22.10.2015, 19:00:00 – 22.10.2015, 20:00:00
Online Webinar Join us in this Webinar where we discuss the relationship between climate change and war and particularly in the Middle East. Conflicts caused by climate change and its impact on resources and habitat will affect us all in the coming years.
Climate change maybe one of the most important factors in conflict and wars in the future. In fact some have argued that has already begun.
We know that war has ravaged Syria and Iraq and other parts of the Middle East have been deeply affected. Some have argued that man-made climate change has also played a significant role in the conflicts in that region.
In this Webinar Waleed Mansour will discuss with Lama El Hatow the role of climate change in the growing conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa and how this will impact on future migration and development.
Waleed Monsour is a staff member and Program Officer at the Swedish Institute in Alexandria. He comes from the German International Development Cooperation in Cairo, where he was working as an adviser. Prior to that he has worked for various international development organizations such as the Heinrich Boll Foundation of the German Green Party and the United Nations. He has a master’s degree in environmental policy. He has also studied various topics around gender, governance and societal dialogue for change. Waleed has profound experience of intercultural dialogue programs and policy work.
Lama El Hatow is an Environmental Specialist focused on issues related to climate change and water resources. Lama has an M.Sc. for the American University in Cairo (AUC) in Environmental Engineering and is currently pursuing her PhD in Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands on the “Trans-boundary water solutions under climate change across the Nile River Basin including Egypt”. She is also the Co-Founder of the Water Institute of the Nile (WIN), a think tank established by Egyptian youth with an alternative vision for the basin-wide management of water resources of the Nile River, focused on win-win solutions between civil society of Nile riparian countries. Lama works as an Environmental Consultant, consulting for organizations including the International Finance Corporation (IFC, part of the World Bank Group), GIZ, UNDP, and the UNFCCC. Lama has been engaged in the UNFCCC international climate change negotiations for the last 5 years focusing on climate policy.
The present war in the region that helped drive the rise of the terrorist Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) was itself spawned in large part by what one expert called perhaps “the worst long-term drought and most severe set of crop failures since agricultural civilizations began in the Fertile Crescent,” from 2006 to 2010.
A new study, “Climate change in the Fertile Crescent and implications of the recent Syrian drought,” found that global warming made Syria’s 2006 to 2010 drought two to three times more likely.
That drought destroyed the livelihood of 800,000 people according to the U.N. and sent vastly more into poverty. The poor and displaced fled to cities, “where poverty, government mismanagement and other factors created unrest that exploded in spring 2011.”
What will the future hold as climate change gathers pace and what can be done in the region to counter its impact on all those concerned. This will be the topic of this webinar.
This is one of several webinars we will be holding with the collaboration of the Swedish Institute in Alexandria and with the support also of the World Lecture Project in Berlin. It is part of our programme of Global Webinars. These will all centre on climate change and its impact.
