriorating beaches.

Many of those barriers have yet to be completed.

According to an Alexandria government official, since the January 2011 uprising, no work has been done on the challenges facing the coast from climate change.

But there is hope, writes Shin-pei Tsay and Victoria Herrmann in a Carnegie Endowment brief on coastal water levels and the threat to major urban areas. Following a plan similar to what New York City has implemented may be a way of staving off the worst scientists’ predict, but it means more than erecting barriers.

“To help stave off these potentially devastating outcomes, coastal cities and communities should align comprehensive climate protection with economic development strategies,” they write.

“New York City, one of the world’s largest economic engines, is doing just that. PlaNYC began in 2007 as an economic development initiative, but when it became clear that the city would experience significant future impacts from climate change, the plan was transformed. Now it is a cutting-edge example of a city climate plan,” the paper continued.

For the MENA region, where vast numbers of population and agriculture exist today, the threat of rising sea levels is one that needs more action and more care if the region is to be able to cope with the environmental changes faced by climate change.

Image via tourdafrique

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Think “Mediterranean” and most Westerners conjure up Monte Carlo or Mykonos, Cannes or Nice, often overlooking the southern coastline cities that lie in Turkey, Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. Fourteen Mediterranean port cities are at risk of extreme and repetitive flooding due to climate change, soils erosion, spikes in population and urban sprawl, according to a Program for the Prevention Preparedness and Response to Natural and Man-Made Disasters (PPRD South) report.  According to ANSAmed, PPRD’s top eight cities-at-risk all boast Middle Eastern zip codes: Alexandria holds top risk, followed by Istanbul, Benghazi, Casablanca, Smyrna, Algiers, Rabat, and Beirut.

European cities of Marseille-Aix-en-Provence, Barcelona, Tripoli, Athens and Naples bring up the rear of the riskiest waterfronts, but we head back to the MidEast for the finale – roll up your pant legs, Tel Aviv-Jaffa.

The World Bank offers a bleaker prediction, stating rising sea level could affect 43 port cities: 24 in the Middle East and 19 in North Africa. It ventures that  a 0.5 meter rise near Alexandria would displace more than 2 million people, with $35 billion in losses in land, property, and infrastructure, as well as incalculable losses of cultural assets.

Rising sea levels and temperatures are predicted to incite increased storms, putting these coastal cities at high risk of experiencing extreme “hundred year floods” (floods of such severity that scientists would estimate them occurring only once in any given century).

The PPRD report, which was commissioned by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, warned that rapid urbanization will see populations in these cities tripling by 2070.

The Mediterranean Sea is increasingly at risk on every level: 30% of the world’s cargo ships sail it, including 25% of the global oil tanker fleet. Millions of people depend upon this waterbody for their livelihoods.

Last week in Calabria, Italy, a one-day conference entitled The Future of Mediterranean Economies and the Promise of Green Economy was held to discuss this subject along with a broader agenda of sustainable development in the Mediterranean region. Experts joined together to devise ways to reduce man-made wastes, switch fossil-fuel based economies to ones based on renewable energy, and introduce sustainable development in the poorest coastal areas.

Good stuff, but we need to widen the focus on this looming dilemma: this trickle of attentiveness won’t stem rising tides.

Image of flooded pyramids by Shutterstock

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Although at first glance the targeted aggression towards Alexandria’s booksellers may not seem like an environmental offense, curtailing freedom of information could potentially set Egypt back hundreds of years – a move that could also deform the country’s fledgling steps toward environmental awareness.

Of course it is too early to draw conclusions, since it is yet unclear what motivated the crackdown, but this is exactly the kind of anti-progress analysts feared would accompany the rise of Islamists in the region.

“The Nabi Daniel Street is considered as one of the oldest most important streets in Alexandria, where it contains more than 40 kiosks that have been selling both new and second-hand books for over 50 years and was visited by many intellectuals and writers like Nagib Mahfouz,” according to literature on the group’s website.

“It begins at Mehatet El Raml and goes all the way to Mahatet Masr. The kiosks are located just in front of the French Cultural Center.”

“The booksellers insist they have valid licenses,” wrote Michael Collins Dunn with the Middle East Institute, who added that if the booksellers are there illegally, the matter should be handled in the courts.

“I plan to follow this story as it evolves,” Dunn continued. “There is no justification for destroying booksellers. None.”

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Azza Abdel Hamid Faiad was the winner of the 2011 European Union Contest for Young Scientists for finding a new way of turning plastic into biofuel.

A sixteen-year-old Egyptian student, Azza Abdel Hamid Faiad from the Zahran Language School in Alexandria has identified a new low-cost catalyst which can generate biofuel by breaking down plastic waste.

The idea of breaking down plastic polymers into fuel feedstocks, the bulk raw material used for producing biofuel , is not a new idea. But Faiad has found a high yield catalyst, aluminosilicate catalyst, that breaks down plastic waste producing gaseous products like methane, propane and ethane, which are then converted into ethanol to use as biofuel.

Faiad and her mentors propose using this discovery to exploit Egypt’s high plastic consumption, which is estimated to amount to one million tons per year, and make money from recycled plastic! She calculates that this technology “can provide an economically efficient method for production of hydrocarbon fuel namely: cracked naphtha of about 40,000 tons per year and hydrocarbon gases of about 138,000 tons per year equivalent to $78 million.”

As we know plastic waste is a huge problem in the Middle East and for our oceans, but hopefully this idea will help convert the problem into a solution.

For her findings, Faiad was presented with the European Fusion Development Agreement award at the 23rd European Union Contest for Young Scientists — involving 130 competitors from 37 countries — held in Finland last year from 23t o 28 September.

Faiad  is now looking to get her findings patented this year through the Egyptian Patent Office and scaling up the idea so that it can become a tangible project on the ground.

She has already garnered interests from the Egyptian Petroleum Research Institute.

Out of the six projects in the environmental section of the contest, three came from Egypt.

Digesting paper with termites?

Aside from Faiad, two other young Egyptian scientists Hassan Ahmed and Yomna Yasser Mohamed, proposed interesting solutions to environmental issues. Hassan Ahmed  looked at managing  paper product waste through termite digestion; the paper is digested by the termites which then enrich the soil with potassium, phosphor and nitrogen  and can be used as fertilizers, the termites also  produce  hydrogen which can be used as a renewable source of energy.

Jatropha plants for biofuel

Yasser Mohamed’s project instead looked at producing a clean and green source of energy that could be manufactured locally in poor rural areas in Egypt. The project selected a plant which is not linked to the food chain , the jatropha plant, to investigate whether it’s oil, methanol, and KOH, which are blended to make bio-diesel, could be produced using different parts of the plant.

Will young Egyptian scientists continue to be at the forefront of environmental solutions? Let’s hope so.

Image via European Commission Research; Image of jatropha plant from Shutterstock

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