Countries across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are contending with rising temperatures, water scarcity, and extreme weather events that impact ecosystems and livelihoods unevenly across geographic and socioeconomic contexts.1 In response, the governments of Egypt, Morocco, and Jordan have adopted long-term policy frameworks that emphasize mitigation, adaptation, and sustainable development: Egypt’s National Climate Change Strategy 2050, Morocco’s National Adaptation Plan 2030, and Jordan’s 2022–2050 National Climate Change Policy. While these national agendas align with international climate commitments, they often obscure important differences between urban and rural settings. Local actors, including civil society organizations, youth groups, farmers, and informal workers, have stepped in to fill these policy gaps and confront climate challenges through both organized activism and everyday environmental practices.2
Focusing on Egypt, Morocco, and Jordan, this piece explores how civil society actors operate within and around state climate policies, attending to the political and spatial conditions that shape the policies’ visibility, legitimacy, and impact. It compares expressions of climate engagement—whether activism, adaptation, or everyday environmental struggle—in urban centers such as Cairo, Rabat, and Amman with those in rural or peripheral areas such as El Minya, Errachidia, and Tafileh. While national strategies are presented as inclusive and forward-looking, local realities often reveal a disconnect between centralized policy and the lived conditions of climate vulnerability. This article considers a variety of actors from formal NGOs and youth-led campaigns in capital cities to community protests over water, land, and environmental degradation in rural regions. These actions—whether visible or marginal, tolerated or repressed—expose the political contours of climate response shaping who gets to act on climate and under what conditions.
Egypt
Egypt’s climate activism unfolds within a heavily regulated civic space, shaped by state-controlled sustainability agendas and limited freedoms of association. The government promotes strategies such as the National Climate Change Strategy 2050 and its updated nationally determined contributions (NDCs), emphasizing green energy and water efficiency.3 However, implementation remains tethered to donor agendas and investment logics, often privileging visibility over equity and megaprojects over community resilience, with real participation restricted to a narrow circle of approved stakeholders.4
Civil society actors outside of the narrow circle, ranging from social enterprises such as VeryNile and Banlastic Egypt to informal networks like the Zabbaleen waste collectors, fill critical gaps by leading awareness campaigns, clean-up initiatives, waste reduction programs, and environmental education in marginalized communities. Yet these actors confront pervasive constraints: The 2019 NGO law, bureaucratic surveillance, travel bans, and the threat of dissolution limit their scope and silo activism, so actors must often work in isolation and compete for limited external support.5
In 2024, Egypt’s decentralization plan, announced at the World Urban Forum 12 in Cairo, signaled a supposed shift toward local governance. However, the centralized control over governorates was maintained, and civic engagement in local affairs (especially decisionmaking and budgeting) was selectively permitted through state-controlled channels. This reorganization, including restructuring the Civil Society and Civic Participation Platform in 2023–2024, has allowed the government to maintain control over local political dynamics while projecting a reformist image. While climate activism tends to be tolerated more than overtly political dissent,6 it remains tightly bound by shifting thresholds of control.7
Cairo
Cairo serves as the epicenter of Egypt’s climate agenda, hosting numerous high-profile sustainability initiatives such as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development’s Green Cities initiative as well as clean mobility pilots like the Cairo Ring Road Bus Rapid Transit system and electric taxis in the New Administrative Capital.8 While these projects are largely state-led, civil society and grassroots actors in Cairo are advancing a more participatory climate agenda. Social enterprises like Schaduf promote rooftop farming, urban agriculture, and eco-friendly landscape design in informal and low-income neighborhoods. In fact, Schaduf reported installing over 500 rooftop farms on low-income homes in the Cairo suburb Hadayek Helwan, enhancing food security and green coverage in marginalized districts.9 In Historic Cairo, citizen-led greening is reclaiming derelict land through pocket park initiatives. An example is the Al-Khalifa Heritage and Environment Park, which transformed 3,000 square meters of an elongated ridge into a vibrant green space with recreational areas, waste systems, and childcare facilities. Notably, its irrigation system innovatively uses water extracted during the process of pumping away accumulated water that had submerged adjacent thirteenth-century domes of al-Ashraf Khalil and Fatima Khatun.10
Despite these efforts, civil society’s impact remains fragmented: Projects are often donor-dependent, siloed, and concentrated in affluent areas, while peripheral neighborhoods receive minimal support. Moreover, the informal urban ecosystem continues to deliver essential climate and environmental services. The Zabbaleen community in the Manshiyet Nasr district, for instance, recycles up to 60 percent of Cairo’s waste yet receives scant official recognition and faces threats from privatization.11 A more overt clash emerged on Warraq Island, where residents resisted forced evictions under the state’s Cairo 2050 modernization vision. Activists framed their defense of land and livelihood as an environmental cause, asserting rights to green space, clean water, and ecological continuity.12 Such examples reveal how climate discourse in Cairo is formalized and visible when it aligns with state priorities and suppressed when it challenges dominant development logics or spatial control.
