{"id":41932,"date":"2019-12-14T07:22:40","date_gmt":"2019-12-14T07:22:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=41932"},"modified":"2019-12-14T07:22:40","modified_gmt":"2019-12-14T07:22:40","slug":"appointment-of-a-new-lebanese-pm-rests-on-upcoming-48-hours-of-re-consultation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=41932","title":{"rendered":"Appointment of a new Lebanese PM rests on upcoming 48 hours of re-consultation"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\nDUBAI: As the cities of today grow into those of the future, they will encounter daunting sustainability challenges.<\/p>\n

\nArguably, the most significant factor that all urban centers will have to take into account is climate change.<\/p>\n

\nWith temperatures projected to rise, new infrastructure and operational challenges will have to be tackled by city authorities.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cWe need to manage our greenhouse gas emissions while managing our economy,\u201d said Fahed Al-Hammadi, director of climate change at the UAE\u2019s Ministry of Climate Change.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cWe must understand future trends in the region and how we will be affected in different sectors. We must engage with the private sector because we can\u2019t work as a government alone,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

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\nFAST<\/span>FACT<\/h4>\n
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\n95<\/h4>\n

\nPercentage of its lifetime a car in the US is parked on average.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n\u201cWe need to attract more \u2018green\u2019 investors, and ensure that the capacity of renewable energy we\u2019re transitioning to can cope with the transformation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nSpeaking at a recent summit in Dubai on emerging technologies, Al-Hammadi visualized cities of the future contributing to a reduction in emissions \u2014 transportation currently contributes a third of total emissions \u2014 and thus helping governments achieve their emission-reduction targets.<\/p>\n

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\nSenseable City Lab at MIT collects data on car movement to improve urban transport. (Supplied)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\nCities\u2019 sustainability will prove a major challenge in the Middle East, a region with a growing population and diminishing water resources.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cClimate change is happening and there are future challenges, but it\u2019s very important, with the structure we have in modern cities, to have an understanding of the impacts and the changes we\u2019re going to experience,\u201d Al-Hammadi said.<\/p>\n

\nOne tool that is becoming increasingly important for urban authorities planning for future challenges is data.<\/p>\n

\nCarlo Ratti, director of Senseable City Lab at MIT, said that reliable data is essential for a better understanding of the cities we live in.<\/p>\n

\nHe is working on collecting data from the movement of cars to understand transport patterns in a city and how it can be improved.<\/p>\n

\nWith the average number of car sensors today ranging from 2,000 to 3,000, Ratti told the EmTech MENA conference that the \u201cambient sensing platform\u201d can be scaled up to include taxis and used for monitoring a city\u2019s \u201cstructural health\u201d (bridges and other infrastructure). Pilot projects are currently being conducted in collaboration with Uber in Singapore, he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\u201cYou can radically change the way we move in a city,\u201d Ratti added. \u201cIn the US today, a car is parked on average 95 percent of the time. It uses valuable space in our cities as well. But a self-driving system can change that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nRatti\u00a0 offered the example of the 1.37 million parking spots in Singapore, 70 percent of which can be cut with autonomous cars.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nHis work encompasses traffic lights as well, whereby cars will be able to detect intersections, removing the need for such lights.<\/p>\n

\nMeanwhile, in Amsterdam self-driving boats that can be used as floating platforms for temporary bridges are being deployed to configure the city in an increasingly dynamic way.<\/p>\n

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\nSelf-driving boats are used as temporary bridges in Amsterdam, Netherlands. (Supplied)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\u201cThe beauty of technology isn\u2019t about creating new needs. It\u2019s about doing things in a different and better way,\u201d Ratti said.<\/p>\n

\nExperts have jumped to cities\u2019 defense by trying to make them more resilient as they face the twin onslaughts of overpopulation (55 percent of the planet\u2019s 7.4 billion people live in urban areas) and climate change (rising sea levels due to global warming threaten to wipe out many coastal cities).<\/p>\n

