I'm Ladeen Fremuth, I am the Deputy Director of Friends of the Earth Middle East.
We have offices in Aman, Tel Aviv, and Bethlehem, and I'm Deputy Director of the Tel Aviv Office.
We are a regional organization, we are actually the only organization in the Middle East with
staff in these three areas working on any topic, and in this case we are focusing on
environment as a means to cooperation in the region and peace building.
We feel that climate change, because the impacts will largely be on water resources,
both in terms of making water resources more scarce, where they already are scarce,
and in terms of sea level rise, this could contribute to greater instability in the region,
and we see the need to raise awareness about climate change and its potential impacts in the
region and action to address this starting now and working into the future as a means to prevent
the possibility for greater political tension or conflict in the region and towards cooperation
and peace building. The impacts that are predicted in the coming decades are greater
temperature increases, greater water scarcity, increased sea level rise up to 30 centimeters,
for example in some areas, and increased drought, more extreme weather events like floods and other
more severe weather events of that kind, and biomes could shift from one area to another.
We started with this paper, Climate Change, A New Threat to Middle East Security, that was
funded by the Pew Environment Group in the United States, and we also have the support of the
East West Institute and the International Task Force on Preventive Diplomacy, and we wrote this
to create greater awareness both among the public and among decision makers on the potential
impacts of climate change and what can be done both to mitigate and adapt to climate change and
why this is a security issue, both in the region and how it can affect political tension, as I've
mentioned, and from a foreign policy and security perspective from other countries like the United
States and countries in Europe, for example, and ways that through the types of projects we're
conducting that work to restore and protect water resources as well as conserve water through
projects like rainwater harvesting where we conserve scarce water resources on both sides of a
political boundary. We work in a cross-border manner in Israel, Palestine, and Jordan to restore
and protect shared water resources, and we think these types of projects will become more important
as we see the projected impacts of climate change over time, and one of our projects, the Good Water
Neighbors Project, works in 17 communities in these three areas with youth adults and mayors to teach
at all of those levels from a community perspective as well as to influence policymakers from the
top down, so we work both bottom up and top down to learn about and provide projects on the ground
to protect these resources. So, for example, we have rainwater harvesting projects in schools.
These projects conserve enough water so that, for example, in Jordan and Palestine where girls
cannot go to school because there's not enough water right now for the bathrooms, these projects
enable girls, especially, to go to school every day. We also have reconstructive wetlands that
take sewage and through a very low technology natural way treat the sewage and then put the
water back into the river in a much cleaner way, and again that both cleans up and conserves more
and restores more water to the water bodies. We work sometimes in parallel in each of the
three areas we work in, and we also work jointly. For example, we have been very successful through
out the second Intifada. This project has been operating for seven years and FOMI has been able
to obtain permits to bring Palestinians into Israel, so we have been able to work even with the
political difficulties in the region on these types of projects. Since we've set up these projects,
we pretty much in our three offices because we work as a single organization, work very well
together and have a very similar approach and philosophy in all of our offices on how to run
these projects. We also have field researchers that work part-time in each of our communities,
and so they are trained and also work very well together with a very common approach. We very
much hope our organization was founded 14 years ago, and the original name was EcoPeace. We've
now kept that name and added Friends of the Earth Middle East because we were affiliated with the
International Friends of the Earth organization by name, and we were created in order to have
environmental projects, again cross-border environmental projects that foster cooperation
and understanding and work toward peace-building. We hope that by creating greater awareness again
starting with this paper that we wrote and showing that the potential impacts are not just on the
environment but they are also on society and on the economy and also on security and potentially
the political stability in the region that we are acting to mitigate or help with mitigation and
adaptation in the region and by creating greater awareness outside of the region so that other
countries help with mitigation and adaptation in the regions particularly for the developing
nations and we are working with other organizations to show that as Israel joins the OECD as a
developed nation that Israel in the post-2012 period of Kyoto where all of the countries will
be looking at what to do from 2012 and beyond because the Kyoto Protocol addresses the period
2008 to 2012 that Israel will look to take on commitments like other developed countries
in that time period of 2012 and beyond. I don't think we will completely stop the impacts of
climate change but through our projects we hope that again through mitigation and adaptation in
the region and of course other projects and efforts both through our projects and more broadly to
both conserve energy and water and promote cleaner technologies on the supply side that we will
mitigate and help with adaptation and prevent the most dangerous impacts that scientists are
predicting could occur and if we do that we might avoid the most serious political, economic and
environmental impacts. We do see climate as a security issue both for the region and for other
countries because of the projected impacts and that there may be different responses but that
all of the countries in the region and beyond need to act collectively and to recognize that this
is a very real security threat both in the region and globally.