El Minya
El Minya Governorate lies in Middle Egypt along the Nile floodplain, its capital city 245 kilometers (about 150 miles) south of Cairo. Agriculture is the backbone of its economy, employing nearly half the labor force, yet poverty affects around 60 percent of its largely rural population, with over four-fifths living in villages.13 El Minya, long peripheral to Egypt’s development priorities, is increasingly central to the country’s evolving climate governance. As early as 2010, residents protested urban encroachments on agricultural land and irrigation failures. These were early expressions of environmental dissent that predate today’s climate discourse.14 More recently, state-led initiatives have expanded, such as the $94.6 million Sustainable Agricultural Investments and Livelihoods (SAIL) program (2014–2025), a partnership with the International Fund for Agricultural Development aimed at rural infrastructure development and solar irrigation.15 The project has made tangible contributions to rural livelihoods and community infrastructure; however, persistent problems with funding disbursement, slow implementation, weak outreach, and management inefficiencies have limited its overall impact.16 Similarly, under the Decent Life initiative, 1.93 billion Egyptian pounds ($40 million) were allocated in 2021 to drinking water projects in 192 villages across El Minya, yet there have also been issues regarding delays and limited public participation.
In contrast, grassroots initiatives represent a more participatory model. The Coptic Evangelical Organization for Social Services’s Promoting Citizenship Values and Practices project encourages civic engagement in climate action, including promoting sustainable farming and climate literacy.16 Complementary efforts have also emerged from international-local partnerships. UN-Habitat, working with the Minya Drinking Water and Sanitation Company, installed seven riverbank filtration units in Bani Amer and Kasr El Rakeeb, establishing nature-based water systems that now provide clean drinking water to over 30,000 residents.17 Meanwhile, informal community groups and agricultural cooperatives are experimenting with climate-resilient crops and alternative irrigation strategies, driven by firsthand experiences of fluctuating Nile River flows and rainfall variability. Youth initiatives, although often undersupported and operating without formal recognition, have organized small-scale tree-planting drives, canal cleanups, and awareness walks that infuse environmental care with local identity.
Morocco
Morocco is frequently celebrated as a climate frontrunner in the Global South, due to its ambitious national policies and landmark renewable energy initiatives such as the Noor Ouarzazate Solar Complex. In addition to its National Adaptation Plan, Morocco’s updated nationally determined contribution has pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 45.5 percent by 2030, while its National Climate Plan (PCN 2030) sets a target of achieving 52 percent of installed electricity capacity from renewable energy sources by the same year.18 Ministries and national agencies orchestrate Morocco’s green transition in a highly top-down manner. Financial flows from international donors, though substantial, tend to move through these centralized channels, often sidelining regional governments and grassroots organizations.
