Climate change is a systemic form of change affecting the biosphere and all human civilizations in it. It is not a linear set of risks that will affect societies, but a form of change that takes a life of its own and reshapes societies and landscapes. Climate change will redistribute natural resources, impact relationships between governments and peoples, heighten vulnerabilities, and create security challenges that may go well beyond what societies can adapt to. The shocks that societies have been experiencing so far—mostly in the form of ever-devastating fires, droughts, and floods—are just the tip of the iceberg. They are the beginning of an upending process whose outcome is not yet fully capable of being understood. In the reshaping process that anthropogenic climate change has launched, foundations of society are themselves in the process of changing, including the equilibriums that have tied human settlements to reliable natural resources and the economic and political relations that have bound societies together.
Analysis, preparation, adaptation, and the willingness to consider radical changes (rather than incremental ones, within business-as-usual scenarios) are the factors that will determine both the quality and outcomes of the process and the ability to adapt to rapidly unfolding risks and opportunities. This way to talk about climate change has however not fully surfaced, and climate change is certainly not being framed this way in the Arab world. For more than a decade, if and when climate change was discussed, it was referred to as a threat or a risk multiplier—not as a game changer.
Yet, climate change in the Arab world is already unfolding rapidly. It will have deep and pervasive impacts even if the international community manages to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (°C) compared to preindustrial levels, which at this point seems unlikely. It is already well-known that the Arab world—spanning from the northern parts of Africa to the Fertile Crescent and the Arabian Peninsula—is one of the most ecologically depleted regions in the world and has been for centuries due to persistent anthropogenic pressures. This ecological depletion, which includes high water vulnerability and low soil productivity, predisposes the region to environmental shocks. Climate change is making those worse. If the world continues to cruise through another decade without acting decisively on climate mitigation, all countries around the world will need to shift their attention to the combined challenges of mitigation and adaptation. The ability of Arab countries to transition away from fossil-dependent economies while simultaneously building adaptation and aggressive regeneration into economic and policy planning will determine the region’s stability in the future.
For decades, conflict protraction has remained a major concern in parts of the Arab world. It is only fair to ponder whether new or protracting conflicts may be on the horizon as the region undergoes profound biophysical and natural endowment change, which will necessarily impact political economies and sociocultural fabrics. While thinking through the lens of conflict and cooperation is obviously legitimate, it is too binary to really understand the profound ways in which the Arab world will change and what climate change will mean for the region and for how the region relates to the rest of the world. Tension and cooperation are likely to take place simultaneously in response to climate change. Tensions may include conflict hotspots, but insecurity will go beyond these hot spots and will take on diffuse manifestations in the future. Cooperation patterns will emerge in response to political, economic, and biophysical changes in the region, and some are already apparent today. But it is unlikely, given the current framing of climate disruptions today, that current cooperation patterns will be enough to hold and tackle the complexity of what is to come.
Climate Disruptions in the Arab World: A Landscape Approach
In February 2023, 419 parts per million of carbon dioxide were recorded in the planet’s atmosphere. This leads to two consequences. First, global warming is on its way to hitting a level 1.2°C higher than preindustrial levels. Second, the accumulated stock of carbon into the atmosphere will materialize into a number of climate disruptions that are baked into the atmospheric system. These disruptions will occur in an increasingly systemic and nonlinear fashion. Looking beyond this already sobering state of affairs, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has highlighted the grave situation that will impact countries the world over:
- The release of excess greenhouse gases continues unabated and has largely rebounded after the slump observed during the coronavirus pandemic.
- The planet should not exceed 1.5°C of global warming compared to preindustrial levels, lest planetary tipping points be accelerated with consequences that may undermine the ability to sustain any human civilization in the future.
- Yet, mitigation strategies have so far failed to reach the necessary level of greenhouse gas curbing, and it is plausible that the world may peak at 1.5°C of warming as early in the next decade. It is hoped that the peak will be temporary and that mitigation strategies will steer humanity toward a lower warming threshold. However, current mitigation strategies are not on par with that scenario.
- Climate finance is drastically underdelivering on adaptation planning, even though it should now rank as a top priority for all countries, particularly in highly climate vulnerable countries such as those in the Arab world.
