How Egypt Can Successfully Mitigate Climate Change
In this article we focus on how Egypt can mitigate climate change via optimizing architecture, building materials and urban planning to suit its evolving climate and related challenges. As a densely populated developing country with a formerly moderate and equable climate, but now facing increasing heat, aridity, severe weather phenomena, and serious and diverse climate change threats including harm to its important agricultural sector, Egypt shares a lot with many countries, and solutions adopted successfully there are widely applicable elsewhere.
Egypt’s climate has been equable for millennia, with little extreme or severe weather, as proven by the durability of its world-famous ancient monuments. Summer (June-September) is rainless and now growing hotter. It is humid from Cairo northwards, but dry and hotter further south (July highs now average 29 degrees on the north coast, 35 in Cairo and 42 in the deep south). Spring and autumn are still mostly sunny and pleasant, while winter (December-February) is cool in the north with a now less rainy season from November-March, and mild further south. Rain there is possible from October-April, but falls in increasingly rare and heavy downpours, which can cause damaging flash floods in parts of the Nile Valley south of Cairo, the Red Sea and Sinai regions.
Climate change is now causing stifling summer heat, water shortages, more frequent and severe sandstorms, rural and now urban flash floods, and rising Mediterranean Sea levels which threaten to drown the very fertile Nile Delta in the north, where most Egyptians live. In the past cool season a new threat also emerged. Two cyclones, the first ever: “Scott” in October 2019 and “Dragon” in March 2020, hit an unprepared Egypt, with heavy wind and sand, driving rain and flooding. Together they caused at least 46 deaths and serious, under-reported physical damage. “Dragon” was especially severe: dumping three billion cubic meters of rainwater over much of the country in just three days (a massive record, given that Egypt’s entire annual rainfall averages only a steadily declining 1.8 billion cubic meters), and flooding wide areas, including whole Nile Valley villages.
“Dragon” hit when the COVID-19 pandemic news began dominating headlines, and now would appear a remote event, but Egypt would be well-advised to remember the cyclones well, and heed their serious and growing future threat, among others. Rising heat and aridity, with more frequent and harsher severe weather outbreaks, are to be expected in coming years and decades with global warming; a reality that Egypt must adapt to and counteract. Homes, offices, roads, facilities and infrastructure will need to be comfortable, heat, cost and energy-efficient, very durable, and resistant to all this severe weather and to earthquakes. Agriculture too certainly can and must adapt.
Egypt needs to learn from worldwide best-practice experiences. A good model is Australia, as an advanced country with a quite similar but comparatively harsher, more diverse, volatile and severe weather-prone climate. Australia has excellent experience dealing with harsh desert weather, sandstorms, tropical cyclones, flash flooding and its related dams: for protection and to utilize the floodwater for irrigation and home use. As regards counteracting rising sea levels and the threat of drowning, the Netherlands’ centuries-old experience and expertise is the best in the world, as is that of Japan with earthquakes.
Architecture and Building Materials
The strategy here for architects and construction engineers is to counteract the rising heat via heat, cost and energy-efficient construction techniques and building materials, local building materials wherever feasible, and apply (with modern adaptations) proven and practical heat-efficient features of traditional Arab architecture. A start would be to crush plastic waste, mix it with sand (both are abundant in Egypt), and pave remarkably inexpensive, smooth, comfortable and durable roads able to withstand harsh weather and non-stop traffic in heavy vehicles. This material is now used to great effect in countries as diverse as the UK and fellow developing country India.
For home construction, a trio of choices for building materials would be mandatory. Modern Egyptian homes are built of concrete + heat-baked red clay bricks, and are influenced by European architecture. This is wrong, as those modern homes are costly, and uncomfortable and energy-wasting in winter and especially summer. Countryside homes and non-luxury apartment buildings would be built of good-looking, and remarkably solid, inexpensive, heat-insulating and environment-friendly compressed earth bricks, which are a mix of sun-baked clay (with no furnaces or energy expended), micro-pebbles, sand and lime.
The long-term solidity and durability of compressed earth bricks has been proven by the survival (for 600 years now, and in even hotter, rainier and more cyclone-prone conditions) of buildings up to 11 floors, made of the less solid simple mud bricks in the ancient walled city of Shibam, in southern Yemen. Meanwhile back in Egypt, ex-urban and luxury homes (suburban and ex-urban villas and apartments) would best be built of limestone or sandstone: both abundant, cost, heat and energy-efficient, durable and beautiful. Apartment buildings over three floors high would be built of a crushed plastic waste mixed with “geopolymer”, which is a modern, less costly and much more environment-friendly alternative to cement. The mix is very light, strong, durable, economic and heat-insulating.
