Impact of Climate Change on Palestinian citizens

Our community, our people are indigenous to this land and have been living in. Harmony and respecting this land. When you live in a country that is now managing the environment, managing the resources and nature and not living with the nature, This shows you that changing the climate, changing the type of tree that fits, changing the urban planning, that's why we have more problems. Because the way cities were organized, the new-built cities were organized, were not matching the topography.

We cut mountains to have a highway, and the Palestinian community planted the right tree, harvested in the right time, fished in the right type of net. Because they lived and saw and accumulated knowledge of what nature behaves and how nature behaves. And until now, this knowledge is not respected. Music.

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining me in our second episode, 48, by Alap48 News website. My name is Abed Abushadir, And the whole idea of this podcast is to shed light on the Palestinians who live inside of the Green Line, who are also citizens of the State of Israel and the struggles we go through living here. In the first episode, we had Professor Amal Jamal who gave us a brief introduction on who are the Palestinian citizens of Israel.

In this episode, we want to talk about the environment and climate change and how does this affect the Palestinians here. And to do so, we have Alaa Abed. Alaa Abed is an environmentalist. Her BSc or bachelor's degree is in environmental health. Her master's was on water resource management. Alaa also specializes in climate adaptation. Alaa, thank you for being here. Thank you for having me.

Alaa, usually when we think of climate change, we think of floods and we think of very hot summer and a lot of rain and unstable weather. But up until meeting you, and as a disclaimer, we did record an episode in Arabic. I personally didn't connect between how environment and climate change also affect marginalized communities and how discrimination is magnified because of climate change.

But before delving into the challenges that the Palestinians here in 48 go through, if you can give us just a brief introduction of how real is climate change, especially in this part of the world. We have four main climate change implications. One of them will be we will have hotter summers. So putting it in a context, we will have 60 days of higher temperatures of above 33 degrees.

So that means four months or six months of summer. summer. Unfortunately, our spring and autumn will probably disappear. So we will have long summers or long winters. We will have sea level rise. It's expected that the sea level will rise of about half centimeter a year. And that, of course, will damage the coastal life and infrastructure. And it will get drier. We will have droughts and changes and more extreme rainfall patterns.

For us, rain rain is good, right? In our region, it's drier in nature, like naturally it's drier. So for us, rain is a blessing. However, there is good rain and angry or bad rain. And the good rain is when it's distributed per a whole season, a rain season. However, with climate change, we will have, Same amount of rainfall, but distributed to less days. So we will have maybe two weeks of angry rain that will lead to floods.

This has implications of even though we have water, but we cannot keep it. Floods will happen. Recent years, the rain was, as you framed it, angry rain. Last few weeks, last month, it didn't stop raining for three weeks and it was very intense.

Intense but you mentioned something very important for us it's a blessing then you mentioned that we can't store it how come we can't store it so for for us to actually benefit from rainfall it has to come a bit slower so the earth can take it when you have intense rainfall and we live in urban areas unfortunately many of our cities or lands are covered either by streets or concrete.

And this will not allow natural percolation of water into the soil. And this will lead to more flooding. We cannot store it. Well, it depends on different factors, the policies in the country. And the second is how you can store rain is through plants. So if you have trees, the trees will take the rain. And you have, of course, in the soil. So that's why why most of the rain will become floods because it will come all of a sudden and then it will become a stream of on our streets.

So this is your field of expertise. But before going into it, I want to talk about the summers and the rising temperatures because I think everybody here agrees that the summer are getting hotter. So you established that also our personal experience in the past few weeks established that the rain is very intense. But in the past few years, we've been seeing rising temperatures in the summer.

What does it do to the general ecosystem here? Higher temperatures will mean more evaporation, which means drier, like a region, for instance. We cannot keep our green spaces. Drier atmosphere and drier region will mean more wildfires as well. Because the wet content of plants and trees will dry out and we have a higher risk of wildfires. And hotter climate means also hotter oceans.

So the oceans and the sea is also, the temperatures of the water of the sea is also increasing and which means this will also lead to other factors of the marine life If people are fishing, this will also affect. The quality and affect the yield in the marine life. Hotter days, we will have more frequent heat waves and the heat waves will lead to an effect that is called urban heat island. An urban heat island is when, you know, we live in concrete cities.

