Social Justice and the Climate Transition

The Middle East and North Africa stand to experience the largest temperature increases of any region on the planet in the years ahead. And amidst the mercury rises, the region is also piling up a range of other ecological harms. Some are due to the region’s trade relations with core economies and enduring reliance on extractive activities, others due to deficits in infrastructure. In conjunction with warming climates, these damages to local environments are imperiling public health, destroying livelihoods, and in some parts, begging questions as to the long-term viability of human life.

With a sense of urgency appropriate to the historical moment, this project is designed to help identify the causes of the MENA region’s climate troubles–and to pinpoint possible solutions. It does so through a multi-pronged approach. The first prong involves the establishment of transnational networks for partnership and collaboration. The second involves the training of a cohort of young researchers from the region. The third involves the mobilizing of an interdisciplinary and mixed-method approach to knowledge production. Pertaining to interdisciplinarity, we orient diagnostic and prognostic works in view of industrial ecology, ecological economics, and political economy. As for research methods, team members mix long-stay fieldwork with quantitative analysis and comparative study. In tandem with the first two prongs of the project, deploying this analytical strategy allows for our research to discern complex causal chains and to flesh out feasible policy alternatives.