Environmental Engineering: Masdar City—Engineering Community

At the time of writing, construction has begun on Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates. Masdar City is planned to be the world’s first carbon neutral and zero waste city. The city is being built from scratch with the aim of accommodating 50,000 permanent residents and 40,000 commuters. The project is an extremely bold move with many companies and research organizations involved and a budget reaching US$22 Billion. The city will use cutting edge technology to harness energy from solar, wind, geothermal, and hydrogen sources. There will also be a big focus on reusing wastewater. The result of all this technology means that landfills will be a thing of the past and the city’s contribution to atmospheric carbon dioxide will effectively be zero.

Masdar city is the current utopia for living in an environmentally friendly way, but what of the people who will live there? The obvious cost and risk associated with creating such a city will mean that residency will be limited to those who are either extremely wealthy or who are world leaders in their field of sustainable resource use. This may be acceptable for a time but with the current world economic crisis, and the fleetingness of money, what will happen to those who become less well off? What will happen to those who grow old and require constant care? Will such people still be deemed worthy to live in such a society that requires large investments of money and knowledge? While Jesus was on earth he spent the majority of his time with the type of people who would, no doubt, be considered not worthy to live or contribute to a society such as Masdar. Throughout the epistles we see people constantly called to remember the poor and outcasts of society. This leads to the question: does a city such as Masdar really honour God in its pursuit of environmental excellence? The prospect of such great engineering advancements coming out of a project like Masdar excites me as a young engineer. However, I am unconvinced that such pursuit of knowledge and wealth creation to minimise environmental impact alone, without regard to other aspects of society, is the best way forward.