Those concrete cities observes the heat, the sunlight and emit it back, which make us feel a double effect of heat.

So we don't only have a direct sun warmth, but we have this intense feeling of heat intensity because of also the humidity effect so yeah we will have hotter cities so that means we will not be able to walk we will not be able to go outside and that means we will not need more cooling in our houses and institutions and that means more electricity and this will affect more some people more than others so your field of work is literally learning how to adapt to this climate change.

Now, knowing Israeli politics and policies, I personally can say that there is some sort of awareness, and I'm also a city council member in Tel Aviv Jaffa municipality, so I see the discourse inside the municipalities.

There is awareness, and it also translates into urban planning. How much do you think there is a difference between the Jewish city and the Arab towns, when it comes to the urban planning and preparedness to this climate change for the near future? This is like a really good question. It's complicated. However, we will try to break it down in this episode, I hope. So when you plan for climate adaptation, you have risks. First, you assess those risks. What type of risk do I have?

Because heat will affect health. It will affect infrastructure. It will affect urban planning. How many times do I have to plant trees? Can they survive the heat? Will there be outbreak of fires? Will I have an emergency plan?

So planning for climate change, you need to understand what are the risks and who is vulnerable to those risks and how much are they exposed to it. And do they have the capacity to adapt to it. So we take all of those into consideration to plan adaptation. And if you see the sensitivity, exposure, and even adaptive capacity of Palestinians is much lower than of Israeli Jewish towns for multiple reasons. It can be historical. It can be because of neglect of years.

It can be because of discrimination. And we can break it down today in this episode. Most of the Palestinians of Israel live in Arab towns, right? So they are separate. 90% of them live separately. And those have administrative boundaries. The municipal boundaries since 1948 hasn't increased. So each town has a piece of land. A municipal boundary of it, where from 48 till now, people increased in numbers 12 folds, the increase of population.

However, the land was limited. So which means instead of investing and planning new neighborhoods and parks and green spaces, land is so precious that I have to to build on it, to live. 90% of Arab towns are privately owned, which means the municipality, if they want to put a new park, because parks and trees, let's say. Are a way to cool the city. In a way, to decrease temperatures, you have to have more green areas. And that's in an urban setting, this is trees or parks.

Palestinians naturally had the hakura, right? The hakura system where you have a stone building, a traditional Palestinian house that is appropriate to climate. You had natural cooling in the summer and natural heating in the winter. That needed space. You had this plot of land around you that had lemon trees, that had citrus trees, olives, and the trees that are fitting for our climate. And this provided you with shade to your house and to the outdoor area.

However, now, because of the limitation of land, And people had to let go of this lifestyle and started to build fast, concrete, and even cover the whole yard. So you don't even have any open area. This increases heat. So what I understand is discrimination with land resources between Palestinians, citizens, and Israeli Jews led to lack of land, which is a very precious resource, which led also, if I want to simplify what you just said, to poor urban planning because of lack of this resource.

Yes, exactly. So you need a resource. You don't have this resource, so you cannot adapt. Because if I say to a municipality, you have a risk, come prepare, please increase the green areas. They're like, where? So when you know that 90% of the lands in Arab towns are privately owned. There's nothing you can do to even change this urbanization of the city. I just want us to compare what happened between 1948 until today with Jewish cities and Jewish towns.

So you established that the Arab towns didn't have any extra land given to them by the state. What happened to the Israeli towns and cities? Many, many towns were newly established, right? So they had a white canvas where you can allocate, okay, I have a need. This town will naturally grow, population grow. So you plan for infrastructure, for rainfall, for wastewater, for sanitation. You plan a whole city from zero where you will connect the people to all their needs.

What climate change does is that it disrupts the provision of services to people.

It disrupts your welfare. fair and in newly planned cities which are jewish israeli cities you can do that on the map like you before planning a city before bringing the people in you actually do everything for them you plan where the schools will be the health care you plan the hospitals the electricity the capacity of the year the the city to take care of floods all of those things are planned ahead and usually with With adaptation, you always have to plan ahead for emergency.