To say that these facts are deeply worrying is an understatement. They provide a global backdrop to the fight against climate change in every region, including in the Arab world—a region where impacts are manifesting in a stronger and more accelerated fashion than expected. Grappling with the reality that these facts create and inferring what needs to happen from a mitigation and adaptation perspective are what will make the difference globally and regionally between a world that adapts and a world that fragments under the weight of compounding crises and multidimensional disruptions.
How Is the Arab World Impacted by the Fast-Approaching Climate Reality?
The Arab region is on average warming twice as fast as the rest of the world. Temperatures in the region have already significantly increased and will continue to do so. The level to which they will increase depends naturally on the success of ambitious global mitigation strategies. It is however crucial to understand that even if the international community manages to keep global warming under the 1.5°C threshold, the Arab region would still experience an average temperature increase of about 2°C between 2021 and 2039, with peaks of temperatures in summer months at about 2.5°C (see figure 1). More alarming assessments estimate that the Arab world could experience as much as 4°C of warming by 2050 compared to preindustrial levels, a temperature increase that would effectively lead to inhabitability.
This prospect is not integrated into medium- and long-term planning from an energy, economic, humanitarian, sociopolitical, nor migratory perspective. It is actually not being discussed nor envisaged as a true possibility in spite of accumulating scientific evidence pointing to the accelerating trajectories of global warming. This is not just at the policy level. Perceptions about climate change in the Arab world indicate a lower level of mobilization about this issue compared to other regions in the world. Survey respondents as recently as in 2022 tended to believe that climate change may harm future generations, but they generally felt less concerned about current changes in the Arab region, in spite of experiencing increasingly dangerous disruptions. This lag in mobilization is the function of many different factors, including the fact that climate change coverage in the media has long received little attention.
The results of such a relatively low level of mobilization are disastrous: One is that governments tend to underestimate the threats that climate change will represent for political and economic continuity in their region. They still view climate change, including its worst trajectories, as a problem that can and will be managed. As a consequence, by failing to appreciate the long-term threats climate change represents, governments fail to organize the systemic type of change that would help to prevent the worst possible scenarios of climate collapse. By failing to tackle change from a systemic perspective, the Arab world faces a likelihood of profound collapse, which will lead to systematic population displacement to other regions.
Impact and Risk Conveyors
Water
Unsurprisingly, the first direct impacts of average global and regional warming collide with water systems on the one hand and food systems on the other. As the planet’s average temperature rises, more water is sucked into the atmosphere and turns into water vapor, which in turn supercharges the disruptive effects of carbon dioxide. Droughts, floods, and fires are the primary forms of climate disruptions that have become common and are destabilizing the Arab region and elsewhere. Nearly half of the population in the region has already experienced acute and protracted effects of drought, which is usually followed by intense episodes of flooding. These forms of disruptions are all signs of too much or too little water. In other words, one of the key drivers of vulnerability in the Arab region has been the gradual and sustained degradation of the hydrological cycle.
This is a vulnerability that has built up over time: some would trace it back to as far as the birth of agricultural societies in the Fertile Crescent area of the modern Middle East. This water cycle degradation makes the Arab region the planet’s most water-insecure area of the world. Apart from Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan, all countries in the region suffer from per capita water poverty, a reality that will only worsen unless multidimensional cooperation avenues are introduced. Water stress and water poverty eventually reverberate in all aspects of societal resilience: They impact food security, health security, energy security, and, more widely, the likelihood of quality sustainable development. In addition, water insecurity is expected to increase dramatically. According to the UN Development Programme, an additional 80 to 100 million people are anticipated to experience acute water stress as early as 2025 due to disrupted rainfall patterns and aquifer recharge capacities. In other words, water insecurity is on its way to becoming a fundamental aspect of systemic risk that impacts various sectors, including human health and mobility. The costs of multidimensional reverberations of water insecurity are often unaccounted for, yet they debilitate economic performance and political stability. With climate change, water bankruptcy is likely to bring governance, economic, and fiscal bankruptcy, too.
