According to experts, climate change and rising food insecurity are major contributors to the recent destabilization of Mali and southern Algeria

Over the last couple of years, there has been a growing link between climate change and political issues in the Middle East. During the Arab Spring there was a real recognition that rising food prices caused by droughts in Russia and the US brought ordinary people to the streets in protests like never before. In Syria, poor water policies were held up as a major contribution to the drought which forced 500,000 Syrians to flee their homes. Now, experts state that global warming is also playing a role in the destabilization of Mali and southern Algeria which has hit the news.

Writing at ‘Informed Comment’, Juan Cole states that although the conflict erupting in Mali is complex politically and socially, changing ecology caused by climate change is a major contributor to the region’s problems. The climate of the Sahel, which Mali is a part of, has fluctuated significantly over the last 100 years:

“In the first 7 decades of the twentieth century, the region got a fair amount of rainfall, and lower Mali where the capital of Bamako is could raise livestock, making Malians agriculturally relatively well off. The consequent rise in population (Mali is now about 15 million) probably made the country overpopulated for what it could sustain in the more arid decades after 1980, when the warming waters of the Indian Ocean produced dry conditions in the Sahel.”

As more and more carbon was (and still is) pumped out by countries all over the world, the climate of the Sahel has become drier. According to a report released October 2012 by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) on food security in Mali, things look set to get worse. Based on the worst case scenarios that they have evaluated, it is estimated that global warming could reduce the amount of food produced in Mali by as much as 16% by 2050. The report also found that the population sustained by agricultural production may encounter a reduced standard of living with an additional 1,130,000 people in rural areas falling below the poverty line by 2050.

Even more worrying, climate change is expected to pose an additional threat to 12% of the population who are currently food insecure and more broadly, to small marginal farmers in many sub-Saharan countries. And all this will no doubt have huge social and political implications.

As Cole points out in his article, climate change factors have already contributed to the political situation which Mali finds itself: “The weakness of the Mali government likely is related to the drought years of the past decade, during which hundreds of thousands of Malians were forced to emigrate to other countries and the agricultural productivity and tax base of the more fertile south was devastated…The drought of the 1970s caused thousands of northern Mali Tuaregs to go to Libya. Col. Muammar Qaddafi organized them as a mercenary unit. Qaddafi, however, dissolved it in the late 1980s, at which time many Tuareg came back to Mali and participated in the 1990 coup.”

For more on the politics and environment connection in MENA see:

Unsustainable Water Policies Crippled The Assad Regime (INTERVIEW)

Climate Change Could be as Dangerous to Syria as Bashar al-Assad

500,000 Syrians Flee Drought-Stricken Zone

#Occupy Climate Change: The Arab Spring & Occupy Wall St

: Image of young girl watering vegetables in Mali via abossuet/flickr.

: Informed Comment

The post Climate Change Contributing to Mali-Algeria Conflict appeared first on Green Prophet.

Case Study: A stable security state or a nation eager for reform? We look at Jordan and the strengths and weaknesses of its civil society

Whilst Jordan may not have seen the flurry of protests that lots of other Arab countries witnessed during the Arab Spring, that doesn’t mean Jordanians are not desperate for reform. In fact, they are and to a certain extent the government has been eager to show they are happy to make changes. In the last two years alone there have been amendments to over 42 articles of the Jordanian Constitution. But, for many, these reforms aren’t having a real impact and there are growing concerns that the authorities are becoming more draconian.

First, there were efforts to censor the internet and last month, protestors gathered to demand the release of activists charged with opposing the regime and slandering the royal family. It seems that becoming a campaigner and a genuine member of Jordan’s civil society just got a little more difficult.

“Although Jordan is a security state – if a less extreme, less openly repressive version of one than Egypt was – it continues to be held up as an example of one of the more progressive and democratic Arab states. Jordan’s path to reform has been a carefully managed top-down process which has all the trappings of democracy while lacking substance. Despite its failure to take meaningful steps towards democracy, donors continue to laud Jordan as a democratizer.” 

That was the damning conclusion that researchers Ana Echagüe and Hélène Michou at the Foundation for the Future came to in a report released in May 2011 exploring Jordan’s civil society.

Over a year on has anything changed for the better? It’s hard to tell. A recent report launched by the same organisation points out the real challenges facing civil society organisations in the country. Firstly, donors tend to fund projects more than the infrastructure of the organization, leaving the organisations structurally weak and with sustainability issues. Secondly, there are legislative and government obstacles to the free execution of civil society activities in Jordan.

For example, the Foundation for the Future explains in a press release that foreign funding is subject to government approval and societies must “not intend to achieve any ‘political’ gains covered by the Political Parties Law in the course of their work”, though the term ‘political’ is undefined.

