( © Ricardo Liberato/Wikipedia)
Old City Meets Continued Heating
Cairo, the capital of Egypt, is one of the oldest cities in the world. It has been around for thousands of years. The great pyramids loom in the background, and an expanse of desert surrounds the city. Cairo was built on the eastern banks of the river Nile because fertile river soil made farming possible. It was also an important point along the river's trade route.
Today, Cairo is one of the most populous cities in Africa and the world. There are about 12 million people who live in the city. Factories provide denizens with a way to make their living. Unfortunately, exhaust from factories and automobiles adds greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and increases the urban heat effect.
The location, age of the city, lack of city planning through the years, and recent population growth means that Cairo is experiencing one of the worst cases of urban heat island effect in the world. Let's take a look at one of the most critical parts of the problem: lack of city planning.
(© Domenico Tondini/Alamy)
As more and more people relocated to Cairo, the city grew unchecked. People built many informal settlements. Informal settlements are not planned out. Most of the houses in these informal settlements are constructed very close together with no room for vegetation to grow. One of the consequences of unplanned cities is that concrete buildings and roads often replace green spaces.
To make matters worse, Cairo does not have a city-wide garbage collection agency. Often, garbage is left in the streets or burned which contributes to the urban heat island effect.
(© Jaxpix/Alamy )
To deal with the problem, citizens fight the heat with air conditioning. In 1999 there were 196,000 air conditioning units in use in Cairo. That number increased to 3,000,000 in 2009. Shortly after that, there were 6,000,000 because of a reduction in price in 2012. Air conditioners may decrease the temperature inside the building in the short term, but they end up increasing the temperature outside in the long term. They increase the temperature by generating waste heat and emissions from powerplants.
Currently, there are no plans in place for Cairo to combat the UHI effect it is experiencing. Without a plan, an already hot city may continue to get hotter with no relief in sight
(©PhotoStock-Israel/Alamy)
