 now, and then the recording started. Wonderful. Meg, I believe, is going to be up one second. Can you hear? OK, we're good. OK, so Jenna will be introducing the panel right now. And so we are so excited on behalf of the Tufts Middle East Research Group to have Mohamed, Karim, and Nishad here for this exciting panel. I'm going to pass it over to my colleague, Jenna, and she will introduce this exciting event. Hi. OK, thank you so much for being here. First of all, I'll begin the introduction to the event right now. So hello, everyone, and welcome to our panel on climate and climate change in the Middle East and North Africa. I'm just going to read you up here a little bit. Today, we will be discussing topics such as the effects of COP26, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, on the region. The pressures that countries and groups are facing related to climate and environmental issues and to the ways that activists in the region have stepped up to combat the crisis, such as all of you three. We have three wonderful speakers with us today with expertise and a long history of work in the region that we are excited to welcome. Nishad Shafi is a climate advocate, energy and policy expert on the Middle East. He was distinguished as one of the world's 100 most influential people in climate policy 2019 by A Political. Nishad's work involves grassroots awareness, policy and research to advocate for laws and policies that create lasting environmental change at multiple scales from national to local. Kareem Al-Gendi is an urban practitioner and sustainability consultant based in London with 20 years of experience. His current work focuses on developing sustainable and resilient cities, urban developments, and buildings in the Middle East and North Africa. But his experience spans Europe, North America, and sub-Saharan Africa. Kareem is the founder and coordinator of CARBUN, an advocacy initiative promoting sustainability in cities of the Middle East and North Africa through research and communication. Dr. Mohamed Mahmoud is the director of the Climate and Water Program at the Middle East Institute. His areas of expertise include climate change adaptation, water policy analysis, and scenario planning. He has previously been a senior policy analyst at the Central Arizona Water Conservation District, where he provided research, modeling, and analysis on interstate Colorado river basin programs and binational water issues between the United States and Mexico. He is also a faculty associate at the Arizona State University. Thank you all so much for joining us. I will now pass off to our moderator for today's panel, Carolina Hidalgo Macabe, a junior studying international relations and civic studies, who is co-president of the Middle East Research Group. Thank you so much, Jenna, for that introduction and for being with us today. We're so excited to have this panel and welcome all who are joining on Zoom and in person in Cabot 206. We're so excited that you took the time out of your busy afternoons to make time for this exciting event this evening. If anyone in the audience has questions at any point, feel free to submit them via the Q&A feature on Zoom. And you can also text message them to Meg in person in Cabot 206. We will get to them in the latter half of the event. I just want to open up this panel starting off with each of you taking two to three minutes to introduce yourself a little bit more than those bios and your work. And we'll start with you, Nishab. Thank you. I'm the most junior, I probably believe that. So thank you so much for the invitation. So I'm Nishab. I'm based here in Doha in Qatar. So I've been working with more on the youth advocacy since I co-founded Arab Youth Climate in 2015, which was a youth club back then, which also was a fresh graduate back then, too. And then in 2018, we became a registered environmental association, first of which kind, which is independent non-governmental organization here at the State of Qatar. So I did a work on youth advocacy. And since 2015, I also had the option to attend the COPS. So I've been actively engaging young people from the region and the role of young people in climate advocacy awareness and also policy development. So a lot of work on capacity building for young people within the region and coming back to the region again in 2022 and 2023 would be in the Middle East and North Africa region. So what are stakes for the young people in the region? This is the work we've been doing now. It's a time to ask the showcase. So that's what I've been doing. And that's what I'm trying to do professionally. I'm a design engineer working in water industry, also recently joining another organization as a sustainability carbon expert, too. Thank you so much, Nishab. We can go to you, Mohamed, next. Sure. Thank you, Carolina. So my name is Mohamed Mahmood. And somewhat newly minted, I mean, it's been a few months, but director of the Climate and Water Program at the Middle East Institute. You know, a lot of my work and background is focused primarily on the nexus of climate change and water resources amongst other sort of drawing impacts from climate change. But a lot of my work is looking at, well, how do we expand adaptation as it relates to climate change impacts primarily in natural resources and environment and most more so water resources and how it's utilized to meet demand both in the municipal way for populations and residents as well as agricultural use and industry. So a lot of my focus is more on the technical aspects as it relates to climate change, as it relates to adaptation and to a lesser degree mitigation. So I'll leave it at that so we can have more time for discussion later. Yes, thank you so much, Mohamed. And we'll go to you, Karim. Thank you. So like Mohamed, I'm also rather technical. My name is Karim El-Gendi. And I, as I say, I'm a rather technical background. I focus most of my consulting work, which you alluded to in the biography on cities and urban developments, mostly large-scale developments in the Middle East and in Africa in general. But I also have this advocacy hat through Carbon, which I founded in 2009. The time I was back in San Francisco Bay Area and I was quite excited about sustainability in the MENA region. I focused specifically most of much of our research and advocacy work and communication work on the cities. And recently I've become more of a researcher because of all of the work that we've been doing for Carbon for the last 12 years or so. So I've joined Chatham House as an associate fellow and I've also joined Mohamed on the Middle East Institute as a non-resident scholar. So that kind of gives me a hat that is more on the research expert side, focusing on climate change adaptation and mitigation, but not exclusively on cities. Do a lot of work on national climate policies as well. Like Nisha had to go to all the conferences of parties, including the last one here in Glasgow. And that exposes us quite a bit to the wider climate policy issues and helps us implement our work and be that research advocacy or consultancy in a way that is more grounded. Wonderful, thank you so much. And that's a great note to end on because our first question