Why is all this relevant? Well, I have been thinking a lot about the environmental movement in the region and the importance of a strong civil society for it to flourish. If people are able to organise freely, feel that their voice matters and are unified then they are likely to take action on issues that concern them. If not, they will wait for the government to not only realise the severity of the problem but also come up with a solution. This is particularly worrying if the issue is climate change.

Climate change is not a problem that can be solved by governments and authorities – it’s far too wide reaching for that. It needs local solutions and local actions to go hand in hand with government support and policy. The problem can’t wait for governments to wake up and smell the carbon-dioxide coffee. So, if we are serious about building up an environmental movement in the Middle East, then we need to be serious about building up a strong and independent civil society first.

For more on Jordan see: 

Websites Go Black to Protest Internet Censorship in Jordan

King Abdullah: Israel is Disrupting Jordan’s Nuclear Ambitions

Recycling Yourself When Green Projects Go Bust

Image of Jordanian forced holding flowers distributed by protesters calling for release of political prisoners in Amman last month. Muhammad Hamed/Reuters.

The post Without A Strong Civil Society, Middle East Environment Has No Chance (Op-Ed) appeared first on Green Prophet.

In advance of the annual EU-Israel Association Council meeting on Tuesday, the European Union stated it will offer Israel upgraded trade and diplomatic relations in over 60 areas, including energy and agriculture. This offer will also grant Israel access to European government-controlled markets and enhance Israel’s co-operation with nine EU agencies.

This announcement came almost a week after the European Commission and Israel announced they are increasing cooperative efforts to develop sustainable water supplies and energy-efficiency, including oil fuel alternatives. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu referred to the latter agreement as an important milestone between Israel and the EU.

Such collaborations have unlimited potential. In June a new innovation by Israeli solar energy company TIGI Ltd., which would make it economical to harvest solar power in regions without sunny climates, won recognition at the Intersolar Europe Exhibition in Munich, Germany. European markets currently represent an estimated 60 percent of Israel’s annual trade.

Despite the fact that Israel is already intrinsically involved with Europe’s intergovernmental renewable energy developments, such as programs overseen by the EUREKA network, the EU’s decision to upgrade relations with Israel has already received a vast array of criticism from senior diplomats and pundits. Just a few weeks ago European foreign ministers warned that Israel’s policies in the West Bank “threaten to make a two-state solution impossible.” One Brussels-based bureaucrat suggested the EU should leverage economic relations to pressure Netanyahu to cease settlement construction in the West Bank.

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict has indeed been a stumbling block for Israel’s relations around the world, including its fledging connection with Japan. But Israel has generally responded to joint pressure on this issue with self-imposed isolation and increased nationalism rather than compliance. Pragmatic alternatives for the EU might include empowering Palestinian people and encouraging diversity and transparency within Israeli democracy. Surveys conducted in 2010 by the Harry S. Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem found that 60 percent of Israelis wanted to dismantle most of the settlements in the Occupied Territories.

Europe’s current economic turmoil is another contributing factor to Israel’s upgrade by the EU. It is perhaps the most significant development between the EU and Israel since 2009, when the EU halted Israel’s upgrade to denounce Operation Cast Lead.

::Guardian

Image of European roundtable from Shutterstock 

Read more about Israel’s global energy connections:

Clean-Tech Bonds Forged Between Israel and Canada

Israel’s Mekorot Builds Global Connections Through Water

NaanDanJain’s Irrigation Technology Strengthens Ties Between India and Israel

The post EU Upgrades Relations with Israel, Energy Over Politics appeared first on Green Prophet.

Around the time of the Copenhagen Summit in 2009, there was a sense that climate change was finally transitioning from something which only concerned hippy do-gooders to an issue that affected the entire international community. Everywhere you looked people were talking about climate change.

There was campaign after campaign, there were art exhibitions, documentaries, theatre productions and it felt like we may have been on the cusp of change (hindsight sadly tells us that we were not).

Another field where climate change was finally grabbing people’s attention was around security. The notion of water wars as well as climate-related migration was entering the public consciousness. This however, was not strictly ‘A Good Thing’.

As Gregory White states in his book Climate change and migration: security and borders in a warming world, ‘securitizating’ climate-induced migration (CIM) is counter-productive as it helps justify more unnecessary migration controls. It also encourages rich nations to abandon any sense of ethical responsibility to those on the receiving end of their emissions: “As industrialized countries contribute the most to climate change through consumption and emissions, CIM [Climate-induced migration] constitutes an ethical dilemma that will require them to reconsider and revise the existing dialogue concerning migration.”

