Photo: iLab/CSIS
Jon Alterman: Olivia Lazard is a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe, where she focuses on the geopolitics of climate and the transitions ushered by climate change. She worked for several years providing research evaluation and support services for humanitarian and development actors in conflict zones. Olivia, welcome to Babel.
Oliva Lazard: Hi, Jon. It’s very nice to be here.
Jon Alterman: What are the most concerning examples of climate change that you're seeing in the Middle East?
Oliva Lazard: We’re seeing some examples of climate change right now in Sudan, with all of these issues around droughts and inundations. The examples are the recurring stories that we see every summer and at various periods of the year—every year now—where the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) suffers from increasing temperatures. Even if we were to manage to stay at a 1.5-degree Celsius global temperature increase, the MENA region would still experience a substantial rise in local temperature, which would mean more drought, more issues around access to water, and more issues around the quality of water. We often see this intra-sequence of events. For example, when you have drought somewhere, you also have massive inundations. These changes are going to have some very large impacts on the way in which people organize themselves in terms of their relationship to their government, livelihoods, human security, and access to health infrastructure.
Jon Alterman: As you look around the region, what kind of political and social impacts do you see climate change causing?
Oliva Lazard: It depends on every context because what we're currently seeing is that climate change exacerbates preexisting social, socioeconomic, and politico-economic fractures. In general, we're seeing a lot of issues around livelihoods' destitution. We're seeing more and more tensions between the central states and different territories that are particularly hard hit by climate change. If you're in the Jordanian capital of Amman, for example, you're likely to experience some issues throughout the year, but it's likely that your state services will be a lot more accessible and that you will have a more rapid speed of action compared to places in the northern part of the country—in Mafraq or Irbid—where populations are hosting refugees from different parts of the region and there is increasing pressure on water, food, and health resources. All of this creates tensions between host and displaced refugee communities, which, in some cases, can lead to violence. It’s not that we can attribute everything to climate disruptions— because there are some issues that have to do with the way in which social services are just not extended to populations at large—but over time we’re seeing that there are more and more stresses associated with access to energy, food, and water. At the same time, we're experiencing more and more fragmentation of social fabrics and more tensions between people and between people and their government. The more mistrust there is within the ability of a central state to provide security, state services, and social security, the more likely there is to be territorial-marginalization, identity marginalization, and social marginalization that then leads to more serious forms of violence—including violent extremism, terrorism, and outright conflict between people and their state.
Jon Alterman: You’ve written about how climate change contributed to the Arab Spring—which essentially represented wars within countries. Have you seen examples of climate change prompting wars between countries? Or do you foresee wars between countries over climate-related issues? Do you think this is mostly going to be an internal stressor?
Oliva Lazard: I think we're only on the cusp of many different versatile, systemic, and profound disruptions in the region. Some of them will only play out at local levels, but I can already envision that there would be different types of stressors that may lead over time to potential conflicts between states—even though we have to be very careful about that type of foresight because we never know. There are a number of factors playing out, but we can have a look at Ethiopia and Egypt, for an example. There are tensions over the construction of the Grand Renaissance Dam. Ethiopia has been filling the dam recently. There's been a lot of tensions and a lot of negotiations happening within the United Nations between the various countries with tributaries of the Nile River, but there is no resolution, per se. There has been a show of force by Ethiopia, with the government saying that they want to develop their economy on a significant scale with this mega infrastructure project. The problem here is that our international infrastructure lags behind in its understanding of what we’re up against. We have failed to understand some fundamental ecological interdependencies that regulate the hydrological cycle worldwide. In the case of the Nile, one of the things that we've missed out upon is the fact that 40 percent of rains falling on Ethiopian highlands actually come from water systems in the Central African Basin— particularly from the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo. If you look at what’s happening in the eastern part of the Congo, there are significant manifestations of conflict. There are a number of different infrastructures which are in planification mode. A lot of different actors are thinking of constructing roads, railways, airports, and other types of infrastructure, which is going to fragment the ecological integrity of the Congo Basin. The more that we deforest the Congo Basin, the less rain will come to the Ethiopian highlands. Naturally—and this is a simple equation—if less rains come to the Ethiopian highlands, Ethiopia will eventually want to keep more and more of it for its own irrigation systems within the country, and it's likely that the Nile will experience a state of ecological weakening which will affect downstream tributaries of the Nile significantly. The problem is that at this point, we have no timeline for understanding these changes. We don’t if some issues may come up within the next 5, 10, or 15 years. The more we can anticipate the problems, the more likely we’re going to be able to maintain a sense of security. For the moment, I’m not seeing any fundamental rethinking about how to integrate massive regeneration projects that can help to stabilize the hydrological cycle along the Nile to both help the development infrastructure in Ethiopia and to make sure that Egypt doesn't run out of water eventually.
Jon Alterman: Of course, Egypt is hosting COP27 in November of this year, the UAE is hosting COP28 in 2023. What do you expect to come out of these Middle East COP meetings that will be specifically relevant to the Middle East?
