Heat is on 2022 FIFA World Cup host
Keeping soccer fans cool during the 2022 World Cup appears to be the least of Qatar’s concerns as it struggles with the effects of climate change
It was 46.7 C in the shade outside the new Al Janoub soccer stadium, and the air felt to air-conditioning expert Saud Ghani as if God had pointed “a giant hair dryer” at Qatar.
Yet inside the open-air stadium, a cool breeze was blowing. Beneath each of the 40,000 seats, small grates adorned with Arabic-style patterns were pushing out cool air at ankle level. And since cool air sinks, waves of it rolled gently down to the grassy playing field. Vents the size of soccer balls fed more cold air onto the field.
Ghani, an engineering professor at Qatar University, designed the system at Al Janoub, one of eight stadiums that the tiny but fabulously rich Qatar must get in shape for the 2022 World Cup. His breakthrough realization was that he had to cool only people, not the upper reaches of the stadium — a graceful structure designed by the famed Zaha Hadid Architects and inspired by traditional boats known as dhows.
Qatar, the world’s leading exporter of liquefied natural gas, may be able to cool its stadiums, but it cannot cool the entire country.
Fears that the hundreds of thousands of soccer fans might wilt or even die while shuttling between stadiums and metros and hotels in the unforgiving summer heat prompted the decision to delay the World Cup by five months. It is now scheduled for November, during Qatar’s milder winter.
The change in the World Cup date is a symptom of a larger problem — climate change.
Already one of the hottest places on Earth, Qatar has seen average temperatures rise more than 2 C above pre-industrial times, the current international goal for limiting the damage of global warming.
The 2015 Paris climate summit said it would be better to keep temperatures “well below” that, ideally to no more than 1.5 C.
Over the past three decades, temperature increases in Qatar have been accelerating. That’s because of the uneven nature of climate change as well as the surge in construction that drives local climate conditions around Doha, the capital. The temperatures are also rising because Qatar, slightly smaller than Connecticut, juts out from Saudi Arabia into the rapidly warming waters of the Persian Gulf.
“Qatar is one of the fastest warming areas of the world, at least outside of the Arctic,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate data scientist at Berkeley Earth, a non-profit temperature analysis group. “Changes there can help give us a sense of what the rest of the world can expect if we do not take action to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.”
While climate change inflicts suffering in the world’s poorest places from Somalia to Syria, from Guatemala to Bangladesh, in rich places such as the United States, Europe and Qatar global warming poses an engineering problem, not an existential one. And it can be addressed, at least temporarily, with gobs of money and a little technology.
To survive the summer heat, Qatar not only air-conditions its soccer stadiums, but also the outdoors — in markets, along sidewalks, even at outdoor malls so people can window shop with a cool breeze. “If you turn off air conditioners, it will be unbearable. You cannot function effectively,” says Yousef al-horr, founder of the Gulf Organization for Research and Development.
Yet outdoor air conditioning is part of a vicious cycle. Carbon emissions create global warming, which creates the desire for air conditioning, which creates the need for burning fuels that emit more carbon dioxide. In Qatar, total cooling capacity is expected to nearly double from 2016 to 2030, according to the International District Cooling & Heating Conference. And it’s going to get hotter. By the time average global warming hits 2 C or 3.6 F, Qatar’s temperatures would soar, said Mohammed Ayoub, senior research director at the Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute. In rapidly growing urban areas throughout the Middle East, some predict cities could become uninhabitable.
“We’re talking about four to six degrees Celsius increase in an area that already experiences high temperatures,” Ayoub said.
“So, what we’re looking at more is a question of how does this impact the health and productivity of the population.”
The danger is acute in Qatar because of the Persian Gulf humidity. The human body cools off when its sweat evaporates. But when humidity is very high, evaporation slows or stops.
“If it’s hot and humid and the relative humidity is close to 100 per cent, you can die from the heat you produce yourself,” said Jos Lelieveld, an atmospheric chemist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany who is an expert on Middle East climate.
For now, managing climate change in a place like Qatar is primarily a matter of money. And Qatar has plenty. Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund is worth about $320 billion. A few of its stakes include Harrods department store, London’s Canary Wharf, the Paris Saint-germain soccer club, the Citycenterdc office and residential development and a 10 per cent stake in the Empire State Building.
Qatar has used its riches to great effect at home, where 11 winners of the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize have built striking highrises and stadiums. The result is a strange combination of avant-garde architecture, oil wealth, Islamic conservatism, shopping malls and climate change that Qatari American artist Sophia al-maria has dubbed Gulf Futurism.
“With the coming global environmental collapse, to live completely indoors is like, the only way we’ll be able to survive. The Gulf ’s a prophecy of what’s to come,” she said in an interview in Dazed Digital, an online magazine covering fashion and culture.