And unfortunately, the Arab towns and cities are called urbanized villages, which means that I was in my village. Usually, if you want, you go and move to the city.

However, our towns or cities, they have a population of 40,000 to 80,000. The biggest city is Nazareth right now. It's 80,000 people. And there's no place to build more houses. They're not highly dense. So it's because they grew around a village. There were no new plans for new neighborhoods where you can do multi-floor buildings, right? We still have this traditional building of I want to live alone with my family. And unlike highly dense cities like Tel Aviv, they have high-rise buildings.

You can put hundreds of people in the same square meter that you cannot live.

Put in an arab town so this reality we call it the urbanization without the benefits of urbanization i call our cities villages on steroids yeah because they also it's like a typical arab or palestinian village usually relies on agriculture so all the land the private land was urbanized so we don't have agriculture anymore but it's highly dense technically it is called a city by law but it doesn't act like a city like you don't have the social fabric of

a city so it's just like a very big village but it's not exactly a village and not exactly a city but super dense not well planned yeah exactly so like you don't have the benefits of a city we want to live in a city because services are better it's faster and everything is in a radius a radius of 15 minutes. Music.

But and not in our towns, okay so you gave us a brief introduction of what's happening with the towns yes um i would have to i would have to also say this as we said so far there's no new town or city that has been built for palestinian citizens of israel since the establishment of the state but you do have have committees in Jewish villages and towns, in Hebrew, that don't accept Arabs as well. Exactly. So also, yeah, this is another phenomena that we have.

So it's not as if the villages doesn't give you or provide you the services you expect. You also can't live in many of the kibbutzim or the small Israeli towns. Most of those gated communities that are exclusive. So I want to go back into the climate change and how does climate change, generally speaking, is expected to affect the marginalized communities?

As we said, if we want to talk about marginalized communities and how climate change will affect them, if we take heat, it's very simple. Heat affects us differently. If I'm a senior citizen, if I'm 65 years old, or I'm younger than five years old. Physiologically, my body cannot deal with heat the same way. People with chronic diseases, people with diabetes, people who have hard diseases are more vulnerable.

And if we look at the statistics, Palestinians of 48, or Palestinian citizens of Israel, have higher disease rate or percentage than Jewish ones. And if we want to talk why, that's a whole episode that you have to do. There are a lot of numbers and statistics and studies about that. And you can see it can be, of course, it's discrimination, it's quality of life, life. It's due to no urban spaces, no gardens, no place to walk anywhere. You're really dependent on your car.

One other, why are you dependent on your car? It's not because you have a lot of money to spend on cars. It's because the first public transportation was first introduced to Arab towns in 2012 in the most developed country in the Middle East. So this is shocking. This is crazy.

When you see that there is a country that is developed and functioning, has the best services in the world, and technology and high tech, and then you see that there are, in this country, some citizens don't have basic services until very late, you wonder why. All of those factors combined made the Arab towns or especially Palestinian citizens more vulnerable to climate change, because their quality of life is much lower.

Their health conditions are much lower. The socioeconomic situation is much lower. When it's hot, I would buy an air conditioning. I would cool my house. However, if I have to choose between paying my electricity bills or bring quality food or pay other bills, then I'm in a more vulnerable situation.

You mentioned, with the lack of proper urban planning, that it also affects the temperature in the city. So I want us to imagine ourselves somewhere in June, July, in a very hot day. I'm going to walk in Tel Aviv, and I want to walk in Milfahim as an example, which is only an hour drive. How would I feel the temperature difference, whether it's in Tel Aviv compared to in Milfahim? Well, now, to be fair, you might not be able to walk in either of them, but that's one.

But I will also talk within Tel Aviv. You cannot walk in the south, but you can walk in the north. It's because the north, they even showed studies that there are four degrees difference between the south of Tel Aviv and the north of Tel Aviv. But this can work in metropolitans because in metropolitans you have periphery, people who live in not ghettos, but kind of underserved, under poorer areas in the city. And in the north, you have more trees and parks.

It's well shaded. That's why you can walk there. Surprisingly, the wealthier people live in the north. People with migration backgrounds, Africans and foreign workers live in the south. So you have this also societal discrimination or inequality where people who are better off are living, maybe because they pay taxes and they make sure that their taxes are going to services. Maybe. This is active citizenship type of factors.