Food
Less water necessarily means less food security. This will affect the Arab region at national and collective levels and in direct and indirect manners. In a direct manner, the inability of soils to retain water and store carbon means that soils in the region will more rapidly lose their productive capacity, which will have deleterious impacts on those who rely on agriculture for their livelihoods and social resilience. From a macroeconomic perspective, the reliance on agriculture varies by country. For example, it is higher in Egypt than it is in Saudi Arabia. In spite of efforts to try and reinforce national food security in the face of obvious disruptions, the Arab region remains, on the whole, reliant on food imports, and increasingly so. Tunisia, for example, has decreased its agriculture contribution to overall GDP by 3 percentage points compared to 2010. Food import reliance exposes the region to two types of issues that may turn into indirect systemic risk conveyance.
The first relates to the way in which climate disruptions are stacking odds against political and economic integration and creating intergenerational challenges that limit adaptation capacity in some countries. This creates brittle foundations for economies to prosper in a rapidly warming region. In a country like Tunisia, agriculture is an important sector, but people who focus on agriculture tend to feel marginalized and receive less policy attention. In turn, the experience of marginalization can lead to political discontent associated with feelings of injustice and socioeconomic, as well as territorial, fragmentation. To give an example, agriculture is most prominent in interior regions while tourism is most often associated with coastal regions. The latter will experience long-term changes as the sea level rises. In the meantime, economic and political power will remain concentrated in various ways around coastal economies, as is already the case, while interior regions will keep experiencing degradation of economic and social opportunities. The lack of economic prospects is not new in interior regions and has already festered into security issues. The advent of the Arab Spring in Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia was but one famous example. The situation, before and since then, has been protracted and led to continued frustration with government policy against a backdrop of worsening drought and environmental issues. The buildup of discontent has led the central government over time to try and restrict labor migration and contain youth populations on the basis of security concerns.1 The lack of movement options, combined with desolate landscapes where monocultures exhaust ecological integrity, constitute a bedrock of socioeconomic potential for destabilization in which young people feel like the government tries to contain them without providing viable options for the future.
This brittleness is then easily magnified and expanded in an import-oriented economy whose food and energy commodity prices can spike radically, whether due to climate-related breadbasket failures (as was seen during the Arab Spring) or grain export weaponization (as is currently being witnessed during the Ukraine war). This is an indirect risk conveyance: political stability can be elusive when inflationary pressures and economic destitution hit territorially and economically marginalized populations the hardest, especially when these populations actually represent a majority of the country. And it is likely to remain so in a world where climate change advances much faster than originally modeled by the IPCC—and where breadbasket failures are bound to increase as long as the world fails to turn the tide on conventional and input-dependent agriculture.
Impacts Beyond Water and Food
The story of climate disruptions and structurally embedded fragility is well known in the Arab region, not least because it in part drove the revolutionary swell of the Arab Spring in light of inflationary pressures on staple crops, a process that lit up movements aiming to overthrow dictatorial regimes unable to care for vulnerability in their population. Climate change impacts do not limit themselves to water and food. They only start there and expand into energy disruptions, as Iraq made visible over the last two summers with long-lasting power cuts. They also extend to health issues, with the growing threat of dust storms that bring the economies subject to these occurrences to a stall and contribute to a growing health crisis. These various forms of crises amount to multidimensional fragility, which creates bottom-up pressures on governments and societies.
This compounding fragility is significant because it stands on the shoulders of widening and structural inequalities, which the region experiences at national and regional levels. Indeed, the Arab world is characterized by some of the direst levels of inequalities in the world. In the region, the wealthiest 10 percent of people control 81 percent of net wealth (up from the prepandemic level of 75 percent). It is expected that an additional 10 million people in the region will fall into extreme poverty by 2023—a number that will likely grow as a result of water scarcity.
Beyond the aggregate regional data, the differences between countries are significant too: conflict-affected countries such as Iraq or Yemen have fundamental troubles climbing the development ladder compared to neighboring countries such as Saudi Arabia or the UAE. The structural and regional inequalities tell a larger story when informed by IPCC findings. Indeed, in its February 2022 report, Working Group II demonstrated clearly that more unequal societies and regions are least likely to adapt to climate change on a structural level, making de-development and conflict risks more plausible. In other words, climate change will widen current levels of inequality and poverty, likely cause reversals in development gains, and therefore pose challenges of new proportions for countries whose national and regional baselines are already fragile.
