Climate change and strategic low-carbon planning in African cities after COVID-19: inclusiveness or chaos?

Cities in sub-Saharan African countries are feeling the impact of climate change with an increase in climate refugees and they have to deal with more intense flooding, land degradation and erosion, droughts, and heatwaves affecting in particular the poor living in informal settlements. Strategies on how to adapt and move to more resilient cities are being designed. But the question is how this transition can be done while municipalities in sub-Saharan Africa are facing difficulties coping with demographic growth, budget scarcity, and poor governance. Most local authorities in sub-Saharan Africa have consistently failed to address the fundamental basic needs of communities, even before the current acute environmental crisis. This paper analyses the persistent urban planning bias preventing transition to sustainability, emerging alternative strategic options promoting resilience and inclusivity while moving toward low-carbon cities, and how the discourse on post-COVID cities is relevant to the context of urban Africa

Inclusive Urban Planning – Promoting Equality and Inclusivity in Urban Planning Practices

Number of challenges exists to encouraging sustainability in urbanisation in the developing world. A common approach over the last 30 years, has been to focus on a “growth-first” plan for development, particularly in new urban areas. This entails encouraging the greatest amount of economic growth through country-level and local planning practices. In theory, growth-first development planning leads to a relatively equitable urban society, however in practice due to policy decisions and externalities, this has not been the case. Inclusive urbanisation seeks to address issues in access to urban services and the equitability of the urban socio-economic structure through ensuring that all participants have access to the same level of services and opportunities as each other. Most often this manifests through ensuring that rights for marginalised or previously-excluded groups, such as women and children, migrant workers or refugees, are accounted for in planning policies, and plans that may exclude these groups are modified to accommodate them equally

Informal Settlements - Electrification and Urban Services

Urban populations in Sub-Saharan Africa are forecast to grow at a high rate in the coming decades. Housing and urban services development is failing to keep up with the rapid urbanisation of Sub-Saharan Africa, and as such informal settlement development is rapidly increasing: providing urban services to these informal settlements is an issue that needs solutions at a local level. Informal settlements are generally defined as those without a formal right of land to the location in which they are situated. However, this does not mean that informal settlements cannot be fixtures of the urban landscape, with some “slum” areas of cities such as Mumbai having endured for over 60 years. Servicing these informal settlements can be challenging: lasting legacies of large-scale informal electricity connections and electricity theft leaves local electricity authorities ill-disposed to formalise these areas, and structural difficulties such as geography and urban form can hamper efforts to formalise other urban services. This concept note aims to introduce the main themes around the issue of informal settlement development in the developing world, with a particular focus on electrification and informal settlements, and providing other formal urban services such as water and sanitation. Formalisation of informal settlements, bringing them within the sphere of formal urban services by the municipality, is also discussed, as are a number of case studies from varied developing world contexts

Waste Management - Innovative Solutions for African Municipalities

The management of solid waste in developing countries is an emerging critical issue. With consumption rising in developing areas of the world, and urbanisation continuing at a rapid pace, the sustainable management of waste and re-utilisation of waste as a resource are both important challenges and research areas in the development sphere. This policy brief, produced by the DFID/DECC/EPSRC-funded SAMSET (Supporting African Municipalities in Sustainable Energy Transitions) Project, aims to address the main issues surrounding the sustainable management of municipal waste, and propose elements of policy recommendations and local-government-level solutions for improving the sustainability of urban waste management. This policy brief focuses on Sub-Saharan African contexts, where rapid urbanisation is arguably posing the greatest challenges, but offers cross-cutting lessons and best practices for urban waste management in a number of developing country contexts

Gender and Inclusive Urbanisation

Traditional urban planning practices for urban development in the developing world often fail to take into account the specific ways in which decisions on a policy level, as well as in implementation, can disadvantage women and girls in urban areas. The dimensions of gender in urban planning are an area that has been underrepresented in the literature on urban planning practices, although in the last decade some attention has been given on how to tailor urban planning practices to be more inclusive across genders. Women can be adversely affected by urban planning in a number of ways, both physical and socio-political. Transport access, access to sanitation and water, and access to clean energy are all areas where traditional methods of urban planning for development leave women and girls at a disadvantage

Work, food, rent, television: The role of lifestyles and experiences on household energy behaviour in rural Lagos, Nigeria