Like you can improve your living conditions of course if you're an active citizen right like you are you're a proud member of your municipality council you make sure that they're really putting the money where it should be you make sure that your kid can walk to school one day so it's also about like this urban planning it's not only about of course having all the resources it's also about about planning together with the people for the people and unfortunately this country

because of the central centralized government the government decides what's good for the people and not the other way around and if we want to go back to um yes yes if we want to compare a jewish town and an arab town a palestinian town we will look that i'm a weak municipality i don't have enough of money, budgets. Because we can talk about budgets later, how is it distributed here, but I live off of municipal tax from people, maybe the collection rate is 40%.

And then I don't have the ability to develop new parks because when I have limited land, so I have to focus on roads, housing, basic services. And at the same time, I don't have money or the capacity, human resources, or the situation in Arab municipalities in Israel is very, very, very complicated. We can talk, of course, about the some characteristics of these Arab localities who are marginalized and underserved.

So I want to be the devil's advocate because you also I've mentioned that I'm city council member, but we're going to publish this episode on Wednesday, a day after the election.

So the day we publish the episode is the first day of me not being a city council member. But for the sake of the argument, I worked with my community, the Palestinian community in Jaffa. Which is a very marginalized community, half the community is under poverty line, a lot of social economical changes that I had to focus on. And to be honest, the last thing I thought about was the climate change and the environmental change and how we should prepare the city for this.

Not because I don't think it's important, but because I have bigger problems right now happening, especially in the last five years, we had COVID. We had Habit al-Karameh, the events of May 2021, like very challenging issues. Wouldn't you say that these challenges that we have in the Palestinian community here overshadow to prepare our cities for the climate change?

Yes, we live on a survival mode. Unfortunately, the biggest problem right now for all of us is climate change because it comes and it exacerbates other issues like poverty, diseases, and infectious diseases and other issues. So it will make other issues harder. So also economic distress. So we have to focus on the root of all causes or the one that comes and multiply it.

And one of them is climate change. Because we live in a place or the Palestinian community lives in a place where they constantly have to tell politicians, friends, the world that they have the right to exist, like everyone else, have basic services, have basic human rights. They are too busy to do that, to actually plan for a future where they don't know if they will be living there.

So unfortunately, this is where we are. we are in an unstable reality of self like i understand when i sit with a community member and i tell them hey climate change you should prepare they're like i would like to actually be alive tomorrow not because of direct war however because of other issues as you said like violence or poverty or i need to take care that i have money or that my kid goes safely to school and can

become someone in a place where they don't accept me. Maybe I don't have the same opportunity. What you're describing right now feels like an introduction to a dystopian village where it's very unstable and the problems will just magnify.

Now, just to put things in perspective, I mentioned that there was heavy rain in the past month. Many of the Arab villages were flooded. In the near future, when I say near future, it's like in five, ten years. How big this problem will be and will it magnify and will these villages be even suitable for people to keep living in them? That's a very good question. We will have more frequency of such events. Will they get worse?

Yes, sometimes. Climate change will increase the magnitude and the frequency of extreme events like what you mentioned. This didn't happen since 1992. So we had more than average rain in all areas in the north, which is amazing, but at the same time. As I said, it wasn't in a way that we stored the water for the future. And one issue in Arab towns that because of lack of land, many of them had to build houses where natural seasonal streams go.

So where rivers were, because we have seasonal streams. So in the winter until spring, water runs in those valleys.

But because of lack of land people had to build on that and that's why every year they will be in the middle of the valley i think palestinian towns in israel are not ready for climate change and will have even the municipalities who are already weak will even be weaker correct me if i'm wrong one of the problems with climate change it also that it also affect the social fabric of community.

And one of the researchers I've read, the higher the temperature, the angrier we get, the lower the temperature. I don't know if this is a cliche or misconception, because you look at European countries and Norwegian countries, you find everybody's chill, and you come to the Middle East and everybody's angry. But how this shift in climate change, especially in hot weather, will affect the social fabric? And is there any connection between the temperature and and violence in the

communities. Definitely. There are studies that have been conducted that show there is a correlation between. I mean, they checked the mental health and climate change, and there was, in extreme events or heat waves, they checked the language on social media, and they saw that there was more use of negative language. It can be also depressive language, Like losing hope or being depressive, but also at the same time angry.