As a result, civil society participation is uneven. While NGOs, youth collectives, and private actors contribute within donor-aligned, technocratic frameworks, more oppositional or justice-oriented movements are frequently excluded or actively repressed. For example, anti-mining protests in Jerada, which ran from late 2017 through 2018 and were triggered by the death of several artisanal miners in dangerous, abandoned coal mines, have been met with bans on demonstrations, police crackdowns, and mass arrests.19 In addition, Amazigh land rights advocacy reflects ongoing activism by Indigenous communities seeking recognition of ancestral lands and cultural protection. These efforts often face state crackdowns, arrests, and legal barriers, including trials conducted in unfamiliar languages.20
Rabat
As Morocco’s administrative capital and a showplace for national urban and environmental policy, Rabat has become a hub for flagship development projects and climate-related infrastructure. Its strategic importance means it often receives outsized investment in green public transit, river restoration, and urban renewal, framed as models of sustainable city-making.21 However, the scale and visibility of these interventions frequently mask underlying tensions between centralized planning and local realities. In Rabat, the impacts of climate-oriented projects often clash with local needs, sparking civic pushback. A prominent case is the Bouregreg Valley Development, a flagship riverfront renewal scheme that displaced traditional fishing communities. Excluded from planning and undercompensated, fishermen formed the Bouregreg Cooperative in 2009 to defend their livelihoods and market access, signaling grassroots resistance to environmentally framed urban agendas that marginalize established economies.22
Another wave of activism unfolded in Rabat’s suburbs in 2024, when Indigenous residents of Kish al-Oudaya launched protests against state reallocation of their ancestral territory without consultation. They demanded fair representation, accurate registries of rights-holders, and just compensation, even establishing community organizing bodies to resist dispossession.23 These mobilizations spotlight how land-based environmental governance is intimately tied to claims of justice and voice. While the Rabat Ville Verte strategy and wastewater irrigation upgrades are presented as modernization efforts, actual consultative processes remain scarce. Nonetheless, the Bouregreg and Kish movements reveal burgeoning civic resilience: Communities are reclaiming agency by contesting exclusionary environmental projects through cooperatives, public demonstrations, and legal claims. These local interventions challenge technical progress narratives, demanding that climate governance be inclusive, transparent, and responsive to the everyday rights of residents.
Errachidia
Errachidia, located in Morocco’s eastern High Atlas Mountains and Ziz Valley, is shaped by harsh climatic conditions and fragile oasis ecosystems that face accelerating pressures from drought, water scarcity, and land degradation.24 In this context, climate resilience is not merely a matter of top-down planning, but also, it is an everyday practice of survival, adaptation, and quiet resistance rooted in traditional irrigation systems, agrodiversity, and community resource-sharing.25 While the Moroccan government, supported by the World Bank, has introduced initiatives like the distribution of 200,000 vitro date palm seedlings and supported women- and youth-led cooperatives, these programs build on long-standing local ingenuity.26 For generations, communities in Errachidia have developed autonomous systems to cope with scarcity, including ancestral irrigation networks known as khettaras, vernacular earthen architecture, and intricate rules of water governance grounded in collective labor and inherited rights. Recent attempts to revitalize khettara networks have rekindled debates about water access, historical equity, and environmental justice. Local farmers and water users are asserting the value of traditional water rights (in other words, entitlements based on past contributions to canal construction) as a counterpoint to newer, often technocratic water management approaches.27 This defense of territorial knowledge and communal systems is a form of civic resilience that challenges the invisibility of rural adaptation practices in national policy. In Errachidia, climate activism is not marked by protest but by the ongoing negotiation of heritage, rights, and self-determination in the face of ecological precarity.
Jordan
Jordan’s climate governance operates within a context of acute resource scarcity and regional instability. As one of the world’s most water-poor countries, it has adopted forward-looking strategies, including the National Climate Change Policy (2022–2050) and its updated nationally determined contribution (NDC) pledging a 31 percent emissions reduction by 2030, conditional on international support.28 These commitments, supported by donors such as the Green Climate Fund, prioritize mitigation through renewable energy and adaptation through improved water management and agricultural sustainability.29
Community-based initiatives are emerging. The Jordanian Hashemite Fund for Human Development, in cooperation with the Ministry of Water and Irrigation and the German Agency for International Cooperation, has advanced community-based water conservation through initiatives like the Water Wise Women program, which trained over 300 women in plumbing, water harvesting, and household conservation.30 Meanwhile, youth groups like the Green Generation Foundation have launched eco-literacy programs, organized climate marches, and trained young people to participate in Jordan’s national climate policy processes.31 Across Jordan, women’s cooperatives are revitalizing traditional crops and permaculture techniques, offering localized responses to climate stress. Examples include the Shuleh Women Cooperative, which markets olives, dairy, and rain-fed produce; the Habak women-led hydroponics cooperative in Dhiban; and permaculture training programs such as the Women’s Empowerment Programme at the Greening the Desert Project.32 These initiatives reflect a growing civic climate consciousness, even as national planning remains centralized and often disconnected from local realities.
