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Introduction
For the first time in history, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will hold a regional climate week in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region on 28-31st March 2022 in Dubai. This initiative aims to gather policymakers, international organisations, private companies, cities, and civil society from across the region to discuss and explore grounds for cooperation. When compared with the founding in 2017 of other regional climate weeks for Africa, Latin America and Asia-Pacific, the establishment of a regional forum on climate change in MENA seems to come rather late. In the line of other recent policy developments, it is yet more evidence that climate action is now finally existing on the region’s political agenda.
The awakening might have been long, but the clock is ticking, and the devastating effects of climate change cannot be ignored anymore. Indeed, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its last report on February 2022 drawing alarming conclusions: temperatures will likely reach the threshold of +1.5°C by 2040, causing irreversible climate change adverse effects. The occurrence and magnitude of climate extreme events – droughts, floods, wildfires – have risen globally and are highly likely to continue being more frequent and intense. Increased aridity has generated both environmental damages as well as the reduction of water and food availability. Worldwide, climate-induced effects on hydrological cycles (uncertain rains, drought, floods) have caused a loss of 9 to 10% of the global cereal production.
The future will not be brighter in MENA: it will be 2°C hotter by 2040 and the region will experience 24 additional annual days of heat exceeding 35°C under the most optimistic scenario. Heatwaves are projected to be more intense and more frequent even under low emission pathways which will endanger habitat, animals and species, and will harden people’s living conditions. It is therefore as critical to invest in ways to adapt to this new climate as it is to implement actions that prevent climate change from getting worse.
As the region is already facing water and food scarcity, climate change adverse effects exacerbate pre-existing challenges with deleterious social, economic, political and security domino effects in MENA. Climate-induced impacts on water could cause a loss of 14% of the region’s GDP without mitigation and adaptation policies. Decline in water availability for the use of any water-intensive sector - agriculture, tourism, industry, domestic use - coupled with increased flood-related land damages will put many livelihoods at risk and will tend to push people from the countryside into unmanaged growing cities. In parallel, the region is already heavily dependent on food imports while projections tend to predict a global rise of food commodity prices, cereals in particular. Those dire living conditions, coupled with more competition over the sharing of declining resources, can be decisive factors for political instability and increase the risk of an eruption of conflicts. It is acknowledged that climate change is a ‘threat multiplier’ because the pernicious socioeconomic effects it entails are stronger influential factors to conflict or displacement than climate itself. Yet with consistent improvement of climate governance to decrease people’s vulnerability and exposure to climate shocks, it prevents further risks of insecurity.
The main challenge of the regional climate week – and of all the future climate events - is thus to encourage policymakers to translate their ambitions into concrete and collective actions. This brief will discuss the potential and benefits for the region to improve climate collaboration for adaptation.
From Inertia to Policy Actions
For three decades, political eagerness to launch climate actions used to be particularly low in the region as climate change was considered to be a third order and distant issue compared to more urgent challenges. MENA has been focusing on enhancing its socioeconomic development and therefore increasing its economic production – the regional GDP tripled from 1 to more than 3 billion US$ between 2000 and 2019 – and in the meantime, its carbon footprint – the 1.2 million of kilotons of CO2 produced in 2000 doubled to 2.5 million in 2018. For oil and gas exporting countries, notably Saudi Arabia, climate ambitions were perceived as a threat to their economic interests and were reluctant to engage actions. Now that the region is aware of the adverse effects of climate change, and in parallel, it acknowledges its potential in investing in alternative green sources of energy, both domestic and international rhetoric have shifted.
Most countries of the region have presently introduced robust climate policies, with Jordan and Morocco being the pioneers in this matter: Morocco promoted its first action plan on climate change in 2009 and published last year a National Climate Plan towards 2030 on how to achieve its green commitments; Jordan developed its first climate change policy in 2013 and has now launched climate-related sectorial plans on water, agriculture, energy, transport, waste and tourism. For other countries of the region, countering climate change has also been integrated into long-term strategic ambitions such as Egypt Vision 2030, Oman Vision 2040, and Vision 2030 for Saudi Arabia.
