A New Climate For Peace: How Europe Can Promote Environmental Cooperation between Gulf Arab States and Iran – Analysis
Publisher: Eurasia Review
Author(s): Cinzia Bianco
Date: 2022
Topics: Conflict Prevention, Cooperation, Governance, Renewable Resources
Countries: Egypt, France, Germany, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates
The Middle East is one of the regions of the world most exposed to climate change and desertification. The urgent challenges it faces include air pollution and sandstorms, temperatures in some areas that exceed a threshold for human adaptability, and extreme weather events, such as Cyclone Shaheen in October 2021 and the floods in summer 2022. Water scarcity, long a grave concern, is worsening. Yet Middle Eastern countries are moving too slowly to address these common threats to their environmental and climate security – and have rarely cooperated with one another in these areas. As such concerns gradually become more relevant to Middle Eastern policymakers, Europeans should encourage them to work together and should create and support a platform on which they could do so. This would advance Europeans’ climate agenda and signal their commitment to tackling climate change as a global problem. It could also reinforce the trend towards de-escalation between Gulf Arab states and Iran.