that opened up to whoever wants to start speaking first is I was hoping each of you could let us know a little bit about what some of the biggest and most significant outcomes of the COP26 summit were impacting the MENA region specifically. So any of you can start off first. You'll have to ask people. You'll have to ask people. You can't do that. Yeah, I'll ask them. I would defer to Kareem because he was actually there. OK, OK. Well, the COP means a lot of things for the world. It's not a regional event, but it does have impacts on the region. We have seen a few things happen in the COP that relate to the region. We have seen, obviously, the COP moving to the region in the next two COPs. And that was a big deal. It was widely discussed and what would that mean and what kind of COPs are we going to get in terms of the focus? There are already clues as to what the COP and SHARM in COP 27 would look like and what the Abu Dhabi COP would look like as well. And they are different in terms of their focus. There probably will end up being more adaptation in the case of SHARM and more about solutions in the case of Abu Dhabi rather than decarbonization and the push to increase ambitions to cut carbon emissions what we saw here in Glasgow. These are very, very broad strokes. So forgive me for this. We had also seen the emergence of some increased ambitions on climate action in the MENA region just before the COP. So everyone ramped up their ambition party because they were encouraged to do so by the ratchet mechanism from the Paris Agreement that every country needs to update its NDC. There are the pledges with the Paris Agreement in a way that is more stringent, more demanding than the one that they submitted five years ago. But there was a clause to allow countries to do it every 10 years as well. So a lot of countries didn't from the region I mean. So those who did have increased ambitions quite significantly and we have seen several zero carbon pledges again before the COP. These are not required necessarily by the Paris Agreement but they indicate a certain change in direction from some countries that have seen the opportunity to transition to a low carbon economy even if the Paris Agreement does not necessarily require them to do this. But the ambitions in general in terms of the pledges have been going up albeit maybe modestly. And then, so there's sort of the bigger trends and then there was the big idea that happened, a regional idea that happened just before the COP when Saudi Arabia announced the Middle East Green Initiative which is sort of, and the first attempt that regional collaboration and we have not seen anything like this at least nothing that was called the Middle East green anything. So that was quite encouraging and the emergence of this new idea circular carbon economy just proposed by Saudi Arabia and it's almost a new framing of how climate should be managed to how the climate issues should be addressed that is different from the current one that is on the table and the COPS and every other climate forum. So Saudi Arabia basically proposed a new way and not just for itself but for the world. So I think these are the big items that I think come to mind in terms of COP26. Thank you so much and we'll go to you Nishad for a little bit of your insight on the COP26 outcomes. Well, I would jump into more on the youth perspective what gained and what is up to the COP27 and COP28 in the region. Not much where part of the COP26 the inclusivity was the main part. Much of the young people were unable to of course with the COVID restriction there were a lot of confusion and of course some of the countries where vaccination was in the prone so they were not able to travel and provided no sufficient funding to the global south to participate in general. The number was still the same old number and again from the global south it was again we see the young people from the global north looks like they're gonna save the world but absolutely no. And now the whole COP is coming to the region. So the things and the whole models of operandi will change. We wouldn't see greater marching in Cairo or in Abu Dhabi and those sort of what is so well-known climate action from the Fridays for Future or other young activists from the global north who are very prone to marches and parliament marches. How would they fit into the contest of the Middle East system? These are either authoritarian or a half-democratic system. How do they fit into this sort of advocacy? But yes in the past region did host COP here in Doha in 2012 which is called COP 18 and in Turkey I believe in the past also hosted but there wasn't sort of this advocacy and young people marching the street calling for actions were in the common in the past but now it has been a very household thing. Now the climate change is not more political anymore. Young people take us like a part of their own and this has been changed how youth movements have been seen in the Gulf region or in the Middle East as such more like towards the North Africa you see more marches and young people are demanding for more actions. So there are a lot of social entrepreneurs and social activists coming up very profoundly on social media or in other media channels. This would be going high and it's a great time for the leadership for young people from the region to showcase what they have been doing and how they can collectively work with. Now I wouldn't say global south also is not going to save the world but now it is time to showcase what is at stake for them which are always goes under the media light you only see a few on the top of the media and a lot of the actions what young people does at the ground it is the right time for them to showcase and it would be a challenging task for the young people from the region but I think this is a good timing for those summits to come to this part of the world as a part of the UN cycle process it comes to now Africa and then goes to Asia which goes to now UAE because of Asia one. So there are a lot of stakes for young people I would love to say, this is something I'm actually writing in the coming days what it would look like for young people for from the middle region how COP26 and all the March great afternoon were asking people to come on the streets how does that put into contest in the Middle East perspective and what young people can showcase to the West that it's not necessary to be on the street to make sure demands are heard at the highest level there are more than other ways to do that which we have been doing for example through Arab climate movement Qatar we have been trying to do in a way I wouldn't be saying we're successful we tried in a way more diplomatic approach where we were in fighting with or putting ourselves in the streets to make our governments heard but in more diplomatic approach where we've been approaching the government and how we can have a seat in those discussions we were like if you ask some of the countries in the global not where they're asked for being on the part of the national discussion for climate action or climate agenda where they're part of they said no we are working on with them but I would say we were part of the national