Donor Support for Climate Change Initiatives in the Middle East and North Africa

Abstract

This report synthesises evidence on the key donors in the climate change space in the Middle East and North Africa, with a focus on ODA eligible countries, including bilateral as well as multilateral finance, and single country and regional projects. This review focuses on support to Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, the occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs), Syria, Tunisia and Yemen. This review notes that there are more mitigation than adaptation projects, with a strong collective focus on renewable energy. It also finds that The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is a key donor supporting a large number of projects across the region, but also supporting large-size projects in terms of the amount of finance. Overall, MENA is a crowded donor space. This review is not exhaustive. Due to time constraints, it was not possible to include all climate-related activities of all donors to the region. Instead, it includes a mix of climate finance from the multilateral climate funds, and, a focus on the largest DAC donors to the region as determined by OCED data for 2017-2018. Across the 11 countries in this review, the largest donors were commonly France, the EU, Germany, Japan and the USA. Due to time constraints non-DAC donors were only included where mentioned in project documents and searches related to non-DAC donors were not conducted. This report was prepared for the UK Government’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) and its partners in support of pro-poor programmes