Mohamed A. Sultan

Have you ever smelled a landfill?

Well, that smell is probably not the worst thing that it produces.

Methane gases.

And you cannot see or smell it until it catches fire.

And that's unfortunately what's been happening in many cities across the continent.

In Dakar, in Accra, in Kampala, in Osaka, and recently at the Pietermaritzburg landfill in South Africa.

Now just imagine being one of the thousands of kids affected by that fire.

Every breath you take is kind of a tighter chest, a sharper headache.

It's really unacceptable.

And these landfills, they catch fire for many reasons.

One of them is that we keep sending organic waste there that decays in the absence of oxygen, creating the conditions for methane to come up.

There's many ways that we know how to solve this question of dangerous landfills.

First of all, stop producing as much waste and sending it there.

Sort and treat what's already there and radically improve the governance of those sites.

Doing that homework has immediate benefits, particularly for populations living nearby.

It improves air quality and it reduces the risk of fire.

And it turns out that addressing methane out of these landfills plays a very important role in tackling the global question of climate change.

I'm a social and economic development professional.

I've spent the bulk of my career looking at how this continent transforms to meet the demands and the ambitions of its people at the intersection of democracy, security and economic opportunity.

And it's kind of always been clear to me, to get to a certain degree of sustainable development, we need to embed climate in our plans.