In the face of such prospects, examining current adaptation approaches is key to understand how the Arab world may shape up in the future.
Resilience Building, Geoeconomics, and Technosolutionism
Resilience in the Arab world is a delicate matter. It depends on global and regional strategies to move as fast as possible away from fossil fuel dependencies and on simultaneous investments into deep adaptation. The faster the energy transition, the more chances the Arab region will have to avoid inhabitability in the medium term. Logically, this should be incentive enough. But several odds play against this realization.
The first stumbling blocks start with fossil dependency. Fossil exports have created rentier economies in a number of countries across the region. Rents are closely linked to power distribution systems, which creates a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it generates path dependency. Elites are unlikely to give up the source of their economic and political power as they maintain important patronage and redistribution systems. Changing energy systems would mean changing the way in which power is administered and shared. Moreover, as over 80 percent of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels, countries dependent on fossil exports have little decisive incentive to shift away to alternative investments. As the war in Ukraine demonstrated, fossil fuel–exporting countries like Saudi Arabia remain at the heart of the global economic metabolism—a leverage of force that fossil-dependent countries are unlikely to want to give up.
This energy and power path dependency has three consequences. One is that countries like Saudi Arabia are actively choosing policies and energy production systems that compound the rapidly unfolding climate breakdown. The second has to do with climate finance. Funds for adaptation measures keep falling short. Indeed, in late 2022, adaptation funds only represented about 10 percent of overall climate finance. This provides an easy rationale for fossil-fuel-dependent countries: They argue they need the money generated from fossil fuel rents to invest in deep adaptation. But if fossil fuels keep creating a rentier path dependency, they say, then the only solution is to go toward technosolutionism for fossil-dependent countries.
Technosolutionism relies on the belief that carbon capture and removal systems will enable the world to keep up its business as usual and that technological innovation will eventually stall climate-related disasters. This belief assumes technologies will be developed in time to allow for deep mitigation and deep adaptation. For example, Saudi Arabia and the UA E are among rising investors in carbon capture and carbon removal technologies, which, if proven effective enough and taken at scale, would enable these countries to maintain their dependency on fossil exports. Yet, so far, no technological solution has been proven to work effectively enough, and certainly not at scale. Taken too far, technosolutionism may well contribute to making the climate crisis worse by delaying the radical type of action needed to turn the ship.
This belief in technology is not just confined to the energy sector. It extends into a technologically oriented approach toward adaptation, including for water, food, and habitability security. The most affluent countries in the Arab region are in fact using the climate crisis and their ability to invest in innovative technologies to propel themselves into a new type of technology-driven economy, understood to be one of the next frontiers of economic growth and competition. This is the case with the UAE’s attempt to support the drive toward “smart sustainable cities.” It is equally the case with Saudi Arabia’s attempts to invest in smart agriculture and other technology-supported ways to generate water security, including expensive forms of desalination and water conversion and diversion. The dual strategy to keep current forms of rentier economies while investing into complementary ones that aim to mitigate the effects of climate change in the region represents a new type of regional, political, and rent-harvesting opportunity for those countries. But it is one that comes at a high cost for others in the region. One only has to look at the investments originally made in the Great Man-Made River in Libya, which are now resulting in national conflict drivers, as well as potential regional tensions with Egypt over Nubian aquifers due to geological water pumping.
The systemic costs of continued fossil dependency and technosolutionism make sense: Not all countries in the region are as well-endowed in economic resources as the UEA and Saudi Arabia. Places like Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Palestine, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen lack capital access and political space to invest in deep-technology forms of adaptation. The more climate-related disruptions that come their way, the greater the challenges and crises to deal with over time and the less fiscal and economic space they have to handle those crises. The cooperative space between countries in the region will be rigged by countries that generally try to use the climate crisis to their own advantage, while underestimating the might of the problem, and those that experience the full set of climate disruptions, without having extensive resources to deal with the consequences at home and in border regions. In all likelihood, this will indeed lead to a future scenario where conflict dynamics worsen and economies of countries already affected by violence stunt—fitting the depiction of climate change as a risk multiplier.
