While its origins lie in long-term carbon emissions, the impacts show climate change’s most devastating human effects are a function of political choices. This research is informed by several variables, such as the impact of climate change as an intervening variable over water and food security, the role played by government policy in the agricultural, water and employment sectors and failure by local governments, regional and international institutions to address vulnerability and adaptive gaps. Combined with unsustainable development, the weaponization of resources and infrastructure during armed conflicts and/or occupation also represent catalysts for increased human and environmental costs. I propose to engage with the critical literature on climate security and justice. I argue that this approach more adequately illuminates complex issues of climate change framed around water, food, displacement and migration. I furthermore engage with critical literature on the colonial and gendered dimensions of climate change, adaptation and displacement. Specifically, I will consider the impacts of colonial legacies in the Arab world on global and regional warming and the ways gender dynamics affect vulnerability. This alternative understanding of climate security offers a promising venue for bridging development and climate change when assessing differential vulnerability and adaptive capacities within the region. These will be assessed in terms of differentiated impacts within selected sub-regional cases: drought and migration (Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Sudan), armed conflict (Syria, Yemen), conflict and occupation (Gaza, Golan Heights, West Bank). The analysis will particularly focus on those particularly vulnerable to climate change impacts, such as migrants, rural communities, and populations in conflict. I will consider environmental justice as the way forward. This section will demonstrate the necessity for reaching an understanding of environmental justice that involves re-thinking political and capitalist carbon-based infrastructures, embracing climate reparations, and repositioning global knowledge production away from exclusively the “global North”. From climate-proofing Syrian and Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon and camps for the displaced to land management and crop production, this research demonstrates the critical role indigenous environmental knowledge plays in climate adaptation. This research adopts qualitative research methods that prioritize a discussion of conceptual and empirical factors by drawing on primary sources and incorporating local expertise in the analysis. These sources will be collected both remotely and in the region (where and when possible). Interviews will be carried out with regionally-based organizations and grassroots initiatives that are attuned to local dynamics, knowledge, and needs.

This paper attends to the differential vulnerabilities and inequalities which intensify the adverse impacts of climate injustice in the context of the Syrian conflict. Drawing on decolonial and Indigenous scholarship, I attend to the interplay between land, resistance, and environmental justice during the Syrian revolution. In doing so, this paper advocates for a decolonial conceptualization of the land and its active role in shaping political mobilization and fostering resilience among affected communities. Through an examination of pivotal events like the Battle of the Mills in eastern Ghouta, I elucidate how the land served as not merely a backdrop but a vital protagonist in the struggle against the Assad regime. I also underscore the deliberate acts of environmental degradation by the Assad regime and the toxic legacy of war pollution, as well as the significance of initiatives such as localized agricultural cooperatives and seed-saving projects to mitigate the environmental devastation wrought by the conflict and to preserve ties to the land in besieged areas. As a result, the land, far from being passive actor, became a source of sustenance, inspiration, and identity for Syrians amidst the turmoil of war and displacement. In sum, this paper recommends an environmental justice lens which attends to the interconnectedness of land dispossession, resistance, and ecological harm so as not to further entrench socio-political injustices and human rights violations.

Climate justice has been widely criticised for its limitations in addressing and acknowledging non-western perspectives, meanings and experiences of harm. It has been increasingly scrutinised by academics and scholars, whether in the global South or pertaining to indigenous communities in the global North. In the Middle East, such a critical turn is needed to flag the issues inherent in western conceptualisations of Climate justice, which disregards systematic injustice inherent in settler colonial and post-colonial regimes which have shaped the region as we know it today. Drawing on literature in Latin American engaging with decolonial thought, and with indigenous realities of Climate injustice in the USA, this paper puts forward the proposition that in order to engage and address Climate injustice in the region, colonial and settler colonial legacy and disruption of way of life and meaning needs to be foregrounded. Learning from those experiences, this paper aims to begin a discussion on how to decolonise Climate justice discourses in the Middle East, especially those related to climate change, Climate peacebuilding and green energy. It argues that such understandings of environment disregard colonial disruptions in indigenous modes of life, devaluing of ancestral knowledge and altering of rights and responsibilities of communities in relation to the natural environment and resources. Focusing on the case of Palestine, the paper explores how decolonial approaches can break the mould under which policy and knowledge production has been developed, offering avenues for community-led and produced knowledge and scholarship inspired by grassroots movements working on food sovereignty and water justice.

During times of conflict, policymakers and academics tend to marginalize environmental degradation in favor of more “immediate concerns” such as loss of human life and health risks. However, this perspective needs to be changed, and environmental degradation should be considered an immediate concern. I argue that in times of war, the environment has been used as a powerful weapon by competing actors to weaken their opponents and make locations unlivable for long periods of time. The environment is not just a casualty of war but one of its most deadly weapons. This paper aims to analyze the weaponization of the environment in Iraq during two different time periods. The first period looks at the early 1990s, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and the subsequent Kurdish and Shia uprisings. The second period examines the defeat of ISIS and their use of the environment as a source of punishment during retreating. In both cases, the defeated powers - Saddam's failed invasion of Kuwait and ISIS's failed capture of Iraq - adopted a scorched-earth approach to maximize damage and minimize livability. In the second location of this study, we will explore the weaponization of the environment and resources by the state of Israel in a much more surgical and strategic way as a form of continuous warfare against the people of Gaza before and during the events of October 7th. In both cases, the damage to the people and the environment is significant, and understanding the nuance of the weaponization of the environment is key to understanding warfare and its outcome.