This momentum is as well visible in the international fora while the region intensifies climate diplomacy both internationally and regionally. Ahead of COP26 in Glasgow in November 2021, Lebanon, Israel, the UAE, and Yemen have pledged to be carbon neutral by 2050, Turkey by 2053, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain by 2060. Jordan, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Tunisia, and Qatar submitted more ambitious Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) and heightened their gas emissions reduction goals. The region will also welcome COP27 and COP28, respectively in Egypt and the UAE in 2022 and 2023, which brings outstanding opportunities to push forward negotiations on vulnerability points for the two countries, especially for which international agreements have not been reached yet. Acting on sea-level rise for instance, that will largely affect both countries, might be part of the COPs’ agenda the same way deforestation was at COP26. From a regional perspective, Saudi Arabia launched in October 2021 the first Green Middle East Initiative which gathered leaders from the region, except for Oman, Lebanon and Syria, and foreign partners - the UN, the United States, China, Russia, France, Greece, Italy, India, Brazil, and Pakistan among others - to exchange on regional climate action.
Climate resilience should however not be solely covered at the State level as the IPCC re-affirmed in its last report how climate impacts significantly differ locally from one area to another between and within countries. It is therefore critical to promote local-based initiatives as well to best respond to specific problems posed by climate in each area and in line with the communities’ priorities.
Cooperation between cities, districts and other local actors is thus beneficial to exchange best-practices and lessons learned on municipal projects. Some 150 cities and regions from Algeria, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon Morocco, Palestine, Tunisia, Turkey, and the UAE are already engaged as climate actors through the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy, helping them to attract climate finance, gather data and mobilize research and knowledge.
Whether national or local, climate actions in war-affected countries lag behind the rest of the region. Political agendas of Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq at a smaller extent, have not been focusing on climate change for evident reasons since immediate needs are conflict-oriented issues such as military actions, peacebuilding or delivering basic services to the population. Syria, Libya, and Yemen are among the few countries in the world which have not ratified the Paris Agreements on Climate change – along with Iran and Eritrea – while Iraq did in November 2021. The IPCC has yet stated that fragile areas, notably those already affected by conflict, are the most vulnerable to climate change and the least capable to adapt. Although the MENA region attracts the least of the world’s climate fundings, projects of climate change adaptation in those war-affected countries have also been particularly low compared to other countries in conflict. Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Ukraine have received from bilateral aid more than 1.2 billion US$ for climate change adaptation, while bilateral funds allocated to Yemen and Lebanon reached around 200 million US$ and less than 100 million US$ to Libya and Syria. In Iraq, between 2010 and 2019, the districts with the lowest records of conflicts were those which received aids for climate adaptation.
MENA countries are not equal in terms of exposure and vulnerabilities to climate change, but they will face the same climate shocks with consequences mostly on water, food, and people’s habitat. Instability in war-affected countries does not ease integration prospects into regional cooperation despite the utmost necessity to initiate measures. Climate actions in countries in conflict require therefore to be integrated into the broader scope of peacebuilding and peace process and must focus on attracting international green finance.
Adapting to the New Climate: Improving Climate Resilience on Water and Food
During the MENA Climate Week, seven sessions will concentrate on the prominent topic of water security as it is the most pressing and crippling issue, the region being already the most water-stressed in the world. Even under the most optimistic scenario, decrease in rains and more frequent drought will shrink water availability, as a 4% decline of rains in Jordan and Iraq, and 8% in Morocco by 2040 are annual losses for the replenishment of freshwaters. Impacts of climate change, coupled with growing water needs to sustain an increasing population, mean that the countries need to invest in adaptive measures to face additional shortages of water.
While some countries of the region have been investing in cooperative measures to face water crisis, and improving by extension their food security, many more are yet to be achieved.
Jordan, the most water scarce country of the region, has long invested in alternative sources of water, for instance by achieving wastewater treatment and recycling. It lately signed a cooperation agreement with Israel in November 2021: in exchange of trading 600 megawatts of solar renewable energies to Israel, Jordan will receive 200 million cubic meters of Israeli desalinated water. The solar farm is built by Masdar, a UAE’s government-owned company. By signing pragmatic agreements, the neighbours will now be able to meet their respective climate targets: Israel to achieve its commitment on carbon neutrality and Jordan to manage its water crisis. The same way, some countries of the region have advanced technologies in water recycling, notably Turkey which built 604 wastewater treatment plants, that they can share with their neighbours. Turkish compagnies on wastewater reuse could sign partnerships with Iraq, which has limited water recycling capacities, as it did with Iran.