Human engagement with modern energy services is foundational to social and economic welfare, as is their disengagement with welfare inhibiting traditional energy services. With modern energy access often leading to the stacked use of modern and traditional energy services, there is a need to understand the drivers and determinants of the energy decision-making of the energy poor. This study draws on 83 semi-structured in-depth interviews with 67 energy poor households in rural Lagos to explore what their lived realities reveal about the nature of their energy decision-making. We observe three important drivers behind household decision to consistently engage with a fuel-technology combination in practice: their organisation of daily life and by extension their vocational activity, the urgency of operating the service, and experience with and exposure to an energy service. Findings suggest that if traditional energy services are to be displaced, then in addition to using modern energy services to develop people’s lives, we need to develop people’s lives to use modern energy services

A review of stakeholders and interventions in Nigeria's electricity sector

In this paper, we explored the interplay between the electricity market structure, methods of electricity trading and different stakeholder dynamics within the Nigerian Electricity Supply Industry (NESI) with a view to understanding how these interplays impact on various forms of interventions in the Nigerian electricity sector. We started off by exploring the market structure and electricity trading system within the Nigerian electricity sector and reviewed the various stakeholder groups within centralized and decentralized electricity systems in Nigeria's electricity sector by highlighting their core responsibilities and the dynamics at play in satisfying their interests. This study revealed that: (1) external stakeholder groups (such as donor agencies and multi-lateral organizations) exert more influence in Nigeria's electricity sector through financial interventions; (2) lack of coordination and engagement among various stakeholder groups pose a challenge to effective electricity infrastructure interventions that address the needs of people in society. The study concludes by highlighting the implications of these challenges and the need to address the rising complexities and uncertainties for better stakeholder involvement in addressing the salient challenges in the sector

Modeling of Nitrous Oxide Production from Nitritation Reactors Treating Real Anaerobic Digestion Liquor.

In this work, a mathematical model including both ammonium oxidizing bacteria (AOB) and heterotrophic bacteria (HB) is constructed to predict N2O production from the nitritation systems receiving the real anaerobic digestion liquor. This is for the first time that N2O production from such systems was modeled considering both AOB and HB. The model was calibrated and validated using experimental data from both lab- and pilot-scale nitritation reactors. The model predictions matched the dynamic N2O, ammonium, nitrite and chemical oxygen demand data well, supporting the capability of the model. Modeling results indicated that HB are the dominant contributor to N2O production in the above systems with the dissolved oxygen (DO) concentration of 0.5-1.0 mg O2/L, accounting for approximately 75% of N2O production. The modeling results also suggested that the contribution of HB to N2O production decreased with the increasing DO concentrations, from 75% at DO = 0.5 mg O2/L to 25% at DO = 7.0 mg O2/L, with a corresponding increase of the AOB contribution (from 25% to 75%). Similar to HB, the total N2O production rate also decreased dramatically from 0.65 to 0.25 mg N/L/h when DO concentration increased from 0.5 to 7.0 mg O2/L

New polymer coating to visualize surgical mesh by MRI

International audienc

New magnetic-resonance-imaging-visible poly(epsilon-caprolactone)-based polyester for biomedical applications

A great deal of effort has been made since the 1990s to enlarge the field of magnetic resonance imaging. Better tissue contrast, more biocompatible contrast agents and the absence of any radiation for the patient are some of the many advantages of using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) rather than X-ray technology. But implantable medical devices cannot be visualized by conventional MRI and a tool therefore needs to be developed to rectify this. The synthesis of a new MRI-visible degradable polymer is described by grafting an MR contrast agent (DTPA-Gd) to a non-water-soluble, biocompatible and degradable poly(epsilon-caprolactone) (PCL). The substitution degree, calculated by H-1 nuclear magnetic resonance and inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry, is close to 0.5% and proves to be sufficient to provide a strong and clear T1 contrast enhancement. This new MRI-visible polymer was coated onto a commercial mesh for tissue reinforcement using an airbrush system and enabled in vitro MR visualization of the mesh for at least 1 year. A stability study of the DTPA-Gd-PCL chelate in phosphate-buffered saline showed that a very low amount of gadolinium was released into the medium over 52 weeks, guaranteeing the safety of the device. This study shows that this new MRI-visible polymer has great potential for the MR visualization of implantable medical devices and therefore the post-operative management of patients. (C) 2011 Acta Materialia Inc. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved