Group CEO and Chief Architect of Arab Engineering Bureau, Ibrahim Mohamed Jaidah.
Qatar has taken steps in recent years to ensure regenerative development for a better future and reverse damage to the natural environment, said an expert at Qatar Foundation’s Education City Speaker series yesterday.
Group CEO and Chief Architect of Arab Engineering Bureau, Ibrahim Mohamed Jaidah, while speaking in a virtual discussion ‘Beyond Sustainability: Imagining A Regenerative Future’, said Qatar is working to build a better future. Along with international experts, Jaidah and the panel discussed how regenerative development could point the way toward a safe and prosperous planet.
“The amount of construction that has been done in the last 20 to 25 years is more than the last 100 years – there has been tremendous growth. But we are fortunate as we have recognised in the last decade or so that we have over-consumed our part of the earth,” said Jaidah.
“With the steps, we have taken, in the last 10 to 15 years, we have started to recover, to regenerate. For example, in the last three years, Qatar has increased food security by 400 percent. If we continue this way, we’ll be self-sufficient in just a handful of years,” he added. Jaidah highlighted the upcoming FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022, the infrastructure, sustainability, and stadiums’ legacy.
“How are we going to continue living with these buildings, to rehabilitate them, for people to make use of them? Here, we had to show plans to rehabilitate the buildings after the World Cup for every design and as part of the competition. And we had to look at the bigger picture because the stadiums are going to form part of our society, they’ll become parks, medical facilities, education institutes,” said Jaidah.
Regenerative Development is a development paradigm designed to push beyond sustainability.
The discussion also looked at regenerative development’s roots in indigenous culture, where and how it is already being embraced, what it can make possible, and how it can be applied in different cultural contexts. The session was moderated by Director of the World Cup Master Program at Qatar Foundation, Jason Twill.
Principal of US-based Regenesis Group, Bill Reed.
“We can’t really save the world, the world is too abstract – it’s too big... but what we can do is save the world place by place,” said a planning consultant and sustainability and regeneration expert who is the Principal of US-based Regenesis Group, Bill Reed.
“By getting everybody engaged and working towards the health of a larger system, it is remarkable what happens. People begin to work together in ways that they would have never worked together,” he added.
Dr. Anne Poelina, Chair of the Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council in Western Australia
The Education City Speaker Series event also heard from indigenous community leader Dr. Anne Poelina, Chair of the Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council in Western Australia, whose work focuses on environmental and cultural protection issues.
“We need to be clever. We need to be innovative. We need to bring a wide range of collective wisdom into how we start to look at how we learn and unlearn,” she said.
“We must come into the world and see ourselves as people who protect the commons for the greater common good rather than the predatory elite for the good of a few,” she added.
