Notes

and North Africa’s seas are not blue. Yet there are opportunities, as the region recovers from COVID-19, to make the policy changes necessary to “blue” its skies and seas.

Hence, it is important for the Middle East and North Africa region to conserve and revive its blue assets to improve livelihoods and reduce the burden of pollution on its residents and the environment. Given the opportunity for transformational change that recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic presents, it is crucial for the region’s economies to induce a meaningful stimulus for reversing some of the damages to its blue assets caused by unsustainable past growth paths. These changes will not only benefit the region’s environment and ecosystems but also help strengthen its economies to withstand the challenges ahead.

With more and more countries worldwide pledging to move toward greener economic development, the Middle East and North Africa would otherwise risk being left behind with stranded assets and outgrown business models. Getting ahead of this risk should be a priority for the region’s policy makers. This report identifies some of the most severe deficiencies that also hinder the region’s continued rise in prosperity and points to some of the most promising possibilities to overcome those deficiencies.

NOTES

1. The national capital accounting framework was developed by the Wealth

Accounting and the Valuation of Ecosystem Services (WAVES) Secretariat.

WAVES is a World Bank-led global partnership that aims to promote sustainable development by ensuring that natural resources are mainstreamed in development planning and national economic accounts. It is now part of the broader World Bank umbrella initiative, the Global Program for

Sustainability. For more information, see “Wealth Accounting and WAVES” on the WAVES website: https://www.wavespartnership.org/en /wealth-accounting-and-WAVES. 2. Economic growth data are from the Human Development Data Center,

United Nations Development Programme, http://hdr.undp.org/en/data. 3. The GCC comprises the countries of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi

Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The Maghreb economies include

Algeria, Libya, Malta, Morocco, and Tunisia. The Mashreq economies include Djibouti, the Arab Republic of Egypt, Iraq, the Islamic Republic of

Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, the Syrian Arab Republic, West Bank and Gaza, and the Republic of Yemen. 4. The information and communication technology (ICT) sector would benefit from increases in fixed and mobile broadband transmission capacity as well as greater competition, and small and medium enterprises still have only a limited online presence in most countries. The quality of trade and transportation infrastructure—as measured by the infrastructure performance subindex of the World Bank’s Logistics Performance Index (https://lpi .worldbank.org/)—has improved since 2007. However, there are wide

differences between economies, and performance appears to have deteriorated since 2015 in some of them. The poorest performing category in this regard was rail infrastructure, with only 12 percent of survey respondents rating its quality as “very high” or “high” (Arvis et al. 2018). Transportation presents opportunities for improvements in rail freight, urban metro transportation, and transitions to e-mobility that could also improve air quality. A 2019 OECD study, “Enhancing Connectivity through Infrastructure

Investment,” estimated total investment needs in the Middle East and North

Africa region of US$100 billion over the next five years to upgrade and maintain infrastructure, with transportation and electricity accounting for around 43 percent of total needs, followed by ICT (9 percent) and water and sanitation (5 percent) (OECD 2019). There are also constraints regarding “soft” infrastructure in the regulatory environment and in trade and customs facilitation. However, the region’s economies have already started investing in their transportation infrastructure, particularly in extensions of the rail network. 5. Country-specific average years of schooling from United Nations

Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Center data (http://hdr.undp.org/en/data). 6. Literacy data are from the World Development Indicators database, http:// wdi.worldbank.org. 7. Regional and global labor and business leadership data are from World Bank

Enterprise Surveys: https://www.enterprisesurveys.org/en/enterprisesurveys. 8. Data on increased poverty rates and food prices are from, respectively, the

World Development Indicators database (http://wdi.worldbank.org) and the

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) Food

Price Index (https://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/foodpricesindex/en/). 9. For comprehensive analyses of the Middle East and North Africa’s economic development on a regional level as well as in individual economies, consult, for example, the World Bank’s “MENA Quarterly Economic Brief” (https:// www.worldbank.org/en/region/mena/publication/mena-quarterly -economic-brief) and semiannual “MENA Economic Update” series (https://www.worldbank.org/en/region/mena/publication/mena-economic -monitor). 10. Despite an overall increase, NOX emissions in the Mashreq have decreased since 2010, driven mainly by decreases in the Islamic Republic of Iran and stagnant trends in Egypt. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, NOX emissions have been reduced mainly in the agriculture sector, stemming from lessintensive use of fertilizers that account for a large amount of soil emissions.

