Nuclear cleanup; non-nuclear cleanup; green infrastructure development; habitat restoration/enhancement; other environmental projects, including futuristic

19th and 20th Century visionaries foresaw the macro-engineering transformation of North Africa’s most arid landscape, the Sahara. Some of their imaginative views are reviewed, with the intent of promoting the early-21st Century construction of two complementary macroprojects: (1) a “Version –50 m Atlantropa” and (2) a “Version 50% Sahara Tent Greenbelt”. Pneumatic tenting of ~3.5 x 10 6 km 2 (approximately one-half) of Earth’s largest desert prototypes a late-21st Century containment of ~123 x 10 6 km 2 of Mars’s dry and frigid surface by a Homo sapiens-AI robot team of macroengineers.

Our suggestion is extend the successful existing as well as newly developed technologies of victims’ minimization during earthquake, flood or other catastrophic events trough a regional or even a global institutional system. The implementation of such system could give access to such technologies to the countries which are exposed to a high probability of such events. The earlier implementation of several preventive measures could lover the casualties and possible consequences of such events.

The proposed project aims to develop a global land and water management plan, to be elaborated at world, regional, national and local level. This plan will focus on reaching a situation in which water and land are used in an ecologically sustainable, socially equitable and economically feasible manner. In a second phase a program for implementation of the plan is envisaged, in the form of a range of large-scale projects, involving infra-structural development, hardware supply and knowledge management and transfer.

Global Forest Watch (GFW)---a project of the World Resources Institute---is the first-ever monitoring network to map out where logging, mining and other development threatens our last primary and old-growth forests. As part of this work, we track: which governments and companies are behind forest development; where these activities are in violation of environmental laws and regulations; and how logging and other activities impacts forests and local people dependent on them.

Modern agricultural development in Egypt started early in the 19 th century. At that time the population of the country was only 2.5 million. The cultivated area was about 2.5 million feddan (1.0 million hectare) and the cropping intensity was less than 100% (i.e land was cultivated with less than one crop per year).
        By the beginning of the 20 th century, and owing to the construction of the Delta Barrages, the cultivated area was raised to 5.0 million feddans and the cropping intensity to about 150%. However, the population was also increased to 10 million.
        As of today the Egyptian population is about 63 million (25 times as much as the population 200 years ago), the cultivated area is about 8.0 million feddan and the cropping intensity is almost 200%
        Obviously, the fast growing population is swallowing the modest increase in cultivated lands, which is constrained by the major factor; that is, water.

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