Interview with Amr Hamzawy: Partnership with Sweden on climate change, vulnerability & governance in MENA

You are the Director of the Carnegie Middle East Program and is leading a team of dedicated colleagues who provide analysis on key regional topics like governance and sustainable development. Can you please give a short description of your mission and how your work is making a difference in the MENA-region and the world.

? The Carnegie Middle East Program’s project on Climate change risks, vulnerability and governance aims to explore the intersection between political and socioeconomic reforms and climate change resilience in the MENA region by focusing on those sectors of society most exposed to climate-change hazards. The project will leverage Carnegie’s field-based expertise on marginalized communities, governance, and human security across the region and showcase how our scholars can contribute to analytical and policy deliberations on climate adaptation. A regional lens will be applied when examining the programs and approaches that several MENA governments are undertaking in addressing climate change, including those of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Iraq, Oman, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. Key topics also include navigating civil society activism and the role nongovernmental organizations play in engaging governments on climate change related issues.

?The Middle East Program of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace generates incisive policy analysis and ideas that help diverse actors across the Middle East, and in major Western capitals, tackle the many significant challenges facing the region. These include managing and reducing conflict, overcoming unresponsive governance, reducing socioeconomic inequality and marginalization, promoting women's rights, adapting to climate change, strengthening civil society, and analyzing the impacts of the great power competition on peace and security in the region. The program combines the work of a network of policy scholars around the region, coordinated by Carnegie’s center in Beirut, with the activities of a set of noted Middle East specialists in Washington. In addition to producing and disseminating policy ideas and solutions, the program actively convenes a wide range of actors in the region and in Western capitals to meet and work together across traditional lines of division. The program is also closely integrated with and draws on the work of Carnegie’s thematic programs in areas such as democracy and conflict, technology, and international affairs, as well as Carnegie’s other regional centers in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere.??

? Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is slated to be disproportionately affected by climate change despite its emissions constituting a mere 3 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions since 1850.?Demographic patterns of growth, severe water scarcity, reliance on fossil fuels, food insecurity, rising sea levels, and migration are all challenges that MENA governments are grappling with today and that will be exacerbated by climate change.?The capacity of states in the region to adapt to these multi-faceted challenges varies due to a myriad of factors and, in some places, climatic events have clearly produced a chain of devastating effects. Severe droughts in Syria and Morocco, for example, have come on top of years of conflict, political unrest, and government mismanagement, exposing certain sectors of the populations to a spiraling loss of food and economic welfare.?Food systems in the region have been further stressed by the Ukraine war, given the dependency of several MENA states on wheat imports from both Ukraine and Russia. The cascading effects of climate change will act as an accelerant on such long standing problems of governance and socioeconomic inequalities, while also posing new disruptions. With countries already suffering from fragility, the necessity of evaluating the relationship between environmental risks, governance and civil vulnerabilities has never been more pertinent.

Sida and Carnegie have recently joined forces in a programming that studies how climate action interacts with governance structures in the MENA, can you please give a brief about this cooperation and its relevance to the region.

Adaptation to climate change requires political will and active, responsive governance. While a number of MENA governments have made pledges to mitigate global warming through a transition to renewable energy and "green" technologies, there is much more they can do.??Most critically, policymakers in the MENA need to bolster the ability of their societies to withstand and?adapt to climate-related stresses through greater political and economic inclusion and by prioritizing policies that protect the most vulnerable sectors of their citizenry:?migrants and refugees, lower-income citizens, especially women, workers in the informal and tourist sector, and the inhabitants of interior and coastal regions, to name but a few. At the same time, governments need to find ways to more effectively enlist local actors, especially rural and indigenous peoples with unique ecosystem and land management knowledge, as partners in climate change mitigation and adaptation. We hope to accurately inform this pivotal age of climate change action in a manner that promotes inclusive and sustainable solutions by adopting a regional analytical approach.

Regionally, capacities to respond and adapt to climate change differ vastly. For the oil-exporting states, such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, and Iraq, oil reserves provide a financial base, but also a challenge, for governments to diversify their economies away from an over-reliance on volatile hydrocarbon revenues and invest into sectors that are more climate-resilient. Oman pledged to reduce its emissions by 7 percent by 2030, and within Oman’s oil and gas sector, the country is evaluating the possibility of reaching net zero emissions.?For agriculturally dependent states, including Iraq but also Egypt and Morocco, challenges include securing enough water, since the sector accounts for 85 percent of water use in the region, as compared to Europe where agriculture accounts for only 40 percent of water. Those three states, in addition to Saudi Arabia, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, use up to 80 percent of their water for agriculture, whereas others in the region, such as Bahrain, Lebanon, and Qatar, report agricultural water usage under 50 percent. This points to a significant need to prioritize efficiency and water management, especially in light of the region being host to the world’s most water scarce countries, in which water loss is expected to lead to a loss of regional GDP ranging from 6 to 14 percent by 2050. Cascading effects to livestock, crop yields, agricultural community livelihoods, and food security are all outcomes of continued water shortages and water waste.

Climate change poses multi-faceted levels of risk for MENA governments, including environmental and biological, socioeconomic, and political risks. These risks deemed “disruptive and damaging,” also cascade from the institutional level, concerning governance, to a citizen level, concerning individuals, especially those who are already vulnerable in MENA societies such as women, minorities, and low-income individuals. Meanwhile, country-based and regional civil society organizations have not been able to engage governments in the search for inclusive policies to address climate change and resulting risks and vulnerabilities. The closed political environments in most MENA countries have limited civil society activism and undermined the emergence of sound engagement channels between governments and nongovernmental actors in undertaking effective climate action.

Swedish cooperation has poverty eradication as a core goal, where poverty is understood in a multi-dimensional nature. Could you please describe how the cooperation contributes to better understanding of who are the poor in the region.

The research project examines the different ways in which climate change impacts societal vulnerability and governance in the Middle East and North Africa. Traditionally, the map of vulnerable population segments in the MENA region has included poor and impoverished communities, religious and ethnic minorities, members of rural populations especially women and children, and migrant communities. In examining the impacts of climate change on vulnerability, Carnegie scholars will disaggregate in a first methodological step pre-existing vulnerabilities focusing on poverty, gender inequality, deteriorating public health and educational services, lack of social safety networks, and oppressive political conditions. In a second step, the impacts of climate change will be measured in relation to pre-existing vulnerabilities as well as to new vulnerabilities such as water scarcity, desertification, and the decline of farmers’ communities. Taken together, these two methodological steps will yield an updated and realistic map of vulnerable communities in the MENA region and, therefore, benefit the poor, the impoverished, the discriminated against, and the unrepresented by voicing their legitimate concerns in order to seek an end to poverty and discrimination.

The proposed research project also analyzes the impacts of climate change on governance. While state capacities vary radically across the MENA region, governance challenges remain almost identical. Eradicating poverty, improving the quality of key services, addressing gender inequality, ending human rights violations, empowering underrepresented population segments, and getting rulers and governments to abide by the principles of the rule of law are key governance challenges that unite Morocco, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. Through their analysis, Carnegie scholars will shed light on how climate change, on the one hand, adds social and political urgency to these governance challenges, and how, on the other hand, it brings to the fore new challenges such as the loss of coastal resources, rising water scarcity and food insecurity, and the widened map of societal vulnerability. Thus, examining the correlations of climate change, vulnerability, and governance in the MENA region will contribute to the objectives of Swedish development cooperation of improving the living conditions of people living in poverty, gender inequality, and under oppression.

Amr Hamzawy - Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Middle East Program: Climate Change, Vulnerability, and Governance in the Middle East and North Africa - Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.