NDC discussion here in the state of Qatar because our work that's how we work with the government here more like diplomacy and how youth agenda can be part of the discussion so we were fortunate to be invited as a stakeholder during the Qatar's NDC discussion so it looks like it's a great time to showcase how things work in our part because I still remember the fresh memory because I attended the summit this year but I was fresh out of the youth climate summit in Milan ahead of the COP26 where young people are still asking why you're in the hosting Fridays for Future in Qatar or UAE unlikely of course of their ignorance they didn't know how the system works now part of the world so this is the appropriate time to showcase them how system works and how our young people we don't always you know I should say the box trying to do our best to make sure our voices so yeah I am hopeful and I think it's a huge leadership for the young people in the Minna region and I think they will deliver Thank you so much Nisad and we'll definitely get to talking more about the role of young people later as well and I'll pass it off to you Mohamed to give some final notes on COP26 and its impacts on the Minna region Yeah I mean I don't have anything more substantial to add than what Nisad and Karim said but just from a high level perspective my perspective you know you could almost argue that even though there was a mad dash at the end of the conference in terms of putting something together that ultimately looked like became the Glasgow pact I think what Karim had initially mentioned I think there was more activity leading up to the meeting than at the meeting itself in terms of substantial commitments or or intentions to address some of the issues associated with climate change like all the all the advance proclamations of carbon reductions and the different activities the green circular economy and those types of things because when you look at the Glasgow pact itself to me it seems more like we're kicking the can down the road you know there was this dispute at the very end with India pushing back on some of the language and so forth so when you kind of peel it back it just looks a lot more like it's a you know we will do we will continue to do our best type of deal so to me it wasn't as impactful as what people had or nations had forecasted ahead of the meeting itself as their intentions to do but I think one item that I feel deserves some recognition in terms of finally getting the spotlight it deserves and I think Karim mentioned this as well which is adaptation you know we're seeing some more of that adaptation work getting it's been happening in the Middle East but you know the emphasis has always been on mitigation and reducing carbon emissions and to me that generally is a top down approach usually it's the nations and governments that really kind of push that initiative or that effort forward but adaptation occurs at virtually any level below that and so seeing that being recognized was a positive thing thank you so much and I appreciate all of your responses zooming out a little bit when we think about climate change impacting the MENA region how do you all believe that climate change is impacting the MENA region in ways that are different than other regions around the world we see how activists in the MENA region as Nishad mentioned are addressing it in different ways but in what ways is it disproportionately impacting or impacting differently and we can start with Karim for this question okay this is an easy question so the climate change you mean the basic impacts for the mental impacts so we know all of that so according to the climate models it will get warmer maybe two degrees maybe four degrees under worst case scenario that's average temperature maximum temperature could go up by seven degrees precipitation will go down maybe by 25 degree percent in the eastern Mediterranean maybe by 40 percent in Morocco again worst case scenario whether it become more variable rainfall will become more intermittent more floods, more drought at the same time so crops might fail as a result because the rain is less predictable we expect sea level rise which could be anywhere between a meter and two meters which will affect the Nile Delta will affect the southern Iraq and potentially some of the literal cities on the Gulf cities on the southern literal off the Gulf expect an increase in the wet bulb temperature to dangerous some say fatal levels around the Gulf on both sides of the Gulf which will affect summer temperature maximum summer temperatures and those who work outside could create some fatal conditions and significant research on that as well so these are the basic things that the eastern Mediterranean is expected to get warmer and the east and southern Mediterranean so the Levant and North Africa expected to get warmer more than the global average maybe 20 percent as much as the global average so if you know that the temperatures global is increased by one degree the those regions have increased by one point two percent point one to two degrees so 20 percent more but that doesn't doesn't mean we fall off our chairs anything like that because the Arctic is forming at a much faster rate so it's one of the hot spots that's not the hot spot but the idea that it's more than the global average is in itself bad enough because the region is not regions disproportionately affected in the effects of climate change all the effects I've just listed the basic effects are more than the region portion or share of the global economy they're more than the region's share of the global population and they're far more than the region's own responsibility for climate change so in a way it's a bit unfair shall we say that that those this part of the world will be affected more than it has contributed to the problem in the first place there are secondary and tertiary impacts but I don't want to say everything so I'll leave it to Nisha then I'm going to talk a little bit about this Yeah, thank you so much Kareem for giving that overview for a lot of the viewers Nisha, let's go to you what other than what Kareem has already contributed what else are some of the biggest impacts of climate change on the minor regions? Well, I mean Kareem put most of all primary, secondary and tertiary effects that sense temperature raises something very closely discussed and most of the water water scarcity given the fact most of the Gulf region are depending on desalination as a whole source of drinking water system in this part of the world and as you know 70% of the desalination comes from the region as such so the long lasting desalination has a long-term effect on the marital ecosystem not much well studied or documented again in terms of the climate impacts at a very local level has been not been very well documented or studied at of course many again that comes with the political answers because of political issues that have been showcased what exactly the effects in Qatar would be looked like in 50 years of time No, we don't have data we have special data telling that many of these will be inhabitable in 50 years time but which part of mentalist is a huge region so the bifurcation