In our video we're going to talk about urban environment, from the perspective of risks as well as the issue of environmental deterioration. To address this, we will talk about households, neighborhoods, cities, countryside, from the small scale to the large scale. What is the risk when it comes to households? The three main problems they are faced with are water and sanitation problems, the issue of air pollution within houses and the problem of household waste. The severity of these problems may be explained by the generally unsanitary and dense life environment, as basic infrastructure is lacking and authorities are not very active about these household environmental risks. An example here: Nouakchott. It is the shabby neighborhood of El Mina, the Kebbe of El Mina after a rainfall. The risks inherent to underprivileged neighborhoods are: the lack of sanitation systems, natural disasters (most of the time, the areas that are built should not have been built) and there is the unchecked production of toxic waste from informal activities. An example here, the niais of Dakar where we see that natural sites are also dump sites, with waste and garbage, and the point is that this waste and garbage create a backfill. The risk at city level. There are four major environmental problems at city level. Water pollution. The whole water cycle, we may say: supply, treatment, the issue of surface waters and water tables which are increasingly polluted. The management of solid and industrial waste. More than half of the waste is left on-site. Natural disasters of course: hurricanes, storms, earthquakes, the increase in heavy rains, and industrial accidents and the storage of industrial waste as in Abidjan some years ago. Finally, there is air pollution: the release or dumping without any treatment, of heavy metals or carcinogenic residues. This is the classic pollution that can be found in all cities. But here, there is not treatment on the production of this pollution. Finally, the risk for the surrounding countryside or the hinterland as we like to call it. The environmental nuisances generated by a city have an impact on a regional scale. It implies over exploitation of natural resources, water, wood used for construction, fish, you name it. An unplanned urban sprawl of some neighborhoods on good arable agricultural lands. Different forms of pollution, as we have already mentioned. And here we have an example, in Nouakchott, of a carcass, it's a donkey that died and was left like this lying on the street. These are sanitary and environmental problems which are extremely important and yet not managed at all. Another example, in another city, where we find, in the very center of the city, in a little pit used to dump waste. We have now covered the household, the neighborhood, the city, the countryside. Now, let's talk about some cross-cutting factors of deterioration. We may want to mention the lack of awareness and the weak involvement of civil society, the relationship with waste and finally the fact that this waste management really belongs to no one. Or at least, this is what people think. Legal loopholes and overlapping institutional jurisdictions. Obsolete property regulation which is inadequate with a rational use of natural resources. Exclusively sectoral approaches and implementations which do not allow to take into account all aspects. Weak institutional capacity when it comes to environmental management. And finally, failing urban planning, since it only rarely takes into account the questions of the environment. Here we have, in just a few strokes, a few elements both about the risks and the systems of environmental deterioration We will have the opportunity to come back to it later, but for now we will stop here as a first introduction on urban environment issues.