Amman
Amman has emerged as Jordan’s climate action flagship, with its Climate Action Plan setting ambitious targets such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2050.33 Backed by international donors and global networks like C40 Cities and Local Governments for Sustainability, the city has prioritized electrified transport, stormwater infrastructure, waste management, and green public spaces.34 However, these high-profile projects are often concentrated in central areas and align more with donor logics than grassroots needs, raising questions about equity and long-term sustainability.35
Amman’s climate activism landscape is shaped by a mix of institutional and grassroots efforts. Civil society organizations such as EcoPeace Middle East, Green Generation Foundation, and the Jordan Environment Society lead public awareness campaigns, urban gardening projects, and policy advocacy efforts, often in collaboration with international bodies.36 While these organizations bring funding and expertise, they also face limitations in autonomy and agenda-setting, especially when their work intersects with politically sensitive urban issues. Youth and student movements contribute actively through campus-based clubs, public events, and digital advocacy. They ensure climate issues remain visible in public discourse but often operate within narrow, safe registers, emphasizing awareness over structural critique.37 Similarly, local women’s groups and neighborhood committees pursue tangible interventions—community gardens, recycling programs, and reforestation—but their reach is often constrained by limited support and infrastructural disparities.
Tafileh
Located in southern Jordan, Tafileh Governorate is emblematic of the spatial and political margins of the country’s climate and development agenda. Poverty rates remain among the highest in the country, with over 17 percent of residents living below the poverty line and unemployment reaching 23.3 percent in 2023.38 The National Food Security Strategy identifies Tafileh as the most food-insecure governorate in Jordan.39 Rich in phosphate and oil shale reserves but lacking basic infrastructure and services, the governorate has long experienced a paradox of resource wealth and developmental neglect. Tafileh has seen repeated protest actions and public objections related to mining, from sit-ins by unemployed residents seeking jobs at Jordan Phosphate Mines Company’s Hassa operations to community and ranger-led opposition to proposed copper extraction threatening the Dana Biosphere Reserve.40 While these protests rarely use the language of “climate justice,” they represent clear forms of environmental claim-making—demanding accountability, redistribution, and recognition. These movements are often informal and coordinated through tribal networks, university student groups, or local elders rather than registered NGOs.
The state’s response has oscillated between neglect, securitization, and bureaucratic deflection. Protests have occasionally led to promises of job creation or environmental studies, but systemic change has been limited. National climate policies—such as the Climate Change Policy 2022–2050 or the Green Growth National Action Plan—reference sustainable land use and environmental equity, but they do not meaningfully incorporate peripheral regions like Tafileh into participatory planning. Instead, rural engagement is largely instrumentalized through donor-funded rural development projects, so it is often short-term and disconnected from broader ecological or political frameworks.
At the local level, residents and youth have adopted everyday forms of environmental adaptation, including rainwater harvesting, community-led terracing, and informal reforestation.41 However, these practices are rarely recognized as climate actions within national reporting or donor metrics. This dynamic reflects the broader civic space in Jordan, where Amnesty International has documented restrictive laws and government oversight that limit NGO advocacy and discourage political engagement.42
Spatial Disparities in Climate Adaptation: The Urban-Rural Divide and Beyond
While adaptation efforts exist across both urban and rural contexts in the six areas discussed, the logics that shape them often differ in formality, orientation, and degree of institutional embeddedness.
In urban centers, adaptation tends to come in infrastructure-heavy, technocratic forms, often led by state or municipal authorities with donor or private sector backing. These projects typically prioritize visibility, scalability, and alignment with broader modernization agendas. This approach often treats the urban landscape as a platform for demonstrating climate readiness, producing measurable outcomes such as emissions reductions, improved transit systems, or enhanced green infrastructure. However, this same model frequently sidelines citizen involvement, reducing urban communities to passive beneficiaries rather than active agents of change. Even where urban planning rhetoric gestures toward inclusion, participatory mechanisms remain weak or tokenistic.
In contrast, rural and semi-rural areas, while often operating with fewer resources, exhibit adaptation approaches that are more socially embedded and participatory, even when facilitated by government-linked programs or international development actors. The presence of initiatives in Tafileh, Errachidia, and El Minya shows that adaptation in these areas is not absent, but is sometimes shaped by relational governance, where local networks and hybrid institutional arrangements (for example, NGOs, cooperatives, or village committees) become essential to implementation. In some instances, these approaches tend to integrate livelihoods, water, land, and social cohesion in holistic ways, if less formalized or visible within national policy narratives.
