The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is facing mounting pressures on its natural resources. Climate change, population growth, food insecurity, water scarcity and extreme weather events are feeding into regional tensions and these are expected to increase in the future, especially tensions over shared water resources. Building the resilience of local communities and government institutions to cope with current and future water scarcity is imperative. Effective management of natural resources as part of sustainable development is key to building this resilience.
As a follow up to the Second Planetary Security Initiative Conference in December 2016, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of The Netherlands, in partnership with the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut (AUB) together with the Netherlands Institute of International Relations Clingendael and the Netherlands Enterprise Agency have taken the initiative to organize a sub-regional policy dialogue for the Levant as part of the Planetary Security Initiative on an integrated approach to the Water-Energy-Food (WEF) nexus.
The immediate aim of the policy dialogue meetings is to identify modalities for regional cooperation or collaboration using the Water–Energy-Food Nexus approach as a vehicle.
The overall dialogue objectives include:
- Propose policy recommendations that can be adopted on both national and regional levels based on shared experiences of existing challenges, opportunities, and initiatives.
- Identify pilot projects that could be replicated in all participating Levant countries that are scalable and could inform national and regional policy on the benefits of a WEF approach to planning.
The first workshop of the policy dialogue took place in Amman, Jordan on the 4th and 5th of October, 2017 and included representatives of ministries of Water, Agriculture and Energy of Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Palestine. The second consultation meeting with the same group takes place in Beirut, Lebanon on 21 and 23 November, 2017.
At the Amman workshop, different approaches to the nexus in the four countries were discussed and suggestions made for nexus projects and regional cooperation. In the Beirut workshop these suggestions will be developed into concept notes, using a WEF nexus planning checklist. At the Planetary Security Conference in The Hague in December, the group will report back on the policy dialogue and its recommendations.