Click here to download the conference agenda

You can register to attend by following this link. You will receive a Zoom confirmation email should your registration be successful. Alternatively, you can watch the event live here on our Facebook page.

To attend in-person, please register using this link.

This conference will take place at the Elite World İstanbul Taksim Hotel, on the June 30-July 1 - Istanbul

Between 2024 and 2026, the MENA region witnessed intense armed conflicts and political crises, across several contexts, including Gaza, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. These conflicts have severely damaged the environment: contaminating natural resources and land, destroying environmental infrastructures, and undermining peoples’ livelihoods. By destroying infrastructure, disrupting livelihoods, displacing populations, and weakening governance systems, conflict has reduced the capacity of states and communities to respond to environmental degradation. Meanwhile, efforts toward environmental recovery face major challenges, especially amid persistent political fragmentation, economic crises, reduced international funding, and institutional collapses.

This Third Annual Conference will devote special attention to post-conflict recovery and reconstruction, examining how environmental considerations can be integrated into rebuilding processes in countries emerging from conflict, particularly Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Sudan, and Gaza. The conference will also explore the growing role of Gulf countries in shaping reconstruction through investment, infrastructure development, and energy transition agendas at a time of major regional shifts. Gulf economies have themselves been affected by regional war, including through threats to energy security, food systems, and key infrastructure like desalination plants. These pressures will likely reshape the region as new infrastructure choices and economic integration models are explored, which will have major implications for the environmental recovery of the wider MENA region.

Adopting a comparative and cross-regional perspective, the conference will bring together experiences from the MENA region alongside lessons from Africa and Latin America, where societies have inherited similar environmental legacies of conflict, extractivism, displacement, and post-war recovery.

Organized by the Arab Reform Initiative (ARI) and the Robert Bosch Stiftung (RBSG), the conference explores the nexus between conflict, climate change, environmental degradation and recovery in the MENA region. Drawing on experiences from across the region, the conference seeks to engage the discussions around governance, justice, and political economy. Topics include legal debates around the emerging concept of ecocide, the impact of conflict on farmers and agricultural workers, commonalities and differences between the Iraqi and Syrian contexts, water transboundary dynamics and the implications of regional geopolitical conflicts in the MENA, the impact of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz on regional energy markets, and the practical use of GIS technology in times of conflict.

Panel 1: Rebuilding After War? Environmental Justice, Recovery, and Regional Cooperation in the Middle East: Cases from Syria and Iraq

Panel 2: Ecocide: From Environmental Reality to Legal Concept

Panel 3: Water transboundary issues between Lebanon, Syria, Türkiye and Iraq

Panel 4: The Strait of Hormuz Crisis: Energy Security, Food Systems, and Regional Adaptation

Panel 5: Usages of GIS technology in analyzing the Nexus of Conflict, Climate and Environment in the MENA

Panel 6: Farmers, Food Sovereignty, and the Human Cost of Conflict

Panel 7: Lessons and Experiences from Beyond Mena: Documenting Conflict-Driven Environmental Destruction