What emerges is less a binary of action versus inaction and more a contrast between standardized versus contextualized adaptation paradigms. Official urban responses often draw from global best practices and funding criteria, favoring replicability and impact metrics. Rural adaptation, meanwhile, leans on place-based knowledge and negotiated legitimacy, prioritizing endurance over innovation. The climate challenge for both urban and rural communities is not only spatial but strategic: how to bridge these modes without diluting the specificity of either. A more just adaptation landscape would not simply redistribute projects geographically but would also reconcile institutional scale with community scale, technical design with lived experience, and policy ambition with local capacity. Recognizing this interplay is essential to moving beyond the urban–rural binary and toward a more integrated, equitable version of climate governance.
Climate activism across the case studies remains uneven, and where it exists, it often functions less as a direct environmental mobilization and more as a substitute or proxy for broader political expression. In contexts where dissent is restricted, particularly in urban settings, environmental discourse can offer a relatively permissible space for voicing grievances about urban inequality, governance opacity, or exclusion from planning processes. In rural areas, by contrast, collective action often emerges around material survival, such as access to water or land, which may not self-identify as “climate activism” but enacts climate resistance through everyday practices.
Recommendations
Ultimately, tackling spatial disparities in climate adaptation is a question not only of environmental justice but also of sustainable development. Strengthening rural adaptation capacities while ensuring equitable urban resilience can contribute to a more cohesive and just climate response.
Addressing climate change challenges in general, and spatial disparities in particular, requires multistakeholder engagement and strong public–private partnerships. Government plays the role of regulator and enabler; communities share their interests, vulnerabilities, and solutions; while the private sector contributes financing and funding, protecting both its own interests and communities through corporate social responsibility and dedicated channels. The following recommendations cannot be achieved without all stakeholders converging, including governments, corporate actors, universities, NGOs, and international donors, each fulfilling their role within this melting pot.
- Integrating rural adaptation practices into national climate strategies by creating place-based policies that recognize rural-specific vulnerabilities and strengths, rather than treating rural areas as secondary to urban interventions
- Decentralizing climate governance to empower local authorities, especially in rural regions, with the autonomy, training, and resources needed to design and implement context-specific adaptation measures
- Investing in rural infrastructure and basic services, including climate-resilient water systems, renewable energy access, and agricultural innovation, to reduce dependency on donor-driven projects and ensure long-term resilience
- Supporting community-based and traditional knowledge systems by formalizing their role in national adaptation plans and allocating funding to scale up successful grassroots initiatives
- Promoting equitable urban resilience by prioritizing climate investments in marginalized and informal urban neighborhoods, ensuring that adaptation is not concentrated in high-income districts alone
- Developing rural–urban collaboration through knowledge exchange platforms, shared data systems, and codeveloped regional adaptation plans that reflect interconnected vulnerabilities
- Strengthening public awareness and climate literacy, particularly in rural areas, by investing in culturally appropriate education campaigns, local training centers, and community outreach
In this series of articles, Carnegie scholars and contributors are analyzing varieties of climate activism from around the world, focusing on the intensification of activity both from the protesters themselves and from the authorities and forces who are the objects of their discontent.
Read more from the series here:
- Why Climate Sabotage Remains an Unlikely Strategy
- The Growing Criminalization of Climate and Environmental Protests
- In Iraq and Yemen, Climate Activism Requires Both Defiance and Adaptation
- Women and Climate Activism in Morocco and Tunisia
- Backlash Against Carbon Pricing in Australia and Canada
- Confronting Backlash Against Europe’s Green Transition
- The Paradox in Southeast Asia’s Decarbonization Agenda
- Northeast India’s Environmental Movements Have Taken a Climate Edge
Notes
1UNDP, Adapting to a New Climate in the MENA Region (2023), https://www.undp.org/arab-states/publications/adapting-new-climate-mena-region.
2Neeshad Shafi, “Climate Activism and Civil Society Organizations in the MENA Region,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, March 27, 2025, https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2025/03/climate-activism-civil-society-mena?lang=en.
