Moshe Terdiman in Green Prophet: During the last six years, the words energy security, water security, and food security could be found a lot in the Arab media. Since most of the Arab media is controlled by the Arab regimes, the appearance of these items shows that the environmental awareness of the Arab regimes has been on the rise.Indeed, as a result of climate change and global warming the Middle East has been facing five major environmental security challenges: water security, food security, energy security, desertification, and land degradation.
These issues have been further aggravated by other socio-economic processes, which characterize the Middle East and include: the huge population growth, the rapid urbanization process and the development of mega-cities on the expense of rural areas.
The urban infrastructures, such as sewage and waste disposal, which have been inadequate anyway and are in dire need for modernization, could not stand the ever-growing human pressure and in a few cities, some of them have totally collapsed.
Moreover, the natural resources, such as water and food, which were just sufficient for the cities’ residents, have been stressed to the limit due to the huge population density within the cities. In addition, green spaces within the cities have given place to gray buildings which have been built whenever possible in order to supply the lodging needs of the incessant stream of new immigrants and local citizens....
Praying in Tahrir, shot by Sherine Tadros, Al-Jazeera English, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license
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