Oliva Lazard: That is a good question because obviously COP27 happens on the back of the Ukraine war, which has sent energy markets in complete disarray over the last six months, and we've seen a number of Middle Eastern powers—including the UAE and Saudi Arabia—rise to preeminence in diplomatic terms again to regain a lot of bargaining chips on the international energy markets. So, I expect a number of Middle Eastern countries to keep on playing this role—to say, “well, fossils are still going to play a massive role within the international energy system and since we need to acknowledge this and work with this reality, the next best available option is to invest more massively into carbon capture systems and geoengineering.” This is what we've been seeing on the part of the UAE and Saudi Arabia in the past. Egypt has a potential card to play—and I'm not entirely sure yet if it is going to play it. The interesting thing about Egypt is that it's one of the countries that has been looking at ecosystems-based regeneration—particularly for the Sinai Peninsula, to try and regenerate the entire Sinai Peninsula over the next 10 to 15 years. The hope is that it would essentially reboot what we call “ecological services”— in terms of the distribution of rainfall and the stabilization of the hydrological cycle—and that it would help to stabilize weather systems in the area and all the way into central Asia. It’s a new type of innovation. It's not the type of technological innovation that we hear a lot about—and that particularly strong, financially affluent Middle Eastern states tend to bank upon for their future. If Egypt were to put this forward as a massive flagship project that it wants to work upon in the future, then it would open up conversations which are a lot more grounded in the reality of the Middle East for the future. Essentially, how do you start solving or working on fundamental drivers and roots of socioeconomic marginalization going through the vessel of ecological regeneration. I find that to be a very promising type of pathway, which is currently vastly under explored and which deserves a lot more attention. I’m hoping that Egypt will bring this to the fore at COP27 to create a complementary type of conversation.
Jon Alterman: Egypt has been investing a lot in solar. It’s been investing a lot in wind. Do you think that those kinds of investments are enough to move the needle, or is Egypt still committed to a carbon-based energy production system?
Oliva Lazard: What we're seeing across the board in the world is that there is a stacking up of different energy sources because there are more and more requests for energy on the whole. So, even if there are more and more increases in solar wind or potentially in hydrogen in some places, it doesn't mean that fossil fuels are decreasing in production or consumption. Egypt is not a country that I know well in terms of infrastructure mapping, but I can imagine that there are some places which are very well connected to energy grids and some which are not. This is something that we need to keep watching in the future. One of the things where the buck will stop in terms of decarbonization is how well we plan an inclusive energy grid—one which is able to service different people, different regions, and different communities across territories—and how we organize supply chains to create a grid which is going to be strong enough. There is also another thing which I find is an interesting potential structural factor at play—which is that as we all know, the European Union has needed to review its decarbonization process because of the war in Ukraine. In May, the European Union published its international strategy for “Repower EU.” Parts of the international strategy now have a very strong focus on what we call the European Union’s neighborhood—particularly North Africa. There is now a very strong intent on the part of the European Union to take North Africa and parts of the Mediterranean basin along its own transition and decarbonization pathway—and to bank upon the creation of green hydrogen technologies and installations of infrastructure—to try and power both European energy needs, and the energy needs of the region itself. The reason why I say that this may be an interesting thing to look at is that we are on the cusp of this change. Rather than focus on the good parts of this—essentially a sort of co-investment of Europe with North African and part Middle Eastern countries into the energy transition—once again, we need to disaggregate factors and details. We need to ensure that as we start this process, particularly in the European Union, there is very strong attention paid to how the political economy of energy creation and decarbonized energy systems plays out in each and every country. We don't want to fall back into a system whereby pumping a lot of money in North African and Middle Eastern countries, we actually strengthen political economies that strengthen elite at the expense of a larger social good, and a larger stabilization of security conditions in those countries. we need to essentially sort of combine energy, financial economic thinking along with socioeconomic inclusivity, governance and stabilization of political economic systems in this region.
Jon Alterman: There’s one issue with Europe and the Mediterranean basin, but a lot of the energy in the world is coming out of the Gulf. A lot of the Gulf states have been exploring remaining energy producers but shifting from the current fossil fuels to other kinds of renewable energy. How do you judge the possibility of the world's current energy exporters remaining energy exporters through the energy transition?
Oliva Lazard: The part that concerns me most about Gulf countries is their penchant for carbon capture systems at the moment. They’re therefore banking on the prolonged ability to pump fossil fuels into the atmosphere because this is where their financial flows come from at the moment. And they seem to have a fairly strong faith in technologies that have yet to come into existence and prove their effectiveness in avoiding climate breakdown. But if we look at Saudi Arabia, the UAE, or Qatar, there is an interest in and a curiosity about trying to invest early into other types of energy systems. The thing that will make or break the ability of these countries to provide energy is the type of supply chains that they rely upon. In the case of the MENA region, we have very few known deposits of the critical minerals needed to create the green technology that we need—meaning solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries, et cetera. For now, a lot of these supply chains are concentrated at an extraction and processing level in Asia—and mostly in China. Based on the reliability of these supply chains, we can judge how effectively Gulf countries will be able to deploy renewable systems in their own territories—and therefore deploy renewable energy systems strong enough to continue providing energy to other parts of the world. That will still be geographically concentrated; we’re not going to talk about a transition where Saudi Arabia will be able to export electricity to the United States, for example. This is the interesting thing about this changing energy system. We have to look at greater integration and how it may foster different types of conversation between neighbors that at times may have tensions with one another. There are lots of things that will determine the future and quality of energy creation and provision from the Gulf to radiating regions, and I’m not entirely sure that I can say just how well it’s going to play out.