of all these regions have been collectively told to be like what Kareem mentioned will have divided but similar impacts at the same time given the fact how region is a copper it would be difficult to question to answer at this point of time but given the fact the region has been always put in a negative or victimised that the view of the countries in the region was causing the bad the bad people are all in this part of the world and even the cop outcomes you always see the big brothers Saudi Arabia in all the negative uses so this has been an unfairly you know sometime showcased of course you need to understand the system how the economic system works in this part of the world and how that has to do with the development and the people who live in this part of the world so in terms of the climate impacts it is going to get severe the region within the Gulf which is even though people might say hey we have the least rain or rainfall towards the year flooding is now getting common in Oman, one of the countries in the Gulf recently had a huge flooding from a flash what we call flash flooding of the flash rains falls so this is what we call the extreme weather events which we've been talked about because in the past for young people we used to struggle in the past how can you show how can you tell that the climate change has been personalized way and people used to still talk about the penguins in the Arctic and talk about the forest fires in California flooding in Bangladesh and now we are seeing everything on a day-to-day basis Oman is getting flooded there was a flash flood in Doha in 2017 or 2018 I believe due to a rain which they received in two days supposed to be the rain for six years so this has been getting common and people are starting to realize that you don't have to refer to now forest fire in California just had a huge fire in Lebanon and Turkey very recently so you don't have to you know go to the western or Asian countries to say hey it's happening there we should mind about climate now the climate change has been now very very visible in a day-to-day system in the region so that has given a more public understanding that okay now it's getting serious it's not just rest of the world we are also part of the rest of the world and we also have been impacted among the young people this has been quite challenging thing because they have been always read as what are the impacts of climate change forest fire days and the countries they always refer is California or some of the South Asian under developed countries and who are not able to cope up with the climate impacts now even with all this infrastructure in the rich Gulf or least towards the Maghrib or Mushrik regions in the Middle East all face a similar thing even the advanced country fail so just to give an example of if you say how big difference between infrastructure in the Gulf towards Jordan or Lebanon which much not much infrastructure as such developed infrastructure with all this billion dollar infrastructure when there was the huge rainfall in Qatar in 2018 I believe almost all the multi-billion infrastructure was leaking so to the fact that some of the country's contractors were put on hold that they cannot travel out of the country until they fix it most of the answer that our infrastructure was not looking into the rainfall because they don't get rain as such it was received so after that I that is what I understand by the local authority made it that extreme weather or rainfall and snow and other things has to be considered in the coming construction phases so almost the billion dollar airport was leaking billion dollar malls were leaking and people like what did you do wrong because you paid so much money to all this consultant to do all this work and what is what is what is this thing I mean the country is in limelight because as you know we are hosting the World Cup next year in Doha and almost all the media is looking at Qatar and all the buildings have been leaked because of a very unusual rain to receive and well that was a good wake-up call for the leaders here and now we didn't receive rain for two years so no rain we we hit our what we call our apparently our winter which takes us now the temperature is almost 16 to 18 degrees Celsius that's like our coldest winters so seemingly this has been changing so people are observing that we didn't receive rain and also the winter what we call supposed to actually comes in September and October mostly October and we just received like a week back the real cold people started wearing so-called our sweatshirts here in the bottom world but you see that the things have been changing in a fast way and people are realizing okay now this is not something in California it's happening in all my country and you can correlate a bit if you ask the people who have been living here so yeah just I'm just personalizing the issues that are in part of the very local end thank you so much Nishad and I'll pass it to you Mohammed no it's tough being glass because they get to say all the good stuff first but I will I will add you know just to extrapolate on both points that Nishad and Karim made we do know we have very good accurate information projections on not just obviously the current impacts but what how we see these impacts changing into the future you know I draw I reference the intergovernmental pound of climate change there's six assessment report on the physical science that came out in August that looked at the projections of warming various changes in warming two degrees four degrees etc and how that affects different distinct regions or subregions in the world and all everything that my colleague said is true one of the things that I find interesting is how these changes affect these different subregions that are relevant to the Middle East and then extrapolating you know sort of that first physical climate change impact and what it means beyond that and you know at the risk of maybe answering a fall one of your later questions Carolina you know when you look at the Mediterranean there is you know warming is happening across the region that's that's a given how much it's increasing is going to obviously depend on what ends up happening you know emissions will play a role in that when we look at the Mediterranean as as one of those regions the coastal Mediterranean there's going to be this further aridity coupled with sea level rise right and so the aridity component is sort of adding an acceleration to fire weather conditions so all these wildfires that we saw in North Africa in the Levant region there is going to be a propensity for that to increase in the future as well you think of sea level rise coupled with that first place I think of is as the now river delta right very fertile region a lot of agricultural activity certainly other parts of the coastal Mediterranean so that very important aspect of the economy the agricultural production is at risk because of sea level rise sort of that intrusion of water slowly through time but also this higher incidence of wildfire so there's now an economic component you look further inland in North Africa not necessarily at the coastal kind of extending down towards the Sahel