Room height is another important factor in hot climates, as higher ceilings result in cooler, more comfortable rooms. Sadly in Egypt, ever-rising building material costs have forced builders to steadily lower ceilings for modern buildings everywhere: now averaging 330cm for luxury villas and 280cm for apartments, and urban congestion was wrongly met by a glut of apartment towers 20–30 floors high. Now, with less costly materials available and shorter buildings needed to curb stifling congestion (as outlined below), greater mandatory room heights of 380cm for luxury villas and 340cm elsewhere, along with efficient ceiling fans, would be feasible, cooling and energy-saving.
Other, new and old options are available for cooler homes. A plastic polymer (TPX), in parts of office/commercial buildings and upscale homes shielded from direct sunlight, would in summer absorb heat from inside and emit it outside; saving considerable air conditioning costs and waste heat being pumped outside. Another polymer (ETFE) would be perfect for windows, as it looks good, is clear, economic, dust and sound-proof, heat insulating, very light and hardy. It is a well-established German invention, manufactured there, while TPX is a recent Japanese invention. As with other useful technologies that we discuss, their inventors have intellectual property rights to be respected.
Egypt can invite all those firms to invest and manufacture in Egypt for the domestic market and to export, protect their copyrights, and recruit, train and employ qualified Egyptian engineers, managers, technicians and workers, subject to tight standards and quality control. Egypt is blessed with a strategic geographic location, very good trade relations with its export markets, and an abundant and cost-competitive workforce. Throughout many decades now, Egyptian employees have consistently proven themselves equal to the challenges and exacting standards of international high-technology firms. Another idea to reflect the summer heat would be mandating for all buildings a very bright white paint (a recent French invention), which reflects 95% of incoming heat and is dust-proof, and hence suits Egypt. The Nile Valley and Delta are quite dusty, which is why Egypt has long avoided heat-reflecting, white/light blue buildings as in North Africa, southern Spain and Greece. Inexpensive, heat-insulating foam layers can also be mandated for ceilings.
Finally are two cooling features of traditional Arab architecture adapted for Egyptian homes. Small balconies with Arabesque-style crisscross wooden windows are heat and cost-efficient and let in breeze and light, while blocking the harsh summer sun’s rays and giving home owners a feeling of privacy, space and being outdoors. More impressively, in winter they efficiently block harsh winds while letting in the now lower and milder daytime sun’s rays, giving needed warmth. This feature was common in old Egyptian homes but is very rare in modern ones. It merits a comeback, with modern, best-practice Moroccan expertise as needed.
The second feature is cooling domes for single-family homes. A dome, elevated from the rest of the ceiling, collects warmer air from below, while an elongated semi-circular vent, usually facing the cooler and breezier north, lets in a steady current of fresh and cooler air to replace it and ventilate the room or area below. This feature is absent from modern Egyptian homes, where it needs two modern adaptations: a durable, special-fiber screen with small holes to let in breeze while keeping out dust and insects, and an electricity-operated, sliding glass window, so as to open or shut the vent depending on the weather. The two Arab-design cooling features are now of increasing interest to western architects in hot countries, especially Spain, which is familiar with Arabesque-style balconies from the Moorish Civilization there (711–1492 AD).
Urban Planning
This too is important. For too long, Egypt’s building codes have been too lax, haphazard or not well-enforced. We start with building height codes, which must balance two competing needs: 1) House, employ and cater to people, especially in larger cities, and 2) Maintain neighborhood quality, curb stifling and heat-worsening congestion, and induce the immobile and risk-averse Egyptian people to efficiently develop, live in and utilize new, groundwater-rich and perfectly habitable areas outside the Nile Delta and Valley, where 95% of Egypt’s 101 million people are crowded on only 5% of its 1 million square kilometer area. Building heights should be capped at three floors for countryside, ex-urban and luxury homes, five for other housing and seven for office and commercial buildings. In the center of the main cities, the caps would be seven floors for housing and ten for office and commercial buildings.
Further climate-friendly goals can be met via urban planning. Smart electricity meters now already allow spacious single-family ex-urban homes, luxury suburban villas and well-funded firms and organizations to buy rooftop photovoltaic cell panels for solar power (paying in installments), meet their entire electricity consumption, and sell electricity to the national grid; thereby lessening costly and carbon dioxide-emitting power stations. This option is also feasible for residential apartment buildings, whose residents would need financial incentives to make such investment commitments. Nevertheless, the state would still save substantial funds despite paying such subsidies.
Urban planning can do more to keep cities green and uncongested. Egypt’s limited remaining urban villas in good condition need a demolition ban, to curb congestion and maintain upscale neighborhood quality. In new cities, streets with apartment buildings should be 20m wide, with trees in the middle. City trees are rare and badly needed in streets and near low-rise homes across the country, as well as replace useless and water-wasting grass gardens in luxury areas. For that purpose, the best trees are Spanish mahogany in the north, and Senegalese khaya further south. Both suit Egypt’s climate, are tall, beautiful, leafy and water-efficient, provide shade, abundant and top-quality wood, and purify and cool the air around them. To sum up, Egypt is perfectly capable of successfully mitigating climate change and becoming a role model for many countries with similar characteristics and challenges.