Such will be the case in Iraq, Libya, and Syria, for example. In these countries, ecological services will keep on degrading as a direct result of the acceleration of climate breakdown. Thus conflicts will most likely concentrate in areas of relative abundance, that is, in places where water resources remain relatively available. Relative abundance results in competition for available resources in the context of a growing population and leads, over time, to potential weaponization. In a country like Iraq, relatively abundant zones could include marshes, a wetland-type ecosystem that has historically led to the rise of agriculture and still sustains important livelihoods in the Fertile Crescent. The more this ecosystem is disrupted, the less ecological services it will provide and the more degradation will lead to destitution without adequate means of adaptation. The end result is not just a multiplication of security challenges related to the loss of livelihoods and human insecurity; if states keep failing to provide fundamental solutions and services in the face of growing disruptions, social contracts will rupture beyond repair.
Beyond national challenges, the overall impact of sustained dependency on fossil fuels may create new forms of regional challenges, in addition to existing ones. As mentioned, climate change needs to be understood as the great redistributor of natural resources, starting with water. In the Arab world, major countries tend to share transboundary water basins that are under direct threat of accelerating climate change. Upstream and downstream countries tend to lack the cooperative infrastructures that may lead to joint stability. This is the result of historically tense relations and, more recently, of the increasing threat of scarcity that leads to having countries pit respective visions of development against one another. Most notably, Egypt and Ethiopia—home to two of the most important tributaries of the Nile River—have escalated geopolitical tensions over river and infrastructure management to the UN Security Council without reaching a resolution so far. Tensions between Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey keep surfacing over water management around the Euphrates and Tigris river systems. Turkey controls over 90 percent of the water that goes into the Euphrates River and more than 40 percent of the water that goes into the Tigris river system. Ankara has been accused on several occasions of weaponizing water to purse its own geopolitical objectives in a region that is prone to deep violence and turmoil.
In all cases regarding transboundary issues, the construction of hydropower infrastructure and nationally determined plans tend to pit countries with more financial capacity against others, often driven by elites who skew decisionmaking regarding public goods. The result is natural capital protectionism. In a context where natural resources are rapidly running scarce, this can easily be perceived in a belligerent light. And, currently, mediation or negotiation mechanisms are simply inadequate even when they are utilized, which is seldom the case. The use of cooperative processes and infrastructures is likely to increase alongside the threat of insecurity and belligerence. The problem is that these processes will occur in a reactive manner and fail to address fundamental insecurity drivers.
The reliance on technology and infrastructure is likely to create more and more fractures at national and regional levels in the future. Plans to divert water, desalinate it, and make its use more efficient tend to fall into an energy-versus-natural-resource trap over time. Technology requires energy. In the Arab world, the more convenient source of energy is also the source of the problems that technologies try to fix when natural resources are scarce. And, innovative technology requires monetary and fiscal resources that are likely to be increasingly used for disaster risk reduction and management. The technosolutionist logic may seem appealing for now, as climate-related changes are underestimated and as long as climate change is relegated to a topic of growing yet manageable concern. Over time, climate degradation may trap countries that fail to prepare in an impossible economic equation and security dilemma. This is why the use of technology needs to be accompanied by larger systemic changes, starting with a plan to stabilize the hydrological cycle at regional levels and, if successful, at global levels.
Transformative Cooperation: Dual Investments Into Decarbonization and Regeneration at Scale
The Arab world faces a dual challenge. One is to shift its economies and energy systems into renewable investments, and the other is to work toward stabilizing and regenerating the hydrological cycle to reboot ecological services and strengthen climate adaptation and resilience.
Remediating the systematic assaults against the hydrological cycle in the region is crucial in order to mitigate climate-related disruptions related to water evaporation. Only by working with the hydrological cycle will countries manage to rebuild water resilience over time rather than navigate scarcity. This requires a different approach to water and security. All states in the region have an interest in trying to rebuild the quality of their soil, starting with its ability to retain water and store carbon. This would necessitate repositioning agriculture and ecological services at the heart of policy and urban and rural planning with a view to shift away from economic activities that are inappropriate to the region’s soils and ecological conditions. To start with, a shift toward regenerative agriculture should be considered as a matter of priority for disaster, conflict, and insecurity prevention in climate-disrupted futures. Incentivizing regenerative, complex, soil-specific agricultures would also have the benefit of providing a different economic vision for countries in the region, especially those that feel territorially and socioeconomically marginalized. It is therefore not just about rebooting productive agriculture; it is actually about tackling systemic changes from the literal ground up, rethinking the way in which socioeconomic fabrics maintain themselves over time and how mobility is envisaged. It is, at the core, a question of dignity (karama, as Arab Spring protesters chanted in 2011 and keep on demanding today).
