Muslim, Jewish, and Christian leaders are meeting today in Jerusalem to discuss climate change and launch the new Interfaith Center for Sustainable Development. Leaders of the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian faiths will be convening this morning in Jerusalem to speak out about climate change at an Interfaith Climate Change Forum. Current environmental conditions in the […]
Aid workers are battling to reach certain drought-affected people in the Horn of Africa, where tens of thousands of people have died. Tens of thousands of people, many of them children, have already died in Somalia – the seat of what is being called the Horn of Africa famine. While many news outlets focus on […]
Abnormally dry weather a nightmare for Afghanis who rely on wheat crops for survival. Afghanistan is likely to face a significant food shortage in the coming months, following poor rains which have affected this season’s wheat crop. Wheat is the primary food staple for most families. “There have been problems with rainfall, so there will […]
In the coming decades, natural disasters could costs Alexandria, Casablanca, and Tunis $1 billion each. The Middle East/North Africa region is the second most vulnerable to climate change, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC). Especially vulnerable are some of North Africa’s most famous cities, including Alexandria, Casablanca, and Tunis. A new World […]
An update on the latest climate negotiations in Bonn as well as Middle Eastern countries which made the headlines during the talks Believe it or not, the latest climate negotiations at Bonn – which discussed the future of the Kyoto Protocol which ends in 2012 as well financing adaptation – have come and gone without […]
A Green Prophet? This ark now being built to scale might save us from climate change. Crazy as it sounds, a Dutch man is building an ark, cubit by cubit, exactly as it’s written in the Bible and to scale – like the one Noah built, described in Genesis. He had the idea for some […]
Climate change will disrupt every aspect of life in the next few decades, including the kernel of Middle Eastern culture. A Middle East without nuts is like Belgium without chocolate: virtually impossible to imagine. But a recent report published in the peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE (hat tip to Grist) shows that warm (and warming) countries […]
The University of Madaba’s geothermal system, the largest in the Middle East Khaled Al-Sabawi, founder and president of Palestinian green energy pioneers MENA Geothermal, was one of the speakers at this spring’s much-publicised TEDx Ramallah conference. In an engaging and humorous speech, Al-Sabawi detailed the many benefits that geothermal energy has to offer his native […]
Outside temperatures often reach into the mid-fifties (celsius!) during Middle East summers. Construction workers feel the heat. Behind every glamorous building in Dubai are hundreds of mostly South Asian workers. Yesterday, during a ten kilometer city hike from the Burj Khalifa to Bur Dubai, the quality of life for nearly half of the Emirate’s population […]
Every month, 150,000 families stand to gain from the Egyptian Food Bank’s distribution program. Egypt is getting serious about food waste. Last year we reported on the extraordinary amount of food wasted during Ramadan. Ironically, at the same time that ritual scraps filled up formal and informal landfills, the Middle East experienced record-high food prices […]
In Alexandria, climate change threatens tourism From London and Rotterdam to Egypt’s Alexandria, most of the world’s great old cities were settled in river deltas. Because of the ease of shipping heavy loads by water in ancient times, river deltas developed as trading posts, and grew over the centuries from villages to become the major […]
Middle East NGOs must cross social, political and religious barriers to achieve long-term solutions to solve their regional complex environmental problems. While changes in political landscape across the Middle East and North Africa continue to pose immediate security and economic challenges for the region, can the environmental movement find a voice through wider political participation […]
Saudi researchers develop a new model for predicting flash floods in the Middle East. They cripple cities like Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, and take lives each year in the Middle East: flash floods come without warning, and are hard to predict (check out our flash flood survival guide), but now Arab scientists at the King […]
The 100-MW photovoltaic power station would be the first to harness Turkey’s remarkable solar resource. Turkey has a lot of catching up to do when it comes to solar power. At more than 1 million terawatt-hours (twH) of solar radiation each year, it receives more sunlight than most countries in Europe — for comparison, Spain […]
Istanbul – a major hub for train travel across the Middle East Survey results published this week reveal that the majority of international travelers would prefer to take trains instead of aeroplanes, if they had the opportunity. The poll of 300 consumers, conducted for train technology company Silverrail, showed that 79% would choose trains over […]