Strengthening water security is critical to prevent political unrest. The region has been shaken by several protests that were directly linked to shortages of water over the past few years that were part of broader social movements of dissatisfaction over States’ mismanagement. In the Libyan city of Tobruk in 2017, protesters threatened to disrupt oil production because of the closure of a seawater desalination plant. The same year in Algeria, 16 wilayas were facing shortages because of prolonged dry spells and protests erupted in Annaba and various cities of the country due to delayed deliveries of palliative water supply from water dams.
In Southern Iraq, the grievances of the violent riots in Basra in 2019 were in part fuelled by a multi-faceted water crisis. Basra inhabitants are confronted by water mismanagement and pollution from their main source of freshwater, the Shatt-El-Arab River, which in 2018 resulted in the hospitalisation of more than 100.000 people due to water contamination. Iraq is also a down-stream country and has received decreasing quantity of water from Turkey and Iran since they built water dams on the Euphrates, Tigris and the Shatt-El-Arab rivers which led to both shortages and salination of Iraqi waters. Improving and upgrading current water management comes thus as a way to adapt to climate effects while preventing further water contamination and water loss. The region should enhance cooperation on regional water guidelines and sign binding cooperation agreements on transboundary water use.
Undoubtedly, the most important challenge that comes with a limited amount of water is a constrained agriculture system. The region already imports half of its food products - the Gulf 90% - and is heavily dependent on cereal imports. In Egypt, Iran, Jordan and Libya, food represented a quarter of their total imports in 2020.
Climate change is a supplementary challenge to food security in MENA in two ways: decreasing water resources and drying soils will inhibit food production, especially rainfed crops as rains will decline. In parallel food imports will be more expensive because climate shocks will raise global food prices, up to 29% for cereal prices by 2050.
Intra-regional cooperation is one of the possible solutions to overcome challenges posed either by dependency on food imports or declining domestic food production. To enhance climate adaptation, the region has invested in innovation in the field of agriculture and technologies. Some start-ups in the UAE have notably expanded vertical farming and developed technologies to transform a dry soil into a fertile one, an advancement particularly relevant in the Middle East as only 2% of the land is arable. Those innovations respond to challenges posed by the limited amount of land available to grow crops and food. Other innovative initiatives, in Lebanon in particular, have developed technological systems to improve and rationalize the use of water in agriculture, which handles water scarcity issues as well. It is essential to spread these new technologies and good practices across the region, either by the gathering of climate actors from the private sectors at regional events such as the Climate Week or by creating permanent platforms of exchange of knowledge.
While the funds allocated to research and development in the region are still quite limited, the creation of a joint research centre on new technologies for saving water and growing food, is a way to promote regional cooperation on adaptation. This platform on agriculture adaptation could also aim to improve monitoring and ground data collection to facilitate the understanding of climate change effects on the local and regional agriculture sector. The objective could also be to develop better climate-smart practices, notably regarding irrigation, and to localize the regions’ comparative advantages to facilitate intra-regional trade. On other terms, the region could promote bilateral or regional pragmatic agreements on food and agriculture products as Jordan and Israel did on their ‘water against green energy’ recent deal.
Adapting to the New Climate: Climate-proofing Humans’ Habitat
Peoples’ primary needs will be as impacted by climate change as their habitat in several ways, be it rural, urban, or coastal. Climate actions have mostly been focusing on urban management, but cooperative actions must be extended to the protection of littoral and rural areas as well, or it will lead otherwise to supplementary challenges to unmanaged urban expansion.
While the urban population might have grown by 2 to 3% annually since 2000, the rural population in some countries of the region remain high – 57% of Egyptians lived in rural areas, 29% of Iraqis, 36% of Moroccans and 62% of Yemenis in 2020 - and many people rely on agriculture for their livelihoods –21% of Egyptians, 18% of Iraqis, 33% of Moroccans and 28% of Yemenis. As agriculture production will decrease, farmers are at risk to lose their incomes, especially those exposed to climate hazards in remote areas. In Morocco for instance, climate change might endanger 32% of habitats of trees Argania spinosa and therefore threatens the two million people employed for argan oil production. Because 70% of poor people are concentrated in rural areas and unless socio-economic adaptive capacities to cope with climate change are developed, the remaining solution to address the loss of rural livelihoods for many households is temporary or permanent rural exodus. The results of a survey led by the World Bank with farmers in Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Syria, and Yemen state that out of all the possible adaptation solutions to climate change, 40% declared that people tend to move out of rural areas, and when they do, 71% move permanently to large urban areas and only 8% to small ones.
