ADSW Talks: The next generation understands sustainability
16 JAN 2022
The Abu Dhabi Department of Energy is facilitating the development of the energy sector in Abu Dhabi in order to support the economic, environmental, and social sustainability requirements of the emirate, both today and into the future. This mission is in line with the Abu Dhabi 2030 vision, which aims at establishing a robust and secure society with a sustainable economy.
In this edition of ADSW Talks, we hear from HE Eng. Awaidha Murshed Ali Al Marar, Chairman of Abu Dhabi Department of Energy, who shares his insights into the changing habits of the next generation of energy consumer and the actions the department is undertaking to enable the emirate to become more sustainable.
The ADSW Talks series hosts influential figures from across the sustainability sector to share their perspectives on the most pressing sustainability challenges facing the world and the collective willpower and solutions needed to build a more sustainable future for all.
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04 SEP 2024
Cooling our world is warming our planet. Here’s how we can turn down the heat.
As global temperatures climb, we are ramping up our use of air conditioning. The trouble is, the machines cooling our spaces are significant contributors to global warming. The UAE is rising to the challenge, combining ancient wisdom with avant-garde thinking.
Summer 2024 has brought unprecedented global heat, and new records are being set as the mercury rises. As more of us rely on air conditioning to help keep our homes, offices and public spaces comfortable, our contribution to global warming is rising, too: air conditioning causes around 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Enter sustainable cooling. The UN and the International Energy Agency estimate that climate-friendly cooling could help us avoid up to 460 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions over the next four decades. That’s equivalent to more than ten times India’s current annual GHG emissions.
Cooling our lives without warming our planet
Sustainable cooling encompasses a variety of measures we can take right now to help limit the impact of growing global demand for space cooling. These include improving the efficiency of existing cooling systems, innovation to develop more sustainable cooling technologies and measures that lower ambient temperatures in buildings and urban environments.
Crucially, our response to this challenge must be twofold: as well as upgrading and reimagining the infrastructure which enables today’s cooling systems, we have an opportunity to reduce the need for cooling by designing and building cooler environments in the first place.
Reimagining age-old techniques
The Middle East can draw on a long tradition of ‘passive’ architecture and design techniques which can significantly reduce heat. Rather than fighting the elements by deploying elaborate technologies to counter sweltering temperatures with artificial cold, this approach takes advantage of local conditions. The aim is to work in harmony with the existing environment to reduce the temperature of buildings, without the need for power. In the UAE, techniques include shading devices, double glazing and positioning buildings to channel natural ventilation. Buildings can also be designed with higher thermal mass, so they self-regulate by absorbing daytime heat and releasing it at night. Outside, green roofing, evaporative cooling using water features, and the application of light color coatings have all stood the test of time - and the elements.
In Abu Dhabi, for instance, traditional techniques are being reimagined for today’s needs. The sustainable urban community of Masdar City boasts a modern spin on an ancient wind tower or barjeel, which captures the prevailing wind, channeling it down past cooling mist jets into a central courtyard below. The structure, which designers say can reduce the temperature by 5 degrees celsius at street level, is built with metallic, open sides, to help visitors understand the passive design. Just a few steps away, this time-honored Middle Eastern technique also helps keep Siemens employees cool at the tech company’s innovative regional headquarters.
Elsewhere in Masdar City, the striking Al Bahr Towers combine traditional mashrabiya-style shading with 21st-century technology. The towers are adorned with over 1,000 computerized hexagonal shades which can move and adjust throughout the day, providing shade when the sun is at its strongest.
Efficiency and innovation
The Middle East is also pioneering innovative ways to future-proof buildings, rolling out new approaches to sustainable cooling. Among these, Tabreed operates 89 district cooling plants across the UAE and GCC, using chilled water from centralized energy plants to cool whole neighborhoods via underground pipes. The company is also developing ground-breaking geothermal energy which currently meets 10% of Masdar City's cooling needs. Geothermal cooling, which harnesses energy from beneath the Earth’s surface, reduces energy needs by up to 70% compared with traditional air conditioners.
AI is another tool in the race to make cooling sustainable, with companies like Hyperganic combining algorithmic engineering with industrial 3D printing and engineering to iterate at scale. Partnering with Abu Dhabi-based Strata Manufacturing, Hyperganic has created heat exchangers with radically different structures that could lead to residential air conditioning units that consume 10% of the energy that a conventional device uses.
Progress is being made to reduce leakage rates from traditional air conditioning units, mainly through better design and installation practices. In the UAE, Mubadala Investment Company’s aerospace unit Strata has teamed up with European partners to develop the world’s most energy-efficient residential air-conditioning system in the Emirates.
The hunt is also on to find more climate-friendly solutions than hydroflourocarbons (HFCs), including hydrocarbon refrigerants and ammonia. In keeping with international commitments, the UAE plans to freeze the consumption and production of HFCs in 2028. When coupled with enhanced energy-efficiency measures, these can help reduce both direct emissions from refrigerant leakages and indirect emissions from the energy used to power cooling units.
Sustainable cooling on the climate agenda
As hosts of the COP28 climate conference in 2023, the UAE placed sustainable cooling firmly on the agenda. Chief among outcomes was the Global Cooling Pledge, which saw 60 countries commit to reducing the climate impact of the cooling sector. Spearheaded by the Cool Coalition, a global network dedicated to more climate-friendly cooling, the pledge aims to reduce cooling related emissions by 68% by 2050 and to increase the global average efficiency of new air conditioners by 50% by 2030 at the latest.
