Activities

The network will work towards achieving its vision by:

• Bringing together a variety of actors from governmental, non-governmental, private, and civil society backgrounds to promote the concept of climate security across the region.

• Raising awareness of climate change as a risk multiplier and potential security threat in the region, particularly to fragile and crisis-prone states. Helping to mainstream climate security concepts into policy making, planning, implementation, and budgeting.

• Advocating for climate security as an integrated, cross-sectoral approach to climate change mitigation and adaptation across the Arab Region that highlights interrelationships between climate change, security, sustainable development, and disaster risk reduction.

• Assisting policy makers in linking the priorities, cultures and mandates of the humanitarian and development agendas in respect to climate security related policy, planning and responses. This includes a coordinated approach in implementing the Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction.

• Fostering interdisciplinary, multi-sectoral, and integrated responses to climate security that are proactive, employ a nexus approach, and are based on complex, multisectoral indicator sets. This may require institutional changes, as planning in the Arab region often happens through a sectoral, silo-based decision-making style.

• Developing regional capacity for climate security thinking, policy making, planning, implementation, and assessment, as well as capacity on nexus thinking and integrated cross-institutional and regional cooperation.

• Promoting joint, interdisciplinary research, knowledge transfer, training, and awareness-raising that makes use of state-of-the-art technologies, advances digital transformation, and employs integrated, participatory, and socially inclusive methodologies.

• Creating and promoting new and more diverse languages, knowledges, and narratives of climate change and climate security generated by men and women, local communities, vulnerable and marginalized population groups, as well as indigenous populations.

• Fostering an enhanced research and policy focus on vulnerable groups, social inclusion and localized knowledge and action, and including vulnerable and marginalized groups in decision-making processes about climate security.

• Promoting gender equality, women’s empowerment, inviting the participation of women and promoting female leadership in shaping the regional climate security agenda.

• Enhancing regional access to, and sharing of, data and knowledge needed to make informed decisions about climate security policies, planning and action. Further, helping with the integration of research findings into policy and strategy development, building better policies that are data driven, evidence-based, factor in lessons learned across the region, and are informed by regional solution transfers.

• Improving regional measurement, assessment, and decision support tools by expanding the use of technical advancements and innovative methodologies. This includes joint forecasting and mitigation schemes, as well as regionally concerted crisis and disaster risk response plans.

• Promoting and providing practical tools for participatory approaches to policy making, planning and implementation.

• Helping to scale-up regional cooperation and partnerships.