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Chinese President Xi Jinping began welcoming dignitaries including United Nations chief Antonio Guterres and Egyptian Premier Moustafa Madbouly on Saturday before a summit attended by leaders from more than 20 countries.The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation gathering will be held in the northern port city of Tianjin on Sunday and Monday, days before a massive military parade in nearby Beijing to mark 80 years since the end of World War II.North Korea’s Kim Jong Un will be among some 26 world leaders slated to attend the parade.The SCO comprises China, India, Russia, Pakistan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Belarus. Sixteen more countries are affiliated as observers or “dialogue partners”.Russian President Vladimir Putin and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi are also due to arrive in Tianjin ahead of the summit.China and Russia have used the organisation — sometimes touted as a counter to the Western-dominated NATO military alliance — to deepen ties with Central Asian states.Other leaders including Iranian and Turkish presidents Masoud Pezeshkian and Recep Tayyip Erdogan will also attend the bloc’s largest meeting since its founding in 2001.- Bilateral meetings -Multiple bilateral meetings are expected to be held on the sidelines of the summit.The Kremlin said on Friday that Putin will discuss the Ukraine conflict with Erdogan on Monday.Turkey has hosted three rounds of peace talks between Russia and Ukraine this year that have failed to break the deadlock over how to end the conflict, triggered when Moscow launched its invasion of its pro-European neighbour in February 2022.Putin will also talk about Tehran’s nuclear programme on Monday with his Iranian counterpart Pezeshkian, a meeting that comes as Iran faces fresh Western pressure.Britain, France and Germany, known as the E3, triggered a “snapback” mechanism on Thursday to reinstate UN sanctions on Tehran for failing to comply with commitments made in a 2015 deal over its nuclear programme.Russia’s foreign ministry warned that the reimposition of sanctions against Iran risked “irreparable consequences”.Tehran and Moscow have been bolstering political, military and economic ties over the past decade as Russia drifted away from the West. Relations between them grew even closer after Moscow launched its offensive against Ukraine.Modi’s visit comes after a trip to Japan, and is his first to China since 2018.The world’s two most populous nations are intense rivals competing for influence across South Asia and fought a deadly border clash in 2020.A thaw began last October when Modi met with Xi for the first time in five years at a summit in Russia.

Sun-baked Morocco, grappling with its worst drought in decades, has launched a pilot project aimed at slowing water evaporation while simultaneously generating green energy using floating solar panels.At a major reservoir near the northern city of Tangier, thousands of so-called “floatovoltaic” panels protect the water’s surface from the blazing sun and absorb its light to generate electricity.Authorities plan to power the neighbouring Tanger Med port complex with the resulting energy, and if it proves a success, the technology could have far wider implications for the North African kingdom.According to official figures, Morocco’s water reserves lost the equivalent of more than 600 Olympic-sized swimming pools every day to evaporation between October 2022 and September 2023.Over that same period, temperatures averaged 1.8C higher than normal, meaning water evaporated at a higher rate.Alongside other factors like declining rainfall, this has reduced reservoirs nationwide to about one-third of their capacity.Water ministry official Yassine Wahbi said the Tangier reservoir loses around 3,000 cubic metres a day to evaporation, but that figure more than doubles in the hot summer months.The floating photovoltaic panels can help cut evaporation by about 30 percent, he said.The water ministry has said the floating panels represent “an important gain in a context of increasingly scarce water resources”, even if the evaporation they stop is, for now, relatively marginal.Assessment studies are underway for another two similar projects in Oued El Makhazine, at one of Morocco’s largest dams in the north, and in Lalla Takerkoust near Marrakesh.Similar technology is being tested in France, Indonesia and Thailand, while China already operates some of the world’s largest floating solar farms.- ‘Pioneering’ -Since the Moroccan pilot programme began late last year, more than 400 floating platforms supporting several thousand panels have been installed.The government wants more, planning to reach 22,000 panels that would cover about 10 hectares at the 123-hectare Tangier reservoir.Once completed, the system would generate roughly 13 megawatts of electricity — enough to power the Tanger Med complex.Authorities also have plans to plant trees along the banks of the reservoir to reduce winds, believed to exacerbate evaporation.Climate science professor Mohammed-Said Karrouk called it a “pioneering” project.He noted, however, that the reservoir is too large and its surface too irregular to cover completely with floating panels, which could be damaged with fluctuating water levels.Official data shows water reserves fed by rainfall have fallen by nearly 75 percent in the past decade compared with the 1980s, dropping from an annual average of 18 billion cubic metres to only five.Morocco has so far mainly relied on desalination to combat shortages, producing about 320 million cubic metres of potable water a year.Authorities aim to expand production to 1.7 billion cubic metres yearly by 2030.Karrouk said an urgent priority should be transferring surplus water from northern dams to regions in central and southern Morocco that are more impacted by the years-long drought.The kingdom already has a system dubbed the “water highway” — a 67-kilometre canal linking the Sebou basin to the capital Rabat — with plans to expand the network to other dams.