Knowledge For Youth Led Climate Action In The Arab Region

Environmental Law in Arab States offers a comprehensive and authoritative account of the guiding principles and rules relating to environmental protection in the Arab region. Taking an international and comparative approach, the book introduces readers to the latest developments of environmental law across the Arab region through applicable legislation, green finance, and climate technologies The impact of these is assessed in each of the major areas of environmental regulation, air pollution, water pollution, biodiversity, conservation of nature and cultural heritage, infrastructure development, and Islamic ecology. Consideration is given to participatory and bottom-up legal strategies – focusing on transparency, accountability, gender justice, and other human rights safeguards – that are needed to achieve greater coherence and coordination in the implementation and enforcement of environmental regulation across the region. The book closes by providing legal assessments and reflections on how Arab countries can, through clear and comprehensive legislation, advance existing national strategies and visions on trade and investment, green growth, Islamic green finance, circular economy, blue economy, and low carbon future amongst others.

In the Arab countries, climate change is a risk to poverty reduction and economic growth, threatening to unravel many of the development gains that have been achieved. The Arab Region is already suffering adverse consequences from climate variability and change. This book provides information on climate change and its impact in the Arab Region, as well as technical guidance on climate adaptation options for policy makers. The areas addressed include the economic impacts of climate change (as measured by the reduction in household income and GDP); the impacts of climate change on the water, health, and tourism sectors; livelihoods and well-being in rural and urban areas; biodiversity; disaster risk management; as well as gender and other social relations. The report is written through a participatory and collaborative process, led by the World Bank in partnership with the League of Arab States, incorporating both regional and international experts on the topics.

In the Arab States, the causes of crises, food insecurity, malnutrition and vulnerability to climate change impacts are deeply interlinked and require multifaceted responses. The Arab region is home to rising levels of conflict and the world's largest population of refugees and displaced people. Simultaneously, it is now the planet's most water scarce and food-import-dependent region, and the only region where malnutrition rates have been rising. Overexploitation of natural resources in the region has also led to severe ecosystem degradation. Poor land and water management are reducing the potential provision of already limited ecosystem services. The impacts of climate change are exacerbating the existing challenges of sustainably managing limited natural resources. Climate change-related desertification has expanded in the Arab region, greatly increasing the vulnerability of the local population. In fragile countries such as Somalia, illegal armed groups such as Al-Shabaab have increasingly attracted young people, who are affected by drought-induced food insecurity and have limited job prospects.To conquer such challenges, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is supporting countries in the four sub-regions of the Arab region (Mashreq, Maghreb, Arab Gulf and Horn of Africa) to adapt to climate change impacts and to prepare for disaster risks. These countries include some of the least developed countries (LDCs), namely: Djibouti, Somalia, Sudan, and the Republic of Yemen; Tunisia in the Maghreb; and the Arab Republic of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and the occupied Palestinian territories in the Mashreq. UNDP projects have aimed to improve natural resource governance and management while balancing socio-economic needs and environmental protection. Currently, UNDP's Climate Change Adaptation (CCA) portfolio includes two projects in Djibouti and Sudan in addition to single projects in Egypt, Somalia, Tunisia and Yemen. The first UNDP CCA project in the Arab region was launched in Egypt in 2010 with financing from the Global Environment Facility's (GEFs) Special Climate Change Fund (SCCF). Since then, the portfolio includes ongoing projects with a total financing of approximately US$42 million, primarily financed by GEF, the Adaptation Fund (AF) and UNDP. Most recently, UNDP has also supported Egypt in accessing financing from the Green Climate Fund (GCF) for coastal adaptation. In parallel to GEF supported initiatives, UNDP has also supported Djibouti, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, the occupied Palestinian territories, Somalia, Sudan and Tunisia in disaster risk reduction and recovery with projects from 2005-2016 valued at US$151 million, through support of UNDP resources and bilateral donors like Canada, European Commission, Iceland, Japan, Kuwait, Switzerland and the US.The purpose of this publication is to detail lessons learned from UNDP's Climate Change Adaptation work and achievements in the Arab region on achieving sustainable and lasting results. Some lessons include building local capacity at all levels to ensure a project's long-term viability, decentralizing infrastructure management, implicating community-based organizations, and promoting resilience of vulnerable populations through livelihood diversification. Providing populations with access to adapted financial services such as Weather Index Insurances (WII) linked with microfinance services was found to support rural populations to become more resilient to climate induced damages. The immediate objective of this publication is not only to share experiences with a wider audience, but also to inform future CCA programming. The publication furthermore acts as a call to action to facilitate a long-term coordinated approach to increasing the resilience of countries most vulnerable to climate change in the region.

