A18 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, OCTOBER 20 , 2019
and environment at the Supreme
Committee, said that the World
Cup would also feature 8.6 mil-
lion square feet of landscaping.
But one important method for
getting to carbon neutral is for
the Supreme Committee to buy
credits using the Global Carbon
Trust set up by Horr. The trust,
like similar cap-and-trade mech-
anisms in Europe or California,
would certify climate projects
that reduce greenhouse gas emis-
sions, he said. The reductions
would then be packaged as cred-
its that can be sold to companies,
organizations or governments in
the region that have failed to
meet targets and need to offset
carbon emissions. The higher the
price, the more likely companies
will address their own emissions
rather than buy others’.
That climate-consciousness
has been largely limited, howev-
er, to the World Cup.
In its submission to the Paris
climate conference in 2015,
where many countries volun-
teered specific targets for cutting
emissions, Qatar demurred and
said that it has been “blessed
with oil and gas resources that
are being used to overcome the
living difficulty on this land.”
The government acknowl-
edged that “ecological and hu-
man systems are vulnerable to
the adverse impact of climate
change,” but it said only that it
would seek “to strike a balance
between development needs and
environmental protection.”
Then on Oct. 9, Qatar Petro-
leum announced that it would
construct a facility to capture
and store 5 million tons of car-
bon from the company’s lique-
fied natural gas operations by- The facility, which will
eventually have a 2.1 million-ton-
per-year capacity, would be big-
ger than all but two worldwide,
said Pavel Molchanov, a senior
analyst at the investment firm
Raymond James.
Along Doha’s Corniche, cli-
mate seems like a pressing issue.
Every week, thousands upon
thousands of foreign workers
gather to stroll, eat, lie on a strip
of grass and dance on docked
traditional boats.
Zahir Ahmmed Ali Ahmmed,
48, comes from Bangladesh and
has spent 19 years abroad work-
ing mostly for a refrigeration
company in Saudi Arabia. He’s
hoping to find work here, where
most low-skilled foreign workers
make $30 0 to $425 a month.
While h e looks, he is staying with
friends, four of whom share a
room with him.
Ahmmed is aware of climate
change. Back in Bangladesh,
where his wife and three sons
live, farmers waited for rains this
year before planting. And they
waited. And waited. But the rain
didn’t come. He blames climate
change.
“The change of seasons back
home, it isn’t how it used to be,”
he said.
Now, in Qatar, he says he
glances every day at t he tempera-
tures back in Saudi Arabia.
Qatar, he said, is much hotter.
As the sun began to set one
afternoon outside the Khalifa
International Stadium, Ghani,
the cooling expert, was trying to
make sure that in the meantime
Qataris can take refuge in air-
conditioned places, even if they
are outside.
“Yes, we are very concerned
about climate change,” he said,
noting that the projects use lo-
cally sourced materials and lo-
cally manufactured seats. “We
looked at every aspect of how to
minimize our carbon footprint.”
The Al Janoub stadium is a
point of pride. He built a 92-by-
92-foot building next door to
store cool water at night. That is
piped during the day into the
stadium, which extracts the cold
through heat exchangers. There
are intake returns in the floor, so
the equipment is re-cooling air
from inside the already cooled
stadium and isn’t sucking in
sweltering air from outside.
When the first game was played
at 10:45 p.m. in May, the system
worked well.
Now, Ghani is designing a
covered open-air walkway so
that spectators don’t expire from
heat on the way to and from the
parking lot or metro.
Outside Khalifa International
Stadium, whose cooling system
he also designed, Ghani looked at
two prototypes. Each features
cooling vents, hanging plants
and curved solar panels.
So far, Ghani said, the design
still needs work. T he s olar panels
don’t provide enough power to
run the cooling system. The
plants are scraggly. And, worst of
all, a stiff hot breeze is blowing
through, rendering the cooling
system ineffective. “Wind is your
biggest enemy,” he said.
Ghani said he is concerned
about cooling the planet, but for
now he’d settle for cooling the
pedestrian walkway. He hasn’t
given up.
[email protected]
Chris Mooney and John Muyskens in
Washington contributed to this
report.venues where stadiums were far
apart or even spread across dif-
ferent countries. The distance
between Qatar’s stadiums is nev-
er more than 35 miles and as
close as three. Five of the eight
stadiums will be connected to
new metro lines still under con-
struction. Both could trim spec-
tators’ global travel, which ac-
counted for about 57 percent of
the carbon emissions at the
games in Russia.