Described by the IEA as one of the most critical energy issues of our time, cooling is growing increasingly prominent within the climate change conversation. The shift to more sustainable cooling for our warming world is a formidable challenge. While the planet heats up, we need to ensure we’re not throwing fuel on the fire of global warming while we try to cool down.
By merging ancient wisdom with cutting-edge innovation, we can reduce our reliance on energy-intensive cooling systems and work with the planet to create cooler environments. The Middle East, with its rich history of passive cooling techniques and ambitious climate goals, is uniquely positioned to lead this shift. But only through concerted global efforts to improve cooling efficiency, develop climate-friendly alternatives and prioritize sustainable urban planning can we hope to escape this vicious cycle and ensure a habitable planet for generations to come.
05 AUG 2024
Game on! How sports can advance climate action
25 JUL 2024
Lessons from the Aral Sea: from desolation to revival
The Aral Sea, straddling the borders of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, was the world’s fourth largest lake in 1960. But in only six decades it has shrunk to just 10% of its former size. Fish and bird populations have collapsed. Local people endure ever harsher weather, difficulties growing crops, and debilitating health conditions brought on by a rapidly changing climate. The disappearance of this vast body of water and its catastrophic environmental and socioeconomic impacts on the region is an alarming allegory for the climate crisis at the global level.
But there's hope. Recent progress in water management, both in the region and elsewhere, may help the Aral Sea recover, and teach us critical lessons about safeguarding our natural resources.
Unprecedented decline
The decline of the Aral Sea has happened over just one lifetime.
Local people have fond memories of swimming in its waters. It boasted a thriving fishing industry. That all changed in 1959, when the Soviet Union brought industrialized cotton production to the region.
A water-intensive crop, cotton was grown using extremely inefficient irrigation practices which diverted water from the Aral’s tributaries. Some of these waterways lost half their volume, and were polluted with fertilizers and harmful pesticides. By 2007, the lake had dropped to just 10% of its original size, and salinity had risen from 14 grams per liter to over 100 – around three times that of normal seawater.
Once thriving lakeside towns and villages found themselves in the middle of a desert, their fishing boats half-buried and rusting in the sand.
The retreat of the lake also exposed 54,000 km2 of salt and dust, contaminated with pesticides, which is now blown across the region by increasingly strong winds. This causes a wide range of debilitating health conditions among humans, including kidney failure, anemia and intestinal cancer. Respiratory conditions affect children up to 200 kilometers away.
Restoring the Aral Sea was seen by many as a lost cause. And major challenges remain - from continued reliance on outdated cotton-farming practices, to regional tensions over how to share the water of the lake and its tributaries. But investment in infrastructure and the resilience of local communities have begun to pull it back from the brink.
Reviving the Aral
The completion of the Kokaral Dam in 2005, financed by the World Bank, was a vital turning point, offering the Aral Sea hope at its lowest ebb. The dam has led to an 18% increase in the volume of the northern part of the lake in Kazakhstan. Several fish species now thrive, as do the fishermen: Within ten years, their annual catch grew fivefold. A second World-Bank-financed dam nearby is set to continue the transformation of the local ecosystem and bring the entire reservoir’s temperature and salinity levels closer to 1960 levels, encouraging biodiversity.
Across the border in Uzbekistan, mass planting of saxaul shrubs is underway, in partnership with USAID. In just four years, these robust plants, which act as the first line of defense against desertification, have helped restore over half of the country’s three million hectares of degraded land.
Encouragingly, these measures are being matched by impactful water management reforms and investment at the governmental level. Uzbekistan is reconstructing irrigation networks, modernizing water management systems and introducing drought-resistant crops. Farming subsidies for water-saving agricultural technologies could reduce consumption by 40-50% and mineral fertilizers by 25-30%. The impact has already been immense. From just 28,000 hectares of farmland in 2018, these technologies now cover 1 million hectares - representing 27 percent of the total irrigated area. The government intends to double this by the end of 2025.
International collaboration
These country initiatives feed into the efforts of the International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea (IFAS), founded 30 years ago by the five nations of Central Asia. A unique collaborative effort, the fund is the most important platform for regional cooperation, encouraging member states to work together to share transboundary water and address the environmental and socio-economic problems of the Aral Sea basin. Kazakhstan is hoping to use its chairmanship of the fund to formalize an agreement to regulate the flow of the Syr Darya, one of the Aral’s main tributaries, helping avoid droughts in downstream countries.
In addition, the UN-backed Multi-Partner Human Security Trust Fund for the Aral Sea Region aims to channel financing into innovative solutions for this complex challenge. In 2021, the UN General Assembly declared the Aral Sea region a 'zone of environmental innovations and technologies', to encourage international research and scientific collaboration in the area.
It is unlikely that the Aral Sea will ever return to its 1960 level, but recent progress has handed this struggling waterway a vital lifeline. The sea’s rapid bounce back over just two decades shows the vast potential of water management measures, for the local ecosystem and the people whose livelihoods depend on it.
Hope for the future
The plight of the Aral Sea is an alarming glimpse into the planet’s future if we do not manage our precious natural resources responsibly. The lessons we can draw from both its destruction and revival apply everywhere.
Rivers, lakes and seas are a vital lifeline that billions depend on for food, livelihoods and power. Their steward governments have a responsibility to work together to share the benefits fairly and sustainably. That means supporting farmers with efficient water infrastructure and providing the right incentives to help them switch to more sustainable crops and practices. It means working collaboratively to ensure a regular flow from source to sea to stabilize regional climates.
While water management may not be taking center stage at COP29, it is critical to the wider goals of the Paris Agreement. It might just bring our struggling waterways back to life.