the eridification the drought issues sort of extend but at the same time there is going to be higher incidence of short but intense duration type thunderstorms and the first place I think of is the now river basin we've been hearing about the flooding issues that have been happening in Sudan and certainly parts of Ethiopia that could happen more often you know unless and it's not to go into the now system that's another you know issue of its own but without sort of almost perfect coordination and conjunctive management of the reservoirs higher intensity duration short and short duration higher intensity thunderstorms you're going to have more flooding and with reservoirs sort of managing for a drought but then also struggling with these storms coming in it makes it very more difficult to manage a system that's already having difficulties in conjunctive management of operations of reservoirs and then when we think of the Arabian Peninsula and certainly more so in central Asia sort of bleeding out from from the from the Arabian Peninsula sort of central Middle East area the warming for systems that tend to be snow driven and I think more towards shifting towards central Asia that the Amudaria system those that are tend to be driven by higher elevation runoff primarily through a snowpack there's going to be less snow being retained and more snow melt ultimately that causes a shift in in the runoff season that you know usually the snow accumulation season in the winter of a runoff season in the spring leading into summer you're seeing a reduction of that flow but also a shift of that and so that affects management of those types of river systems downstream and you know tiger fradies to a smaller extent as well and then touching on a point I think Michelle had made as well on extreme weather the Arabian sea is in very close proximity to the equator and so when we think of solar radiation there's there's more more solar energy being absorbed by the ocean sea surface temperatures increase when sea surface temperatures increase the warmer they get those are right conditions to to produce and provide energy for intense severe weather and storms you know at at the lower end of severe the type of thunderstorms that cause you know intense precipitation some amount of flooding certainly you know areas like Oman that have actual mountainous topography to an extent that will cause types of flash flooding in valleys but at the more worrisome end and we've seen it this year with Cyclone Shaheen there is more more probability of those types of cyclonic severe intense storms to actually emerge out of the Arabian sea and make landfall I mean the Arabian sea is like I said because it's proximity to equator is naturally warmer so those types of storms of varying scales are always being produced on the Arabian sea but half of them don't make landfall they generate and over the sea and and they just dissipate over the sea and some some smaller amount make landfall but at a reduced intensity what we're likely going to see unfortunately is some of those higher intensity cyclones make landfall and make landfall at that higher higher intensity scale and so that obviously comes with it you know the damages and unfortunate loss of life and and those types of things so that's you know grim news but that's that's what is being projected in the future thank you so much and not to get into more grim news but who or what are some of the most vulnerable groups being affected and impacted by climate change in the Mina region right now and would what is being done to address the disproportionate impacts on these vulnerable groups and if you'd like to start Muhammad this one and we could go back around the other way I like how the hard one is the one I get to answer first you know I'll answer this broadly and then and then maybe my panelist will dive a little bit deeper you know I think generally in terms of preparation for for these types of events in terms of whether putting policies or initiatives into action or actual projects or infrastructure that helps to mitigate some of these impacts generally speaking I think nations that don't have as much financial capabilities or resources or access to personnel or technologies to start putting some of these actions into play I think are going to generally be be most vulnerable if just if looking at in terms of response right I think the region as a whole is vulnerable because of all these very impacts that are going to happen because of warming and you know geography changes some of those impacts to some of those different subregions but I think in terms of response certainly capacity to respond is would be a little bit more difficult a challenge for nations that don't necessarily have those resources ready to put into action so I'll let others dive a little bit deeper thank you so much and we can go to you Nishad next and then to Karim very like I'll just take from Muhammad's top like it is disproportionate because some of the countries are well wealthy or economically stable and better in the structure of ways make it easier for them to at least to buy some time to be frank example if you take from the Gulf countries point of view agriculture is not a main source of income revenues are from xyz so you know it so most of the farm lands are already not been very fertile most of the activations are modally into hydroponics or a greenhouse systems where they develop a lot of farming system as such which is extensive and because a lot of finance and subsidies by the government to do that but you go towards from this golf towards Maghrib or Mushry countries farming and agriculture is the most economic and most job oriented areas for the much of the families who lives in those parts of the world and this sort of changes in sudden weather or the changing weather both affecting on temperature and on the water scarcity makes it absolutely disastrous for the seasons so it causes them to have failed crop seasons or drought forces them to go away from farming and they migrate towards the cities and that puts more burden on the cities for finding more jobs and this creates a lot of vacuum for young people especially given the fact it has been not very well studied or documented but you know young people are moving moon towards radicalization because they don't find better job opportunities and this creates a lot of issues within the region it has been going through a lot of civil wars and etc so as I was looking from the perspective of how a disapproval impact would be different for like I mentioned in the region wise looking further this is going to be intense and making sure also understanding the fact that the 70% or 60% of the regions population are young people and if you don't really find a real solution to providing them better infrastructure and jobs in the coming years it would be extremely difficult for the governments to cop up into pressure already this region has been seen appraising and you know fight against for you know independence and democracy as such and they already have something to do with the the existing climate or environment system making or sparking that that issues to be starting so the like I mentioned like