3UNFCCC, Egypt’s Second Updated Nationally Determined Contributions (2023), https://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/NDC/2023-06/Egypts%20Updated%20First%20Nationally%20Determined%20Contribution%202030%20%28Second%20Update%29.pdf.
4Amr Hamzawy and Selma Khalil, “Egypt’s Challenges and Opportunities in Climate-Related Finance and Governance,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, March 13, 2025, https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2025/03/egypts-challenges-and-opportunities-in-climate-related-finance-and-governance?lang=en.
5Dina Zayed, “On the Margins: Civil Society Activism and Climate Change in Egypt,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, May 2, 2024, https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2024/05/on-the-margins-civil-society-activism-and-climate-change-in-egypt?lang=en; and Egypt Presidency of the Republic, Law No. 149 of 2019 on Regulating the Exercise of Civil Work (“NGO Law”), Official Gazette 33 (August 19, 2019): unofficial translation, https://www.icnl.org/wp-content/uploads/law149eng.pdf.
6Maria Gloria Polimeno, “Does Civic Participation Through Development Support Institutional Mitigation in Egypt?,” Arab Barometer, January 17, 2025, https://www.arabbarometer.org/2025/01/does-civic-participation-through-development-support-institutional-mitigation-in-egypt.
7Human Rights Watch, “Egypt: Government Undermining Environmental Groups,” September 12, 2022, https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/09/12/egypt-government-undermining-environmental-groups.
8“The EBRD in Egypt,” European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 2023, https://www.ebrd.com/content/dam/ebrd_dxp/assets/pdfs/country-strategies/egypt/The-EBRD-in-Egypt-Results-Snapshot.pdf; Sara Sabry, “The Road to Better Mobility: The New Bus Rapid Transit on Cairo’s Ring Road,” Alternative Policy Solutions, American University of Cairo, October 13, 2021, https://aps.aucegypt.edu/en/articles/742/the-road-to-better-mobility-the-new-bus-rapid-transit-on-cairos-ring-road; “Egypt Launches Electric Cab in the New Administrative Capital Starting May 15th,” Egypt Independent, May 13, 2024, https://www.egyptindependent.com/egypt-launches-electric-cab-in-the-new-administrative-capital-starting-may-15th; and “Cairo,” EBRD Green Cities, https://www.ebrdgreencities.com/our-cities/cities/cairo.
9“Helwan Project,” Schaduf, 2024, https://schaduf.com/projects/helwan-project.
10Omar Zahran and Julia Micklewright, “How the Past Meets the Future: Greening Strategies with Pocket Parks in Historic Cairo,” What’s That Green?, 2024, https://whatisthatgreen.com/pocket-parks-in-historic-cairo.
11Wael Fahmi and Keith Sutton, “Cairo’s Contested Waste: The Zabaleen’s Local Practices and Privatisation Policies,” in María José Zapata and C. Michael Hall, Organising Waste in the City: International Perspectives on Narratives and Practices (Policy Press, 2013), https://doi.org/10.51952/9781447306382.ch009.
12Ibrahim Ezzeldin, “Under Siege: Urban Development in Egypt’s Warraq Island,” Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, 2025, https://timep.org/2025/06/04/under-siege-urban-development-in-egypts-warraq-island.
13Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, “Empowerment of Vulnerable Rural Communities Project, Minya Governorate, Egypt,” 2023, https://www.fao.org/egypt/projects/Norwegian-project.
14IRIN News, “Growing Protests over Water Shortages,” The New Humanitarian, July 27, 2010, https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news/2010/07/27/growing-protests-over-water-shortages.
15“Egypt Sustainable Agriculture Investments and Livelihoods Project Mid-Term Review,” International Fund for Agricultural Development, 2019, https://www.ifad.org/documents/48415603/49538424/Egypt+1100001745+SAIL+Interim+Mid-term+Review+Report+November+2019.pdf/52717a18-ad5b-bce8-4c0e-47b03374d536?t=1726608871646.
16“Launch of the ‘Promoting Citizenship Values and Practices’ Project in Minya with Support from the Civil Society Organizations Support Fund,” Coptic Evangelical Organization for Social Services, 2025, https://ceoss-eg.org/46828/?lang=en.