Critical analysis of what we know - and do not know – about women in the Arab region is needed to support social change. But how is knowledge on women and gender produced in the region? How does this change when it is undertaken by Arab women researchers? Through a critical examination of local fieldwork experiences, the contributors of the volume - who are Arab women researchers themselves - answer these questions. The book examines the specific structural conditions that shape people's lives in the Arab region, from the effects of imperialism, settler colonialism and the neo-liberalization of economies, to racial capitalism, securitization, and embedded patriarchal ideologies and structures. The authors assess the implications of these different dynamics on undertaking research and also examine their own daily lives, the lives of their interlocutors, and the practices of their field. In doing so, they are able to escape hegemonic approaches and frameworks to the study of gender and to instead theorize from the local context to produce knowledge as they see it. This 'engaged gender research' challenges dominant discourses in academia, rejects the presumptions of 'Arab exceptionalism', and challenges liberal feminisms. It devises a new way of undertaking research on gender in the region to lay the foundation for a more just tomorrow. Covering Morocco, Tunisia, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and the Arab Gulf, the book argues that an engaged gender research - which is feminist and critically analyses the historical, political, economic and social contexts of the research topic first - will transform how we understand women and gender, and the Arab World.

The Be the Movement workshop was an inspiring gathering of climate change activists, youth and concerned professionals. Five main needs on how to strengthen the climate action movement were identified and discussed: message for new audiences; empowering educators; innovating campaign strategies; considering costs; and leading for solutions. The workshop confirmed that urgent and bold action is required to tackle climate change. Participants recognized that the global climate change movement will be enhanced if they: a) increase collaboration and cooperation, b) recognize the intimate and unavoidable link between eradicating extreme poverty and climate change, c) emphasize early climate action to avoid high costs in the future, d) stress that mitigation will not hinder economic development, e) highlight that each and every individual can make a difference, and f) offer assistance for educators. Overall, the proceedings and recommendations serve as a pragmatic compendium of shared knowledge for climate action.

This book takes both a global as well as a local perspective in assessing the impacts of climate change on the economy, agricultural sector, and households in three of the MENA countries; Syria, Tunisia and Yemen. The major channels of impact for global climate change are through changing world food (and energy) prices, especially since all the countries under analysis are or have become net importers of oil and petroleum products and many food commodities in recent years. The impacts of local climate change decrease crop yields in the longer run and through them, productivity in the agricultural sector and all the implications this may have on both, the livelihoods of those dependent on the sector as well as the rest of the economy. The analysis also covered what happens when both global and local climate changes work simultaneously for each country. Findings show that in all three countries the effects of climate change are negative for people and the economy—GDP falls and livelihoods suffer. Furthermore, the prevalence of extreme variations in climate—such as the droughts affecting Syria and the floods impacting Yemen—draws attention to the potentially significant drawbacks that are likely to not only affect any strides towards economic growth and development, but may also reverse such strides if appropriate policies are not in place to weather this storm. The analyses in this book apply CGE models.

A Global Idea outlines how youth—as shown by the Arab Spring uprisings and subsequent state responses—became a prominent social and political category during the first two decades of the twenty-first century in the Middle East. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interview data, and textual analysis, Mayssoun Sukarieh explains that the spread of youth as an important category is linked to the operation of a "global youth development complex," a diverse transnational network of state, private sector, civil society, and international development aid organizations that worked through key urban areas such as Washington, DC, Amman, and Dubai. In its analysis of the arrival, extension, and embedding of the youth development complex in the Middle East during this period, A Global Idea addresses a broader question that is of global and not just regional concern. How are certain ideas that are central to the working and reproduction of global capitalism able to travel the world so that they are found virtually everywhere?