In Egypt, industrial NOX emissions decreased beginning in 2010. This was probably because of advances such as the switch from burning heavy fuel oil (mazout) to using compressed natural gas in brick factories (see Higazy et al. 2019), while NOX emissions stemming from agriculture remained stagnant.

In addition, recent SO2 emissions reductions in the Mashreq were driven primarily by the Islamic Republic of Iran and Syria (where the ongoing conflict disrupted industrial activity, most probably causing the reduction in SO2 emissions). In the Islamic Republic of Iran, the switch toward gas for energy production (away from heavy oils), desulfurization of flue gas, and increased use of cleaner fuels for energy production have helped reduce SO2 emissions (Delfi et al. 2018). In the Maghreb, Morocco has contributed most to the subregion’s stagnant or decreasing trends in SO2 emissions. It has set some of the strictest sulfur limits in gasoline and diesel in recent years (see the

chapter 3 section on policies to reduce vehicle emissions), potentially contributing to these trends. 11. Land degradation is defined as the reduction or loss of the biological or economic productivity of lands, such as long-term loss of natural vegetation, arising from human activities. Although land management is discussed briefly here, it is not the focus of this report and has been addressed in two recent regional publications: “Sustainable Land Management and Restoration in the Middle East and North Africa Region: Issues, Challenges and

Recommendations” (World Bank 2019c) and “Sand and Dust Storms in the

Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region: Sources, Costs and

Solutions” (World Bank 2019b). 12. According to national reports to the Convention on Biological Diversity (https://www.cbd.int/countries/), the Middle East and North Africa countries with the greatest plant diversity, each with more than 3,000 species, include

Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Syria, and Tunisia. Animal diversity is highest, with more than 5,000 species each, in Algeria, Lebanon, Syria, and

Tunisia; mammal diversity is particularly high in the Arabian peninsula. 13. Data on land under protection, by country, come from the World Database on Protected Areas, International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN): https://www.iucn.org/theme/protected-areas/our-work/world -database-protected-areas; and “Terrestrial Protected Areas (% of Total

Land Area) – Country Ranking,” Index Mundi: https://www.indexmundi .com/facts/indicators/ER.LND.PTLD.ZS/rankings. 14. Water stress occurs when water withdrawals for human, agricultural, and industrial uses are high relative to the renewable water resources—that is, when there’s a high ratio of annual water withdrawals to average annual surface freshwater availability. 15. The region’s five countries among the top 10 GHG emitters per capita are

Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Oman is ranked 12th among the world’s top GHG-emitting countries. Except for the Islamic Republic of Iran, per capita emissions in the Mashreq and

Maghreb subregions are less than one-fourth those in the GCC, as follows (by descending order of magnitude): Iraq, Lebanon, Algeria, Jordan, Tunisia,

Egypt, Morocco, Syria, the Republic of Yemen, and Djibouti. GHG emission data are from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) at the Oak Ridge (Tennessee) National Laboratory, Climate and

Environmental Sciences Division, US Department of Energy: https://cdiac .ess-dive.lbl.gov/home.html. 16. The carbon emissions data presented in this section are based on territorial data by the Global Carbon Project (https://www.icos-cp.eu/science-andimpact/global-carbon-budget/2019) using a production-based approach.

This means that the numbers do not adjust for international trade and emissions embodied in traded goods and services. However, when using data that incorporate such effects, leading to what are called consumption-based carbon emissions estimates, the section’s findings are qualitatively unchanged.

The Middle East and North Africa is the world’s only region not decoupling at all when using these trade-adjusted estimates as well, while other regions have either absolutely or relatively decoupled. This is because—although there are differences in the levels of carbon emissions between these approaches for some countries (such as Bahrain or Qatar)—the differences in trends (changes over time) are not pronounced. The analysis presented