Muhammad mentioned too the the fact is that some of the country who has more economically stable they may find some buy some time over the course of time but rest will be really already suffering I mean I don't have to say they're going to but they're already suffering and the only thing is the intensity is going to be more severe in the coming days thank you so much and we'll go to Kareem for some closing remarks on this question can I complain that I get to your last time I don't and they already said everything well there is one thing to say that obviously obviously it's the it's the less well-off countries of the Levant and North Africa that will struggle and in my view within those countries of how it has pointed out within those countries though the sectors that will be most likely to be affected will be agriculture and tourism the the fact that the weather is going to be less inviting we mean there's going to be less tourists and the fact that the temperature will change the rainfall will be less and the humidity will increase or the sea the culture season the growing season will shift all of these reasons mean that it will get less agriculture productivity so less livelihoods so people who work in agriculture might lose their livelihoods and as a result we'll have to move to cities which are already struggling with unemployment so the youth unemployment issue will just get worse so if you are looking for a group that will struggle most I would say it's the youth of the Middle East the North Africans sorry the the the Levant and North Africans cities and I would say that would only get worse in the coming years as a as a result of these primary impacts and then there's the other issue which is another group the refugees and the displaced the region is home to many most of the world's displaced people are in the region a lot of them are in Turkey a lot in Syria internally displaced Lebanon and Jordan and those those people are highly vulnerable because the access to water is limited to start with so as a scarcity of the resource caused by climate change could only exacerbate their their their suffering really and and in my mind also the any resource conflict that could emerge in the region would would make this worse both both for both groups and I worry about that scenario but we have no certainty about that happening at all but that's my two cents on the subject thank you so much and getting to one of the questions that's already been submitted into the q&a and going off of that Ian asks will the impacts of the of climate change on water scarcity interplay with the situation along the Nile with the grand Ethiopian renaissance renaissance dam if so how and then so we can start with you Dr Muhammad because I know you specialize in water scarcity but then to go broader from that as well in what way other ways do you see the impacts of climate change impacting conflict in the region as a whole yeah you know we can use the Nile as example but I think what I what I'll say is relevant to other similar you know multi-nation trans-boundary river system certainly Tigris referedies now you know just touching on what Karim said some of you know some of the vulnerable populations that rely on those systems um the issue and and we've seen on the now we're seeing it now in the news with what's happening with the drought in Syria which is really just an extension of of the drought affecting the Tigris river system in general is with drought what ideally would be a collaborative system I mean there there is a path forward for nations that share a river system that have multiple reservoirs on it where they could maximize their benefits if there is coordinated operation amongst those reservoirs because part of the issue is for some of those reservoirs you're trying to maximize water water storage as well as water release and then connection with water release if it's a high if it has a hydropower component which is significant amount of them do certainly the grid is it's really more of a hydropower generating reservoir than it is storage because of where it's placed in the system it's pretty much right at the border between Sudan and Ethiopia so it doesn't benefit Ethiopia to store water there because releasing it doesn't benefit their population but there has to be even in the best conditions where we're not under drought these systems are not under drought coordinate operation between nations helps to maximize water releases downstream because there's competing demands right think of Egypt at the end of that system huge agricultural component in Egypt so they're very much reliant on a particular amount of supply moving downstream and so the further you go upstream there's more reservoirs and there's sort of different priorities between the nations and almost competing and certainly gets worse as drought persists what ends up being happening is maybe there's more storage being held upstream there's changes to releases downstream that affects how water is used certainly for agricultural production right there's different different crops may grow on different parts preferably be grown and harvested in different times of the year each crop has different irrigation requirements all of these sort of complicating factors almost make it difficult as is but without coordinate operation it becomes even more difficult so I think going to a specific question again if you have a system that's already in drought then sort of generalizing here the reservoirs are tend to be operated more to maximize storage right so you're releasing water downstream but sort of the more optimizing rule is to maximize your storage as you're trying to release water downstream to meet the downstream demand or maximize hydropower as you're doing that what ends up happening is when you have these short type of intense thunderstorms and the Nile so you know as it's been happening now not so much in the Euphrates in a system that may be already being operated sort of bare thin that's when you tend to have these flooding events because they're not anticipated and they're already overlaying over a system that's operating under drought versus operating under wet conditions because if you're operating under wet conditions you know you operate your reservoirs differently in terms of how much you store and how much is released but when you're operating on drought it almost goes counter counterintuitive to how you'd operate it under their wet conditions so that's why these flooding things happen and then if you look at the Euphrates you're seeing some of the secondary effects where there's less water being released Turkey downstream to Syria and downstream to Iraq and you're seeing why the drought issue in Syria in the northern part of Syria is getting attention because there's less water available water isn't being used for agriculture cost of crops and agricultural production goes up populations already struggling as was mentioned previously so access to food becomes difficult access to water becomes difficult you see people going to the actual river system and taking water directly themselves it's not treated they're getting sick and then because they're only alternative at this point is