Abdulkarim Hasan Rashed

By Abdulkarim Hasan Rashed

Urban areas—cities—are not simply geographic areas for human gathering but are a locus of economic production, cultural and social interactions, and ecological development. Therefore, cities create positive development values when planned and managed on a sustainable footing by considering institutional, governance, environmental, political, economic, coherent policies, cultural, and social conditions and requirements. Sustainable urbanization has multiple benefits including creating more employment opportunities and better incomes, hubs for innovative solutions by attracting competencies, enhancing land utilization efficiency, improving infrastructural performance, providing better services (e.g., education, health, water supply, and electricity), economic growth hub, acting as knowledge centers, better social and cultural life, and providing better living standards. While the impacts of rapid unsustainable urbanization are water stress, scarcity, and high consumption, sanitation wastewater, water pollution, air pollution, climate change, noise pollution, cultivated land depleted, urban sprawl, dust, solid and hazardous wastes, destruction of biodiversity, high energy consumption, traffic congestion, soil pollution, and deforestation. Thus, the 2030 Agenda1 for Sustainable Development—and its sustainable development goals (SDGs)—and New Urban Agenda are key transformative power toward sustainable urbanization development; this development is not at the expense of the environment while leading to prosperity and improving quality of life.

Part of the book: Sustainable Regional Planning

By Abdulkarim Hasan Rashed

The sustainable development goals (SDGs) constitute an opportunity to engage the industrial sector to enhance its role in preserving the environment. The industrial sector has an essential role in economic growth, job creation, innovations, and sustainability. No matter the scale of the industry, it is small or large; thus, all companies can contribute to the SDGs toward a better future. Pollution problems are the root cause that hinders attain sustainable development in the industrial sectors. Thus, global challenges are climate change, water pollution and scarcity, air pollution, and resource depletion needs to be tackled collaboratively, and the industrial sector can contribute to the solution through pollution control and sustainable innovations. In the rapid transformations of business models and systems for the future and the fourth industrial revolution, the industrial sector has a crucial role; without it cannot save the environment and improve the economy and human health. To transform the current industrial systems toward a more feasible eco-friendly needs significant cooperation and coordination among concerned stakeholders. To do so, firstly, industries need to adjust their strategies and plans to be consistent and coherent to start the transformation process toward sustainable industrial development.

Part of the book: Advances and Challenges in Hazardous Waste Management

By Abdulkarim Hasan Rashed

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the New Urban Agenda (NUA) form significant ambitions towards a sustainable and better human future. The sustainable development goals (SDGs) have a deep-rooted urban dimension, as exemplified in Goal 11, which intends to make cities inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable, and around 23% of the SDG indicators have a clear urban component. That is forming a window of opportunity to integrate both Agendas towards sustainable urbanization and improving the quality of life in urban agglomerations. Both Agendas should be functioning jointly towards contributing to improving the quality of life and providing all essential life services and needs. Thus, the integration approach is the best pathway to synergy aims of both Agendas to tackle the challenges and formulate a coherent interlinkage in the thematic areas. Consequently, urbanization and sustainable urban agglomeration development need a strong Agenda and implementation framework to tackle the environmental, social, and economic challenges of urban agglomerations. Therefore, the big lesson distillery from both Agendas is to localize the SDGs in the urban agglomerations to attain sustainability at a broad scope. Overall, the integrated approach to urban sustainability covers all sustainability aspects and the correlations among sustainability dimensions in both Agendas.

Part of the book: Urban Agglomeration - Extracting Lessons for Sustainable Development [Working title]