Shafi, the climate activist and
environmental engineer who
comes from India, says that the
government is undercounting
the cost of the World Cup, mak-
ing it easier to become carbon
neutral. Many big-ticket infra-
structure items are not being
counted as World Cup projects
because they are considered to
be part of the country’s preexist-
ing 2030 building plan, he said.
That building program in-
cludes roughly $200 billion for
metros, a new airport and roads.
The Supreme Committee for
Delivery & Legacy, responsible
for the World Cup preparations,
said its budget for stadiums and
training sites would come to
about $7 billion. A committee
official, who was not authorized
to speak for the committee, said
other developments were “not a
direct result of the tournament
coming here.”
The government recently un-
veiled a plan to plant 1 million
trees in Qatar. Shafi calls it
“unrealistic” and said, “10 sap-
lings are planted by VIPs and
then they go home.”
Nevertheless, the c ommittee is
pushing ahead. It says it will
rebuild one stadium using con-
struction waste for 88 percent of
its materials. Another will be
made of shipping containers and
modular steel components so it
can b e broken down and sent t o a
country that needs stadiums
more than Qatar will after the
games. Thousands of seats at
other stadiums can be relocated,
too.
“We don’t want to be left with
white elephants,” said the com-
mittee official. “They will be very
easy to undo and take apart.”
Ghani said “like Lego.”
Bodour Mohammed al-Meer,
the manager for sustainabilityhigh-end bit of urban planning
known as the Msheireb. The
development’s walkways and
streets point north to take ad-
vantage of breezes that come
from that direction. Cylindrical
pillars will blow cool air in an
open courtyard featuring water
fountains and a sun-blocking
canopy can be closed on windy
days.
The development has 6,40 0
solar panels that will generate
4 percent of the development’s
energy.
At the Gulf Organization for
Research and Development,
Horr, the environmentalist who
heads the group, is developing
regional building quality stan-
dards that he hopes will bring
about far-reaching change.
Some of the early high-rises —
such as the 80 2-foot Palm Towers
— used glass to clothe their
exteriors, allowing more heat
inside. New regulations limit
glass to no more than 40 percent
of a building’s exterior, says Has-
san Sultan, a member of the
Qatar branch of the American
Society of Heating, Refrigeration
and Air-Conditioning Engineers.
“When two-thirds of your elec-
tricity goes to air conditioning,
unless you manage this part all
your other measures are minor,”
Horr said.A carbon-neutral Cup?
Late last year, the government
announced that the World Cup
would be carbon neutral. That
means that for every mile flown
from overseas, for every mile
driven between venues, for every
factory that produced construc-
tion materials, and for every air
conditioner running overtime,
there should be an offsetting
reduction in greenhouse gas
emissions.
Qatar’s government says the
carbon emissions will be smaller
than those at other World Cupbe tied to climate change, too.
And on Oct. 20 last year, as much
as 98 millimeters (3.9 inches) of
rain — 120 percent of the annual
average and 25 times as much as
the average October — fell in just
four hours. The freak storm
flooded homes and roads.
“It is an outlier,” Ayoub said.
“The question is: Is it part of a
trend?”
In the Middle East, concerns
are rising that the combination
of heat and humidity will one day
exceed the capacity of humans to
tolerate the outdoors. In such
conditions, air conditioning
would no longer be a conven-
ience; it would be essential to
survival.
“I often get asked: ‘Can we
reverse whatever i s happening in
the climate?’ ” Mannai said in an
email. “I ask: Can you turn off air
conditioning and refrigeration
and stop using cars? Nobody will
say yes.”Surrender or action
Mannai advises “adapting to
the new norm,” which carries a
dual meaning. It is in one sense a
surrender, a realization that
there is little to be done about the
vast s tore of carbon i n the atmos-
phere. Ye t it also means that in
finite u rban localities, it m ight b e
possible to moderate tempera-
tures.
In August, Qatar’s Public
Works Authority paved over a
200 -meter stretch of road near
the souq with layers of bright
blue material designed b y a Japa-
nese company. Unlike asphalt,
the material reflects much of the
sun’s radiation. Temperature
readings dropped by as much as
12 degrees to a mere 136 .4 de-
grees Fahrenheit (58 Celsius).