So yes, there is a connection and of course it should be further studies about it. And yeah, this is not a fun topic. Music.

What does the future hold for us well i think i should mention another thing with climate change and there will be more pressure on our resources like water in this region it's dry and water is of course civilizations has lived and can only thrive with water it means food agriculture agriculture and it means viable cities healthy cities and we can see in the middle east they always talked about that the next war is about it's a water war and we can see that in egypt and ethiopia ethiopia

and here with all the climate change where are you like israel is a very adaptive country I can say that they have five water desalination plants they have more water than they need and they can sell it to their neighboring countries last year there was an in the cope and the conference of the parties. There was a new treaty between Israel and Jordan, which is energy for water. And Jordan has a lot of lands.

They can do solar energy and then provide this land for Israel as energy and get water back. So this type of stress, climate change will come and put pressure on our resources. It can lead to a conflict or a war or it can lead to cooperation, as some peace-building lovers can say. But this excludes the whole justice aspect of it. What you're saying is very interesting because it shows two things. The first thing is that as a state, it's capable of adapting to climate change.

You've established it when you talked about the urban planning of the cities, of the Jewish cities, how they adapt and prepare themselves, especially of being built on a clean white canva, unlike the Palestinians in the villages that were the same villages from 1948 on the same piece of land.

The second thing is, even though the state has managed to find ways unconventionally, and pretty smart of dealing with the lack of water and being able even to leverage it in this region, show that they are able to solve the problems, but they choose not to for the Palestinian community. Now, I do want us just to summarize, legally speaking, at the end, problems that a flood that could happen in one of the Palestinian village could also affect neighboring Jewish cities.

Legally speaking, from a policy perspective, is there any work being done to solve this problem or is just being shoved under the rug? Yes, there is. I mean, there are governmental decisions, there are budgets that are given to local authorities. If we want to understand how this country works, it's a highly centralized government. It gives the second powerful, other than the ministry, the second powerful body is supposed to be the local authority.

However, the relationship between the centralized government and the local authority is their subcontractor. So they make decisions and they tell them what to do and how to do it. At the moment, there are many cities who are doing adaptation plans and some of them are Arab cities. However, it's like this. Two years ago, the government decided, oh, we need to adapt to climate change. The next year, they put the plan, the budget, and they said to people, make adaptation plan.

Arab localities were concerned about waste collection. They still have problems with it, waste collections, infrastructure, education, many, many problems that they couldn't solve. And now with a new topic they barely heard of, they have to make a strategic plan how to deal with climate change in one year and a half without even knowing about it. So that shows you what do they do in such a situation? They give it to companies.

The company comes, contractors, they do a beautiful plan better than New York, and then they give it to you. It doesn't match reality? Not really.

Will I ever implement it? Not really. so we stay in the same spot so even governmental solutions will not really fit because they're not ground up they're not coming from the people so i want us just to summarize this topic with the urban plan you established that the local arab municipalities they're understaffed they are under budget they have to carry discriminations from 1948 until today but then you mentioned the need of the state to have new

urban plans to deal with climate change and you mentioned that it usually comes from up, down. Now, we are speaking about a state that sees itself as a state for a specific group, but we are talking about the Palestinian community who have a different culture, a cultural need, and any urban plan, I assume, needs to have cultural sensitivity to the people who live there. Is this taken into consideration when the state talks about preparing these villages to future changes and plans?

I think there is an understanding of difference, but... A misunderstanding of why. It's like knowing there's an elephant in the room, but not talking about the elephant in the room. Leaving a bit of space for imagination and creativity, but at the same time, we need the same results. So it's your problem to deal with the gaps. But I would like you to have a plan like Tel Aviv.

If you discuss this, like in our work, you do adaptation planning and decision making based on data, based on results and studies unfortunately one type of gap and discrimination is data discrimination we have to the central blue of statistic doesn't have socio-economic data distributed by neighborhood for instance since 2008 so that's the last report that can tell me where elderly people People live distributed by neighborhood or statistical area. Whose fault is that?