As well as tackling the ethics around climate-related migration, White explores what climate-induced migration actually is. He states that it is not always going to be people leaving disappeared islands or lands that have become deserts. Slow environmental degradation of areas of the world is a more realistic imagining of the problem. Indeed, he states that slow degradation is already playing some role in existing migration alongside more traditional push and pull factors (economic opportunities, politics etc).

White also explores many of the common misconceptions people have about migration in general and CIM more specifically. For example, many people think that the world is on the move with the poorest threatening to ‘swamp’ our shores. As such migrators are seen as a security threat that must be controlled. This feeds rather dangerously into perception that climate refugees are also a threat to the developed world’s stability and security.

Despite what the media and lots of right-wing pundits like to tell us, most migration is regional and very limited. So African tend to migrate to other African nations. Asians will migrate to other Asian countries and so on. What’s more, although we tend to think that the poorest are the most mobile this isn’t true at all. In fact, one of the issues White raises is that with environmental degradation, migration tends to slow down as the very poorest lose the means to muster even the most basic resources to be able to transplant themselves away from their situation.

The very lucky few, the richest and most influential in a ecologically-struggling society, are those who retain the ability to migrate and to migrate significant distances across continents to the developed world. Most migrators end up in regional transit states such as Morocco, Mexico and Turkey without the ability to move on to more affluent societies.

As such, White states that a “security-minded approach to CIM diverts intellectual energy from more important endeavours.” -Endeavours such as helping the developing world adapt and mitigating the emissions of the developed world. White adds that efforts to encourage adaptation and nurture south-south cooperation on trade and sustainable development practices, would be “far better than sounding an environmental-refugee klaxon and securitizating international borders.” Especially as the securitization of borders would have its own ecological costs inflicted by the military-security industry.

This rather slim book (180 pages) is a great introduction to the complexities of climate migration and the rather unique position transit states find themselves when it comes to CIM. Many of it conclusions about the dangers of securitizing climate-induced migration extend to the dangers of securitizing the broader agenda. That is, it becomes about conflict and securing resources rather than shared responsibility towards each other and cutting our emissions.

Title: Climate Change and Migration: Security and Borders in A Warming World
Author: Gregory White
Year of Publication: 2011
Publisher: Oxford University Press

For more green book reviews see: 
The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change by Stephen Gardiner
Book Review of Edgelands: A Journey Into England’s True Wilderness
I’m With The Bears – Book Review

The post Climate, Migration and Why the Security Agenda Just Doesn’t Help appeared first on Green Prophet.

According to local engineers, the public needs to show its support for Jordan’s ambitious Bus Rapid Transit to help it overcome political barriers

Over a year ago, we reported (with considerable excitement) that Jordan was planning to deal with the growing congestion of the capital city by establishing a new line of buses. These high-capacity buses would carry more than 120 passengers along exclusive bus lanes, and would operate every three minutes during peak time. The Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) plans were aimed at reducing traffic along Amman’s busiest routes by improving public transport- a victory for the environment and common sense we thought.

However a couple of months before the project’s inauguration it was announced that the BRT plans have been shelved pending further review. There were murmurs that corruption had led to the project’s demise although officially, the project was halted due to ‘feasibility and funding concerns.’

In December, Prime Minister Awn Khasawneh referred the case to the justice ministry to investigate. Ayman Smadi, the director of the project acknowledged that there had been certain political factors behind the suspension of the project. Speaking to the Jordan Times, he explained that “there was huge pressure from Parliament to halt work on the project” and alleged that there were no valid technical reasons for doing so. He also added that the BRT project was being used as a “scapegoat” by those who wanted to attack Greater Amman Municipality’s management and certain deputies.

At a seminar held this week looking at the reasons behind the suspension of the project, several engineers insisted that the project was the city’s best option. They added that those in support of the project and the general public need to be more vocal in their support so that political barriers could be overcome.

“The right to transport is as essential as the right to healthcare,” said Mohammed Al Asadi, an architect specialised in urban planning who attended the seminar. Indicating his support for BRT, Asadi added that any public transportation strategy must include building a fast, comfortable and affordable mass transit system for all citizens.

:: Jordan Times

: Image via paalia/flickr.

For more on Jordan’s public transport issues see:

Jordan’s Ambitious Bus Plans Get Shelved

Jordan’s Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) Set For 2012 Inauguration

Middle East Joins Worldwide Campaign for Greener Transport (PHOTOS)

The post Jordan’s Public Transport Plans Blocked By ‘Political’ Barriers appeared first on Green Prophet.