17“Riverbank Filtration Project for Clean Water Production in Minya, Egypt | UN-Habitat,” UN-Habitat, accessed May 29, 2025, https://unhabitat.org/riverbank-filtration-project-for-clean-water-production-in-minya-egypt.
18“Morocco NDC,” United Nations Development Programme, 2023, https://climatepromise.undp.org/what-we-do/where-we-work/morocco; and Morocco, Plan Climat National à Horizon 2030 (PCN 2030) (Rabat: Government of Morocco): 2019, https://faolex.fao.org/docs/pdf/mor209343.pdf.
19“Morocco: Another Crackdown on Protests,” Human Rights Watch, 2018, https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/06/04/morocco-another-crackdown-protests.
20Shabnam Mayet, “How the Indigenous Amazigh People in Morocco Fight for Language and Land,” Resilience, January 2023, https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-01-05/how-the-indigenous-amazigh-people-in-morocco-fight-for-language-and-land.
21“Bouregreg Valley Redevelopment Project,” Arab Urban Development Institute, https://araburban.org/en/infohub/projects/?id=7584&utm; and “Rabat-Salé Tramway,” Arab Urban Development Institute. https://araburban.org/en/infohub/projects/?id=9218.
22“Redevelopment of the Moroccan Bouregreg River Valley,” Tadamun, July 26, 2019, https://www.tadamun.co/redevelopment-moroccan-bouregreg-river-valley/?lang=en.
23Soufiane Elgoumri, “The Protest Movement over Morocco’s Kish al-Oudaya Lands,” Washington Institute, August 2, 2024, https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/protest-movement-over-moroccos-kish-al-oudaya-lands.
24“Morocco’s Oases: A Unique Heritage Promoted by Local Communities,” World Bank Group, December 3, 2024, https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2024/12/03/morocco-s-oases-a-unique-heritage-promoted-by-local-communities.
25M. A. el Mokhtar, R. ben Laouane, M. Anli, A. Boutasknit, A. Fakhech, et al., “Climate Change and Its Impacts on Oases Ecosystem in Morocco,” in Ahmed Karmaoui (ed.), Climate Change and Its Impact on Ecosystem Services and Biodiversity in Arid and Semi-Arid Zones (IGI Global, 2019): 217–245), https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-5225-7387-6.CH012; and M. Houssni, J. Kassout, M. el Mahroussi, S. Chakkour, M. Kadiri, et al., “Evaluation and Structuring of Agrodiversity in Oases Agroecosystems of Southern Morocco,” Agriculture 13, no. 7 (July 17, 2023): https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture13071413.
26“Morocco’s Oases: A Unique Heritage Promoted by Local Communities,” World Bank Group, 2024, https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2024/12/03/morocco-s-oases-a-unique-heritage-promoted-by-local-communities.
27“Morocco—Sustainable Oasis Ecosystems Management Project,” World Bank Group, 2024, https://documents.worldbank.org/en/publication/documents-reports/documentdetail/099052024100019069; and Mohamed Beraaouz, Mohamed Abioui, Mohammed Hssaisoune, and Jesús Martínez-Frías, “Khettaras in the Tafilalet Oasis (Morocco): Contribution to the Promotion of Tourism and Sustainable Development,” Built Heritage 6, article 24 (2022): https://doi.org/10.1186/s43238-022-00073-x.
28Jordan Ministry of Environment, “Updated Submission of Jordan’s 1st Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC),” 2021, https://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/NDC/2022-06/UPDATED%20SUBMISSION%20OF%20JORDANS.pdf.
29D. al Khayyat, “Jordan Receives a $25 Million Grant to Enhance Climate Change Adaptation,” United Nations Jordan, March 21, 2021, https://jordan.un.org/en/122751-jordan-receives-25-million-grant-enhance-climate-change-adaptation; and “FP232: Jordan Integrated Landscape Management Initiative (JILMI),” Green Climate Fund, https://www.greenclimate.fund/project/fp232.
30A. V. I. Prieto, “JOHUD’s ‘Water Wise Women’ Wins Best Water Conservation Project,” Jordan Times, May 9, 2018, https://jordantimes.com/news/local/johud%E2%80%99s-water-wise-women%E2%80%99-wins-best-water-.
31Green Generation Foundation, https://ggfjo.org.
