The Climate Crisis as an Entry Point to Environmental Peacebuilding: Can the climate-resilience policies of the ‘Green Blue Deal’ promote environmental peacebuilding in the Middle East?

art by Nina Montenegro (USA)

Gidon Bromberg and Shelby Kaplan (EcoPeace Middle East)

A set of policies around the EcoPeace Middle East’s proposed “Green Blue Deal” promoting shared climate resilience in Israel, Jordan, and Palestine could provide an effective entry point for environmental peacebuilding, particularly in climate hotspot regions.

Context

Climate change is often described as a threat multiplier,[i] in that its direct effects, like extreme heat and reduced rainfall, can exacerbate societal tensions including the scarcity of water and food. Climate-induced resource scarcity, especially of water availability, is often seen as a potential cause of conflict between riparian parties that share transboundary water resources.

However, if the threats posed by climate change can unsettle internal national stability and are of common concern to neighbouring states in the same region, the climate crisis could also be seen as a multiplier of opportunities, whereby nations or regions come to understand the need for cross-border cooperation in order to increase adaptive capacities and achieve more sustainable, equitable, and prosperous results region-wide.[ii]

EcoPeace Middle East’s call for a Green Blue Deal in the Levant is an example of the climate crisis serving as an entry point for cross-border peacebuilding efforts. The initiative seeks to inform the policy considerations of Israeli, Jordanian, and Palestinian decisionmakers, and the understanding of international stakeholders as they work to meet the challenges posed by climate change in the region. The Green Blue Deal model could be one of many effective approaches for the future of environmental peacebuilding policy, particularly in climate hotspot regions.

What’s been done

EcoPeace’s “Green Blue Deal” proposes harnessing the sun and the sea to create region-wide desalinated water and energy security for all. It highlights the need to solve Israeli and Palestinian water allocations to achieve water equity; proposes climate-smart investments and green job development around the Jordan Valley; and recommends public awareness and education programmes that can engage the stakeholder publics, especially younger generations, to understand the importance of water and climate diplomacy as an effective tool for conflict resolution and peacebuilding.[iii]

The recommendations in the Green Blue Deal report emerge from EcoPeace’s 27 years of experience working on these issues. The report highlights regionally focused low-hanging fruit, including possible entry points for policymakers seeking to pursue their own countries’ interests. It also aims to spur governments to create their own holistic “green blue” plans, and to provide opportunities for mutual gain and dialogue on region-wide programmes,[iv] including more practical and solvable issues in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Since the release of the Green Blue Deal report, government representatives and the international community have publicly expressed support for the call for a Green Blue Deal initiative. In some cases, governments are already advancing initiatives inspired by the report, such as the recent signing of a water-energy deal between Israel and Jordan. This pivotal deal, which paves the way for the sale of Jordanian solar energy in exchange for Israeli desalinated water, changes the nature of the relationship between the two countries to one of healthy interdependencies, where for the first time each country has something to sell and to buy from and to the other. The declaration is being described, by both sides, as the most significant agreement between the two countries since signing the peace treaty in 1994. The initiative has further attracted the attention of the private sector, including leading international renewable energy companies, which have a vested interest in bringing strong investments to the region to meet the challenges of climate adaptation and mitigation.

Looking ahead

The EcoPeace report calling for a Green Blue Deal for the Middle East focuses on Jordan, Palestine, and Israel. However, a major facet of the strategy to advance a Middle East-wide “Green Blue Deal” is to find like-minded organizations that could advance similar thinking in other areas of the Middle East, for example, the Tigris/Euphrates basin, Arab Gulf, lower Nile basin, and other Eastern Mediterranean countries. Linking strategies and programmes across the Middle East would avoid siloed development and provide institutional linkages that would connect these areas in a truly Middle East-wide Green Blue Deal.

 Similarly, in other conflict regions around the world where climate change hotspots have been identified, civil society organizations, think tanks, and academia could research the rationale for developing Green Deal models that identify opportunities for peacebuilding in these areas.

For example, the Water Energy Nexus chapter of the EcoPeace Green Blue Deal report could be replicated in any region that has both coastal areas and desert hinterland. The nexus exploits the comparative advantages of coastal and desert hinterland areas. Coastal areas can produce large quantities of water through desalination, thus promoting regional water security and climate adaptation if the coastal areas sell large amounts of water to desert hinterland areas. In turn, hinterland desert areas can produce large-scale renewable energy as a climate mitigation measure, which can be sold to coastal areas who, due to high population density, often struggle to locate the land mass needed to produce the renewable energy required to meet their international climate commitments and to power desalination plants.[v] The nexus can therefore create healthy interdependencies between neighbouring states, with each side having something of great value to sell to the other as an important contribution to stability and peacebuilding.

[i] EcoPeace Middle East (2019) Climate Change, Water Security, and National Security for Jordan, Palestine, and Israel, Amman, Tel Aviv, Ramallah (https://old.ecopeaceme.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/climate-change-web.pdf)

[ii] Bromberg, G., Majdalani, N. and Abu Taleb, Y. (2020) A Green Blue Deal for the Middle East, EcoPeace Middle East: Tel Aviv, Ramallah, Amman (https://old.ecopeaceme.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/A-Green-Blue-Deal-for-the-Middle-East-EcoPeace.pdf)

[iii]Ibid.

[iv]Ibid.

[v]EcoPeace Middle East, Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (2017) Water Energy Nexus. A Pre-Feasibility Study for Mid-East Water-Renewable Energy Exchanges, Amman (https://old.ecopeaceme.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/WEN_Full_Study_Final_Web.pdf)