Well, one reason is that Arab or Palestinian towns and cities newly named their streets and have addresses. However, these addresses are not attributed to any statistical area on the map. So the ministry of welfare is waiting for this data but doesn't make sure that you actually have the staff to do it when you publish data every year or like every 10 years when you have it when you have half of the cities with lack of information i wouldn't publish it until everyone is on board.

But it's normal now that I publish governmental information about all my cities on towns under my legislation, under my authority, but I don't care if half of them didn't actually submit. So is it negligence from the Arab towns or is it negligence from the ministries? So this this is the problem. It's like. You are weak, you don't have the capacity. Let's say you're behind, a slow runner. Do I make sure that I give you the shoes and the right infrastructure to come

ahead and run with me? Or do I leave you behind? And I think this is the question to ask. I think the last sentence you mentioned describes well what we feel about the near future. That these gaps between the Arab villages and the Jewish cities and towns, not only are they increasing, but they're becoming more and more dangerous. So now not only is the Arab villages, for example, more dense, but they're going to be very difficult to live in, and then you don't have any other option.

And the problems, other than environmental changes, are just magnified because of the environmental changes.

So until you get to solve the first problem that you should be dealing with the other problems are magnified at the same time which makes it even more difficult to solve yeah thank you very much for your time thank you for having me but i think, just to end on a positive note honestly yes we i like positive notes. I think people are, what I like is that people are more and more aware of climate change.

I never encountered a climate denier here. Our communities respect and believe in science and research. So when you come to the people and give them the message that we need to prepare for the future, that is a bit harder. They are willing and would love to be part of it.

It's just that we need to change structures to give people the ability to create the future they want to live in so this is such a good point because my grandfather he passed away two years ago he used to be a fisherman and he always used to talk about how it rains less in Jaffa than it used to rain before 1948 and after 1948 because of the urbanization of Jaffa and the orange field The second thing is he used to complain and demonstrate in the 70s and 80s over the fishing policies,

because at that time, the state allowed using some sort of nets that could catch very small fish. And they demonstrated back then that this sort of fishing is overfishing that will lead to mass extinction of many fish, which literally happened. So he might not have labeled himself as an environmentalist. I think he was. Yeah, but his actions. I think one important aspect that you bring up is indigenous knowledge.

I think our community, our people are indigenous to this land and have been living in harmony and respecting this land. When you live in a country that is now managing the environment, managing the resources and nature and not living with the nature, this shows you that... Changing the climate, changing the type of tree that fits, changing the urban planning, that's why we have more problems.

Because the way cities were organized, the new-built cities were organized, were not matching the topography. We cut mountains to have a highway. And Palestinian community planted the right tree, harvested in the right time, fished in the right type of net, because they lived and saw and accumulated knowledge of what nature behaves and how nature behaves. And until now, this knowledge is not respected.

When we talk about flood management, we talk about the sinsila, we talk about the terraces that we used to build in, or the hakura, we talk about the traditional Palestinian house that was appropriate to climate, and all of this knowledge is actually gone.

So you're disconnected to your land you're disconnected to your environment and you live in this urbanized dystopia dystopia that someone else built for you and told you this is reality this is how the future look like you know with capitalism and urbanization and futuristic towns that doesn't look like us but we have to live with its problems and this becomes our goal we forget about how we used to live and our knowledge and I

think this is also a policy and I believe if we look back Palestinians do have knowledge indigenous knowledge to how to deal with climate change and adapt. However we would like to I mean we should preserve it and try to save it and archive it, and also another way is is just when you work with climate justice, when you understand that I don't just plan just for the sake of planning. I want to live in a better place that fits all differently.

And when you put social justice, when you put better systems that serves the most marginalized and serves the most vulnerable, then you live in a better place. And I think this is the basis of life. life. Thank you so much. You're welcome. I mean, thank you for having me. Thank you for your time. Much appreciated. So this was the second episode of 48 podcast by Arab 48 news website.

My name is Abida Bushhadeh. And just as a quick reminder, if you want to help us grow, don't forget to to like this episode on whatever podcast app you're using, and you can also share it with whomever. Music.