As COP 29 convenes, Human-Caused Climate Change Menaces the Middle East Across Borders
Juan Cole 11/12/2024
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The European Centre for Development Policy Management has issued a new report on the threats of human-caused climate change to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, concentrating on cross-border dangers that affect more than one country.
Heat and drought would rank high on this list. The Middle East is heating twice as fastas the global average. Egypt and Iraq are especially vulnerable to sea level rise. Some of the consequent threats can only be dealt with by inter-governmental cooperation. But that kind of cooperation is hard to come by as things now stand.
An example of a cross-border problem is the substantial reliance of numerous MENA nations on imported food, especially grains, which renders them vulnerable to global food price fluctuations caused by climate-related events (or wars) in other regions.
We saw this problem in the Russia-Ukraine War, which threatened Middle East wheat supplies. But climate-drive mega-droughts could have similar implications.
MENA countries are not well positioned to deal with climate change impacts, they point out, given that governments tend to be highly centralized, with power concentrated in the hands of oligarchs or juntas dependent directly or indirectly on oil and gas. The oligarchs are out for themselves, seeking “rents” from oil-rich countries where they don’t have such mineral wealth themselves. They exclude from decision-making grass-roots organizations, workers, the poor and women, who are often on the front lines of global heating and know better than the air-conditions, petroleum-swigging elites how dangerous it is. All this is true for individual countries. Imagine getting them to cooperate on climate resilience or the green energy transition across borders.
The oligarchs of the region promote water-intensive crops like citrus fruits for export even in arid countries, because they can make money on the exports, and even though their countries have to import a lot of food. That is, they could put in staples like grain instead of citrus fruits, but then they wouldn’t make money from exports. Their people would, however, be less hungry.
For another example, they say, the elites in Tunisia concentrate on olive cultivation for the world market (it is the third largest producer). But there are so many olive orchards and so few of any other sort of crop that the country is making difficulties for itself. Monocultures are especially vulnerable to disease outbreaks or global price fluctuations. The olive orchards drink up the country’s agricultural water, making it hard for farmers to put in other crops.
An irrigation system is used in an olive grove located in Siliana, Tunisia, on May 10, 2024. Farmers face a major problem in keeping their fields productive due to water stress and drought. (Photo by Chedly Ben Ibrahim/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
In Libya, the army controls much of the economy. The country is heavily dependent on oil exports, and suffers when petroleum prices plummet. The country imports 75% of its food, so if anything disrupts the global food supply chain, Libyans are in big trouble. Petroleum is mostly used to fuel vehicles, but as the world electrifies and goes to EVs, Libyans will be up the creek if they don’t find another source of wealth.
There are five big categories of cross-country threats, they say:
1.The Biophysical: “risks for trans-boundary ecosystems, such as international river basins, oceans and the atmosphere.” They give the example of Turkey’s dam-building at the headwaters of the Euphrates, which is threatening water flows in Iraq, which depends on two large rivers for survival. Climate change is also reducing flow. Iraq could be in big trouble over this trans-boundary problem.
2. Financial. Foreign direct investment in the region could fall substantially because of climate impacts, hampering infrastructure projects. Lack of infrastructural adaptation could hurt efforts to come to terms with climate change.
3. Trade: “Potential risks to international trade, such as the import and export of climate-sensitive crops and implications for food security.” MENA imports 50% of its food from the outside, and if there are droughts elsewhere in the world things could turn very dangerous.
4. People-Centered: They point to the millions of displaced people in the region. Half of Syrians had to move house during the Civil War, in which a major drought was probably implicated. Some 11 million Sudanese have been displaced by the current civil war, in a population of 48 million. They don’t say so, but the Nile Delta in Egypt is very populous (60 million people) and very low-lying, at risk from the rising waters of the Mediterranean. God knows where they will go.
5. Geopolitical. This term refers to regional conflict. We see this (this is me, not the report) in Lebanon, where Israel’s attacks have displaced 1.2 million people. There are only about 4.5 million Lebanese.
While Europe has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to help MENA countries begin the transition to solar and wind energy, it has offered very little money to help Middle Eastern countries become more resilient in the face of climate change.
The authors note that the Middle East and North Africa is a diverse geographical area. It has its famous deserts but also mountain ranges, green valleys like Lebanon’s Biqa’ (now being bombed by Israel), long river valleys, mangrove stands along the seas, and swamps in southern Iraq.
The way contemporary analysts categorize the Middle East, it stretches from Iran in the east to Morocco in the far west, and from Syria in the north to Yemen in the south. Nearly 500 million people inhabit the area, and many states within it still have high birth rates, giving it millions of youths. The median age is something like 22 or 24, compared to 38.5 for the United States. Like India and Africa, it is young.
Some parts of the region are desperately poor, others are fabulously wealthy. Outside the petroleum states, they point out, parts of Syria, Iraq, Yemen, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and Libya, are low-income, conflict-impacted societies facing severe challenges like human displacement and acute poverty. Simultaneously, middle-income nations like Morocco and Egypt are proactively exploring business opportunities within the global green transition.
Morocco and Turkey are virtually the only countries in the area that have had some success transitioning their grids to sustainable sources of energy, though much poorer Morocco is more advanced in wind and solar, while Turkey depends more heavily on hydroelectricity.