to use bottled water or water tankers that are coming into their communities and that water is highly inflated in terms of cost so there's second there's certainly secondary and third effects because of that but but it's it makes it very difficult to manage those reservoirs and then you have sort of this almost winners versus losers type of of operation at the system thank you so much and I'm going to change the question a little bit and go to Nisha on this one to start but what countries in the MENA region are emerging as leaders in addressing the climate crisis right now and specifically thinking about Saudi Arabia and the green initiative how will politics and leadership be willing to follow Saudi Arabia's leadership on this initiative well I mean of course the politics in the region will definitely define how this would how the cooperative way they would move forward given there is the Gulf countries as as you know there is a council called GCC the Gulf New Council if they stick into working together there's a lot of opportunity as such but the leadership of Saudi Arabia coming up with the Middle East objective was I would say with some sort of iconic because it was not just the Gulf year when someone was looking at he was looking at the regional as such MENA region and he was looking at bringing billions of money of course it was not just an announcement of making the region greener but with a lot of challenges and a lot of challenging questions to also be asked but of course it comes at a time when the region was going more unfriendly to more friendly direction if you might have recalled the blockade of Qatar by the regional partners original countries was something MENA opening eyes that this region is never shy of you know politics and it gave up an opportunity that you have to look at your own back because you never know your friends and your enemies the next day so that has been sidelined now you will see the President Mohammed bin Salman is touring the Gulf countries recently he was hopping over in Doha or Maan and he was in UAE going to Kuwait so probably this is sort of you know relationship building is better for the region as such and one of the discussion topics was environment and climate that's what I heard from his discussion with Amir here in Qatar so who I would presume is the theme on trade environment are also on top priority discussion on is the short trip to the region and beyond UAE is also another regional leader who has been hosting the first region elementary summit in Abu Dhabi during the just ahead of COP I think it was in October or early October July I guess with the support with the Presidents of COP President and also a US Special Envoy for Climate Change John Kerry was also there also some great announcement new coalition was formed within the countries in the region as such so looking forward the region would do great I mean the net zero pathways from the region UAE Saudi Arabia Bahrain all coming up with very for me very fancy net zero commitments see how how well that are going to be materialized in the days to come would be a big challenge at also at the same time nothing is without any challenge if you want to you know take very unnecessary actions against climate change as such and run using emissions so moving forward we would see how the commitments are materialized within the indices which are also submitted by the regional countries Qatar had 25% reduction in the business as usual scenario and we would love to see how they're going to announce and just I heard from yesterday the ministry is looking at nuclear power here in the Qatar after UAE so things have been moving in a fast phase they're looking nuclear as an option moving away from oil and gas so that's something UAE also has in their energy mix I think Qatar is also looking at something to take things faster so well in terms of reducing their emissions for of course for the local consumption they are very much very much working hard to reduce through common capture or less flaring all these are main targets for them to reduce the emission of course like I mentioned the the emission reductions are more on the consumption of local base not on the international whatever they have been you know trading to the global market is not considering to that I believe so it is a challenge at the same time it needs collective effort and given now the region is looking to prosper together as one like in the past gives a good hope that they can work together thank you so much and Karim do you can you speak to some of the regional leaders as well maybe some outside of the Gulf region whether in North Africa or in the Levant region who are some of the leaders that are taking climate change seriously and inspiring action there's plenty of good action going on and in the region the conventional leaders have been Morocco which has highly been praised by a climate action tracker and other observers like that they've gone down a little bit but the renewable energy project has been widely praised as being quite progressive and at one point was in line with Paris goals which is high praise indeed others have made moves albeit limited including the renewable energy pushes that you'd see in Egypt although Egypt doesn't really push on decarbonisation but it has a successful renewable energy project that aims to get to 42% renewables by 2035 I believe Jordan is making good efforts on that front Turkey is already producing half of its electricity from renewable energy and I think we've already alluded to the high aspirations that we've seen from the UAE and from Saudi Arabia in terms of full decarbonisation so I think that's the wider picture it's rather patchy the ways in which these have been measured are confusing to say the least a lot of these NDCs don't have don't explain what the baseline scenario is the business as usual scenario is so it's hard to tell actually if that's a real reduction or just a slower growth of carbon emissions but in some cases you can but overall I think this would this would give you a picture and who's who's trying most thank you so much and one more question for Mohammed this is an audience question they're wondering how much of COP do you think will turn into action and what governments are supporting this I'm a little bit pessimistic so maybe I'm not the best person to answer this question I think inevitably action will come you know my my concern is will it be too late I mean you could argue it's too late for action as is right um one of the other other things I'm just to go back to the IPCC report besides it's saying that yes you know climate impacts of climate change are unarguably anthropogenically influenced you know human human activities behavior has been a driver of what we're seeing but some of the impacts even in the best case absolute best case scenario of action and response and primarily this is associated with with emissions right mitigation actual mitigation efforts some impacts are not going to be reversible for hundreds of years and and the one I think of that's referenced is sea level rise you know at this point sea level rise will continue unabated even in in the best case scenario even if you slash emissions