Cities are growing faster in Africa than anywhere else. In fact, the continent's urban population has doubled in the last 20 years. The African Green City Index compares how major cities are managing.
What Resource Use Says about Africa's Economy
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Four out of every ten people in Africa live in cities, and this figure is expected to hit 50 percent by 2035. One of the world’s fastest-growing cities — it may well double its current population of three million by 2020 — is Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. Such growth would put a tremendous burden even on cities in industrialized countries; but in Africa, which tends to lack financial resources and expertise, it can be a special challenge to provide all urban residents with electricity, water, and housing. So it’s not surprising that two thirds of the people in cities like Dar es Salaam, Maputo, Lagos, and Luanda live in shantytowns, where environmental protection isn’t the top priority. Nicholas You, an expert on sustainable urban development based in Nairobi, says this has to change. “Green guidelines aren’t something that would be nice to have in Africa; without them, there will be no sustainable development on the continent,” he says.
The African Green City Index outlines the specific sustainability challenges Africa faces, as well as the continent’s strengths. The final report was presented at the 2011 Climate Summit in Durban. Siemens commissioned the Economist Intelligence Unit to examine 15 cities in Africa for the study. The South African cities of Durban, Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Pretoria did well in the index, largely because of their extensive environmental protection efforts. Cape Town, for example, has introduced a program for energy efficiency and climate protection and has launched 130 individual projects designed to achieve reductions in electricity use, among other things. Plans call for 300,000 solar-powered boilers to be installed in the city over the next few years; and a wind farm that entered service in 2008 feeds clean energy into the country’s national grid. Still, coal remains South Africa’s primary energy source for generating electricity.
The index also showed that the strengths and weaknesses of South African cities are similar to what’s found in the West. Waste disposal and clean drinking water aren’t major issues, but per capita electricity use, water consumption, and waste production are skyrocketing. The main objectives for the future are therefore to use available resources more efficiently, develop alternatives to fossil fuels, and step up recycling efforts.
Several cities in northern Africa also performed well in the index — Alexandria, Casablanca, Cairo, and Tunis, for example. UN Habitat reports that these cities have succeeded in supplying almost all of their households with clean drinking water and electricity and have relatively good transport infrastructures, although Cairo is the only one of the 15 cities studied that has a subway.
On the other hand, sub-Saharan cities (Accra, Addis Abeba, Dar es Salaam, Lagos, Luanda, Maputo, and Nairobi) face huge problems. These cities’ efforts to quickly meet their populations’ basic needs conflict with long-term goals that could include improved environmental protection.
Lagos, for its part, has shown what can be accomplished even when municipal budgets are tight. Until recently, the city’s outskirts were dotted with huge piles of garbage. A newly established agency for waste management then took matters into its own hands, and as a result around 10 percent of the waste in Lagos is now recycled. About 30 tons of plastic waste is used to make shopping bags and similar products every day, for example, and plans call for the volume of recycled waste to be almost tripled by 2015.