Beyond agriculture, regenerative approaches should include landscaping changes for disasters and adaptation. Several experiments have already demonstrated that landscaping techniques can be used in arid and semi-arid areas to stock water in times of inundations. The techniques can also contribute to rebuilding ecological resilience in desertified areas, which can help with carbon storage and ecological rebooting. Finally, regenerative processes can be used to support mediation over transboundary issues in the Arab world, particularly when it comes to water management. This requires shifting the mediation focus from managing to fighting and reversing scarcity through confidence-building measures and cooperative frameworks. It also involves working with data-driven methodologies that make apparent the hydrological cycle and atmospheric rivers that bind together countries of the Arab world. By working with the hydrological cycle and trying to bring water back from its gas form into water bodies and aquifers, there may be hope of increasing more reliable weather and rainfall patterns, including in the age of climate disruptions.
Working with the hydrological cycle involves complex methodologies and economic sector changes. It is a more diffuse and inclusive type of adaptation, since it involves rebuilding human societies that nourish ecological services as much as they take from them. Technical support for this work is scarce, but it is slowly starting to emerge within the region as one area of potential engagement and as a conflict prevention approach. Appetite for innovative approaches for transformative integrated conflict and climate disaster prevention is growing. Tools exist, but they need to be tested and refined. At this point of looming climate breakdown, countries in the regions would do well to open up to adaptation avenues that are less conventional, yet potentially disruptive for the better. The good news is that economic resources may gradually become more available if carbon markets are connected to this type of adaptation work. Carbon credits, defined as financial schemes payable to carbon storage projects or facilities, are most often associated with finance flowing to ecosystems like the Amazon Rainforest. They are rarely considered for the Arab world since soils are so dry and vegetation so scarce compared to other regions of the world. But it is a mistake to think the Arab world cannot play its part in rebuilding ecological services that include carbon storage. In fact, this region may well be a low-hanging fruit for effective carbon finance flows.
These financial flows will have to be limited in timeframe, though, since they should stop when fossil fuels are phased out. This is where the Arab world also needs to play an active role. It is not just about investing in solar and wind farms or electrified systems; it is also about investing in a new set of supply chains and technological innovations that will define the future of stability for energy and industrial systems in the years to come. It is also, therefore, about investing in the new type of geopolitical relations that will shape international relations in the decades to come.
A number of economies in the Arab world have leverage to play into the new energy ecosystems of tomorrow. Finance is needed to accelerate extraction, processing, technological development, and end-use installations. In addition, new regional integrations for energy resilience need to be designed and planned. The green revolution is not a panacea for peace. No energy transition in the history of humankind has gone without deep turbulence. But there is indeed something different about this one: It is not just a matter of competition for the next phase of economic expansion; it is a matter of survival, and nowhere but the Arab region demonstrates better the need for investments and climate action to move fast. And no region has more of an incentive nor greater agency to shift directions toward the age of renewables, even if it entails some changes in power distribution structures.
Conclusion
Conflict and cooperation will coexist in the Arab world, and both trends are likely to intensify in the near future. But the most important aspect lies beyond the binary: Humanity is not just facing the plausibility of increased conflict or violence. In the case of the Arab world, humanity is facing the possibility of inhabitability. An area of over 13 million square kilometers that hosts over 430 million people is on its way to becoming unfit for human living. This is unprecedented and, frankly, difficult to imagine. Yet, taking this fast-approaching reality as the departing point for planning and action is in order. The dual priorities of regeneration and decarbonization require changes in political economies of power and resource distribution, which currently represent the major obstacles to change. Elites, especially in the wealthiest of countries of the Arab world, must become aware of their responsibilities and interests in the age of climate adaptation, lest they have no country to govern in the next two to three decades.
Notes
1 Author’s field work, 2018.