The imperial city has a very serious pollution problem.
Marrakesh, 25 December 2019.- COP , Conference of the Parties, the supreme body of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, meeting annually since 1995, was in Marrakesh, Morocco, from 7 to 18 November 2016. Three days earlier, on 4 November, the “Paris Agreement” entered into force.
Three years later, in December 2019, we have reached the following conclusion: Marrakesh has a very serious pollution problem and it is paradoxical that it welcomed COP 22.
One does not know whether the high level of pollution, which is stuck in the throat, is because vehicles are old – even though they do not look so outdated- or is the multitude of motorcycles that circulate in the streets, including – miraculously without running anyone over – The Medina. There’s no way to avoid thinking that it should have long since become fully pedestrian.
Pollution is so high that the only way to walk along the main avenues is by covering your nose and mouth. We don’t want to think about how it can be in the middle of summer, with 50 degrees of heat. The fact that it rains so little only would aggravate the discomfort.
The paradox is even greater, because possibly the economy of the city has a high component dependent on tourism, both the city and the nearby Atlas Mountains, in whose skirts Richard Branson has a hotel and at the villages where local guides say Mark Zuckerberg, the young chairman of Facebook, came by helicopter.
In fact, it is inevitable to think how the hundreds, perhaps thousands of small shops in La Medina, survive, if not of the tourists, as the multitude of inventories accumulate in form of baboons, pendants, bracelets, ceramics and wood art, all beautiful and refined , but where each corner is similar to the following one.
Of course, the solution is not easy. How to ban that traffic? Who pays for the switch to new electric motorcycles? We think the daily tax that tourists must pay in hotels must be the first taxpayer to generate the necessary subsidies. It really seems urgent.