Jon Alterman: Do you think there are any Middle Eastern countries that are doing particularly well, either pursuing decarbonization or preparing for climate change?
Oliva Lazard: “No,” is my short answer. If I extend that to the MENA region, then I would say that the one country which seems to be a bit more forward-thinking would be Morocco—even though technically MENA countries tend to keep understanding the climate crisis mostly as a carbon problem. In Morocco’s case, they retain a lot of extractive industries—including phosphorus, which breaks other types of ecological interdependencies, like the hydrological cycle. It's not just countries in the MENA region or that are underplaying the threats that we are facing. I think that we, collectively as an international community, are not fully understanding the type of ecological destructions that are coming our way or how much the energy transition should be used to change business as usual and to rethink territorial governance administration political economic distribution, inclusivity, and governance systems, et cetera. To me, this is not just a matter of accelerating as fast as possible towards decarbonization alone. It's a matter of moving toward decarbonization while also thinking, “Since we're going to be one of the most affected regions when it comes to climate destructions, are we investing into the right type of climate adaptations, knowing that there is a huge question mark around what climate adaptation fundamentally looks like?” It's not just about elevating bridges when you have inundations, for example. It's not just about better insulating buildings. It's not just about switching from air conditioning to a different type of cooling system. Territories are going to change. The whole thing about climate change is that it's undermining the way in which natural resources have been distributed and located for hundreds of years across the biosphere. If we don't manage to integrate the notions of how landscapes behave, how we can make them more resilient, and how we can change our economies to ensure that we aren’t heightening our vulnerabilities, then we’re not having the right types of conversations at all to prepare for the very near future—if not the downright present.
Jon Alterman: In your mind, what role do Western governments have in prodding Middle Eastern governments to behave differently? What should the most important areas of emphasis be as the United States and Europe and parts of northeast Asia try to move Middle Eastern governments in a different direction?
Oliva Lazard: The first responsibility is to accelerate as cohesively, comprehensively, and systemically as possible towards their own transitions first. This is not something that we're fully seeing yet. We're seeing some progress, but it's still not enough. We’re still not doing enough in Europe either, and there's still a lot of things that need to happen not just on the energy side but on the food side. In the case of the MENA region—which I understand to be a bioregion of its own—I think that there is a lot of discussions that European powers and the European Union can have, starting with, “how we re-complexify food production systems?” When I say re-complexify, it sounds like a very fancy word, but what it means is actually very simple. Our global food system is organized around monocultures. Monocultures tend to provide reliable crops, and it helps international markets because they are specific type of staples that provide a financial and monetary basis for world markets. The problem with monocultures, though, is that they're extremely climate vulnerable, and they create drought. Drought is not just the result of climate change. Drought leads to climate change because it actually impoverishes soils, releases carbon into the atmosphere, and decreases the ability of soil to retain water—and therefore to retain soil biodiversity which is essential to the nutritional component of our food system. The more we shift away from monocultures, the more we regain an understanding, knowledge, and capacity to recover indigenous seeds in different regions of the world to cultivate them and move towards much more diverse agricultural systems—in terms of both crops and economic systems. The more we do this, the more likely we are to increase the ability of ecologically depleted countries in the MENA region to weather the climate destruction coming their way, to bring water back to their land, and to bring back a sense of resilience associated with food stability. Even though I know that this a very complex endeavor, it's actually one of the lowest hanging fruits in the fight against climate change—even more so than energy. I will always remember at COP26, I heard a sentence that stuck with me from this high ranking official from the World Bank. He said, "for the change and transformation of our energy systems, we have a North Star; we know that we need to decarbonize and to bring more renewable sources of energy into our energy mix." But for food systems we don't have this North Star. There are many ways in which we can move towards regenerative food systems and that can help bring more stability and resilience in the age of climate destructions. From there, it’s almost a simple kind of rethinking, even though it is a complex process. If you rethink food systems, you naturally have to rethink the relationship between capital and rural hinterlands—or between urban and rural hinterlands. You have to rethink the notion of mobility. You have to rethink the relationship and socioeconomic inclusiveness of governance. And you have to rethink the way in which people value their own cultures. The more we regain that, the more we can create different types of conversations for diplomatic engagements between countries that are about valuing differences in regions and their ability to collectively rise to the challenge of climate resilience.
Jon Alterman: Olivia Lazard, thank you very much for joining us on Babel.
Oliva Lazard: Thank you so much, Jon.