to absolute minimum um sea level rise will still persist for for at least a couple hundreds of years some other impacts in terms of warming can still be mitigated but still that action won't be for decades as well so though so even in the best case scenario we won't really see a lot of these impacts for most of our lifetimes most of us in our lifetimes so but that's not an excuse to to kick that can down the road right but you know I'm hopeful I'm trying to be hopeful in terms of you know what came out of the COP meeting with the Glasgow Pact and and you know with the with the COP being in the middle in the main region the next couple of years that we see more action and with respect to mitigation that was the focus in this COP but I also I'm I think I'm more realistically uh expectant of adaptation taking more of a forefront because it's there those are two pieces of the puzzle obviously mitigation addresses climate change directly but adaptation is also helpful in terms of dealing with some of the impacts you know one doesn't go without the other so thank you so much and that is all the time we have for questions would all of you like to make a short 30 second to a minute closing statement and we can start with Muhammad and then go to Karim and then Nisha to finish it off sure I'll just pick up on the last thing I said in terms of adaptation mitigation and then kind of how important both you know both of them are in adaptation getting more of a spotlight because the way the best analogy I can describe it I think resonates with people if you think of climate change as a disease right maybe this is too on the nose with the whole COVID pandemic but mitigation when you talk about reducing emissions mitigation is like treating the disease directly right but adaptation is like treating the symptoms right you're not necessarily treating the disease you're finding ways to adapt and deal with the outcomes of climate change both are helpful ultimately treating the disease is good as the ultimate outcome right that's that's why the talk is always focused on emissions but until that happens and as we're seeing it's not going to happen soon you still want to deal with the symptoms right so that's why adaptation takes a larger role as we still try to deal with the mitigation issues so I think both both are very important and just want to want to leave people with that anecdote thank you so much sure it's hard to summarize after this panel but I would I would say that the region has just has such a unique and highly fragile environment and and as a result given its exposure to climate change and its social vulnerability to climate change its overall climate risk is really high and so one it's easy to despair and and say well the region ultimately people will have to move somewhere else maybe move to more temperate climates if it gets really bad all these challenges you've listed but I have listed so I would I would I would say that risk is really high the risk of falling into that despair but the future doesn't have to be that bad so there are ways in which the region can become more resilient can become more adapted can deal with some of these challenges there are ways in which it can learn to live within its means and learn to live in more in harmony with its nature and find development solutions that are not based on western models of urban development for example but are they're based on local climate and local needs given the climate change as well so the the future climate of the region and and innovation can help so we're not saying that we could find a silver bullet somewhere where this is going to be all gray but we're saying it can be less bad and we can avoid the worst impacts of climate change if we use human ingenuity and find ways in which we can navigate around this both on the adaptation side and on the mitigation side and I will close with that thank you thank you so much Nishad well uh same uh you'll give me a last one so I have nothing else to add on to Muhammad and Karima did that so just to wind up with a new perspective given the region is when it will be affected eventually young people will be looking after having more green jobs industries were booming up in sectors like Karim mentioned innovation and science is something that the region have to look after and of course use the normal belt or solvent belt they have in many of the oil and gas rich countries to fund those programs that would be free uh way forward for young people to see that they have a better or prosperous future here as such and also coming forward to how the COP26 and 7 looks like given the region has a close proximity with least developed countries unlike the global north this region have been very close proximity working with LDC countries and this would see like Muhammad mentioned a lot of discussion on loss and damage which got a space at COP26 and the funding it was retooled by US and other Western interests so this will gain more traction in the Sharmashek the Egypt summit happening the next year and that is was asked by most of the LDC countries and what you call the small oceanic island countries as such seeds what you call seeds countries and also LDC countries they would love coming to Egypt because they know they have the support from the region as such to something like you take over the US and the you know the historical limiters you know how you can collectively work on and the given the region has been quite profoundly supporting financially outside the not the main climate fund which they were asking for but also from the state budgets have been sent to this least developing countries as such and also the least LDC is hosting a summit here in Doha which is the LDC conference next in January and climate is one of the main agenda and how the how it can be enhanced how they can be helped supporting to provide the technology transfer financial support etc so COP 27 I mean all cops has been used the same they're gonna save the world but it is not going to save the world but at least they've paved some path towards that so I think the COP 27 will be critical for the LDC countries as such if they required a real support a lot of good opening apps happen at COP 26 other than some face out and face down comments at the end of the day but some real pictures have been opened up but it needs more concrete steps will probably take place in Egypt and in Abu Dhabi in the coming years so yeah I'm I'm a bit optimistic at the same time things are not improving at also so COP is just a you know place to discuss but things happened all across the year so hopefully they sit ahead of time to make sure they are in line before we end up at Marrakesh or sorry we end up in in Sharma Shraik or in Abu Dhabi so like optimistically looking forward and yeah that's it thank you so much especially Nishad where I know it's past 11 p.m in Qatar right now but I would like to again to thank our panelists for taking the time to speak with us and for our audience members and students for participating in the event we are just so grateful for everyone wishing students a great finals week coming up and thank you all and hope you have a wonderful weekend everyone thank you thank you