Coastal areas in Egypt, the UAE, Tunisia, Libya, Iraq, Qatar, Israel, and Morocco are also at threat of elevation of sea-level and of flood where highly populated cities are built, such as Alexandria, Tunis, Tel-Aviv, or Abu Dhabi. A one-meter rise in sea-level would impact 0.25% of MENA’s land but would affect 3.2% of the population. The 2021 IPCC report warned that sea-level rise is now irreversible and could be as high as 1 to 2 meter higher by the end of the century and will reach around 0.3m by 2050 under the best scenario. As the seas are rising, measures must be implemented to prevent the lands from sinking, by achieving construction work to impede submersion or by re-settling people living in vulnerable areas with attractive relocation programs. Without any of those practices, sea-level rise might cause unmanaged displacements to urban peripheries as it appears in many cases as the last remaining and inevitable solution.
Displacement to urban centres is an adaptive measure to climate change but it will fuel another climate-related issue. Heat tends to concentrate in cities because of the aggregation of human activities and the use of energy. Therefore, the more a city grows, the more it warms. Added to climate change, urban people will be more exposed to very high temperatures. According to the IPCC, ‘it is expected that more than 90% of the 300 million people who will be exposed to super and ultra-extreme heatwaves in the Middle East and North Africa will live in urban centres’. By 2049, heat waves on the Southern Mediterranean shore, in the Levant and in Turkey could increase on average by 1.5 to 2.5°C in cities but can be 11°C higher in Northern Egypt and 8°C higher in the Levant. To protect their inhabitants’ health and activities, local officials will have to develop adaptive measures to mitigate the impact of heat increase in the cities, especially in areas where informal dwellings proliferate. Informal dwellings are indeed made of low-quality construction materials and are not meant to cope with floods or extreme heats which make their residents extremely vulnerable to climate extreme events.
Improving urban resilience to climate change impacts is on the agenda of the MENA Climate Week, yet development of rural areas and coastal protection are not projected to be discussed. For social, economic and security reasons, those two aspects of climate change cannot be neglected anymore and will require utmost cooperation on finding possible solutions to tackle those common issues by joining research investments or exchanging knowledge.
Recommendations
To all MENA climate actors:
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Benefit from the organisation of COP27 and COP28 in Egypt and the UAE to foster international agreements and legislation on climate-related consequences that are of relevance for the region and on which international commitments are still missing, sea-level rise.
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Develop permanent platforms of multi-level discussion in the region to encourage more regional cooperation on climate adaptation and develop collective actions on common challenges. Such initiative could be achieved by either creating a new organisation dedicated to regional climate governance, or by developing such structure of cooperation under the umbrella of pre-existing regional bodies. The initiative launched by the Council for Arab Ministers Responsible for Environment at the League of Arab States, the Arab Framework Action Plan on Climate Change for 2010-2020, could be reinforced in being more inclusive and extended beyond Ministerial level only.
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Develop local-based platforms to develop adaptation pilot program or to exchange on a regular basis on lessons learned from sectoral perspectives for local communities facing common climate threats, involving regions, urban and rural municipalities, local civil society, and the private sector.
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Create a regional joint research centre to monitor climate change from its local to regional effects and develop adaptive intra-regional solutions for water scarcity, agriculture, urban and rural exposure to extreme heat and sea-level rise.
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Navigate possibilities of multi-dimensional pragmatic bilateral or multilateral partnerships and mutual comparative advantages to tackle climate-related challenges.
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Stimulate green innovations by allocating more funds to research and development and expand regional knowledge sharing.
To the international community:
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Integrate climate change adaptation to peacebuilding and political stability processes in war-affected countries.
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Mediate and foster cooperation agreements on transboundary water basins for riparian countries.