The potential threat climate change poses to peace and security is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) are one way MENA countries can address this compound risk.

Climate change phenomena such as rising temperatures, increasingly scarce water resources, desertification, and soil erosion risk directly undermining the food and livelihood security of around 20% of the region’s population that directly relies upon food, land, and water systems for their income and sustenance. Such impacts could also lead to destabilizing cascading societal effects by jeopardizing already fraught state-society relations, contributing to unemployment and price increases, and further exacerbating existing conflict dynamics. Moreover, given the bi-directional nature of the climate-conflict interface whereby climate risks and conflict can compound to drive a vicious cycle of vulnerability, continued instability and conflict in parts of the region are likely to hinder states’ and communities’ efforts to build sufficient adaptive capacity. This renders such contexts ever more vulnerable to evolving climate impacts. Indeed, as much was underlined by Taylor Luck in his brief on climate priorities in the Middle East and North Africa.

The Rise of the Climate, Peace, and Security Agenda

Fortunately, global recognition of the connections between climate change, peace, and security is growing. Last year’s COP28 in Dubai saw the first ever thematic day dedicated to Relief, Recovery, and Peace, and the declaration on Climate, Relief, Recovery, and Peace (to which 82 countries and 43 organizations are signatories) represents an additional collective commitment for stronger action and greater investment in addressing climate change in fragile settings. Despite this increased awareness of the intersection of climate change and conflict, however, only seven MENA states—Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Lebanon, Yemen, Egypt, and Morocco—were recorded as signatories to the Declaration. Indeed, it can be argued that many MENA countries have not yet developed policy agendas that sufficiently recognize the intersection of climate, peace, and security.

One key arena where this shortcoming is reflected is in the NDCs, which outline the actions states will undertake to contribute to the global target of limiting global warming to 1.5°C, adapt to climate change, and allocate financial resources to address these challenges in accordance with the 2015 Paris Agreement. The NDCs of the MENA states are broadly ambitious, particularly those in the middle income bracket,  yet despite the importance of factoring in conditions of fragility and conflict into longer-term objective setting and the means to achieve said objectives, evidence of MENA countries meaningfully engaging with these risks is lacking. For instance, analysis of the first round of NDCs conducted by the United Nations Development Programme, reveals that direct references to conflict, peace, security, stability and/or war are not as common in MENA NDCs as perhaps necessary (UNDP, 2020). Furthermore, when the intersection between climate change, peace, and security was referenced (namely, Algeria, Yemen, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon), it is often with only a cursory nod, and with broad differences in how these factors interacted and their consequences.

The NDCs of the next round are due to be submitted in 2025 and represent an important planning instrument through which the intersection of climate change and conflict could be more systematically accounted for, mainstreamed, and potentially addressed. Reflecting the inherently cross-sectoral nature of the climate challenge, NDCs form a powerful multisectoral tool to involve multiple stakeholders and generate coherent plans to address climate impacts. Plans do not only engage in mitigation and adaptation target setting, but also define how to reach these targets. They also contain sophisticated measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) systems to check on progress over agreed upon time frames, and ideally outline a costed financing strategy to aid implementation of specific actions. Given these characteristics, the NDC drafting process and its related structures provide several important opportunities to bring together climate with other sustainable development goals and to mainstream conflict-sensitivity and peace responsiveness.

Mainstreaming Climate, Peace, and Security in the NDCs

NDCs offer a vehicle through which various ministerial planning templates can become more unified to identify cross-sectoral trade-offs and synergies and improve the capacity to mitigate and respond to the potentially negative spillover effects climate action may have for social cohesion and conflict. Both objective setting and decisions around how objectives are to be achieved should be explicitly considered in the context of how they may impact the relational vulnerability of specific population groups, and thereby perhaps serve to exacerbate pre-existing inequalities. In other words, climate action offers an opportunity to renegotiate some of the foundational politico-economic and socio-cultural relationships that enable the resilience of some to be built upon the intrinsic vulnerability of others. This entails moving from strictly technical concerns around what to stop, reduce, or cut towards a broader set of social, political, and economic, and environmental considerations.

If adaptation and mitigation measures in the agricultural sector are, for example, not accompanied by measures addressing more structural drivers of insecurity—such as insecure or unequal land tenure rights or exploitative value chain governance arrangements—such interventions run the risk of reproducing structural inequalities and increasing the risk of conflict. Identifying these potential risks and opportunities to promote synergies across multiple sustainable development goals will likely require the construction of key analytical capacities within drafting authorities, such as capacities to conduct conflict and pro-peace analyses.

Moreover, as the NDC drafting process is inherently a multistakeholder endeavor, it offers an opportunity to consciously involve and integrate conventionally marginalized groups into consultation and decision-making processes. Such efforts enable groups, which may conventionally be cut off from decision making, to have an active say in how and where climate action may impact their lives and livelihoods, thereby rectifying structural inequalities and contributing towards a sustainable, positive peace. This inclusivity should, however, be conscientiously managed.

Climate policymaking necessarily occurs in a power-laden environment in which multiple actors are able to deploy a variety of resources to pursue their sometimes divergent goals. Specific protocols should therefore be created to ensure equitable access to information and decision-making fora for all stakeholders, particularly those that may conventionally lack the resources to do so. This may include the promotion of participatory or devolved planning processes, the creation of representative multi-stakeholder governance platforms, or instituting clear accountability mechanisms towards affected population groups.  

MRV systems could also be expanded to better monitor potential changes in intra- and inter-communal relationships, thereby accounting for potential risks to peace and social cohesion. Determining and measuring the full range of costs and benefits for all groups potentially affected by a specific objective or policy measure is critical to avoid an inequitable distribution of risks and exposure across and within communities, which may in turn entrench unjust political economic relations.

Developing ways to regularly measure even more intangible considerations such as social cohesion and trust is therefore critical to periodically review whether an intervention is “doing harm” and adjust activities where necessary. A starting point would be to include existing peacebuilding indicator typology sets into MRV systems where possible, though work remains to be done in ensuring such systems are able to account for complex, multidimensional, and cascading socio-ecological risk processes.

In short, mainstreaming the interaction of climate impacts with vulnerability, conflict, and exposure is urgently needed to ensure climate action remains effective even in conditions characterized by fragility. As 2025—and the submission of the next round of NDCs—rapidly approaches, it is important that these gaps are addressed.