32“Building Women Cooperatives in Jordan and Selling Local Products,” GOPA Worldwide Consultants, https://www.gopa.de/stories/building-women-cooperatives-jordan-and-selling-local-products; T. Abulhawa, “Sustainable Use of Ecosystem Services in Jordan (EKF-ESS project),” Deutsche Gesellschaft Für Internationale Zusammenarbeit, https://www.es-partnership.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Yarmouk-Case-Factsheet.pdf; H. Alhanayfah, “Habak: Jordan’s First Women-led Hydroponics Cooperative,” The New Arab, https://www.newarab.com/features/habak-jordans-first-women-led-hydroponics-cooperative; Women’s Empowerment Programme, Greening The Desert Project, https://www.greeningthedesertproject.org/donations/womens-empowerment-programme; and H. Hussein, “Toward Inclusive Climate Action in Jordan,” Arab Reform Initiative, April 25, 2025, https://www.arab-reform.net/publication/toward-inclusive-climate-action-in-jordan.
33Jordan Ministry of Environment, The Amman Climate Plan, Greater Amman Municipality,
34C40 Cities, “Sustainable Urbanization and Resource Efficiency for the City of Amman,” C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, 2019, https://www.c40.org/case-studies/sustainable-urbanization-and-resource-efficiency-for-the-city-of-amman; and ICLEI, “Greater Amman Municipality,” Local Governments for Sustainability, 2015, https://iclei.org/network_city/greater-amman-municipality.
35Hussein, “Toward Inclusive Climate Action in Jordan.”
36Hussein, “Toward Inclusive Climate Action in Jordan.” Find these organizations online at https://ecopeaceme.org; https://ggfjo.org; https://iucn.org/our-union/members/iucn-members/jordan-environment-society.
37United Nations Development Programme, “Youth for Climate Action: Engaging Jordanian Youth in Climate-Related Policymaking,” 2022, https://www.undp.org/jordan/publications/youth-climate-action-engaging-jordanian-youth-climate-related-policymaking; and A. Owier, “Empowering Jordanian Youth in the Face of Climate Change and Its Impacts on Human Mobility,” International Organization for Migration, June 5, 2024, https://environmentalmigration.iom.int/blogs/empowering-jordanian-youth-face-climate-change-and-its-impacts-human-mobility.
38A. Deek, A. Shajrawi, K. Alshaketheep, O. Zraqat, B. Asfour, and A. Deeb, “Assessing the Socioeconomic Ramifications: Jordan’s Economic Growth and Its Effects on Poverty Mitigation and Income Inequality,” in Technological Horizons: Insights for Accounting, Auditing and Internal Control in Emerging Markets (2025): 239–256, https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83608-756-420251010; and Jordan Department of Statistics, “Statistical Yearbook 2023,” no. 74 (Amman, Jordan: The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, 2023): https://dosweb.dos.gov.jo/databank/yearbook/YearBook2023.pdf.
39United Nations Jordan, “The National Food Security Strategy,” Food and Agriculture Organization and World Food Programme, 2021, https://jordan.un.org/sites/default/files/2022-10/Document%202%20-%20The%20National%20Food%20Security%20Strategy.pdf.
40Petra, “Unemployed Tafileh Residents Protest to Demand Jobs | Jordan Times,” Jordan Times, 2014, https://jordantimes.com/news/local/unemployed-tafileh-residents-protest-demand-jobs; and Marta Vidal, “Copper Mine Threatens Jordan’s Largest Nature Reserve,” Al Jazeera, 2021, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/3/copper-mine-threatens-jordans-largest-nature-reserve.
41“Jordan Pushed Green Urban Agenda in EMV Q1 Report,” Jordan News Agency, April 30, 2025, https://petra.gov.jo/Include/InnerPage.jsp?ID=70988&lang=en&name=en_news&; and D. al Khayyat, “FAO and Alhalat Partner to Promote Water Conservation and Climate Change Awareness in Jordan,” United Nations in Jordan, January 26, 2025, https://jordan.un.org/en/288175-fao-and-alhalat-partner-promote-water-conservation-and-climate-change-awareness-Jordan.
42Amnesty International, Amnesty International Report 2022/23 - The State of the World’s Human Rights (London, 2023), https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/WEBPOL1056702023ENGLISH.pdf.