Libyan sculptor Ali Al-Wakwak has transformed the charred remnants of war into inspiring creations

Around a week ago, Libyans celebrated the first anniversary of the uprising against Muammar Gaddafi. It’s certainly been a turbulent year for Libyans and although the future isn’t as certain as some would hope, thousands took to the streets to celebrate the new start they fought so hard for. Indeed, this chance for more open and democratic Libya is already leading to creative projects. Using bullets, tanks and burnt-out cars collected from abandoned military bases, Libyan sculptor Ali Al-Wakwak is recreating life from the weapons of death.

Al-Wakwak began work on his numerous sculptures during the revolution. From birds, small animals to a huge dinosaur (which is meant to represent the Gaddafi regime), he wanted to remember the ugly side of history. He explains that we must accept what has been broken, the ugly but that we must integrate it into something new too. Indeed, Al-Wakwak’s work is about transformation without forgetting – you can see a beautiful bird but also that it is made out of charred metals, bullets and wire. It’s also a highly collaborative project, with sometimes as many as ten people working to bring the sculpture together.

Speaking to Mashalla News, Al-Wakwak also talks openly about the impact the Gaddafi regime had on him and the seven years he spent in prison for refusing to go to war in Chad. “They put me in the military prison Abu Slim because I refused to go to war and kill people. I was lucky not to be tortured, but I spent years in a small cell together with seven or eight other people, without books, without anything.”

Al-Wakwak continues, “My son was also in jail. He is 27 now, when they caught him seven years ago he was so young. He hadn’t done anything wrong, the only thing he did was praying a lot. But he’s not an Islamist, only a devoted believer. Gaddafi was afraid of those. He was tortured in prison of course, they all were. For four years, I didn’t see him. After that I could visit him once every three months. It was only now after the revolution that he came out of prison.”

The largest sculpture that he has worked on is ‘The Dinosaur’ which is 35 metres in height. Al-Wakwak explains that it represents the Gaddafi regime in so much as it’s old, heavy and also now extinct. He adds that hopefully the Arab Spring and the revolution in Libya will inspire others to fight and overcome their very own ‘dinosaurs.’

::Mashalla News

Images via Ali Al-Wakwak’s facebook page.

For more green news from Libya see:
Iraq and Libya For Eco-Seeking Bravehearts
Gaddafi Could Use Water As Weapon of War
Subsidies Jeopardize Renewable Energy Projects In Middle East

The post Libyan Artist Turns Weapons of War Into Amazing Sculptures appeared first on Green Prophet.

As the political conflict rages on, drought-hit farmers in Syria struggle on and the aid trickling in to help is severely inadequate

In March 2011, the political situation in Syria began to unravel. Syrians took to the streets in places like Homs and Hama in an uprising against president Bashar al-Assad, who responded with mortar and grenade attacks. The intensity of the conflict only increased in subsequent months and now the political situation appears at breaking point. For example, farmers and herders in Syria are being forced to deal with political instability, recurrent drought and also the lack of funds donated to humanitarian programmes in the country.

“We are willing and able to reach many of the farming communities affected by the drought and the crisis, provided resources are made available by the donor community,” explained Abdulla Tahir Bin Yehia, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) representative in Syria. “[But] no single donor has given us a single penny this year. Funding from the donor community is absent,” Bin Yehia said to IRIN.

Due to the political crisis, around 18,000 migrant farming families who had fled to urban centres back in 2006 and 2010 due to droughts have been forced to move back home. This has left them with no source of income and in need of humanitarian assistance to restart their agricultural and herding activities.

So despite better rainfall in 2011, many of those who returned to their farmland did not plant because they had no seeds. They are now also struggling to afford petrol for their water pumps and the limited amount of exports leaving the country. Herders on the northeastern drought-hit areas are also constrained in their movement due to the political conflict and animal fodder prices have increased due to petrol price rises.

The UN FAO states that it has supported 7,000 small herders in Hassakah, Deir-ez-Zor and Homs governorates with animal feed; 2,000 farmers in Deir-ez-Zor with seeds; and 500 women-headed families with income-generating activities in Hassakah and Idlib governorates. But as Bin Yehia points out, “this is a small number out of 65,000 households who need humanitarian assistance.”

According to IRIN, a total of nearly 300,000 households have needed “life-sustaining assistance” in the last three years. Yet due to lack of funding, less than 20 percent of them have received it.

: IRIN News.

:: Image via Bombardier/flickr.

For more on Syria see:

Millions Go Hungry in Syria, Libya and Yemen

500,000 Syrians Flee Drought-Stricken Zone

Syria’s Dustbowl Attributed to Wasted Water

The post Syrian Farmers Increasingly Vulnerable appeared first on Green Prophet.