Hurricane Laura’s center made landfall 10 miles east of here near tiny Cameron, Louisiana, with winds estimated at 150 mph, and demolished nearly everything in its path. The small travel trailer and outdoor shower he rented to tourists – nicknamed “The Runes” – was nowhere to be seen. His stomach churned as he scanned the homes swept from their foundations, crumpled trailers, RVs flipped like toy cars and power poles snapped in half. – Robert Eggert drove up to this battered seaside town early Thursday and nearly lost his breakfast. The researchers consider that addressing the potential for urine recycling would be a worthwhile follow-up to this study.Watch Video: Hurricane Laura destroys homes, buildings in Louisiana This would improve regional food provision and reduce sanitation-induced urban water pollution, making urban systems more sustainable. Urine collection initiatives to enable its use as a fertilizer would make urban systems more independent and resilient. Urine is therefore the main source of nitrogen loss. Existing reports so far provided only partial, sectoral assessments, focusing either on waste management, on sanitation, or on agriculture, while this study showed that nitrogen losses through sanitation and waste management largely exceeded other waste-contained nitrogen flows in these cities. The study provided the first overview of waste-contained nitrogen flows in sub-Saharan cities. Their respective results may thus be considered an approximate illustration of a development trajectory. However, it could well evolve towards a situation similar to that of Ouagadougou: a large nitrogen sink with no significant city-hinterland recycling.Īlthough of contrasting size, currently around 400,000 and 2,800,000 inhabitants respectively, these two cities evolve in highly similar biophysical, climatic, agricultural and socioeconomic settings. The study showed that Maradi was a nitrogen sink, albeit at the heart of a still relatively sustainable urban food system. The fact of focusing on the nitrogen in waste rather than on waste flows themselves enabled a systemic understanding useful to the local authorities. The method was applied to nitrogen in Maradi and Ouagadougou, to determine whether and to what extent those city regions could progress towards sustainable urban food systems. Based on that analysis, the researchers focused on the origin and fate of those nutrient-containing waste flows. Their approach distinguished four nested spatial levels: the urban area the potential territorial recycling system the country and the international level. To give the authorities a cross-sectoral view of a city's nutrient sink status, the researchers identified and analyzed a range of waste flows. This runs counter to The UN Sustainable Development Goal 11, which aims to "make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable." Those sinks, and the degradation and draining of nutrients in hinterlands, have significant environmental and health impacts. Fast-growing cities constitute nutrient sinks relying on nutrient-poor hinterlands. Collecting that urine could provide valuable fertilizer suitable for local agricultural use, and thus serve to make city region food systems more sustainable.Ĭurrent urban development trajectories in sub-Saharan Africa are not sustainable. The study was a first, and showed that urine was the main source of nitrogen losses. For their study, the researchers analyzed nitrogen flows in waste in two sub-Saharan cities: Maradi (Niger) and Ouagadougou.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |