The reality of climate breakdown is already visible in the Arab region,1 undermining the ecological and socioeconomic basis of life. Countries such as Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan and Egypt are experiencing recurrent severe heat waves and prolonged droughts, with catastrophic impacts on agriculture and small-scale farmers.2 Ranked as one of the world’s five most vulnerable nations to climate change and desertification, Iraq was hit in 2022 by many sandstorms that shut down much of the country, with thousands of people hospitalised because of respiratory problems. The country’s environment ministry has warned that over the next two decades Iraq could endure an average of 272 days of sandstorms a year, rising to above 300 by 2050.3 In the summer of 2021, Algeria was struck by unprecedented and devastating wildfires; Kuwait experienced a suffocating heat wave, registering the highest temperature on earth that year, at well over 50ºC; and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Yemen, Oman, Syria, Iraq and Egypt all experienced devastating floods, while southern Morocco struggled with terrible droughts for the third year in a row. In the years ahead, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projects that the Mediterranean and Gulf regions will see an intensification of extreme weather events, such as wildfires and flooding, and further increases in aridity and droughts.4
‘It’s now or never, if we want to limit global warming to 1.5ºC.’ That’s the warning from the IPCC working group behind the 2022 comprehensive review of climate science. The review report warns that the world is set to reach 1.5ºC of warming within the next two decades and states that only the most drastic cuts in carbon emissions, starting today, can prevent an environmental and climate disaster. Since these reviews are conducted every six to seven years, this can be seen as the last warning from the IPCC before the world is set irrevocably on a path to climate breakdown, with terrifying consequences. As United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres declared when the report was released: ‘In concrete terms, [this level of global heating] means major cities under water, unprecedented heat waves, terrifying storms, widespread water shortages, and the extinction of one million species of plants and animals.’
The impacts of these changes are disproportionately felt by marginalised people, including small-scale farmers, agro-pastoralists, agricultural labourers and fisherfolk. Already, people in the Arab world are being forced off their lands by stronger and more frequent droughts and winter storms, expanding deserts and rising sea levels.5 Crops are failing and water supplies are dwindling, deeply impacting food production in a region that is chronically dependent on food imports.6 As the effects of climate change are increasingly felt, there is a huge pressure on already scarce water supplies due to changes in rainfall and seawater intrusion into groundwater reserves, as well as groundwater overuse. According to an article in the Lancet, this will place most Arab countries under the absolute water-poverty level of 500 m³ per person per year by 2050.7
Climate scientists are predicting that the climate in large parts of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) could change in such a manner that the very survival of its inhabitants will be in jeopardy.8 In North Africa, for example, those whose lives will be changed the most by climate change include small-scale farmers in the Nile Delta and rural areas in Morocco and Tunisia, the fisherfolk of Jerba and Kerkennah (Tunisia), the inhabitants of In Salah in Algeria, the Saharawi refugees in the Tindouf camps (Algeria), and the millions living in informal settlements in Cairo, Khartoum, Tunis and Casablanca. Elsewhere in the Arab region, small-scale farmers and fisherfolk in occupied Palestine, internally displaced people and refugees in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Jordan, and hyper-exploited migrant workers in the UAE and Qatar will face the violence of the climate crisis with little protection as they are frequently housed in squalid conditions, denied routine medical care, and face malnutrition.
The climate crisis was not an inevitable fact: it has been, and continues to be, driven by the choice to keep burning fossil fuels – a choice made predominantly by corporations and Northern governments, together with national ruling classes, including in the Arab region. Energy and climate plans in that part of the world are shaped by authoritarian regimes and their backers in Riyadh, Brussels and Washington DC. Rich local elites collaborate with multinational corporations, and international financial institutions, such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Despite all of their promises, the actions of these institutions show that they are enemies of climate justice and of humanity’s very survival.
Every year, the world's political leaders, advisers, media and corporate lobbyists gather for another United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP) on the issue of climate change. But despite the threat facing the planet, governments continue to allow carbon emissions to rise and the crisis to escalate. After three decades of what the Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg has called ‘blah blah blah’, it has become evident that these climate talks are bankrupt and are failing. They have been hijacked by corporate power and private interests that promote profit-making false solutions, like carbon trading and so-called ‘net-zero’ and ‘nature-based solutions’, instead of forcing industrialised nations and multinationals to reduce carbon emissions and leave fossil fuels in the ground.9
With COP28 being held in Dubai, UAE, in 2023, the Arab region will have hosted the climate talks five times since their inception in 1995: COP7 (2001) and COP22 (2016) in Marrakech, Morocco; COP18 (2012) in Doha, Qatar; and COP27 (2022) in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. In recent years, and especially since the 2015 Paris Agreement walked back from the (already grossly inadequate) binding targets established in the Kyoto Accord to allow countries to independently determine their own emissions reduction targets, scepticism about the ability of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to tackle the most urgent challenge facing humanity has grown. COPs attract massive media attention but tend not to achieve major breakthroughs. COP27, held in Sharm el-Sheikh in 2022, achieved an agreement on Payment for Loss and Damage that has been lauded by some as an important step in making richer countries accountable for the damage caused by climate change in the global South.10 However, as the agreement lacks clear funding and enforcement mechanisms, critics worry it will meet with the same fate as the broken promise (first made in COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009) to provide $100 billion in climate finance by 2020. That promise was never fully realised, with assistance often taking the form of interest-bearing loans instead.11 As for COP28, the UAE’s appointment of Sultan al-Jaber, CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, to preside over the talks seems to many activists and observers to symbolise the deep commitment to continued oil extraction, regardless of the cost, which has characterised negotiations to date.