A short walk away, the Qatar
Foundation — a progressive or-
ganization set up by Sheikha
Moza bint Nasser, the current
emir’s mother — is overseeing aresearch shows — one telltale
sign of urban-driven factors.
But there is also evidence that
Doha is warming because of
climate change. Its temperatures
are in sync with other places in
the Middle East and Persian
Gulf, including nonurban areas,
studies show.
Many of these countries expe-
rienced a temperature spike
from 1997 to 1999, a period
punctuated by a major El Niño, a
periodic warming that starts in
the Pacific Ocean and affects the
entire planet. At the time, 1998
was the warmest year on record.
But temperatures didn’t come
back down again, suggesting a
climatic change, not a limited
urban one.
The Qatar Peninsula is also
exposed to warming seas. One
recent study, for instance, found
that between 1982 and 2015, sea
surface temperatures across the
shallow Persian Gulf and Gulf of
Oman jumped by about 1 degree
Celsius (1.8 Fahrenheit), far
above global readings. During
July, the average sea surface
temperature reaches 32. 4 de-
grees Celsius (90.3 Fahrenheit).
Lelieveld, the atmospheric
chemist in Germany, says the
country is caught in a feedback
loop. Though there are virtually
no clouds or rain in Qatar, rising
water temperatures in the Per-
sian Gulf lead to more atmos-
pheric humidity in certain
months. That means there is
more water vapor, which is a
greenhouse gas and contributes
to yet more warming.
“The story is that these areas
are warming faster than the rest
of the globe, and in certain cities
on top of that you have an urban
heat island effect and urban
pollution,” s aid Lelieveld.
Ayoub, the climate research
director, worries that some ex-
treme weather events such as
dust storms or rainstorms mightheat.
Moreover, solar power plans
will be dwarfed by the govern-
ment’s plans to expand LNG
production by 43 percent by
202 4, adding 60 new tankers to
its armada.
‘Can we reverse
whatever is happening?’
Scientists are wrestling with
the question of why this small
desert country and its rapidly
industrializing capital have ex-
perienced such extraordinary
rates of warming. Over the past
five years, a large swath of the
country measured more than
2 degrees Celsius warmer than
during the preindustrial era, ac-
cording to data from Berkeley
Earth.
Abdulla al-Mannai, director of
the Qatar Meteorology Depart-
ment, argued in emails to The
Washington Post that the fast
warming of Doha is being driven
largely by urbanization, or what
is known a s the u rban heat island
effect, in which the dark surfaces
of city streets and rooftops ab-
sorb solar radiation.
Mannai provided data show-
ing that temperatures in the city
of Doha have climbed by an
astonishing 2.8 degrees Celsius
(5.1 Fahrenheit) since 1962. The
National Oceanic and Atmos-
pheric Administration and N ASA
give lower figures, but ones that
still reflect a major warming of
1.9 degrees Celsius (3.4 Fahren-
heit) in just over 50 years. And
that is after an adjustment that is
designed to take urbanization
into account.
Mannai said that internation-
al experts rely too heavily on
temperature readings at the
Doha airport, which he said is
susceptible to urban warming.
The Doha airport temperature
records are the nation’s most
complete, but other monitoring
stations around the country
show less warming, he wrote.
“Even though there is an in-
crease in temperature, it is far
less than in industrial countries,”
Mannai wrote.
Urban heat islands can indeed
drive temperature increases.
Doha is warming faster at night,
QATAR FROM A
PHOTOS BY SALWAN GEORGES/THE WASHINGTON POSTTOP: The cooling units stored along a street at the outdoor Souq Waqif market in Doha help to ease the stifling evening heat. ABOVE: Fans equipped with misters blow moist
air on evening diners while they are seated close to the units. Overnight lows in the city rarely dip below 90 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer.
Source: Berkeley Earth JOHN MUYSKENS/THE WASHINGTON POSTChinaMiddle EastUnited StatesEuropean UnionIndiaThe carbon cost of cooling
Emissions from space cooling,
including air conditioning, fans and
dehumidification, could double by
2050 if climate policies aren’t
strengthened.2 billion tons of CO1.10.1990 2016 2050Rest of the world“I often get asked: ‘Can we reverse whatever is happening in the
climate?’ I ask: Can you turn off air conditioning and refrigeration and
stop using cars? Nobody will say yes.”
Abdulla al-Mannai, director of the Qatar Meteorology Department, in an email