Environmental Justice

It is impossible today to build a competitive new nuclear plant in a transparent market economy without massive government subsidies. Existing nuclear plants are facing increasing difficulties to cope with significantly rising maintenance and, in many cases, post-Fukushima upgrading costs. Therefore rather than nuclear power making, as the IAEA has claimed, a growing contribution, the sector remains in decline or, as Vermont Law School economist Mark Cooper has called the development, a “renaissance in reverse”...

Today, few people retain any illusions that United Nations conventions like the Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity can avert global warming, the loss of biodiversity and the depletion of arable soil and water. Likewise, the pursuit of hard caps for CO2 emissions and stricter environmental and social standards to reduce natural-resource consumption and protect workers seems to have fallen out of vogue, with crisis-stricken economies concerned that such regulations would impede investment and trade...

- Large-scale wind farms and solar power plants are springing up everywhere one looks. That’s good for the climate, but small-scale farmers and the poor are becoming the pawns of hard-nosed business interests around the world

Expectations for the climate summit in Doha were so low that it is quite remarkable that the meager results still managed to fall short of them. Many NGOs condemned the conference as a failure. The EU and Germany called it an important step in the right direction. A summary of the results of the climate conference in Doha.

Germany has drawn a lot of attention for the Energiewende - the aim to switch to a renewable energy economy, phase out nuclear power and leave fossil fuels behind. But what exactly is the German energy transition: How does it works and what challenges lay ahead? Check out this new website..

MA’AN Development Center, who has been a partner of the Heinrich Böll Stiftung Ramallah for many years, is providing regular and up-to-date information about environmental and agricultural issues, in addition to conducting awareness raising activities which provide the impetus for discussion and debate.  

To raise awareness about water issues in Jordan, 7iber has conducted the project “Once Upon a Water”, collecting stories of people and communities throughout the country that tell about vanishing water resources.

Climate change will have an impact on all parts of the world, but the Arab countries of the Middle East and North Africa are certainly among those most affected by it. Some of the most significant effects of climate change which have already affected or will affect most of the 340 million people in the Arab region are increased average temperatures, less or more erratic precipitation and sea level rise, in a region which already suffers from aridity, recurrent drought and water scarcity.

One of the great challenges of the 21st century is to bring about global equity without further overstepping the planet’s ecological limits nor overusing the earth’s finite resources to the extent that future generations are deprived of the opportunity for shaping a sustainable and equitable social coexistence and the associated economic and production patterns. Social equity is inseparable from ecological sustainability. Inequitable distribution and overuse of resources, both domestically and internationally, is one of the key reasons why millions of people today live below the poverty line, while at the same time the earth’s sustainable ecological limits have long been exceeded..

There is no freedom without a supporting infrastructure; this is the conclusion one will reach after listening to the Palestinian expert Dr. Riyad Hodali talking about the status of energy in the occupied Palestinian territories. The masterminds of the Oslo Accords once used the slogan “Gaza and Jericho First”, but this plan did not lead to the aspired independence, along with continuous settlement expansion, but also with years-long negligence by the Palestinian leadership of the notion of energy independence. In the alleys of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Doha we met Dr. Riyad Hodali, the Executive Director of the Palestinian Solar and Sustainable Energy Society (PSSES), who talked to us about PSSES’s point of view regarding the energy sector in Palestine.