During the first week of March, Africa’s development finance leaders convened in Zimbabwe for the UNECA-hosted COM2024 summit amid a wavering continental growth agenda. Recognising that many SDG and African Union Agenda 2063 targets remain far out of reach, participants focused discussions on overhauling the global financial architecture to help generate the massive funding Africa needs to accelerate inclusive, sustainable growth.
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Key investors in renewable energy for the Middle East and North Africa regions will be on hand to discuss the criteria for securing project financing. They will present the case studies of the Shams 1, a 100MW plant in Abu Dhabi and the Noor 1, a 160MW (being constructed in Morocco).
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The bone-dry plains of the Western Sahara may be no place to plant a garden, but their extreme solar irradiance values render them ideal for solar farming. Morocco has persuaded foreign investors to underwrite a $9 billion solar power project.
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No news that first-class passengers have deeper pockets than economy flyers. Now the World Bank confirms their carbon footprint is about sevenfold that of the average airborne Joe.
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Middle East city heads want to make their cities more sustainable. The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is 60 percent urbanized compared to the global average of 52 percent and is home to one of the world’s most rapidly expanding populations. By 2030, a 45 percent increase of MENA’s urban population will add […]
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Farming is risky business in Morocco, where a 30 percent drop in precipitation since 1970 makes steady, predictable annual crop yields virtually impossible. So the World Bank was called in to help implement Plan Maroc Vert – an ambitious initiative designed to boost the country’s cereal production and create a more sustainable agricultural sector by 2020. […]
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Cairo’s traffic is the stuff of legends. It’s easy to spend hours in total gridlock while trying to get from one side of the city to the other, with people honking and shouting. Then there is the smog that spews from aging vehicles. But what to do about this economic, personal and social hazard? […]
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It was about a decade in the making: without much fanfare the World Bank has released a report stating that the Dead Sea – Red Sea Canal project (also called the Red Dead Conduit) will work. The basic idea is to take salty water from the Red Sea, pump it up to a channel, desalinate it […]
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Sketch of the map of the Red Dead Canal commissioned by Jordan. While we don’t celebrate the energy crisis and financial woes in Jordan, it is poor finances that’s reportedly putting the highly controversial Red-Dead Canal on hold, Israel’s Maariv newspaper reported on Wednesday. The original plan which called for a canal between the Red […]
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Consequences of climate change especially acute in the Arab world, and traditional methods for coping with climate are severely stressed finds new World Bank assessment. All eyes are on Qatar now as the country hosts the UN-sponsored climate change event COP18. We’ve been reporting on COP18 before it began and during, and recently posted about […]
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More and more studies highlight the truly drastic action we need to take at Doha to avoid four degree warming – but is it too late? According to a new report, heat waves in the Middle East with temperatures consistently above 40 degrees could seem like ‘a pleasant prospect in a few decades’ if we […]
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Tunisian buildings are the most energy intense in the Arab world. Carboun has released a powerful infographic which details how energy is consumed in the Middle East. Using data received from personal contributions, the World Bank and the International Energy Agency, founder Karim Elgendy has mapped out energy use by country in each of the […]
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Following the Israeli Minister’s green light for the Red-Dead Canal project, Friends of the Earth Middle East are calling for alternatives to the project to be fully explored Since the very start, the Red-Dead Canal project has been fraught with controversy. The project which aims to revive the Dead Sea, which is shrinking one metre […]
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Heaping urban trash may be an even more daunting global phenomenon than climate change, the World Bank warned in a recent report. What a Waste: A Global Review of Solid Waste Management reveals that by 2025, city dwellers could produce as much as 2.2 billion tonnes of solid waste a year, up 70% than the 1.3 billion […]
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Claiming the the World Bank's Clean Technology Fund is supposed to be used to alleviate poverty, a British group is objecting to the use of World Bank funds in Morocco to deploy a Desertec solar project in Morocco that will export power to Europe.
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