\nThe health sector will need an overhaul to cater for the evolving needs of the cities of the future.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nA pioneer in this area is BioBot, a US biotech company that measures the concentration of drugs that are excreted in urine and collected in sewerage systems.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cWe measure opioids in sewage to estimate consumption in cities, counties and states,\u201d says BioBot\u2019s website. \u201cWe map this data, empowering communities to tackle the opioid epidemic in real time.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nBy mapping a city\u2019s wastewater network and studying the demographic information associated with that data, more effective public-health policies can be created, said Newsha Ghaeli, the company\u2019s co-founder and president.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cA human health crisis affecting communities, such as measles, polio, obesity or diabetes, is only heard about when the crisis turns into a catastrophe,\u201d Ghaeli said.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cBut it doesn\u2019t have to be this way. We imagine a city where every person can contribute to a database about our health and we\u2019re building it, based on a concept called wastewater epidemiology.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nFor instance, human urine is an important pathological sample, and so can be regarded as a rich source of information embedded in city sewers.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cYou need a lot of different disciplines and industries working together to make sense of this data, like engineers, chemists, biologists, public health, urban planners, water and sewers, elected officials, data scientists and public works,\u201d Ghaeli said. \u201cSo we\u2019re the first company in the world to commercialize data from sewage.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nHardware units are installed inside manholes, hanging a few feet above the sewer flow, with tubes that capture bacteria and study the chemical profile. BioBot\u2019s team of scientists then looks at the human bacteria, viruses and chemicals.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\u201cThere\u2019s so much we can learn from wastewater,\u201d Ghaeli said. \u201cWe chose to tackle, first, the opioid epidemic, which is the leading cause of accidental death of Americans under 50.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nHowever, recent studies have shown that less than 1 percent of those who suffer from\u00a0 opioid use disorder are dying.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\u201cSo it doesn\u2019t matter how you slice or dice the data, we just don\u2019t have the information,\u201d Ghaeli said. \u201cWhat\u2019s clear is that we\u2019re measuring the wrong thing, so we are now measuring 30 different drugs and looking at emerging trends in drugs.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nThe first town to test the system was Cary in North Carolina, where overdoses decreased by 40 percent last year for the first time in half a decade, Ghaeli said.<\/p>\n

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\nPavegen\u2019s tech captures energy from pedestrian footsteps to power street lighting. (Supplied)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\nDuring a six-month pilot program, BioBot was also able to create a heat map to pinpoint areas where overdoses were concentrated.<\/p>\n

\nDespite such technological breakthroughs, and the fact that an estimated 33 percent of the world\u2019s energy is now derived from renewable sources, many of the world\u2019s most densely populated cities are ailing.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cCities have been built for machines \u2014 cars and planes \u2014 and some have forgotten about the people,\u201d said Laurence Kemball-Cook, CEO of Pavegen.<\/p>\n

\nThe technology company has developed paving slabs to convert energy from citizens\u2019 footsteps into \u201cenergy, data and rewards.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nHe said: \u201cI\u2019m on a mission to try to make our cities greener. There is a big challenge in urban areas.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nTo achieve his goal, Kemball-Cook turned to kinetic energy, capturing the energy from pedestrians\u2019 footsteps to power streetlights.<\/p>\n

\nSo far, the kinetic-energy system has been used in Nigeria, London, Abu Dhabi Airport, Thailand and Birmingham, as well as on a running track in Hong Kong.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cWe\u2019re excited about the vision of the future city,\u201d he said, adding that he hopes to take Pavegen\u2019s technology to Expo 2020 in Dubai and Neom in Saudi Arabia.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cThe potential of using human power in our cities is huge. The technology in a city has to work with the people,\u201d Kemball-Cook said.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cA city isn\u2019t just about finding a new energy solution, it has to be about wellness, smart (practices), fun, sustainable and connecting into the Internet of Things data layout,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DUBAI: As the cities of today grow into those of the future, they will encounter daunting sustainability challenges. Arguably, the most significant factor that all urban centers will have to take into account is climate change. With temperatures projected to rise, new infrastructure and operational challenges will have to be tackled by city authorities. \u201cWe…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":41933,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41932"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41932\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/41933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}