Panayiotis Charalambous
My name is Panayiotis and I work in the field of education and I have a particular interest in natural sciences, my specialty is water sanitation. This has everything to do with the quality of water and its application in farming, cities, habitat preservation, etc. So if you have a surface water body or an underground water reservoir or a river delta or the edges of the sea crossing with the shoreline and you have an aquatic issue, I can most probably discuss something about it.
One of the main reasons that I wanted to study in this field was the obvious problem that Cyprus has with water. There's a lot of practices that are energy-consuming, like desalination of water to provide for drinking water and those can be very effective in providing the necessary water quantities. But the costs of them are exceptionally high, both in energy and in money. I do believe that we manage water in a very inefficient way and due to the world undergoing this climate change with the greenhouse effect becoming much more intense, Cyprus is undergoing the process of desertification. So the entire island is suffering. Every summer becomes warmer, every winter becomes more extreme. We're facing a lot of phenomena that we haven't seen in the past decades or so. For example flash floods, where you have extreme rain clouds forming in a couple of hours, then it rains for half an hour, and half of the city is flooded. This is in part due to the issues with the sewage system of the city. But it also has a lot to do with the capacities and the concepts of how we design these cities. But there is a lot of things that we can do to improve the problems we are facing. Unfortunately, the Cypriot government is not as keen on improving these. I'm not trying to say that they're not working towards it. I'm saying that they're working slowly and this is a bit of an issue.
Q: What are some of the strategies that could be applied to better the future with water security here in Cyprus?
So to improve water security, we need to understand what it means to each of us. So water security has a lot of different roles coming in it. So one of them is accessibility to sanitized water that's good enough for human consumption. This needs to be enough for us humans to consume and survive and ideally, this should be provided directly from the individual waterboards of each community instead of having to consume bottled water. We should strive for greater, easier, and safer access to drinking water.
The second aspect of water security comes in the form of agriculture. We do need to irrigate our lands if we want to produce anything like crops, fruit, etc. Farmers should have access to water that they can be used for this purpose. Now, this should never be looked at linearly, but in Cyprus we do and it's a big issue. We should try to deviate from the linear model of taking resources, use them, and then you throw them away. We should turn it to the cyclical economy model. This is a process of use, reuse, and reapplication of different things, so we should try to breach different gaps and link different processes together so that nothing gets wasted. Because our resources are finite, we should strive to better preserve all of the ecosystems and our water resources.
We use a lot of air conditioning and we use this during the summer, during the winter. It's either too hot or too cold. There's always air conditioning working somewhere. Now, one of the byproducts of the use of these cooling machines is the production of the distilled water. All right. So they take essentially water out of the humidity that they have around it and they convert it to distilled water which could be collected and we could use this for many things, from using it in our cars or storing it, or delivering it to a central point to reach different aquifers. There are quite a few things that we could do with this water. Another thing that we could do quite easily is just to have water collection at home. So if it rains and you have a couple of open boxes, bottles, or tanks to collect rainwater, that's a lot of water that you can then pass through some basic filters and you have some more water to work with. Also, the water that you collect is water that's not going to be flooding the street.
Another big thing that Cypriots would need to start doing, in my opinion, is to stop putting cement over everything. Most people here in Cyprus have this idea that if something is not paved and it doesn't have those layered stones on top of everything with the occasional tree here and there, if there is like grass or dirt showing through the ground, then it's aesthetically not pleasing. This is a terrible problem because one of the best ways to contain rainwater is to let the ground soak it up. It will then diffuse slowly to wherever it needs to go. But by covering the ground we enhance these floods that we end up seeing. It's funny to say this, but Cyprus is one of the top countries when it comes to land coverage in the world in urbanscapes.
Q: What do you think about investing in solar energy in Cyprus?
Solar energy is one of the cleanest forms of energy that we can use which is true. But the infrastructure needed for solar power is unique in the materials that it requires to use and the area that it needs to cover. Now, having said that, it's almost certainly in most cases, going to be better than fossil fuels. It's more efficient and it's better for the environment. But it's not like it's free energy. It comes with its costs and those costs are both for setting up the infrastructure, which has a very high initial investment cost and something that a lot of people don't realize is that it's not proportionate to the efficiency of these devices is not proportionate to the amount of sunlight that they get that there's an optimal amount.
So the output of these devices would be better described by a bell curve. So with the temperatures here in Cyprus, we'd be way over the threshold for the optimum. So we need to figure out how and where to set the proper devices and maybe we should consider solar power that is not generated through solar panels as there are other options that we can use, such as redirecting the solar energy through a set of mirrors on boiler tanks that produce superheated steam that can be then funneled through turbines that produce electricity. This is a different option that we have, it's being implemented in a few parts of Spain, which is another Mediterranean country with a lot of Sun as well, and it's shown that it has better results in producing energy in these conditions.
Besides the installation process of this infrastructure, there is also its maintenance. If something gets damaged, you need to fix it because if your efficiency goes down, you start essentially losing money and that's not something you want to be doing. You want to have your infrastructure working at peak efficiency. The third difficulty that we will encounter in setting up these solar panels is how much can our electricity network sustain? Because electricity is not something that you can easily store. It's something that you produce, you distribute and you consume, or store. So you need batteries. But if you want batteries that can hold large amounts of energy, you need to use a very specialized kind of batteries that are made out of many rare minerals. Those are both expensive to acquire and in many cases highly toxic to the environment. So, there's a lot of considerations about handling, using, and storing these batteries and the electricity that's going to be involved with them. They're a hazard to both the people using them, the area surrounding them, and many other things. Now, the last problem that we can encounter with this is the environmental impact, because where you place the whatever you choose to place these fields, thus changing the purpose of the land. By doing so, you will disturb the local ecosystem, so choosing where to place them in a small island like Cyprus that doesn't have these huge expanses of homogeneous ecosystems that will be very resilient to such an installation can prove quite difficult.
What SDG are you personally interested in?
For sure SDG6 is about clean water and sanitation. SDG7, which is affordable and clean energy, and SDG11, has to do with sustainable cities and communities. Those are the ones that I'm mostly interested in in my particular field of studies. But of course, all of them are of some interest to me. But still mostly focused on SDG6 and SDG11.
In the current situation in Cyprus which SDG requires more action?
The things that we should focus on the most are SDG6 and SDG7 because these immediately affect the economy of the island and as a result, the lives of people. I would actually put work and economic growth, so SDG8, the sustainability of the cities and build community communities, SDG11, and I would also put SDG3 that has to do with good health and well-being. Focusing more on the mental health of the whole island, because we do have a few issues here. There's this general idea that has been going away slowly but steadily that visiting a psychologist, psychiatrist or any mental health professional is something to be avoided and together with that is carries a lot of stigmas here in Cyprus. Of course, the younger generations seem to be getting more open-minded towards this, but I do believe that we need more progress. We need more things to happen in this field for the better of everyone in our society. This would go to quite a great length to improve the health of the communities, especially considering that Cyprus is a hub for receiving migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers that come from different places of the world. I do believe that a healthier community is going to be a better place for all of us.
What’s your message to people about SDGs?
Read about the SDGs, familiarize yourself with what they are, realize what these goals are referring to, and reflect on them. Because these goals have to do with us as individuals and they have to do with the empowerment of our society as a whole. If we focus on those, we can help ourselves by helping others.