So far, Qatar has maintained outdoor life through a vast expansion of outdoor air conditioning. In the restored Souq Waqif market, a maze of shops, restaurants and small hotels, three- to four-foothigh air-conditioning units blow cool air onto cafe customers. At a cost of $80 to $250 each depending on the quality, they are the only things that make outdoor dining possible in a place where overnight low temperatures in summer rarely dip below 32C.
Even Qatar’s small band of climate activists sympathize. Asked about the outdoor air conditioners, Neeshad Shafi, executive director of Arab Youth Climate Movement Qatar, said,
“That’s about survival. It’s too hot. That’s the reality.”
Qatar already has the distinction of being the largest per-capita emitter of greenhouse gases, according to the World Bank — nearly three times as much as the United States and almost six times as much as China.
Many Qataris believe that the World Bank’s accounting is misleading. Qatar’s huge exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) are burned by distant customers across the globe. The bank’s methodology charges Qatar for those emissions, rather than its fossil-fuel-gobbling customers.
Even so, Qatar emits a lot of greenhouse gases. About 60 per cent of the country’s electricity is used for cooling. By contrast, air conditioning accounts for barely 15 per cent of U.S. electricity demand and less than 10 per cent of China’s.
And higher temperatures combined with a growing population will mean greater energy demand, primarily for fossil fuels. While native Qataris number roughly 300,000, the number of foreign workers in Qatar has grown by a million just in the last decade, pushing the population to 2.7 million.
Qatar is adding natural gas capacity faster than it’s adding solar — and at low prices. The country’s new dairy farm, a natural candidate for solar power, uses 35 megawatts from the natural-gas-fired grid to keep the cows cool.
Moreover, solar power plans will be dwarfed by the government’s plans to expand LNG production by 43 per cent by 2024, adding 60 new tankers to its armada.
Scientists are wrestling with the question of why this small desert country and its rapidly industrializing capital have experienced such extraordinary rates of warming. Over the past five years, a large swath of the country measured more than 2 C warmer than during the pre-industrial era, according to data from Berkeley Earth. Abdulla al-mannai, director of the Qatar Meteorology Department, argued in emails to The Washington Post that the fast warming of Doha is being driven largely by urbanization, or what is known as the urban heat island effect, in which the dark surfaces of city streets and rooftops absorb solar radiation.
Mannai provided data showing that temperatures in the city of Doha have climbed by an astonishing 2.8 C since 1962. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA give lower figures, but ones that still reflect a major warming of 1.9 C in just over 50 years. And that is after an adjustment designed to take urbanization into account.
Mannai said international 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 increase 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, research 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 experienced a temperature spike from 1997 to 1999, a period punctuated by a major El Nino, 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.
Lelieveld, the atmospheric chemist in Germany, said the country is caught in a feedback loop. Though there are virtually no clouds or rain in Qatar, rising water temperatures in the Persian Gulf lead to more atmospheric humidity in certain months. That means there is more water vapour, 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,” said Lelieveld.
Ayoub, the climate research director, worries that some extreme weather events such as dust storms or rainstorms might be tied to climate change, too. And on Oct. 20 last year, as much as 98 millimetres of rain — 120 per cent 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 convenience; it would be essential to survival.
“I often get asked: ‘Can we reverse whatever is 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.”
Late last year, the government announced the World Cup would be carbon neutral. That means that for every mile flown from overseas, for every factory that produced construction materials, and for every air conditioner running overtime, there should be an offsetting reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
Qatar’s government said the carbon emissions will be smaller than those at other World Cup venues where stadiums were far apart. The distance between Qatar’s stadiums is never more than 56 kilometres and as close as five. Five of the eight stadiums will be connected to new metro lines still under construction. Both could trim spectators’ global travel.
Shafi, the climate activist and environmental engineer who comes from India, said the government is undercounting the cost of the World Cup, making it easier to become carbon neutral. Many big ticket infrastructure items are not being counted as World Cup projects because they are considered to be part of the country’s pre-existing 2030 building plan, he said.
That building program includes roughly $200 billion for metros, a new airport and roads.
The Supreme Committee for Delivery and 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.”
Bodour Mohammed al-meer, the manager for sustainability and environment at the Supreme Committee, said that the World Cup would also feature 8.6 million 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. The trust, like similar cap-and-trade mechanisms in Europe or California, would certify climate projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, he said. The reductions would then be packaged as credits 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, however, to the World Cup.
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 locally sourced materials and locally manufactured seats. “We looked at every aspect of how to minimize our carbon footprint.”
Now, Ghani is designing a covered open-air walkway so 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. The solar panels don’t provide enough power to run the cooling system. The plants are scraggly. And a stiff hot breeze is blowing through, rendering the cooling system ineffective.
Ghani said he is concerned about cooling the planet, but for now he would settle for cooling the pedestrian walkway. He hasn’t given up.
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.