Middle Eastern and North African states, with their national oil and gas companies, alongside the big oil majors, are doing their best to maintain their operations, and even expand and profit from the remaining fossil fuels they possess. Sisi’s Egypt is aspiring to become a major energy hub in the region, exporting its surplus electricity and mobilising various energy sources, such as offshore gas, oil, renewable energies and hydrogen, to satisfy the European Union’s (EU’s) energy needs. And this is of course inextricable from the ongoing efforts at political and economic normalisation with the colonial state of Israel. The Algerian regime, for its part, is also benefiting from the oil price bonanza and taking advantage of the EU’s scramble for alternatives to Russian gas in order to expand its fossil fuel operations and plans. The Gulf countries, such as Saudi Arabia, UAE and Qatar, are no different. The ruling classes across the region have been talking about the ‘after oil’ era for decades, and successive governments have paid lip service to the transition to renewable energies for years without taking concrete action, apart from some grandiose and unrealistic plans and projects, such as the proposed, and controversial, futuristic mega-city of Neom in Saudi Arabia. For these ruling classes, the iterations of the COP process represent a golden opportunity to advance their greenwashing agenda, as well as their efforts to attract and capture funds and finances for various energy projects and purportedly ‘green’ plans.
Egypt’s hosting of the 2022 COP was controversial in view of its government’s record of repression and its efforts to prevent access to the summit by environmental groups and climate activists. In fact, the Sharm el-Sheikh COP27 was one of the most exclusionary conferences in history, with a substantially diminished space for the activism, dissidence, discussions, debates, new connections, networking, collective strategies, actions, and mobilisations needed to generate pressure on global decision-makers to deliver on their promises and promote real solutions to the unfolding climate emergency. The choice of Egypt as the host in 2022, and of UAE as the host for 2023, is not innocent and is a clear indication that the COP process as a whole is becoming more undemocratic and exclusionary. Moreover, the context of the intensification of geopolitical rivalries unleashed by the war in Ukraine is not amenable to cooperation between major powers and provides yet another pretext for continuing the global addiction to fossil fuels. Indeed, it could be the final nail in the coffin of global climate talks.
Humanity’s survival depends on both leaving fossil fuels in the ground and adapting to the already changing climate, while moving towards renewable energies, sustainable levels of energy use and other social transformations. Billions will be spent on trying to adapt – finding new water sources, restructuring agriculture and changing the crops that are grown, building sea walls to keep the saltwater out, changing the shape and style of cities – and on trying to shift to green sources of energy by building the required infrastructure and investing in green jobs and technology. But whose interest will this adaptation and energy transition serve? And who will be expected to bear the heaviest costs of the climate crisis, and of responses to it?
The same greedy and authoritarian power structures that have contributed to climate change are now shaping the response to it. Their main goal is to protect private interests and to make even greater profits. While the international financial institutions, such as the World Bank and the IMF, and Northern governments and their agencies, such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the EU, and the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ), are all now articulating the need for a climate transition, their vision is of a capitalist, and often corporate-led, transition, not one led by and for working people. While the voices of civil society organisations and social movements in the Arab region are largely not heard when it comes to the implications of this transition and the need for just and democratic alternatives, the aforementioned institutions and governments speak loudly, organising events and publishing reports in all the countries of the Arab region. These actors don’t shy away from highlighting the dangers of a warmer world, and even argue for urgent action, including using more renewable energy and developing adaptation plans. However, their analysis of climate change and the needed transition remains limited – and even dangerous, as it threatens to reproduce the patterns of dispossession and resource plunder that characterise the prevailing fossil fuel regime.
The vision of the future that is pushed by these powerful actors is one where economies are subjugated to private profit, including through further privatisation of water, land, resources, energy – and even the atmosphere. The latest stage in this development includes the public–private partnerships (PPPs) now being implemented in every sector in the Arab region, including in renewable energies. The drive towards the privatisation of energy and corporate control of the energy transition is global and is not unique to the region, but the dynamic is quite advanced here and has so far been met with only limited resistance. Morocco is already advancing along this path, and so is Tunisia. In Tunisia, a major push is under way to expand the privatisation of the country’s renewable energy sector and to give huge incentives to foreign investors to produce green energy in the country, including for export. Tunisian law - modified in 2019- even allows for the use of agricultural land for renewable projects in a country that suffers from acute food dependency,12 a dependency that was starkly revealed during the COVID-19 pandemic and that is evident once again at the time of writing, as war rages in Ukraine.
As developments like this take place across the region, they highlight the importance of asking: ‘Energy for what and for whom?’ ‘Who is the energy transition intended to serve?’ The supposedly ‘green economy’ and the broader mainstream vision of so-called ‘sustainable development’ are being presented by international financial institutions, corporations and governments as a new paradigm. But in reality they are merely an extension of the existing logics of capital accumulation, commodification and financialisation, including of the natural world.